Transitivity of the climate–vegetation system in a warm climate

To date, the transitivity of the global system has been analysed for late Quaternary (glacial, interglacial, and present-day) climate. Here, we extend this analysis to a warm, almost ice-free climate with a different configuration of continents. We use the Earth system model of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology to analyse the stability of the climate system under early Eocene and pre-industrial conditions. We initialize the simulations by prescribing either dense forests or bare deserts on all continents. Starting with desert continents, an extended desert remains in central Asia in the early Eocene climate. Starting with dense forest coverage, the Asian desert is much smaller, while coastal deserts develop in the Americas which appear to be larger than in the simulations with initially bare continents. These differences can be attributed to differences in the large-scale tropical circulation. With initially forested continents, a stronger dipole in the 200 hPa velocity potential develops than in the simulation with initially bare continents. This difference prevails when vegetation is allowed to adjust to and interact with climate. Further simulations with initial surface conditions that differ in the region of the Asian desert only indicate that local feedback processes are less important in the development of multiple states. In the interglacial, pre-industrial climate, multiple states develop only in the Sahel region. There, local climate–vegetation interaction seems to dominate

Visualizing the sacred: video technology "televisual" style, and the religious imagination in Bahian candomblé

Candombl´e is an Afro-Brazilian spirit-possession cult, whose splendid performance of "African tradition" and "secrecy" has long prohibited the reproduction of religious activity by modern media technology. Authoritative voices within candombl´e have explicitly stated that modern media technology is incongruous with authentic traditional religion, claiming that the body in ritual action is (and should remain) the only medium through which an understanding of the sacred can be reached. Nonetheless, more and more cult adepts seek to portray their religious life through video technology, challenging priestly as well as anthropological discourses on the cult. A discussion of some of the very first video productions made by and for the candombl´e community reveals that community members are modern media consumers, taught by TV what is aesthetically desirable and stylistically correct and keen to upgrade the importance of a religious event by "making it look like TV." My analysis reveals just how much TV has become an authenticating and authorizing agent in the religious field: Endowed with the power to make spirit worship part of the contemporary media society that is Brazil (rather than locate that worship in an imagined "Africa") and allowing the significance of embodied "deep knowledge" to be articulated in a style that is universally understood and appreciated by media consumers, TV is nothing less than constitutive of the very values people attribute to their religious experiences

I AM THEIR EVIL

Anthropologists usually take an encounter to be an act of empathy: an opening up to the other. Yet etymologists have pointed out that the word encounter is grounded in “the meeting of an adversary”. Originally it referred to the realm of fights, confrontations, battles. In this video-thought, the author wonders how to deal with the fact that his beloved Brazil is increasingly hostile to his way of being. Should he continue the anthropologist’s way of encountering the other, or is it time to put up a fight

Persistent Topology of Syntax

We study the persistent homology of the data set of syntactic parameters of the world languages. We show that, while homology generators behave erratically over the whole data set, non-trivial persistent homology appears when one restricts to specific language families. Different families exhibit different persistent homology. We focus on the cases of the Indo-European and the Niger-Congo families, for which we compare persistent homology over different cluster filtering values. We investigate the possible significance, in historical linguistic terms, of the presence of persistent generators of the first homology. In particular, we show that the persistent first homology generator we find in the Indo-European family is not due (as one might guess) to the Anglo-Norman bridge in the Indo-European phylogenetic network, but is related to the position of Ancient Greek and the Hellenic branch within the network.Comment: 15 pages, 25 jpg figure