Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa’s cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which (...) varied communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents’ interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire. (shrink)

Background: Older, frail patients with multimorbidity are at an especially high risk for disease severity and death from COVID-19. The social restrictions proved challenging for the residents, their relatives, and the care staff. While these restrictions clearly impacted daily life in Norwegian nursing homes, knowledge about how the pandemic influenced nursing practice is sparse. Aim: The aim of the study was to illuminate ethical difficult situations experienced by Norwegian nurses working in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design and (...) participants: The research design involved semistructured individual interviews conducted with 15 nurses working in 8 nursing homes in 3 health regions in Norway, within both urban and rural areas. Ethical considerations: Oral and written information about the study was provided before the participants gave their written consent. The transcribed interviews were de-identified. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Four ethical difficult situations were identified: (a) turning the nursing home into a prison; (b) using medication to maintain peace and order; (c) being left alone with the responsibility; and (d) s. impact on decision-making. Conclusions: The nurses’ ethical challenges were intertwined with external factors, such as national and local guidelines, and the nurses’ own internalized factors, which were connected to their subjective professionality. This duality inflicted emotional distress and gave nurses few opportunities to perform nursing in a professionally sound and safe manner. (shrink)

The biophilia hypothesis posits an innate biological and genetic connection between human and nature, including an emotional dimension to this connection. Biophilic design builds on this hypothesis in an attempt to design human-nature connections into the built environment. This article builds on this theoretical framework through a meta-analysis of experimental studies on the emotional impacts of human exposure to natural and urban environments. A total of 49 studies were identified, with a combined sample size of 3,201 participants. The primary (...) findings indicated that exposure to natural environments had a medium to large effect on both increasing positive affect and decreasing negative affect. This finding supported the anticipated emotional dimension of the biophilia hypothesis and lends credibility to biophilic design theory. Evidence was revealed in support of the affective/arousal response model. Immersion in environments indicated a larger effect size than laboratory simulation of environments. Methodological recommendations for future experimental research were few, however the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule outcome measure was recommended as a measure of both positive and negative affect for further studies. A combination measurement of stress related outcome variables was proposed to further explore the affective/arousal response model and its potential relationship to the biophilia hypothesis. The meta-analysis provides evidence for fundamental theories regarding human-nature connection, while revealing gaps in current knowledge. (shrink)

The argument developed in this article originates from the reflection that what constitutes a city or what is meant by urban are differently understood in different parts of the world and by different scholars. Thus, I first address the problematic of incommensurability. I argue that this key issue in the philosophy of science is central to how the debate on urban anthropology has developed. Then I ask whether this problematic extends to cross-disciplinary debate among the contemporary social sciences (...) and what relevance the resulting understanding of the city has outside the academic world. I maintain that social analysis should endeavour to bring out the political, economic, and socio-cultural complexity of urban life. Having carried out research in urban Europe, I offer an analysis of the city that encompasses the meaning of urbs, polis, and civitas. Finally, I discuss the epistemological significance of urban ethnography, drawing on my field research in Brindisi, a South-Italian city. (shrink)

Objective To determine the attitudes of Egyptian patients regarding their participation in research and with the collection, storage and future use of blood samples for research purposes. Design Cross-sectional survey. Study population Adult Egyptian patients (n=600) at rural and urban hospitals and clinics. Results Less than half of the study population (44.3%) felt that informed consent forms should provide research participants the option to have their blood samples stored for future research. Of these participants, 39.9% thought that consent forms (...) should include the option that future research be restricted to the illness being studied. A slight majority (66.2%) would donate their samples for future genetic research. Respondents were more favourable towards having their blood samples exported to other Arab countries (62.0%) compared with countries in Europe (41.8%, p<0.001) and to the USA (37.2%, p<0.001). Conclusions This study shows that many individuals do not favour the donation of a blood sample for future research. Of those who do approve of such future research, many favour a consent model that includes an option restricting the future research to the illness being studied. Also, many Egyptians were hesitant to have their blood samples donated for genetic research or exported out of the Arab region to the USA and European countries. Further qualitative research should be performed to determine the underlying reasons for many of our results. (shrink)

