Thinking through Tubes: Flowing H/air and Synaesthesia

The tube, as both object and concept, has cropped up from time to time in the ethnography of lowland South America, most notably in Rivière and Lévi-Strauss’s discussions of blowpipes, hair tubes and pottery and in Hill and Wright\u27s writings on Yuruparí flutes and trumpets. Using data from Northwest Amazonia, this paper first seeks to provide a more rigorous definition of the tube as a concept, exploring its various manifestations and relating these to the body as an image of totalization and detotalization. With reference to myths about creation and Yuruparí, the paper then argues that flows from tubes provide an abstract, generic model of human reproduction, growth and creativity and explores parallels between Amerindian and pre-Enlightenment European ideas of the human body and its fluids. Involving both the visual and acoustic registers, creativity as flow also implies synaesthesia, an issue that figures prominently in Tukanoan myths about yagé where the blood of birth gives rise to undifferentiated speech, music and ornament that are then differentiated as the baby’s body is dismembered. The paper concludes by suggesting that the peculiar emphasis on tubes and synaesthesia in Northwest Amazonian thought may have to do with conceptual issues related to patriliny and exogamy

The Origin of Night and the Dance of Time: Ritual and Material Culture in Northwest Amazonia

Based on a survey of published material complemented by original fieldwork, this paper shows that Northwest Amazonian Arawakan, Tukanoan and Makuan stories of the Origin of Night form parts of a single, more inclusive myth about the sequential creation of earth, trees, house-frames, roofing leaves, night, song and dance. Here a box of feather ornaments plays a central role as the container of both roofing leaves and night with leaves as feathers, the ornaments of the house-as-person. When placed on the house-frame as thatch, these ornament-leaves shut out the light causing night. The feather box, a container of bright yellow feathers that order time, appears in myth as a manifestation of the sun and is paired with the rattle lance, another object with solar and lunar connotations. The lance measures the phases of nocturnal ritual dances by mimicking crickets whose changing noises mark the passage of night. More abstractly, the paper concerns the understanding of time in terms of changes of color and sound in the natural world; how time is given material form in ritual objects; and how the wild time of natural sounds is domesticated and controlled through ritual dances involving feather ornaments and sequences of song and dance

Good Reasons or Bad Conscience? Or Why Some Indian Peoples of Amazonia Are Ambivalent about Eating Meat

Originally written for a conference on meat attended by farmers, anthropologists, people involved in cultural affairs, and other members of the public, and seeking to avoid emphasis on cultural difference, this paper explores common ground between Euro-American and Amerindian ambivalence about meat consumption. Meat-eating raises two shared concerns: an intuitive recognition of the resemblances between humans and animals and an uncomfortable awareness that human life often depends on the death and destruction of other living beings. I suggest that, behind some obvious cultural differences, Amazonian shamanic and ritual procedures aimed at the de-subjectification of meat share points in common with various Euro-American procedures that seek to disguise or render invisible the harsher realities of meat eating

Patrimony, Publishing, and Politics: Books as Ritual Objects in Northwest Amazonia

With particular reference to works by Tukano and Desana authors, this paper examines some of the cultural and historical factors that underlie the unique propensity of indigenous peoples of Northwest Amazonia to publish their narrative histories in books. Jointly written by a knowledgeable elder and a younger literate amanuensis, each book in Coleção Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro series contains the origin narratives, myths, and recent history of a particular group, told from the point of view of one of its clans. Writing down and thus rescuing oral traditions under threat from the pressures of education, urbanization and other factors makes good sense in the context of a contemporary Brazilian world favoring claims to autonomy and separate identity. However, the paper argues that these books are also transformations of ritual objects that amount to ancestral relics. The Tukanoans’ interest in books as objects also makes sense in relation to much older religious practices and political strategies with features of the Tukanoans\u27 patrilineal organisation implying a cultural predisposition to reify their culture that predates contact with outsiders. If there is an elective affinity between aspects of traditional Tukanoan culture and their liking for books, so too does the Kayapó\u27s emphasis on the aesthetic effects of their political rituals fit neatly with their enthusiasm for VCRs and camcorders

