Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. (...) Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...

Looking at the library of Vilém Flusser, which is preserved in the Flusser-Archive in Berlin, we notice not only the wide interest of Flusser’s in all possible fields of knowledge but also the different stations in his nomadic life. The library is simultaneously an image of his intellectual journey and, especially considering his Brazilian period, a representation of Flusser’s friendships. When we search for connections between them, his books give us a notion about Flusser’s early contacts, before his return to (...) Europe, to German, Italian and Spanish intellectuals, and most of them are connected to his great interlocutor Vincente Ferreira da Silva. But we find also an obvious relation to the lesser-known Portuguese thinkers such as Eudoro de Sousa, as well as Flusser’s acquaintance with authors like Agostinho da Silva and Delfim Santos who held great significance for the dialog between Portugal and Brazil in the 1950s. (shrink)

Venomous snakebite is a neglected tropical disease and disease of poverty, affecting hundreds of thousands of people annually. The only effective medical intervention for snakebite is antivenom, produced primarily using captive venomous snakes as a source of venom. This paper analyzes snakes’ welfare at venom labs within this global health context. I recommend significant changes to improve the welfare of captive snakes, particularly in light of recent ethological research and attention on snakes. These recommendations are broadly consequentialist, aiming to improve (...) the lives of the snakes and ensure that people have increased access to affordable antivenom. (shrink)

The critical scientific realism by I. Niiniluoto is one of the few concepts that speaks not only of scientific realism, but also of reality itself. Such an elements of the concept, like tropic realism - the minimal ontological realism (in the Putnam’s sense), stating that there is no single true description of reality, or the idea that the knowledge can be a subject of the analysis of false beliefs (by definition, truthlike beliefs do not have to be true) - are (...) the best ways to illustrate how I. Niiniluoto understands the contemporary trend to imply vagueness into definitions of the main philosophical categories like “ontological object”, “truth value”, etc. Reflections on the book: Niiniluoto I. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford University Press, 1999. (shrink)

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

Christina Landman is a professor of Theology at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa. As an East African serving under her as a research fellow at the Research Institute of Theology and Religion since 2014, and as somebody whose articles have been published in the two journals where she has been the editor, I can only honour her by contributing to her festschrift and in basing my reflections on my understanding of theological education in tropical (...) Africa, where she plays a critical role – despite my bias towards East Africa, and Kenya in particular. In other words, the goal of this article is to focus on the future of theological education in Africa, with special reference to Eastern Africa, and Kenya in particular. How has Africa journeyed with theological education since its inception in the 19th and 20th century? How is it reflected in the academic institutions of higher learning, in ministerial training, in general academic contexts and in local congregations? Is it Africanity without ethics? Does it have a future? In addressing these concerns, the article employs historic-analytical design in its endeavour to assess the efficacy of theological education as an agent of social transformation in 21st-century Africa. Considering that Africa cannot be identified as a single geocultural context and/or as a monolithic entity, the article builds its case by mainly referring to the Kenyan context. Its methodology includes an extensive literature review of some materials that are connected to theological education, participant observation and personal reflections as an educationist in an African context. The methodology will also include the Protestant divinity school that was established in Frere Town, Mombasa, and later shifted to Limuru, Central Kenya, in 1929. It is set on the premise that the future of theological education in Africa is guaranteed by the growing interest in theological education among the youth, especially in the 21st century. (shrink)

The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect (...) white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Scholars and environmentalists in the industrialized nations have repeatedly deplored the destruction of tropical forests as a byproduct of economic development. Their position is based upon scientific, economic, and ethical arguments. Proponents of economic development from the tropical nations recognize that its immediate benefits are enjoyed by their own relatively poor populations while the benefits of habitat preservation are enjoyed by the world as a whole. So far, few institutional mechanisms have been developed that can reconcile the competing perspectives. In (...) addition to reviewing the arguments in favor of and against habitat preservation, this paper proposes some innovative institutions that can both satisfy developmental aspirations and account for the global benefits of habitat preservation. (shrink)

As one of the most widely read genres of literature, travel writing plays a crucial role in forming popular images and understandings of foreign places and foreign peoples. This essay examines the dominant images of rainforests and rainforest peoples portrayed in accounts of travels in tropical America published in National Geographic. Special attention is paid to the issues of how particular representations are privileged in this magazine's travel accounts and how these representations relate to questions of authority and power. The (...) analysis shows that the prevailing representations of the tropical forests and tropical forest-dwellers in the travel accounts of National Geographic rely on historically changing, but equally categorical distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. (shrink)