Health research has shown that overweight and obesity in children and adults are becoming significant public health problems in the developing world. Evidence suggests that this phenomenon is more marked in urban than rural areas and may be associated with modernization. However, the underlying reasons for this nutrition transition remain unclear. Dietary shifts, often in conjunction with income and time constraints in urban environments, may entail a greater reliance on more convenient sugar and fat-dense food. Also, the necessity (...) of labor-intensive agricultural work to meet rural subsistence needs is supplanted in urban environments by sedentary work. This paper extends the application of human behavioral ecology theory into the realm of international development and policy by applying Kaplan’s embodied capital theory to explore differences in food habits and nutritional status of Indo-Fijian children within the context of urbanization. Urban high-embodied-capital women demonstrate higher rates of wage-earning employment than urban low-embodied-capital or rural women. Findings indicate that urban high-embodied-capital households spend significantly more on food purchases, purchase a greater proportion of processed foods, and have children with higher body mass indexes (BMI) than do urban low-embodied-capital or rural households. This suggests that urban high-embodied-capital mothers, who tend to be employed, may be making trade-offs between income and food choices. (shrink)

Parental investment decisions guide parental actions regarding children’s productive work and are shaped by ecological context. Urban ecology enhances long-term payoffs to investment in human capital, increasing opportunity costs for work performed by children, and decreased workload should result. Using an embodied capital framework, self-reported data on urban and rural Indo-Fijian children’s work activities are compared. Results show higher workloads for older children, rural children, and girls. High scholastic achievement is associated with lower workloads for girls, but not (...) boys. This pattern is interpreted as daughter-biased investment in the context of urbanization. (shrink)

In the evaluation of genomic high-throughput technologies, the idea of “utility” plays an important role. The “clinical utility” of genomic data refers to the improvement of healthcare outcomes, its “personal utility” to benefits that go beyond healthcare purposes. Both concepts are contested. Moreover, there are only few empirical insights regarding their interpretation by those professionally involved or personally affected. Our paper presents results from qualitative research (20 semi-structured interviews) regarding professionals’ and personally affected people’s views on the utility of genomic (...) information. We find that the discussion of clinical utility is the domain of professionals who primarily consider aspects of test validity and clinical outcomes. By contrast, personal utility plays a prominent role in affected persons’ discussions. Four different aspects are addressed: (a) life and family planning, (b) relief and justification, (c) self-knowledge and self-determination, and (d) entertainment. These differences have important implications for informed consent and counseling in the context of genomic high-throughput technologies. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

An urbanely written dialogue which convincingly demonstrates the "compartmentalized" character of a number of modern cosmologies. The implications and inconsistencies of biological and physical views of nature, space and time take up the first part of the book; the second turns to an examination of a Steineresque mysticism, a puzzling emphasis since the objections raised to it in the text itself are never satisfactorily answered. Barfield's major polemic point, the need for more communication among intellectual disciplines as they examine their (...) basic assumptions, is presented with cogency and esprit.--C. L. B. (shrink)

Housed in one volume for the first time are several of the seminal essays on Du Bois's contributions to sociology and critical social theory: from DuBois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and culture; and finally from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and cultural criminologist to (...) Du Bois as critic of the disciplinary decadence of the discipline of sociology. Unlike any other anthology or critical reader on Du Bois, this new volume offers an excellent overview of the critical commentary on arguably one of the most imaginative and innovative, perceptive and prolific founders of the discipline of sociology. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that only the victim of a wrong can forgive that wrong. Several philosophers have recently defended “third-party forgiveness,” the scenario in which A, who is not the victim of a wrong in any sense, forgives B for a wrong B did to C. Focusing on Glen Pettigrove's argument for third-party forgiveness, I will defend the victim's unique standing to forgive, by appealing to the fact that in forgiving, victims must absorb severe and inescapable costs of distinctive (...) kinds, a plight that third parties do not share. There are, nonetheless, significant, even essential, roles played by third parties in making forgiveness possible, reasonable, or valuable for victims of serious wrongs. I take a closer look at the links between victims, wrongdoers, resentment, and forgiveness in showing why the victim alone can forgive. (shrink)

I share Kulagin's bewilderment over the term "work-situation theme." There is something unnatural in dividing literature - the study of human beings - into topics and headings. How many kinds of prose we have heard of in recent years: working class, rural, urban, youth, military, intellectual, personal, industrial. The eruptions and outbursts occurring in literary life tend largely to eliminate these lines of demarcation, and then the arguments rage not so much upon themes as about language, creative style, characters, (...) and the degree to which the writer was successful in depicting the full richness and variety of life. (shrink)

