Possessed by a slave, not slavery

The present paper is divided into three large steps around the themes of spirit possession and the historical imagination of slavery in Cuba. These three steps reflect both ethnographic dimensions of these themes and broader theoretical approaches towards them. The last step, ‘apomimesis’, is the one proposed by the author, not by way of replacement but displace­ment. The first step, ‘formulaic’ historical imagination, covers the ground of a direct expression of slavery as historical trauma through spirit possession. The second step, ‘mimesis’, displaces the first by adding into it the possibility of reversal, of empowerment, the slave becoming an anti-slave. The third creates another simultaneous condition. Through the negative dialectics of apomimesis the non-slave emerges

The Island of Crossed Destinies : human and other-than-human perspectives in Afro-Cuban divination

This thesis focuses on the significance and articulation of divinatory practices in Cuba a place where a number of different religious traditions (mainly of African and European origins) have come to coexist. Reflecting on the particularities of my ethnography, I concentrate on three such traditions: Ocha/Ifá, Palo Monte and Espiritismo. However, rather than engaging with them as different ‘traditions’ or assuming their syncretic character, I attempt to explore the way in which they constitute distinct but related perspectives on human destiny or, as my friends and informants put it, on people’s ‘path’ (camino) perspectives, that is, which continuously constitute and recalibrate each other. Echoing the work of authors such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, I try to illustrate the nature of these perspectives by bringing to the fore the ways in which different divinatory practices instantiate and embody the efficacy or ‘point of view’ of different ‘other-than-human’ beings be they deities or the dead. Thus, while in the case of Ocha/Ifá and its oracles, I concentrate on the relation between ‘humans’ and the orichas (deities), my discussion of divinatory practices within Palo Monte and Espiritismo places the emphasis on the relation between ‘humans’ and various kinds of the dead (muertos). Treating these relations as an exchange of perspectives between ‘humans’ and ‘other-than-human’ entities, I argue for the need to focus on ‘ontology’ and the indigenous understanding of these entities’ ‘nature’ in order to avoid both ‘reductionist’ and ‘constructivist’ renderings of divination; in other words, to avoid the theoretical limits of ‘syncretic’ or ‘purist’ readings of the (Afro-)Cuban spirit world and its efficacy. This emphasis on ‘ontology’ leads me to construe divination as ‘perspectivism’ and to treat it as both a theoretical strategy and an ethnographic challenge

Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes (orgs.), Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices: Anthropological Reflections

The book places itself within a relatively recent effort in the social sciences to acknowledge the centrality of the body and the corporeal dimensions of social phenomena – in anthropology, see for instance, the works by Thomas Csordas (Embodiment and Experience, Cambridge University Press, 1994), Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek (Bodies and Persons, Cambridge University Press, 1998), or Brian Turner (The Body and Society, Sage, 2008 [1984]). Religious contexts seem to be of particular int..

VITALAS at TRECVID-2008

In this paper, we present our experiments in TRECVID 2008 about High-Level feature extraction task. This is the first year for our participation in TRECVID, our system adopts some popular approaches that other workgroups proposed before. We proposed 2 advanced low-level features NEW Gabor texture descriptor and the Compact-SIFT Codeword histogram. Our system applied well-known LIBSVM to train the SVM classifier for the basic classifier. In fusion step, some methods were employed such as the Voting, SVM-base, HCRF and Bootstrap Average AdaBoost(BAAB)

Cavernous Hemangioma of the Rib: A Rare Diagnosis

Hemangioma of the rib is an uncommon benign vascular tumour. A case of rib hemangioma in a 29-year-old woman is presented. Chest roentgenogram and computed tomography revealed a mass along the inner surface of the 7th left rib with bone destruction. She underwent resection of the 7th rib. The pathologic diagnosis was cavernous hemangioma. Hemangiomas of the rib are rare tumours but should be kept in mind in the differential diagnosis of rib tumours

Uterine Embolization as a New Treatment Option in Adenomyosis Uteri

Adenomyosis is characterized by the development of endometrial ectopic glands and tissue in the myometrium layer in depth greater than 2.5 mm from the endometrial surface of the separative area by -myomas well as by hypertrophy and hyperplasia of the smooth muscles of the myometrium. This is filtration, not mere displacement, of the myometrium, from the endometrium. Clinical symptoms include dysmenorrhea and menorrhagia. It is diffuse (adenomyosis) or focal (adenomyoma), asymmetrically affects the uterine wall of premenopausal women (usually the posterior) and often coexists with myomas. The pathogenesis of adenomyosis remains unknown. The treatment options are: drug therapy, invasive treatment of fibroids: myomectomy (open—intra-abdominal, laparoscopic, hysteroscopic), hysterectomy, myolysis—cryocatalysis, microwave or radiofrequency thermal catalysis (RF-ablation), ultrasound focus catalysis (FUS), laser photocatalysis and percutaneous selective uterine artery embolization (UAE). Embolization remains an alternative and not a substitute of hysterectomy. The medical indication is made on a case-by-case basis, depending on age, desire for pregnancy and the clinical symptoms of adenomyosis

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha M., 2015, Electric Santería, Nova Iorque, Columbia University Press [review]

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