Rumfitt on truth-grounds, negation, and vagueness

In The Boundary Stones of Thought, Rumfitt defends classical logic against challenges from intuitionistic mathematics and vagueness, using a semantics of pre-topologies on possibilities, and a topological semantics on predicates, respectively. These semantics are suggestive but the characterizations of negation face difficulties that may undermine their usefulness in Rumfitt’s project

In the Shadow of a Willow Tree: A Community Garden Experiment in Decolonising, Multispecies Research

In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world

Believed belief: science/religion versus Sukuma magic

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CHAPTER 8: DWIGHT READ: TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM: FOLLOWED BY A DISCUSSION BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND DWIGHT READ

Here I report on Dwight Read’s theory for a paradigm change in kinship anthropology which entails kinship terminologies being interpreted as symbolic computational systems based on kin-term products. I also report on how Read argues that different conceptualizations of sibling, either sibling resulting by descent from parent, or sibling viewed in terms of shared parentage, two cultural conceptions that are rendered – here exemplifying the masculine side – by the kin-term products, S o F = B [son of father = brother] or F o B = F [father of brother = father), lead to respectively building up a descriptive or a classificatory terminology. The chapter also deals with how Dwight Read accounts for the relationship between genealogical tracing and the working out of kin terms using kin-term products and how the logic of kin-term products is consistent with the extension of kin terms to kin-type categories beyond the primary ones.The paper also reports on a discussion between Dwight Read and the author, initiated by questions and observations from the latter, regarding different aspects of Read’s reasoning. Not exhaustively, to be mentioned here is the way kin relationships are concretely worked out using kin-term products, the model of the family space and the nuclear family, group marriage,  how the conceptualization of sibling in terms of shared parentage expressed through the kin-term product F o B = F [father o brother = father] relates to ethnographic data, the nature of the logic of kinship terminologies, the status of the structural equation S o F = B [son o father = brother] when used within the context of a classificatory terminology, the axiomatic nature of a number of kin-term products pertaining to specific kin terminologies, the equations pertaining to classificatory kinship terminologies that are  likely to algebraically reduce chains of kin-terms products, mapped from corresponding kin type strings, like “son of son of father of father of father” (S o S o F o F o F) is mapped from the collateral genealogical relations, father’s father’s father’s son’s son (fffss or fffbss) to an irreducible kin term, here father, which is the one native speakers use for the said genealogical connection.The discussion also addresses, taking the example of ancient Chinese dialects, the question of what should be the structural prerequisites for a transition from classificatory (Dravidian) terminologies into bifurcate collateral and descriptive terminologies, a transition that is often posited by a number of linguists and anthropologists. Finally, the discussion deals with the question as to whether the kinship terminologies of the world all ultimately derive from a pre-dispersal African Proto-Sapiens kinship terminology. Throughout these lines of discussion, the central question is raised as to why different cultural choices on how siblings are conceptualized were made that led to different human kinship terminologies and social structures

'Stalking the stalker': a Chwezi initiation into spirit possession and experiential structure

Among Sukuma (Tanzania) the Chwezi spirit society operates in the shadow of, and in tension with, the lineage cults domesticating the dead. As this ethnography describes, Chwezi candidates are initiated into spirit possession by 'stalking the stalker', that is, by seeking synchrony with intrusion. Recognition of the healing and of the power/resistance in spirit performances once resuscitated anthropology from its crisis of representation, but now arrests advance. Both functions obscure possession itself, which, unlike rituals, has a subversive, 'quaternary' structure that reveals the gap between experience and communication, and thus decentres both self and society. Spirit possession exposes the plurality of experiential structures. This may better account for its role world-wide in dialectics of social resistance and of cathartic healing

Formal Arithmetic Before Grundgesetze

A speculative investigation of how Frege's logical views change between Begriffsschrift and Grundgesetze and how this might have affected the formal development of logicism

Anatomical Network Comparison of Human Upper and Lower, Newborn and Adult, and Normal and Abnormal Limbs, with Notes on Development, Pathology and Limb Serial Homology vs. Homoplasy

How do the various anatomical parts (modules) of the animal body evolve into very different integrated forms (integration) yet still function properly without decreasing the individual's survival? This long-standing question remains unanswered for multiple reasons, including lack of consensus about conceptual definitions and approaches, as well as a reasonable bias toward the study of hard tissues over soft tissues. A major difficulty concerns the non-trivial technical hurdles of addressing this problem, specifically the lack of quantitative tools to quantify and compare variation across multiple disparate anatomical parts and tissue types. In this paper we apply for the first time a powerful new quantitative tool, Anatomical Network Analysis (AnNA), to examine and compare in detail the musculoskeletal modularity and integration of normal and abnormal human upper and lower limbs. In contrast to other morphological methods, the strength of AnNA is that it allows efficient and direct empirical comparisons among body parts with even vastly different architectures (e.g. upper and lower limbs) and diverse or complex tissue composition (e.g. bones, cartilages and muscles), by quantifying the spatial organization of these parts-their topological patterns relative to each other-using tools borrowed from network theory. Our results reveal similarities between the skeletal networks of the normal newborn/adult upper limb vs. lower limb, with exception to the shoulder vs. pelvis. However, when muscles are included, the overall musculoskeletal network organization of the upper limb is strikingly different from that of the lower limb, particularly that of the more proximal structures of each limb. Importantly, the obtained data provide further evidence to be added to the vast amount of paleontological, gross anatomical, developmental, molecular and embryological data recently obtained that contradicts the long-standing dogma that the upper and lower limbs are serial homologues. In addition, the AnNA of the limbs of a trisomy 18 human fetus strongly supports Pere Alberch's ill-named "logic of monsters" hypothesis, and contradicts the commonly accepted idea that birth defects often lead to lower integration (i.e. more parcellation) of anatomical structures

Locating sovereignty in the auto-ethnographic-political poetics of daily existence in two amazonian films

The theme of daily life is a common one in the Brazilian Video in the Villages (Vídeo nas aldeias) filmic archive. I analyze the diversity of cinematic treatments of and approaches to the theme of daily life in an Indigenous village by comparing, contrasting, and examining how two films construct, embody, and experience communal life through culturally specific methods of inquiry. In particular, I explore concepts of time, the senses, creativity, and the relations between the individual and the collectivity as all of the above are cinematically rendered in the intimacy, the performance, and the ritual of daily life. Specifically, I look at how these two VNA productions, Shomõtsi (2001) and Kiarãsã Tõ Sâty, The Agouti’s Peanut (2005), repoliticize the everyday through sovereign practices. I discuss these cinematic works as they relate to imperfect media (Salazar & Cordova, 2008), decolonial pedagogies, and the “cosmological embeddedness of the everyday” (Overing & Passes, 2000, p. 298).peer-reviewe

Does Resource Commercialization Induce Local Conservation? A Cautionary Tale From Southwestern Morocco

Ecotourism, bioprospecting and non-timber product marketing have been promoted recently as market-based instruments for environment protection, but without sound understanding of the resulting net conservation effects. We present evidence on the local conservation effects of recent argan oil commercialization in Morocco, which seems a promising case study in conservation through resource commercialization. Our empirical analysis shows, however, that resource commercialization is not creating strong net conservation incentives because assumptions implicit in the prevailing logic prove incorrect in this case. Generally, the experience of southwestern Morocco provides a cautionary tale about the assumed efficacy of conservation strategies founded on resource commercialization.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,