Melted honey: sax and sex

[Abstract]: This paper deals with multisensory processes of engaging and disengaging with a musical world through the body. It is based on ethnographic research with an Australian Police band. Band members make a strict distinction between rehearsal and performance. For band members, rehearsals are characterised by a multi-sensual disengagement with instrument. During rehearsals, which entail a close multi-sensory focussing in on the points at which instrument body and musician body met, the senses of touch, sight and hearing are engaged in the process of surveillance. Such surveillance is undertaken in order that the musicians can identify faulted touches to instruments that result in faulted sounds. Touch to the instrument body is ‘watched’, not only with the eye, but in and through touch and hearing senses. These sensual combinations serve to separate person and instrument. In contrast, performances are characterised by a multisensual embodiment of the instrument, to the point that band members understand themselves to be constructed of instruments, and that instruments are constructed of them. In performances, instruments and performers come to phenomenologically complete one another’s bodies. Band members discuss the sensually experienced distinction between rehearsal and performance by means of a distinction between fucking (which they understood as similar to rehearsal) and making love (which they understood to be similar to performance experience). Band members also drew on food/music metaphors, including the difference between constructing a musical dish from a recipe (the written music) and tasting the melted honey of performed sax sounds. They used this metaphor to describe the sensual difference between making sound in rehearsal, and the corporeally penetrative act of inviting a sax into the body in musical performance. Using the distinction between rehearsal and performance, and the penetrative metaphors that band members used to describe it, I draw on and extend the critiques that Michel Serres made of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to analyse rehearsal and performance moments as, respectively, multisensory processes of surveillance and anti-surveillance

No smoking within nine metres of discipline limits

I seek to open the social practice of smoking to anthropological enquiry that has been largely caught up in the agenda of cessation – to the point that it is difficult to examine it outside this frame without being accused of advancing the interests of Big Tobacco. Analysis has also been foreclosed by adherence to frames that privilege rationality. Smoking behaviour becomes understandable and translatable via explanations of addiction or ignorance: it is rational for the addict to source her drug, and rational for the smoker ignorant of its harms to continue smoking. Equally, using a rational frame anthropologists might explain smoking practice in relation to pleasure – if they are not wedded to a cessation agenda – as maximising pleasure might also be rational, as might any practice if only one can understand the agent’s motivations. I argue for an anthropological analysis of smoking that permits more than translation

Domestic Temporalities: Sensual Patterning in Persian Migratory Landscapes

When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 7, Edition 2 September 200

Diffusion on an Ising chain with kinks

We count the number of histories between the two degenerate minimum energy configurations of the Ising model on a chain, as a function of the length n and the number d of kinks that appear above the critical temperature. This is equivalent to count permutations of length n avoiding certain subsequences depending on d. We give explicit generating functions and compute the asymptotics. The setting considered has a role when describing dynamics induced by quantum Hamiltonians with deconfined quasi-particles.Comment: 9 pages, 2 LaTeX figures, macro packages qtree.sty and pict2e.st

Social support and the perception of geographical slant

The visual perception of geographical slant is influenced by physiological resources, such as physical fitness, age, and being physically refreshed. In two studies we tested whether a psychosocial resource, social support, can also affect the visual perception of slants. Participants accompanied by a friend estimated a hill to be less steep when compared to participants who were alone (Study 1). Similarly, participants who thought of a supportive friend during an imagery task saw a hill as less steep than participants who either thought of a neutral person or a disliked person (Study 2). In both studies, the effects of social relationships on visual perception appear to be mediated by relationship quality (i.e., relationship duration, interpersonal closeness, warmth). Artifacts such as mood, social desirability, and social facilitation did not account for these effects. This research demonstrates that an interpersonal phenomenon, social support, can influence visual perception

Transatlantic connections in colonial and post-colonial Haiti: archaeometric evidence for taches noires glazed tableware imported from Albissola, Italy to Fort Liberté, Haiti.

