MARKET SOCIETY’S MORAL SUBJECTS: INTEREST, SENTIMENT, PROPERTY

My comments address two well-known texts. One is Crawford Macpherson’s portrait of ‘possessive individualism’ in which he suggests that ruthless competition for power through possessions is the distinctive feature of a market society which first took shape in seventeenth century England. The other is Adam Smith’s account of moral sentiment which revolves around a creative tension between human sympathy and ‘betterment’ or ‘self love.’ The significant divergence in their views invites further analysis - especially in the light of recent comparable work on neoliberalism

Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an “included-exclusion” within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics, and hence for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs

The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica

In inner-city neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica, criminal "dons" have taken on a range of governmental functions. While such criminal actors have sometimes been imagined as heading "parallel states," I argue that they are part of a hybrid state, an emergent political formation in which multiple governmental actors—in this case, criminal organizations, politicians, police, and bureaucrats—are entangled in a relationship of collusion and divestment, sharing control over urban spaces and populations. Extending recent scholarship on variegated sovereignty and neoliberal shifts in governance, I consider the implications of this diversification of governmental actors for the ways that citizenship is experienced and enacted. The hybrid state both produces and relies on distinct political subjectivities. It is accompanied by a reconfigured, hybrid citizenship, in which multiple practices and narratives related to rule and belonging, to rights and responsibilities, are negotiated by a range of actors. - See more at: http://www.anthrosource.net/Abstract.aspx?issn=0094-0496&volume=40&issue=4&doubleissueno=0&article=339507&suppno=0&jstor=False&cyear=2013#sthash.6XmjPANm.dpu

Why the cocks trade: what a transnational art market can reveal about cross-border relations

In the streets of Santo Domingo, Haitian and Dominican paintings are sold side-by-side, usually by Haitian dealers attracted to their neighbour’s much larger tourist market. They are easy to tell apart, for the Haitian paintings generally conform to the naïf style, whereas the Dominican paintings feature rural scenes or Taïno designs. The cultural differences in the designs of the paintings, and their appeal to foreign tourists rather than Dominicans, lend support to decades of scholarship describing Dominican–Haitian relations as being built upon nationalism and notions of racial difference, as well as the ‘exotic’ appeal that the Caribbean holds for tourists. However, this scholarship falls short of providing a holistic account of Dominican–Haitian relations because it sidelines the crucially important role of trade – historically and contemporaneously – in structuring them. In this article, I reinterpret the history and contemporary nature of art markets in Hispaniola to argue that market relations should be considered alongside symbolic representations when assessing transnational identity politics

SARS-CoV-2 Omicron is an immune escape variant with an altered cell entry pathway

Vaccines based on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 are a cornerstone of the public health response to COVID-19. The emergence of hypermutated, increasingly transmissible variants of concern (VOCs) threaten this strategy. Omicron (B.1.1.529), the fifth VOC to be described, harbours multiple amino acid mutations in spike, half of which lie within the receptor-binding domain. Here we demonstrate substantial evasion of neutralization by Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 variants in vitro using sera from individuals vaccinated with ChAdOx1, BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273. These data were mirrored by a substantial reduction in real-world vaccine effectiveness that was partially restored by booster vaccination. The Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2 did not induce cell syncytia in vitro and favoured a TMPRSS2-independent endosomal entry pathway, these phenotypes mapping to distinct regions of the spike protein. Impaired cell fusion was determined by the receptor-binding domain, while endosomal entry mapped to the S2 domain. Such marked changes in antigenicity and replicative biology may underlie the rapid global spread and altered pathogenicity of the Omicron variant

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England.

The evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021