Visualizing a Post-Apocalypse: Notes on New Ayoreo Cinema

This essay describes one recent Ayoreo film and its production in order to reflect on the wider significance of lowland South American Indigenous cinema and analyses of it today. Informed by the authors’ roles in the collaborative editing of the film Ujirei, the article details how one Ayoreo filmmaker cinematically visualizes a unique aesthetic response to the aftermath of pandemic upheavals and world-ending violence – a response that pointedly exceeds any prescriptive or structuralist approach to lowland Indigenous cinema. In order to better grasp the subjective, conceptual and political implications of this project, the essay aims to craft an analytic genre capable of approximating a cinematic aesthetics that envisions rupture and regeneration as mutually constitutive modes of survival in the face of dehumanizing colonial violence. It foregrounds the editing process as one ethnographic site for illuminating the decolonizing praxis of lowland Indigenous filmmaking. In doing so, the essay crafts a larger argument about the ways certain Indigenous cinematic forms, as process and product, may usefully orient the poetics and politics of anthropological attunements to the defining crises of the contemporary

Ujnarone Chosite: Ritual Poesis, Curing Chants and Becoming Ayoreo in the Gran Chaco

Ujnarone Chosite: Ritual Poesis, Curing Chants and Becoming Ayoreo in the Gran Chaco. This essay describes the ujnarone curing chants among the so-called Ayoreo Indians of the Bolivian and Paraguayan Gran Chaco as a communicative and media technology whose potency was rooted in the multiplicities of social time and the dynamism of performative contexts. Although ethnographers have imagined ritual forms like the ujnarone to be the locus for Ayoreo cultural authenticity, they have been entirely abandoned by contemporary Ayoreo, many of whom now view them as dangerously taboo. This essay argues against the ethnographic fetishization of traditional practices such as ujnarone, and provides a way to conceptualize ritual discourse as a precedent, not an opposite, to contemporary Ayoreo Christianity and use of electronic media technologies.Ujnarone chosite : poésie rituelle, chants thérapeutiques et identité ayoreo dans le Grand Chaco. Cet article décrit les chants thérapeutiques ujnarone des Indiens ayoreo du Grand Chaco bolivien et paraguayen. Ces chants sont ici considérés comme une technologie de communication dont la puissance s’enracinait naguère dans les multiplicités du temps social et dans les dynamismes de leurs contextes d’occurrence. Quoique les ethnologues aient considéré les discours rituels tels que les ujnarone comme des clés de l’authenticité culturelle ayoreo, ils ont été totalement abandonnés aujourd’hui, de nombreux Ayoreo les considérant même comme dangereusement tabou. Tout en dénonçant la fétichisation ethnographique des pratiques traditionnelles telles que les ujnarone, cet article montre comment il est possible d’envisager ces discours rituels comme un précédent, et non comme un élément antithétique, du christianisme ayoreo contemporain et de l’usage des médias électroniques.Ujnarone chosite: poesis ritual, cantos terapéuticos e identidad ayoreo en el Gran Chaco. Este ensayo describe los ujnarone, cantos terapéuticos entre los llamados indígenas ayoreo del Gran Chaco Paraguayo y Boliviano, como una tecnología de comunicación y mediación cuya potencia derivaba de la multiplicidad del tiempo social y de los contextos de enunciación dinámicos. A pesar de que etnógrafos han imaginado los ujnarone y otras formas de discurso ritual como fuentes de la autenticidad cultural de los ayoreo, estos últimos han abandonado estos cantos, e incluso, muchos de ellos actualmente los consideran peligrosos. Este ensayo argumenta en contra de la fetichización de las prácticas tradicionales como ujnarone, y provee una manera alternativa de conceptualizar el discurso ritual no como opuesto, sino como precedente, al cristianismo y al uso de las tecnologías electrónicas de comunicación

Radio fields : anthropology and wireless sound in the 21st century

Radio is the most widespread electronic medium in the world today. As a form of technology that is both durable and relatively cheap, radio remains central to the everyday lives of billions of people around the globe. It is used as a call for prayer in Argentina and Appalachia, to organize political protest in Mexico and Libya, and for wartime communication in Iraq and Afghanistan. In urban centers it is played constantly in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and classrooms. Yet despite its omnipresence, it remains the media form least studied by anthropologists. Radio Fields employs ethnographic methods to reveal the diverse domains in which radio is imagined, deployed, and understood. Drawing on research from six continents, the volume demonstrates how the particular capacities and practices of radio provide singular insight into diverse social worlds, ranging from aboriginal Australia to urban Zambia. Together, the contributors address how radio creates distinct possibilities for rethinking such fundamental concepts as culture, communication, community, and collective agency.320 page(s

Introduction : radio fields

49 page(s

The Anthropology of radio fields

This review surveys a resurgent ethnographic interest in radio media in order to identify the contours and potentials of an emergent anthropology of radio. We first locate such scholarship in relation to long-standing questions about the nature and power of technological mediation, as well as voice, sound, and aurality. This allows us to reveal how conceptualizations of a singular ontology of radio often implicitly underwrite most accounts of its social power. Finally, we draw attention to how recent but rarely consolidated anthropological efforts to engage ethnographically with radio technology and its sensorial affordances require critically rethinking the relationships among radio, ontology, and mediation. In doing so, this review advances a new working definition of radio: not as an old medium on the verge of obsolescence, but as a vibrant domain for acoustically resignifying the ontological that merits sustained ethnographic exploration.16 page(s

Humans more than humans and non-humans : critical intersections around anthropology and ontologies

¿Qué significa ser humano en un mundo en el que las fronteras entre cultura y naturaleza son cada vez más porosas? ¿Qué prácticas éticas son posibles cuando se reconoce el papel que los no humanos desempeñan en la constitución de este y de otros mundos? En antropología, la aproximación a estas preguntas se presenta como un conjunto de posturas teóricas y metodológicas denominado giro ontológico. Este libro compila una variedad de perspectivas teóricas y etnográficas que matizan e incluso polemizan los fundamentos y alcances de este giro.Bogot

Optimization of Tubulysin Antibody–Drug Conjugates: A Case Study in Addressing ADC Metabolism

As part of our efforts to develop new classes of tubulin inhibitor payloads for antibody–drug conjugate (ADC) programs, we developed a tubulysin ADC that demonstrated excellent in vitro activity but suffered from rapid metabolism of a critical acetate ester. A two-pronged strategy was employed to address this metabolism. First, the hydrolytically labile ester was replaced by a carbamate functional group resulting in a more stable ADC that retained potency in cellular assays. Second, site-specific conjugation was employed in order to design ADCs with reduced metabolic liabilities. Using the later approach, we were able to identify a conjugate at the 334C position of the heavy chain that resulted in an ADC with considerably reduced metabolism and improved efficacy. The examples discussed herein provide one of the clearest demonstrations to-date that site of conjugation can play a critical role in addressing metabolic and PK liabilities of an ADC. Moreover, a clear correlation was identified between the hydrophobicity of an ADC and its susceptibility to metabolic enzymes. Importantly, this study demonstrates that traditional medicinal chemistry strategies can be effectively applied to ADC programs