Personnalité métaphysique et rites traditionnels mortuaires Sud Fore

Ethnographic studies on Melanesian concepts of the human body and religion have expanded our understandings of the concept of personhood. Melanesian ethnographers have used a number of descriptive words to describe the metaphysical components of the person, including: soul, spirit, life force, ghost, and vital and spiritual essence. By investigating the traditional mortuary rites of the South Fore people in Papua New Guinea, which included the practice of endocannibalism, investigators were able to distinguish the 5 souls of the composite metaphysical person and their relationship to the humors of the body. An understanding of the South Fore cosmology and its relationship to its human inhabitants was required to understand these deeply embedded concepts. The South Fore person was found to be composed of 5 souls and bodily humors which together formed a composite individual, yet partible through division. We elucidated the concepts of the 5 souls of the Fore person, which revealed a strong correlation between the landscape with its overlying cosmology and the cultural bodily humors, and demonstrated their relationship to the power of the land.Les études ethnographiques sur les concepts mélanésiens du corps humain et la religion ont élargi notre compréhension de la notion de personnalité. Les ethnographes mélanésiens ont utilisé un certain nombre de mots descriptifs pour décrire les composants métaphysiques de la personne, y compris l'âme, l'esprit, la force de vie, le fantôme et l'essence vitale et spirituelle. En enquêtant sur les rites funéraires traditionnels du peuple du Sud Fore (PNG), avec une pratique de l’endocannibalisme, les enquêteurs ont été en mesure de distinguer les cinq âmes de la personne métaphysique composite et leur relation avec les humeurs du corps. Une bonne compréhension de la cosmologie du Sud Fore et sa relation avec ses habitants humains ont été nécessaires pour comprendre ces concepts profondément ancrés. La personne du Sud Fore est donc composée de cinq âmes et humeurs corporelles qui, ensemble, forment un individu composite, encore divisible. Ici est donc élucidé le concept des cinq âmes de la personne Fore, qui révèle une forte corrélation entre le paysage avec sa cosmologie sus-jacente et les humeurs corporelles culturelles, et la preuve de leur relation à la puissance de la terre

Genome-wide association study in multiple human prion diseases suggests genetic risk factors additional to PRNP.

Prion diseases are fatal neurodegenerative diseases of humans and animals caused by the misfolding and aggregation of prion protein (PrP). Mammalian prion diseases are under strong genetic control but few risk factors are known aside from the PrP gene locus (PRNP). No genome-wide association study (GWAS) has been done aside from a small sample of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). We conducted GWAS of sporadic CJD (sCJD), variant CJD (vCJD), iatrogenic CJD, inherited prion disease, kuru and resistance to kuru despite attendance at mortuary feasts. After quality control, we analysed 2000 samples and 6015 control individuals (provided by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and KORA-gen) for 491032-511862 SNPs in the European study. Association studies were done in each geographical and aetiological group followed by several combined analyses. The PRNP locus was highly associated with risk in all geographical and aetiological groups. This association was driven by the known coding variation at rs1799990 (PRNP codon 129). No non-PRNP loci achieved genome-wide significance in the meta-analysis of all human prion disease. SNPs at the ZBTB38-RASA2 locus were associated with CJD in the UK (rs295301, P = 3.13 × 10(-8); OR, 0.70) but these SNPs showed no replication evidence of association in German sCJD or in Papua New Guinea-based tests. A SNP in the CHN2 gene was associated with vCJD [P = 1.5 × 10(-7); odds ratio (OR), 2.36], but not in UK sCJD (P = 0.049; OR, 1.24), in German sCJD or in PNG groups. In the overall meta-analysis of CJD, 14 SNPs were associated (P < 10(-5); two at PRNP, three at ZBTB38-RASA2, nine at nine other independent non-PRNP loci), more than would be expected by chance. None of the loci recently identified as genome-wide significant in studies of other neurodegenerative diseases showed any clear evidence of association in prion diseases. Concerning common genetic variation, it is likely that the PRNP locus contains the only strong risk factors that act universally across human prion diseases. Our data are most consistent with several other risk loci of modest overall effects which will require further genetic association studies to provide definitive evidence