Tropical cyclones and their pertinent natural hazards can cause destructive damage to people and properties. Vietnam, located in the Northwest Pacific basin, is highly vulnerable to tropical cyclones due to its geography (i.e., a long coastline and narrow width). In this paper, we discuss how the negative consequences of tropical cyclones on Vietnam can be exacerbated by climate change and how forests, either in the mountainous or in the coastal regions, play crucial roles in safeguarding the country from tropical cyclones (...) and their pertinent hazards (e.g., landslides and flood). Despite the importance of forests, their protection values are undermined, leading to continuous deforestation of natural forests for socio-economic development. We suggest the social transitions towards eco-surplus culture through more proactive and transparent communication of the destructive outcomes of tropical cyclones and the protection roles of forests in the current climate change era. (shrink)

Prolonged investigations of past and present use of wetland margins in various lowlands within Latin America have yielded a wealth of detail. It has become necessary to search out regularities in the natural environmental context and the human adaptations, all of which can be done advantageously in the context of the concept of landscape. Such a move in the direction of theory is attempted here by means of a heuristic model and an exploration of variations in its expression. The discussion (...) of seasonal as well as longer termed change in the natural environment and human adaptation is easily accomodated. The essay includes a brief consideration of some of the recent directions in the investigation of the tropical wetland landscape. (shrink)

Almost everyone in the developed world wants the logging of tropical rain forests to stop. Like Antarctica, they are said to be much too important and much too valuable to be utilized just for development and are said to be part of a global heritage. However, it is not that simple. People in the developing world consider our criticisms to be ill-informed, patronizing, and self-serving. We are seen as having “dirty hands.” They hold that we neither have nor deserve moral (...) standing as critics until we change our trade policies, rhetoric, and extravagant lifestyles. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared (...) vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience. (shrink)

AS POSIÇÕES DO MIL- MOVIMENTO INTERNACIONAL LUSÓFONO (2008-2012) Cada vez mais, o MIL tem agregado pessoas de todo o espaço lusófono Desde logo, porque há um reconhecimento cada vez maior da importância estratégica da convergência lusófona, Horizonte maior do MIL Vivemos um tempo de viragem histórica, em que os vários povos da lusofonia começam a compreender os benefícios desse caminho comum, passadas que estão de vez algumas páginas historicamente mais traumáticas Daí a sintonia temporal, senão mesmo geracional, do MIL O (...) MIL nasceu no tempo certo Obviamente, isso, por si só, não seria suficiente Se cada vez mais pessoas têm aderido a este movimento cultural e cívico é porque reconhecem em nós, para além de tudo o mais, credibilidade e coerência Isso é, de resto, o que desde logo ressalta no histórico das nossas posições, aqui de seguida recordadas em súmula- uma extrema coerência entre todas as posições tomadas Em todas elas, de uma forma ou de outra, está, com efeito, presente o que nos move- promover o reforço dos laços entre os países e regiões do espaço da lusofonia, no plano cultural, mas também social, económico e político. (shrink)

In the field of life science there is a growing awareness of the metaphorical tenor of many of its key concepts and the problems that arise from them, as in the now-controversial case of the genetic ‘program’. In the seminar Life Death (2019) Derrida addresses this question from Georges Canguilhem’s difficulties in establishing a clear distinction between metaphor and concept, precisely with regard to the notion of ‘program’, concluding that this difficulty ‘demand[s] a recasting of this division and of the (...) law of this division’ between metaphor and concept. Beginning with these pages from Life Death, the present essay aims to reconstruct the deconstruction of this opposition and its epistemological consequences by going back to the Derridean essay ‘White Mythology’ (1971), to which Derrida refers in the seminar and in which the question of metaphor in the life sciences had been addressed in a critical confrontation with Bachelard and Canguilhem. (shrink)

(2014). Explosive Population Growth in Tropical Africa: Crucial Omission in Development Forecasts—Emerging Risks and Way Out. World Futures: Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 120-139.

In Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, we defended the following claims: Not only states of affairs, or facts, but also concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value ; The final value of a concrete object need not be intrinsic, i.e., it need not be exclusively based on the internal properties of its bearer; The final value of a concrete object is not reducible to the value of some states of affairs that involve the object in question. Our arguments (...) for – have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)