Most people do not think to observe geology from the sidewalks of a major city, but all David B. Williams has to do is look at building stone in any urban center to find a range of rocks equal to any assembled by plate tectonics. In Stories in Stone, he takes you on explorations to find 3.5-billion-year-old rock that looks like swirled pink-and-black taffy, a gas station made of petrified wood, and a Florida fort that has withstood three hundred (...) years of attacks and hurricanes, despite being made of a stone that has the consistency of a granola bar. Williams also weaves in the cultural history of stone, explaining why a white fossil-rich limestone from Indiana became the only building stone used in all fifty states; how in 1825, the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument led to America’s first commercial railroad; and why when the same kind of marble used by Michelangelo clad a Chicago skyscraper it warped so much after nineteen years that all 44,000 panels of it had to be replaced. This love letter to building stone brings to life the geology you can see in the structures of every city. (shrink)

This book provides a unique, cogent, engaging account of environmental determinism that has long been much needed in the classroom and beyond." -- Andrew Sluyter, Associate Professor, Louisiana State University, USA This book pulls together major critiques of contemporary attempts to explain nature-society relations in an environmentally deterministic way. After defining key terms, it reviews the history of environmental determinism's rise and fall within geography in the early twentieth century. It discusses the key reasons for the doctrine's rejection and presents (...) alternative, non-deterministic frameworks developed within geography for analyzing the roles played by the environment in human affairs. The authors examine the rise in recent decades of neo-deterministic approaches to such issues as the demarcation of regions, the causes of civilizational collapse in prehistory, today's globally uneven patterns of human well-being, and the consequences of human-induced climate change. In each case, the authors draw on the insights and approaches of geography, the academic discipline most conversant with the interactions of society and environment, to challenge the widespread acceptance that such approaches have won. The book will appeal to those working on human-environmental research, international development and global policy initiatives. William B. Meyer is Associate Professor of Geography at Colgate University, USA. He is the author of several previous books, including Human Impact on the Earth, Americans and Their Weather: A History, and The Progressive Environmental Prometheans. His research interests include urban geography, environmental history, and the history of environmental thought. Dylan M.T. Guss works in the technology investment sector. (shrink)

Much is being made of local food. It is at once a social movement, a diet, and an economic strategy—a popular solution—to a global food system in great distress. Yet, despite its popularity or perhaps because of it, local food (especially in the US) is also something of a chimera if not a tool of the status quo. This paper reflects on and contrasts aspects of current local food rhetoric with Dalhberg’s notion of a regenerative food system. It identifies three (...) problematic emphases—the locavore emphasis, the Wal-Mart emphasis, and the Pollan emphasis—and argues that they are shifting local food (as a concept and a social movement) away from the deeper concerns of equity, citizenship, place-building, and sustainability. It is suggested that local food activists and advocates might consider the use of multiple methodologies and forms of expression to explore the integration and reintegration of local food into diverse and redundant place-based practice. A short case study of a low-income, urban neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan, illustrates the value of contextual analysis for more fully enabling the local food movement and a regenerative food system. (shrink)

This study examines urban agriculture (UA) in Sacramento, California (USA), the nation's self-branded “Farm-to-Fork Capital,” in order to highlight UA’s distinct yet entangled roots. The study is based on 24 interviews with a diverse array of UA leaders, conducted as part of a five-year transdisciplinary study of UA in Sacramento. In it, we unearth three primary “taproots” of UA projects, each with its own historical legacies, normative visions, and racial dynamics. In particular, we examine UA projects with “justice taproots,” (...) “health taproots,” and “market taproots.” We use this analysis to understand how different kinds of UA projects are embedded in racial capitalism in ways that transform relationships between people, the city, and food systems. Unearthing these entangled roots helps illuminate UA’s underlying politics, showing how these roots grow in both competitive and symbiotic ways within the soil matrix of racial capitalism. We argue that these roots interact differently with racial capitalism, creating disparities in their growth trajectories. In particular, UA projects associated with the justice taproot are historically underrepresented and undervalued. However, we argue that there are some prospects for building alliances between the UA movement’s three roots, and that these are both promising and problematic. (shrink)

