The power of Ecuador's indigenous communities in an era of cultural pluralism

The Ecuadorian indigenous movement emerged just as the binaries that once defined the Indian/white boundary became acknowledged internal polarities of indigenous society. In this article, I argue that these divergences energized indigenous communities, which built material infrastructure, social networks, and political capital across widening gaps in values and incomes. They managed this task through a kind of vernacular statecraft, making the most of list making, council formation, and boundary drawing. As the movement shifts into electoral politics, the same community politics that launched it now challenges the national organization. As they work to define a coherent national program, the principal organizations of the national movement must reproduce the local contacts and relations among communities that made Ecuador's indigenous pluriculturalism such a potent presence in the 1990s

An ethnography of neoliberalism

Both a method and a goal of neoliberal policy, competitiveness structures ever more economic practices while consolidating cultural and community commitments. Current anthropological models treat competition narrowly as a reflection of economic inputs - capital, innovation, and talent. In contrast, I show that, first, competing successfully is predicated less and less on economic factors and increasingly on expressiveness and communication. Second, competition entails not so much individualism as positioning and thus is best understood as a structural relationship among competitors. Third, the essential cultural work of competition is not to sweep away inefficient conventions but rather to reconcile the painful inequalities emergent within a community with its professed shared values. To support these claims, I analyze artisan economies, a sector of the global economy that has been surprisingly, if not always happily, revitalized by neoliberal policies. Concentrating on indigenous artisans in Ecuador, I examine how people use words, art, crafted objects, and consumer goods to construct competition as an economic and moral field and place themselves within it

Development, Citizenship, and Everyday Appropriations of Buen Vivir: Ecuadorian Engagement with the Changing Rhetoric of Improvement

The Ecuadorian state frames its development interventions in infrastructure and human capital as advances in buen vivir or ‘good living’. This paper reports ethnographic research that draws attention to everyday appropriations of state discourses on buen vivir in the Amazon and Andes. Non-state actors in marginalised communities often use state discourses strategically in engagements and negotiations with state actors. We argue that uses of official versions of buen vivir discourse often reflect such strategic appropriations of state idioms, rather than subjective commitment to state-led development and official notions of buen vivir

Efficient and gentle delivery of molecules into cells with different elasticity via Progressive Mechanoporation

Intracellular delivery of cargo molecules such as membrane-impermeable proteins or drugs is crucial for cell treatment in biological and medical applications. Recently, microfluidic mechanoporation techniques have enabled transfection of previously inaccessible cells. These techniques create transient pores in the cell membrane by shear-induced or constriction contact-based rapid cell deformation. However, cells deform and recover differently from a given extent of shear stress or compression and it is unclear how the underlying mechanical properties affect the delivery efficiency of molecules into cells. In this study, we identify cell elasticity as a key mechanical determinant of delivery efficiency leading to the development of “progressive mechanoporation” (PM), a novel mechanoporation method that improves delivery efficiency into cells of different elasticity. PM is based on a multistage cell deformation, through a combination of hydrodynamic forces that pre-deform cells followed by their contact-based compression inside a PDMS-based device controlled by a pressure-based microfluidic controller. PM allows processing of small sample volumes (about 20 μL) with high-throughput (>10 000 cells per s), while controlling both operating pressure and flow rate for a reliable and reproducible cell treatment. We find that uptake of molecules of different sizes is correlated with cell elasticity whereby delivery efficiency of small and big molecules is favoured in more compliant and stiffer cells, respectively. A possible explanation for this opposite trend is a different size, number and lifetime of opened pores. Our data demonstrates that PM reliably and reproducibly delivers impermeable cargo of the size of small molecule inhibitors such as 4 kDa FITC-dextran with >90% efficiency into cells of different mechanical properties without affecting their viability and proliferation rates. Importantly, also much larger cargos such as a >190 kDa Cas9 protein–sgRNA complex are efficiently delivered high-lighting the biological, biomedical and clinical applicability of our findings

Post-agrarian aspirations: tourism and rural politics in Ecuador

This ethnographic study examines post-agrarian aspirations and rural politics in Ecuador. After decades of urban outmigration under a neoliberal agrarian order, many rural places have witnessed efforts to develop local tourism economies as a possibility to transcend stigmatised agrarian livelihoods and to (re)constitute communities. We build on anthropological studies of aspiration to explore how visions of post-agrarian futures are shifting the actors, scales and terms of rural politics in the present. Through two case studies, we observe how state actors have come to re-inscribe their role within post-agrarian imaginaries, partially rewriting the terms of state legitimacy in rural places

Efficient and gentle delivery of molecules into cells with different elasticity via Progressive Mechanoporation.