This paper presents the first archaeometrical data on colonial glazed wares (taches noires) imported in Haiti (Fort Liberté). The analysis evidenced the exclusive presence of Italian taches noires products, dated before 1820 and related to the colonial era. The presence of English wares next to colonial materials demonstrated continuity in the use of landscape after the Independence and the establishment of international trade relationships between the state of Haiti and the British Empire. Results are an important step forward in the understanding of production and movement of the Taches noires ware, which were exported globally between the eighteenth and nineteenth centurie

Negative Cooperativity in the Nitrogenase Fe Protein Electron Delivery Cycle

Nitrogenase catalyzes the ATP-dependent reduction of dinitrogen (N2) to two ammonia (NH3) molecules through the participation of its two protein components, the MoFe and Fe proteins. Electron transfer (ET) from the Fe protein to the catalytic MoFe protein involves a series of synchronized events requiring the transient association of one Fe protein with each αβ half of the α2β2 MoFe protein. This process is referred to as the Fe protein cycle and includes binding of two ATP to an Fe protein, association of an Fe protein with the MoFe protein, ET from the Fe protein to the MoFe protein, hydrolysis of the two ATP to two ADP and two Pi for each ET, Pi release, and dissociation of oxidized Fe protein-(ADP)2 from the MoFe protein. Because the MoFe protein tetramer has two separate αβ active units, it participates in two distinct Fe protein cycles. Quantitative kinetic measurements of ET, ATP hydrolysis, and Pi release during the presteady-state phase of electron delivery demonstrate that the two halves of the ternary complex between the MoFe protein and two reduced Fe protein-(ATP)2 do not undergo the Fe protein cycle independently. Instead, the data are globally fit with a two-branch negative-cooperativity kinetic model in which ET in one-half of the complex partially suppresses this process in the other. A possible mechanism for communication between the two halves of the nitrogenase complex is suggested by normal-mode calculations showing correlated and anticorrelated motions between the two halves

Geochemical and petrographic assessment of clay outcrops and archaeological ceramics from the pre-Hispanic site of Aguas Buenas (cal 400–1250 CE), central Nicaragua

This research characterizes and reconstructs clay procurement and production practices through the integration of in-situ portable XRF and petrographic analysis on ancient ceramics and clay materials recovered from the Mayales river subbasin (central Nicaragua). A particular choice for this study was the largest and arguably most significant archaeological site in the area, Aguas Buenas (cal 400–1250 CE), a pre-Hispanic indigenous agglomeration consisting of 371 human-made mounds of various shapes arranged in geometric patterns. Microanalytical approaches were applied to reconstruct the use of raw mineral resources in the production of ubiquitous pottery materials found at this site and in its immediate surroundings. The resulting compositional analysis produced geochemical and mineralogical data allowing for the characterisation of distinct, geologically-based compositional groups throughout the valley, improving on the limited geological data resolution previously available. The integrated microscopic and compositional analysis (through p-XRF) of archaeological pottery materials and raw clay samples, generates a number of hypotheses and insights about the nature of the Aguas Buenas site, and its role as a shared space amongst groups living in the Mayales river Subbasin. Additionally, this study provides a solid research framework of investigation that can be employed for more detailed and extensive future studies on pre-Hispanic human occupation in this research area or elsewhere

The characterization and role of zinc binding in yeast Cox4.

Yeast Cox4 is a zinc binding subunit of cytochrome c oxidase. Cox4 is the only cofactor-containing subunit that is not directly part of the catalytic core of the enzyme located in the mitochondrial inner membrane. The Zn(II) site is shown to be distinct from the bovine ortholog, as it results from the x-ray structure of the entire cytochrome c oxidase in having a single histidyl residue and three conserved cysteines residues in the coordination sphere. Substitutions at the Cys ligand positions result in non-functional Cox4 proteins that fail to lead to cytochrome oxidase assembly. Limited function exists in His-119 mutants when overexpressed. Zn(II) binding in Cox4 is, therefore, important for the stability of the complex. The solution structure of yeast Cox4 elucidated by multidimensional NMR reveals a C-terminal globular domain consisting of two beta sheets analogous to the bovine ortholog except the loop containing the coordinating His in the yeast protein and the fourth Cys in the bovine protein are in different positions in the two structures. The conformation of this loop is dictated by the different sequence position of the fourth coordinating zinc ligand. The Zn(II) ion is buried within the domain, consistent with its role in structural stability. Potential functions of this matrix-facing subunit are discussed