There is, at present, little precise understanding of the relative contributions of the various income streams used by impoverished rural households in southern Africa. The impact of household profiles on overall income also is not well understood. There is, therefore, little consideration of these factors in national economic accounting. This paper is an attempt to reduce this gap in knowledge by reflecting on the relative contribution of agro-pastoralism, secondary woodland resources, and formal and informal cash income streams to households in (...) the semi-arid rural village of Thorndale, Limpopo Province, South Africa. In the absence of jobs and confronted with high migrant labor, households with open access to natural resources derived more benefits from land-based livelihoods than cash income streams (i.e., 57.5 % vs. 42.5 %). Total livelihood income was valued at US$2887 per household per annum. A significant correlation between monetary values derived from crops and formal wages was established, and it was found that households with high cash incomes tended to invest more in crop production. Over 80 of households were male-headed. Of these heads of household, more than 60 were long-term migrants to urban areas, leaving household decision-making to the women. The low literacy rates of women have deprived them of paid jobs outside the area and, therefore, have increased their dependence on crops (62%) and secondary woodlands resources (60%). This was further reflected in the proportion of households in which females were the main contributors of cash income (9.7%), or joint contributors with men (24.4%). Various positive correlations were established between the number of women per household and the three land-based livelihoods. This implied that women’s total control over such activities was mostly a result of the absence of men and not a typical phenomenon. In spite of this control, it was not positively reflected in the lives of majority of the women. Households differed in their participation in livelihood activities. Household size influenced the level of production and was positively correlated with the value of secondary woodland resources and crops. The study shows the interdependence of land-based livelihood sources and the impact of household features on production and consumption. Policies that focus on livelihood options need to recognize and accommodate associated household dynamics. (shrink)

What aspects of philosophical style really count? What aspects of philosophical writing count only as matters of style? Some features of philosophical writing and talking do seem to be of merely ornamental significance, worthy subjects only of gossip or banter. We are familiar with the academic sneer with which poor Professor Kluck is charged with having “somehow managed to confuse” one thing with another. A more serious stylistic matter, of course, would be Professor Kluck’s own willingness to use the apparatus (...) of modal logic in his pathetic endeavors. Or is that a matter of style? If so, does the same concept apply to such amusing and affective phenomena as accent and cadence? We have heard Professor Chisholm’s rising terminal voice inflection, if only because it is so widely imitated. One thinks of Professor Earle’s favorite condemnation “boring” pronounced with an “o” which seems to touch base on every vowel sound known to man. We are impressed by Goodman’s pithiness, and we register his penchant for alliterative triples. We compare Bergmann’s Laocöonian baroque prose with Quine’s soothing urbanity. It is an interesting fact that these are the features which come to mind when we begin to consider the whole question of philosophical style. Have we so internalized the parts that really count that they seem “white,” neutral, style-free? There might well be historical factors which encourage such blindness. Varying degrees of lingering transcendentalism about philosophical method would not be easily reconciled with the awful idea that one is merely speaking a local dialect. Of course the transcendentalism itself is rarely owned up to as such, as if it is assumed that it is Reason which speaks but that it is in poor taste to say so. Alternative methods, when confronted, generate distaste, horror, or the head-shaking sort of wonderment of the Eighteenth Century Parisian who wondered how on earth anyone could be a Persian. (shrink)

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found (...) an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient--and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. (shrink)

Since 1992, institutions accredited by The Joint Commission have been required to have a process in place that allows staff members, patients, and families to address ethical issues or issues prone to conflict. While the commission's expectations clearly have made ethics committees more common, simply having a committee in no way demonstrates its effectiveness in terms of the availability of the service to key constituents, the quality of the processes used, or the outcomes achieved. Beyond meeting baseline accreditation standards, effective (...) ethics resources are requisite for quality care for another reason. The provision of care to the sick is a practice with profound moral dimensions. Clinicians need what Margaret Urban Walker has called “moral spaces,” reflective spaces within institutions in which to explore and communicate values and ethical obligations as they undergird goals of care. Walker proposed that ethicists needed to be concerned with the design and maintenance of these moral spaces. Clearly, that concern needs to extend beyond ethicists to institutional leaders. This essay uses Walker's idea of moral space to describe individuals and groups who are actual and potential ethics resources in health care institutions. We focus on four requisite characteristics of effective resources and the challenges to achieving them, and we identify strategies to build them. In our view, such moral spaces are particularly important for nurses and their colleagues on interprofessional teams and need to be expanded and strengthened in most settings. (shrink)