Intracellular delivery of cargo molecules such as membrane-impermeable proteins or drugs is crucial for cell treatment in biological and medical applications. Recently, microfluidic mechanoporation techniques have enabled transfection of previously inaccessible cells. These techniques create transient pores in the cell membrane by shear-induced or constriction contact-based rapid cell deformation. However, cells deform and recover differently from a given extent of shear stress or compression and it is unclear how the underlying mechanical properties affect the delivery efficiency of molecules into cells. In this study, we identify cell elasticity as a key mechanical determinant of delivery efficiency leading to the development of "progressive mechanoporation" (PM), a novel mechanoporation method that improves delivery efficiency into cells of different elasticity. PM is based on a multistage cell deformation, through a combination of hydrodynamic forces that pre-deform cells followed by their contact-based compression inside a PDMS-based device controlled by a pressure-based microfluidic controller. PM allows processing of small sample volumes (about 20 μL) with high-throughput (>10 000 cells per s), while controlling both operating pressure and flow rate for a reliable and reproducible cell treatment. We find that uptake of molecules of different sizes is correlated with cell elasticity whereby delivery efficiency of small and big molecules is favoured in more compliant and stiffer cells, respectively. A possible explanation for this opposite trend is a different size, number and lifetime of opened pores. Our data demonstrates that PM reliably and reproducibly delivers impermeable cargo of the size of small molecule inhibitors such as 4 kDa FITC-dextran with >90% efficiency into cells of different mechanical properties without affecting their viability and proliferation rates. Importantly, also much larger cargos such as a >190 kDa Cas9 protein-sgRNA complex are efficiently delivered high-lighting the biological, biomedical and clinical applicability of our findings

Experiment and simulations of kinetic instabilities in mirror-confined ECR discharge plasma

Non-Maxwellian electron distribution functions give rise to a rich variety of kinetic instabilities, such as streaming instability, Weibel instability, and electrostatic and electromagnetic cyclotron instabilities. Electron ring-like distributions are ubiquitous in space plasmas and also occur in mirror-confined plasma where the loss-cone cuts a 'hole' in the distribution function. We report recent observations and simulations of instabilities in mirror-confined ECR discharge plasma [1], where excitation on harmonics and half-harmonics of the electron cyclotron frequency have been observed. The relevance to space plasma are also discussed where similar observations by satellites are common [2,3]. Theory and simulations show that electrostatic instabilities take place where two electron Bernstein modes merge [4]. Electromagnetic Vlasov simulations also show the coupling between electrostatic and electromagnetic electron Bernstein modes leading to instabilities near cyclotron harmonics

Microwave emission due to kinetic instabilities in an over-dense mirror-confined plasma

The kinetic instabilities of a microwave plasma confined in an open magnetic trap are relevant to understanding various types of radio emission in space plasma, for example, in the magnetospheres of the Earth and the planets, the Sun, and certain types of stars. The high efficiency of the kinetic wave generation mechanism is due to the low group velocity of plasma waves (in comparison with electromagnetic waves), which ensures they enjoy an extended interaction time with nonequilibrium particles resulting in a high integral gain. Emission from the plasma is observed due to various mechanisms for the transformation of plasma waves into electromagnetic waves, for example, as a result of scattering by thermal ions. In view of the universality of the physical mechanisms of radiation generation, essential aspects of natural systems can be reproduced in laboratory magnetic traps under controlled and reproducible conditions. Hitherto the excitation of plasma waves in open magnetic traps has been carried out with the use of electron beams. The technique reported here exploits a plasma generated by irradiating a mirror confined plasma using mm-waves from a gyrotron under electron-cyclotron resonance conditions, a technique also potentially of interest for technological applications. In such a discharge, a two-component plasma is created with a dense cold (background) fraction with an isotropic particle velocity distribution and a less dense high-energy fraction of nonequilibrium electrons with an anisotropic distribution function. In these experiments, bursts of powerful electromagnetic radiation at a frequency close to the upper hybrid resonance and to the second harmonic of the electron gyrofrequency were observed for the first time, accompanied by synchronous precipitation of fast electrons from the trap. The observed bursts were associated with the instability of plasma waves under conditions of a double plasma resonance, with subsequent transformation of the plasma waves into electromagnetic waves. This poster focuses on a theoretical and experimental study of wave generation in a dense magnetoactive plasma at the harmonics of the electron gyrofrequency. In the experiments at the IAP RAS, a detailed study of the fine structure of dynamic spectra using ultra-wideband oscilloscopes with a bandwidth of up to 59 GHz is reported. Theoretical and numerical analysis at relevant plasma parameters is underway at the University of Strathclyde. Comparison of experimental and theoretical data will lead to an understanding of the mechanisms of electromagnetic radiation generation in magnetic traps and the features of the radio emission spectra observed in natural conditions

Progress report of investigations on gyrotron ECR ion source SMIS 37

A review of experimental investigations on ion production in plasma developed on SMIS 37 source at the Institute of Applied Physics of RAS (Nizhny Novgorod) is reported. Pulsed power gyrotron with emission frequency 37.5 GHz was used for plasma creation and heating in the simple magnetic mirror trap. Magnetic field with value up to 3.5 T was created by pulsed coils. Experiments were carried out in nitrogen as operating gas. Formation of multicharged ions in dense plasma in different regimes of plasma confinement was investigated. In this report we describe some investigations of instabilities of the plasma in the trap. Low frequency instabilities are analyzed basing on the results of plasma high-speed image registration. Also, whistler cyclotron instability was observed. Short pulses of accelerated electrons with energy about 10 keV are measured. Detected short pulses of microwave emission of the plasma characterize cyclotron instability too. Dense plasma of singly charged ions obtained in the trap with the plug magnetic field much less than resonant value. Flux of the plasma exceeds 0,1 A/cm2, electron temperature is about 20 eV. Such plasma seems to be interesting for surface modification