Nigerian scam e-mails and the charms of capital

So-called '419' or 'advance-fee' e-mail frauds have proved remarkably successful. Global losses to these scams are believed to run to billions of dollars. Although it can be assumed that the promise of personal gain which these e-mails hold out is part of what motivates victims, there is more than greed at issue here. How is it that the seemingly incredible offers given in these unsolicited messages can find an audience willing to treat them as credible? The essay offers a speculative thesis in answer to this question. Firstly, it is argued, these scams are adept at exploiting common presuppositions in British and American culture regarding Africa and the relationships that are assumed to exist between their nations and those in the global south. Secondly, part of the appeal of these e-mails lies in the fact that they appear to reveal the processes by which wealth is created and distributed in the global economy. They thus speak to their readers’ attempts to map or conceptualise the otherwise inscrutable processes of that economy. In the conclusion the essay looks at the contradictions in the official state response to this phenomena

Review Essay: Biopolitics 2.0 – Reclaiming the Power of Life in the Anthropocene

Biopolitics was once the preserve of critical Foucauldian-influenced theorists. This is no longer the case. The rise of new materialisms, networked and object-oriented ontologies and demands for the ‘renaturalization of politics’ (Grosz, 2011; Sharp, 2011) have turned the political into the biopolitical in much of radical contemporary political theory. Here, the biopolitical is often in tension with the Foucauldian discourses of the last few decades, affirming alternative possibilities rather than merely critiquing regimes of power (Malabou, 2008; Kirby, 2011; Taussig, 2018). One factor in this shift has been the impact of anthropogenic climate change and global warming on the contemporary political imagination, increasingly refracted through conceptualizations of the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015; Cohen et al, 2016; Chandler, 2018). A second factor has been that the life sciences no longer appear to support understandings of deterministic differences but rather to cast evolution in sympoietic and entangled ways, making biology appear as no longer essentialising but as increasingly importable into politics, in ways which disrupt modernist or liberal conceptions of the culture/nature divide (Haraway, 2016). Two important but very different engagements, which reflect these affirmative readings of biopolitics, are reviewed here, from the fields of postcolonial literature and gender and race in international politics

Letters of introduction for Andrew Inglis Clark's visit to the U.S.A., 1897

Letters of introduction for Andrew Inglis Clark's visit to the U.S.A., 1897, from G.W. Bell, U.S. Consul, D.G. Thompson, F.W. Taussig, Margaret Windeyer of Western Australia, M.McMillan and T. Swan. Also menu of the Annual Dinner of the Reform Club. C4/C391 (1-13

Multimodal Imaginaries and the “Big Worm”: Materialities, Artefacts and Analogies in São Paulo’s Urban Renovation

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries”, that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts

Counterparts: Clothing, value and the sites of otherness in Panapompom ethnographic encounters

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Anthropological Forum, 18(1), 17-35, 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00664670701858927.Panapompom people living in the western Louisiade Archipelago of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, see their clothes as indices of their perceived poverty. ‘Development’ as a valued form of social life appears as images that attach only loosely to the people employing them. They nevertheless hold Panapompom people to account as subjects to a voice and gaze that is located in the imagery they strive to present: their clothes. This predicament strains anthropological approaches to the study of Melanesia that subsist on strict alterity, because native self‐judgments are located ‘at home’ for the ethnographer. In this article, I develop the notion of the counterpart as a means to explore these forms of postcolonial oppression and their implications for the ethnographic encounter

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues? controversial 2008 article in PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Power, that it is the very limitations of RCTs ? their inadequacies in producing reliable evidence of clinical effects ? that help to strengthen assumptions of their superiority as methodological tools. Finally, I suggest that the case of RCTs helps to explore the question of why failure is often useful in consolidating the authority of those who have presided over that failure, and why systems widely recognized to be ineffective tend to assume greater authority at the very moment when people speak of their malfunction

The Touch of Iconoclasm

This article reflects on some depicted, intentional acts of iconoclasm undertaken by Isis in Northern Iraq, and viewed as online videos. It attempts to consider what makes these moving images compelling to audiences who share an orientation to the protection and preservation of ancient artefacts. In doing so it prompts a reflection on their circulation as part of stories that get told about cultural heritage, and particularly the simple civilizational oppositions that get set up between ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ culture. Centring on the significance of the sensation of touch to practices of cultural inscription, it suggests that the Northern Iraq videos animate forms of synaesthesic material engagement that are denied by the modernist technologies of museum culture

Pharmacy Participation in Non-Prescription Syringe Sales in Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties, 2007

Increasing sterile syringe access for injection drug users (IDUs) is one way to prevent HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) transmission in this population. In 2005, California Senate Bill 1159 allowed counties to adopt the Disease Prevention Demonstration Project (DPDP). Where enacted, the DPDP allows pharmacies that register with the county to sell up to ten syringes to adults without a prescription. In the current study, we describe pharmacy participation in nonprescription syringe sales (NPSS) in two counties in California and examine factors associated with NPSS. Telephone and in-person interviews were conducted in Los Angeles (LA) and San Francisco (SF) with 238 pharmacies in 2007 (n = 67 in SF; n = 171 in LA). Quantitative survey items captured pharmacy registration with the county, pharmacy policies/practices, episodes and conditions of NPSS and refusals to sell, potential negative consequences of NPSS, and staff attitudes regarding HIV and HCV prevention for IDUs. Overall, 42% of pharmacies reported NPSS (28% in LA and 81% in SF), although only 34% had registered with the county (17% in LA and 76% in SF). Many pharmacies required proof of a medical condition (80% in LA and 30% in SF) and refused NPSS if the customer was a suspected IDU (74% in LA, 33% in SF). Few negative consequences of NPSS were reported. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, we found that the odds of NPSS were significantly higher among pharmacists who thought syringe access was important for preventing HIV among IDUs [adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 2.95; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.10–7.92], were chain pharmacies (AOR = 12.5; 95% CI = 4.55–33.33), and were located in SF (AOR = 4.88; 95% CI = 1.94–12.28). These results suggest that NPSS were influenced by pharmacists’ perception. NPSS might be increased through greater educational efforts directed at pharmacists, particularly those in non-chain pharmacies

Digital transformations and the archival nature of surrogates

Large-scale digitization is generating extraordinary collections of visual and textual surrogates, potentially endowed with transcendent long-term cultural and research values. Understanding the nature of digital surrogacy is a substantial intellectual opportunity for archival science and the digital humanities, because of the increasing independence of surrogate collections from their archival sources. The paper presents an argument that one of the most significant requirements for the long-term access to collections of digital surrogates is to treat digital surrogates as archival records that embody traces of their fluid lifecycles and therefore are worthy of management and preservation as archives. It advances a theory of the archival nature of surrogacy founded on longstanding notions of archival quality, the traces of their source and the conditions of their creation, and the functional ‘‘work of the archive.’’ The paper presents evidence supporting a ‘‘secondary provenance’’ derived from re-digitization, re-ingestion of multiple versions, and de facto replacement of the original sources. The design of the underlying research that motivates the paper and summary findings are reported separately. The research has been supported generously by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services.Institute for Museum and Library ServicesPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111825/1/J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdfDescription of J26 Conway Digital Transformations 2014-pers.pdf : Main articl