Background: There are numerous benefits to ethics consultation services, but little is known about the reasons different professionals may or may not request an ethics consultation. Inter-professional differences in the perceived utility of ethics consultation have not previously been studied.Methods: To understand profession-specific perceived benefits of ethics consultation, we surveyed all employees at an urban tertiary children’s hospital about their use of ethics committee services (n = 842).Results: Our findings suggest that nurses and physicians find ethics consultations useful for (...) different reasons; physicians were more likely to report normative benefits, while nurses were more likely to report communicative and relational benefits.Conclusions: These findings support an open model of ethics consultation and may also help ethics committees to better understand consultation requests and remain attuned to the needs of various professional groups. (shrink)

A collection of Lovejoy's essays written during the first quarter of the century dealing mainly with issues in James and Dewey--there is hardly any mention of Peirce. A charming sketch of James as a philosopher is included. Throughout Lovejoy writes with wit and urbanity. But the dominant impression is one of reading a period piece rather than participating in living philosophic inquiry.--R. J. B.

Urban and agricultural communities are interdependent but often differ on approaches for improving water quality impaired by nutrient runoff waterbodies worldwide. Current water quality governance involves an overlapping array of policy tools implemented by governments, civil society organizations, and corporate supply chains. The choice of regulatory and voluntary tools is likely to influence many dimensions of the relationship between urban and agricultural actors. These relationships then influence future conditions for collective decision-making since many actors participate for multiple years (...) in water quality improvement. In this policy analysis, we draw on our professional experiences and research, as well as academic and practitioner literatures, to investigate how different types of water quality interventions influence urban-agricultural relationships, specifically examining policy tools on a regulatory to voluntary spectrum. Interactions between farmers and other rural agricultural interests on one hand, and urban residents and their stormwater managers and wastewater treatment plants on the other, influence dynamics relevant for water quality improvement. We suggest that the selection of policy tools within complex governance contexts influence urban–agricultural relationships through financial exchange, political coalitions, knowledge exchange, interpersonal relationships, and shared sense of place. Policy tools that provide a means to build relationships and engage with people’s emotions and identities have potential to influence personal and community change and adaptive capacity, while processes such as lawsuits can catalyze structural change. Engaging these relationships is particularly critical given the need to move out of polarized positions to solve collective problems. (shrink)

Most of the discussion in bioethics and health policy concerning social responsibility for health has focused on society’s obligation to provide access to healthcare. While ensuring access to healthcare is an important social responsibility, societies can promote health in many other ways, such as through sanitation, pollution control, food and drug safety, health education, disease surveillance, urban planning and occupational health. Greater attention should be paid to strategies for health promotion other than access to healthcare, such as environmental and (...) public health and health research.Lifestyle plays a major role in most of the illnesses in industrialised nations.1 Six of the 10 leading factors contributing to the global burden of disease are lifestyle related: unsafe sex, high blood pressure, tobacco use, alcohol use, high cholesterol and obesity.2 Lifestyle-related illnesses also contribute to the rising costs of healthcare. Spending on healthcare accounts for about 16% of the gross domestic product in the USA, or US$1.9 trillion.3 Although smoking has declined steadily there since the 1960s, smoking-related medical expenses are still about US$75.5 billion per year.4 Obesity, which has been climbing in the past two decades, accounts for about US$75 billion in healthcare costs there each year.5 Alcoholism and drug addiction in the USA account for annual healthcare costs of about US$22.5 billion and US$12 billion, respectively.6,7 Federal government spending on healthcare relating to HIV/AIDS is over US$13 billion per year.8Given the well-documented relationship between lifestyle, disease burden and healthcare costs, it makes economic and medical sense to hold individuals morally responsible for their health-related choices. While this view has a great deal of intuitive appeal, it also faces numerous objections.9–12 First, holding individuals entirely responsible for their own health conflicts with medicine’s obligation to treat the sick and society’s obligation …. (shrink)