Good Reasons or Bad Conscience: A Postscript

Published in French in 1996, the original article for which this comprises a post-script set indigenous Amazonians’ attitudes to meat alongside those of Euro-Americans. With the accelerating deforestation of Amazonia linked with the cultivation of soya used to feed animals for meat, and with calls to reduce or abandon meat consumption as one way of averting catastrophic climate change, it is topical once again. In this postscript, I reply to two contrasting critiques of the article, the first wary of an excess of ontology, the second distrustful of a deficit of it. Does a focus on ritual and shamanism obscure the wanton mistreatment and wholesale slaughter of animals in everyday Amerindian hunting practices? Does an appeal to sentiment ( bad conscience ), as a common dimension in indigenous and Euro-American attitudes to animals, risk obscuring important differences between the ontologies of the peoples concerned? Responding to these critiques, I defend the approach taken in the article and clarify my original, incautious use of the phrase bad conscience

Using electrostatic potentials to predict DNA-binding sites on DNA-binding proteins

A method to detect DNA-binding sites on the surface of a protein structure is important for functional annotation. This work describes the analysis of residue patches on the surface of DNA-binding proteins and the development of a method of predicting DNA-binding sites using a single feature of these surface patches. Surface patches and the DNA-binding sites were initially analysed for accessibility, electrostatic potential, residue propensity, hydrophobicity and residue conservation. From this, it was observed that the DNA-binding sites were, in general, amongst the top 10% of patches with the largest positive electrostatic scores. This knowledge led to the development of a prediction method in which patches of surface residues were selected such that they excluded residues with negative electrostatic scores. This method was used to make predictions for a data set of 56 non-homologous DNA-binding proteins. Correct predictions made for 68% of the data set

Quantum counterpart of spontaneously broken classical PT symmetry

The classical trajectories of a particle governed by the PT-symmetric Hamiltonian $H=p^2+x^2(ix)^\epsilon$ ($\epsilon\geq0$) have been studied in depth. It is known that almost all trajectories that begin at a classical turning point oscillate periodically between this turning point and the corresponding PT-symmetric turning point. It is also known that there are regions in $\epsilon$ for which the periods of these orbits vary rapidly as functions of $\epsilon$ and that in these regions there are isolated values of $\epsilon$ for which the classical trajectories exhibit spontaneously broken PT symmetry. The current paper examines the corresponding quantum-mechanical systems. The eigenvalues of these quantum systems exhibit characteristic behaviors that are correlated with those of the associated classical system.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Semiclassical analysis of a complex quartic Hamiltonian

It is necessary to calculate the C operator for the non-Hermitian PT-symmetric Hamiltonian H=\half p^2+\half\mu^2x^2-\lambda x^4 in order to demonstrate that H defines a consistent unitary theory of quantum mechanics. However, the C operator cannot be obtained by using perturbative methods. Including a small imaginary cubic term gives the Hamiltonian H=\half p^2+\half \mu^2x^2+igx^3-\lambda x^4, whose C operator can be obtained perturbatively. In the semiclassical limit all terms in the perturbation series can be calculated in closed form and the perturbation series can be summed exactly. The result is a closed-form expression for C having a nontrivial dependence on the dynamical variables x and p and on the parameter \lambda.Comment: 4 page

Concordance between Sources of Morbidity Reports: Self-Reports and Medical Records

As part of a 10-year follow-up study of morbidity following spouse bereavement, concordance between subject reports of their illness experience and that given by their doctors’ and other medical records has been assessed. Enumeration from medical records involved extensive and careful perusal of general practitioner, specialist, and hospital records while subject reports were aided by a structured questionnaire which helped to prompt subjects’ memories. The findings showed generally poor concordance between these two sources of morbidity data. Overall only 22% of disease events were found in both sources: of the diseases that did not match 65% were from the record source and 35% were from the self-report source. Despite finding that concordance rates varied with some subject and disease factors, concordance was always less than might be expected to occur by random chance (the throw of a coin). These findings have serious implications for epidemiological and pharmacoeconomic research involving morbidity history as they suggest that neither the subject nor their medical record can generally be assumed to provide a complete enumeration of morbidity burden. Indeed, irrespective of the significant factors under consideration, the maximum concordance reached in this study was 45.7%