The Sopono cult and smallpox vaccinations in Lagos

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 11INTRODUCTION: This paper examines the question of how African societies view conditions which Western society calls "disease," and how Africans respond to Western-oriented medical efforts to deal with "disease." This paper is based on data obtained before and during an international smallpox vaccination campaign in West Africa, among husbands and senior wives in a random sample of households •. All of the data were obtained in metropolitan Lagos, and the analysis focuses on members of the large Yoruba tribe who comprised 81 percent of the sample. It is recognized that an urban sample cannot be considered characteristic of either African or Yoruba society. At the same time, Lagos is regarded as peculiarly intensive in blend of African and Western influences (see especially Mabogunje, 1968), and the analysis also focuses on this aspect and derives special interest because of this concentration of social forces in one compact geographical area

Basic health needs in Africa

African Studies Center Working Paper No. 2

Minuscule representations, invariant polynomials, and spectral covers

Given a minuscule representation of a simple Lie algebra, we find an algebraic model for the action of a regular element and show that these models can be glued together over the adjoint quotient, viewed as the set of all regular conjugacy classes of the Lie algebra. There are partial results in the case of a quasiminuscule representation, and a conjecture in the case of a general irreducible finite-dimensional representation. The method of proof is to relate the question to a problem concerning holomorphic principal bundles over cuspidal cubic curves.Comment: LaTeX, 42 pages, final version, to appear in the proceedings of the University of Missouri conference on Hilbert schemes, vector bundles and representation theory, new material on extensions and the adjoint representation of a simply laced Lie algebra adde