“A Hideous Torture on Himself”: Madness and Self-Mutilation in Victorian Literature

This paper suggests that late nineteenth-century definitions of self-mutilation, a new category of psychiatric symptomatology, were heavily influenced by the use of selfinjury as a rhetorical device in the novel, for the literary text held a high status in Victorian psychology. In exploring Dimmesdale’s “self-mutilation” in The Scarlet Letter in conjunction with psychiatric case histories, the paper indicates a number of common techniques and themes in literary and psychiatric texts. As well as illuminating key elements of nineteenth-century conceptions of the self, and the relation of mind and body through ideas of madness, this exploration also serves to highlight the social commentary implicit in many Victorian medical texts. Late nineteenth-century England, like mid-century New England, required the individual to help himself and, simultaneously, others; personal charity and individual philanthropy were encouraged, while state intervention was often presented as dubious. In both novel and psychiatric text, self-mutilation is thus presented as the ultimate act of selfish preoccupation, particularly in cases on the “borderlands” of insanity

Susceptibility of Human Lymphoid Tissue Cultured ex vivo to Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-Related Virus (XMRV) Infection

BACKGROUND: Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was generated after a recombination event between two endogenous murine leukemia viruses during the production of a prostate cancer cell line. Although the associations of the XMRV infection with human diseases appear unlikely, the XMRV is a retrovirus of undefined pathogenic potential, able to replicate in human cells in vitro. Since recent studies using animal models for infection have yielded conflicting results, we set out an ex vivo model for XMRV infection of human tonsillar tissue to determine whether XMRV produced by 22Rv1 cells is able to replicate in human lymphoid organs. Tonsil blocks were infected and infection kinetics and its pathogenic effects were monitored RESULTS: XMRV, though restricted by APOBEC, enters and integrates into the tissue cells. The infection did not result in changes of T or B-cells, immune activation, nor inflammatory chemokines. Infectious viruses could be recovered from supernatants of infected tonsils by reinfecting DERSE XMRV indicator cell line, although these supernatants could not establish a new infection in fresh tonsil culture, indicating that in our model, the viral replication is controlled by innate antiviral restriction factors. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the replication-competent retrovirus XMRV, present in a high number of laboratories, is able to infect human lymphoid tissue and produce infectious viruses, even though they were unable to establish a new infection in fresh tonsillar tissue. Hereby, laboratories working with cell lines producing XMRV should have knowledge and understanding of the potential biological biohazardous risks of this virus

Data, Meta Data and Pattern Data: How Franz Boas Mobilized Anthropometric Data, 1890 and Beyond

AbstractBetween 1890 and 1911, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas conducted a whole suite of anthropometric studies, which all in all generated data from body measurements carried out on about 27,000 individuals. To this day, this data is being re-analyzed by researchers with a range of disciplinary interests. In my chapter, I will take a close look at a small subset of the original datasheets Boas used in his surveys, and how he and other scientists processed the data in later publications. My analysis will reveal that the extraordinary potential for travel and re-use of Boas’s data crucially depended on the way in which he designed his surveys. Alongside recording standard anthropometric variables, Boas collected genealogical and geographical information on the individuals measured, which allowed him to flexibly classify data in a variety of ways. It is this richness in structure, or “pattern data,” that explains why the data from Boas’s anthropometric projects remain valuable for researchers from a variety of disciplines to this very day.</jats:p

On the future of anthropology: Fundraising, the job market and the corporate turn

Building on the author's participant observation in academic leadership roles over the last two decades, this article reviews four areas of engagement for anthropology within the larger context of US higher education: a) fundraising; b) training and placing of students; c) the so-called 'corporate turn' and its alleged effects on current evaluation measures; and d) the popularity of anthropology among college students in the context of a highly self-critical discourse among professional anthropologists and a challenging academic job market. On the basis of the data presented, I argue that (1) fundraising activities are nothing new in anthropology and might play a role in continuing to support a holistic view of anthropology, (2) programs in anthropology should embrace rather than be skeptical of the potential for the employment of anthropologists in other fields or non-academic professions, (3) being students of society, anthropologists should be more engaged in the running of the university including its financial aspects and should teach their students to be more entrepreneurial, and (4) the applied and public aspects of anthropological research should be foregrounded and rewarded. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

The Ethics of Anthropology

The early history of professional anthropology is characterized by chronic ambivalence between, on one hand, participation in colonial rule (providing insights into native social and political organization) and in postcolonial economic domination (helping to overcome perceived “cultural barriers to development”) and, on the other hand, the role of culturally informed “conscience” of Western powers (revealing and denouncing social injustices and vulgar misrepresentations of exotic alterity). From the 1970s, anthropology’s critical role gradually became dominant among academic practitioners. A reflexive, critical approach to field research thus emerged from within the discipline years before the institutionalization of research ethics discourses and protocols. As funding bodies and universities came to introduce formal ethics protocols largely derived from regulations developed in relation to medical research in the 1980s, professional anthropologists first responded with irony and resistance. This was not only because the discipline had invested considerable energy over many years in questioning and reevaluating the position of the researcher and the consequences of her actions but also because the generic expectations of ethics protocols were poorly suited to a discipline based on long-term immersive field research. Anthropological departments, careers, and scholarship were built over decades of professional involvement in field research and had developed distinctive but informal protocols based on a long-standing tradition of working across regional, cultural, and social divides. We argue that the best basis for any ethics of the discipline lies in continued reflection on case studies of ethical dilemmas in anthropological research and that special attention should be paid to data ownership and protection, consent, and the treatment of incidental findings