Pende Masks in Kauffman Museum

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.jstor.org/

Representations, Ritual, & Social Renewal: Essays In Africanist Medical Anthropology

Specifically, this collection was assembled for two engagements during the author's sabbatical during the Spring semester, 2004. The first was a set of lectures at Harvard University in connection with a consultancy at the African Studies Program there. The second engagement was a six-week short term course at the Medical University of Vienna, in Austria. In this connection the author was able to make a two week trip to the Sudan, and to study Sufi sheik-healers. Some of the essays were also given by the author at other conferences, or reflect additional thinking for such venues. The collection then became a textbook in the author’s course Anthropology 461/761 “Introduction to Medical Anthropology” at the University of Kansas.The slides were prepared to accompany some of the lectures of Representations, Ritual, and Social Renewal. They are numbered to correspond to the appropriate chapter in the text. Words or phrases in bold in the text identify images in the presentations.The essays in this collection reflect the author’s thinking about sickness, health, and healing in Central Africa in the early years of the 21st century.“Representations, ritual, and social renewal” encapsulates a perspective on Africanist medical anthropology that is sensitive to how issues of disease, health and healing are seen, communicated, symbolized; how they are situated in concrete behaviors and political-economic structures and conditions that affect health; and how they are engaged by common people, specialists, and leaders in projects and endeavors to ameliorate health. Although the setting of most essays is in the Kongo region of Western Equatorial Africa (the Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Angola, and southern Republic of Congo-Brazzaville), where the author conducted much of his fieldwork, some topics have a wider sweep, such as: the verbal cognates of Bantu-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa, and the sub-continental distribution of some institutions and concepts; the environmental settings for therapeutic traditions in rainforest, savanna, and semi-arid regions; the presence of environmentally-triggered diseases such as malaria, ebola, sleeping sickness, etc. As argued in the Introduction, it is the author’s conviction that the history of health and healing in sub-Saharan Africa is shaped by a unique and pressing array of diseases and economic conditions, such that a unique medical anthropology emerges from the study of these issues and histories

N'kisi Figures of the Bakongo

This is the published version

Lemba, 1650-1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World

©1982 John M. Janzen. The contents of this monograph have been divided into five files for easier downloading. Readers on faster internet connections may prefer to download the entire book in one 70 MB file. It is being made available in both formats

Identity, Voice, Community: New African Immigrants to Kansas

This is the final report of a grant awarded to the Kansas African Studies Center, funded in part by the Kansas Humanities Council

Deep Thought: Structure and Intention in Kongo Prophetism, 1910—1921

This is the published version. Copyright 1979 Johns Hopkins University Press.There is no abstract available for this work

Divergent Legitimations of Post-State Health Institutions in Western Equatorial Africa

This study examines the legitimation of power and knowledge in the struggle of public health and health care agencies in the Lower Congo region of the Democratic Republic of Congo to vanquish chronic tropical diseases. Of particular interest is the creation of alternative institutions following the collapse of state sponsored structures and supply lines in the 1980s and 1990s, and the process by which such alternative structures are legitimized. A review of legitimation theory suggests that new paradigms are required to assess the nature and efficacy of diverse non-state institutions within a fluid global neo-liberal context. The paper argues that these new or newly adapted post-state institutional arrangements, born in the crisis of state failure, may be effective in the lessening of the disease burden that weighs on the region to the extent that they are able to muster the legitimacy of the populace, the professions, the national society, and the wider international community. I thus hope to shed light on the paradox of persistent tropical diseases — e. g., malaria, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis, as well as seasonal grippe, typhoid fever, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS — as endemic or seasonal scourges, despite their being understood by local specialists, with known treatments and public health measures to control them

Rejoinder on N'kisi

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Reading the Complex Skipper Butterfly Fauna of One Tropical Place

BACKGROUND: An intense, 30-year, ongoing biodiversity inventory of Lepidoptera, together with their food plants and parasitoids, is centered on the rearing of wild-caught caterpillars in the 120,000 terrestrial hectares of dry, rain, and cloud forest of Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica. Since 2003, DNA barcoding of all species has aided their identification and discovery. We summarize the process and results for a large set of the species of two speciose subfamilies of ACG skipper butterflies (Hesperiidae) and emphasize the effectiveness of barcoding these species (which are often difficult and time-consuming to identify). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Adults are DNA barcoded by the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, Guelph, Canada; and they are identified by correlating the resulting COI barcode information with more traditional information such as food plant, facies, genitalia, microlocation within ACG, caterpillar traits, etc. This process has found about 303 morphologically defined species of eudamine and pyrgine Hesperiidae breeding in ACG (about 25% of the ACG butterfly fauna) and another 44 units indicated by distinct barcodes (n = 9,094), which may be additional species and therefore may represent as much as a 13% increase. All but the members of one complex can be identified by their DNA barcodes. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Addition of DNA barcoding to the methodology greatly improved the inventory, both through faster (hence cheaper) accurate identification of the species that are distinguishable without barcoding, as well as those that require it, and through the revelation of species "hidden" within what have long been viewed as single species. Barcoding increased the recognition of species-level specialization. It would be no more appropriate to ignore barcode data in a species inventory than it would be to ignore adult genitalia variation or caterpillar ecology

Altered spring phenology of North American freshwater turtles and the importance of representative populations

Globally, populations of diverse taxa have altered phenology in response to climate change. However, most research has focused on a single population of a given taxon, which may be unrepresentative for comparative analyses, and few long-term studies of phenology in ectothermic amniotes have been published. We test for climate- altered phenology using long-term studies (10–36 years) of nesting behavior in 14 populations representing six genera of freshwater turtles (Chelydra, Chrysemys, Kinosternon, Malaclemys, Sternotherus, and Trachemys). Nesting season initiation oc- curs earlier in more recent years, with 11 of the populations advancing phenology. The onset of nesting for nearly all populations correlated well with temperatures during the month preceding nesting. Still, certain populations of some species have not advanced phenology as might be expected from global patterns of climate change. This collection of findings suggests a proximate link between local climate and reproduction that is potentially caused by variation in spring emergence from hibernation, ability to process food, and thermoregulatory opportunities prior to nesting. However, even though all species had populations with at least some evi- dence of phenological advancement, geographic variation in phenology within and among turtle species underscores the critical importance of representative data for accurate comprehensive assessments of the biotic impacts of climate change