Background: Confidentiality lies at the core of medical ethics and is the cornerstone for developing and keeping a trusting relationship between nurses and patients. In the wake of the HIV epidemic, there has been a heightened focus on confidentiality in healthcare contexts. Nurses’ follow-up of HIV-positive women and their susceptible HIV-exposed children has proved to be challenging in this regard, but the ethical dilemmas concerning confidentiality that emerge in the process of ensuring HIV-free survival of the third party – the (...) child – have attracted limited attention. Objective: The study explores challenges of confidentiality linked to a third party in nurse–patient relationships in a rural Tanzanian HIV/AIDS context. Study context: The study was carried out in rural and semi-urban settings of Tanzania where the population is largely agro-pastoral, the formal educational level is low and poverty is rife. The HIV prevalence of 1.5% is low compared to the national prevalence of 5.1%. Methods: Data were collected during 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork and consisted of participant observation in clinical settings and during home visits combined with in-depth interviews. The main categories of informants were nurses employed in prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV programmes and HIV-positive women enrolled in these programmes. Ethical considerations: Based on information about the study aims, all informants consented to participate. Ethical approval was granted by ethics review boards in Tanzania and Norway. Findings and discussion: The material indicates a delicate balance between the nurses’ attempt to secure the HIV-free survival of the babies and the mothers’ desire to preserve confidentiality. Profound confidentiality-related dilemmas emerged in actual practice, and indications of a lack of thorough consideration of the implication of a patient’s restricted disclosure came to light during follow-up of the HIV-positive women and the third party – the child who is at risk of HIV infection through mother’s milk. World Health Organization’s substantial focus on infant survival (Millennium Development Goal-4) and the strong calls for disclosure among the HIV-positive are reflected on in the discussion. (shrink)

This book consists of the papers by Northrop Frye, Stuart Hampshire, and Conor Cruise O'Brien read at the inauguration of the Society for the Humanities. The topic was eminently suitable for the inauguration because it provided the occasion for three respected humanistic scholars to reflect on the fragile status of scholarship in our troubled times. While each defends the virtues of objectivity and detachment in scholarship, each is aware how easily these virtues can and do degenerate into vices. Frye sketches (...) the balance that must exist between the scholarly virtue of detachment and the moral virtue of concern. The latter includes the sense of importance of preserving the integrity of the total human community. While Hampshire basically accepts the tension that Frye delineates, he explores in greater depth the ways in which committed scholarship in the humanities is an imaginative working out of personal problems felt to be urgent. Lest his colleagues commit the sin of smugness, O'Brien's more astringent paper focuses on the subtle, pervasive pressures of modern politics that perniciously distort scholarship. The papers, together with Black's urbane introduction, are gentle but elegant reminders of the ideals of humanistic scholarship and the ways in which they are threatened in the contemporary marketplace.—R. J. B. (shrink)

Parental investment strategies are contingent on parental capacities and ecology. Parental embodied capital may be important in aspiration construction and investments in children’s human capital, which is especially important in urban environments where skills are directly tied to wage income. For Indo-Fijians, rural ecology strongly limits opportunities. Here this limitation is conceptualized as extrinsic risk and immune to reduction through enhanced parental investment. Urban migration is interpreted as a risk reduction strategy, given an expanded urban opportunity structure (...) (lower extrinsic risk). Qualitative and quantitative data from 678 Indo-Fijian children suggest that, contingent on parental capacities, parents migrate in response to their perceptions of decreased opportunities that manifest as high levels of extrinsic risk in rural environments. Parental investment in quality and quantity corresponds to parental perceptions of extrinsic risk, which in turn correspond to migration status, indicating that parental strategies do respond to perceived limits on investment payoffs. (shrink)

These volumes provide a large introduction to the works of modern value theory from their beginnings in J. Bentham, F. Nietzsche, and H. Lotze to the more recent Anglo-American studies. Volume I is concerned with "the German-Language Group." Extensive discussion is devoted to the views of F. Brentano, A. Meinong, C. von Ehrenfels, J. C. Kreibig, E. Heyde, H. Rickert, H. Münsterberg, M. Scheler, K. Wiederhold, W. Stern, F. Wilken, M. Beck, and V. Krafts. It provides a good conspectus of (...) varieties of nineteenth century value theories. The author aims at an exposition rather than critical treatment of the various philosophers. Each chapter contains a useful bibliography. Of more contemporary interest is Volume II which deals with the Anglo-American Group. One finds here a detailed presentation of the theories of W. M. Urban, J. Dewey, B. Bosanquet, D. Prall, C. G. Shaw, R. B. Perry, D. H. Parkel, W. Stern, A. C. Garnett, J. N. Findlay, E. Brightman, B. E. Jessup, C. I. Lewis, R. Lepley, S. C. Pepper, Everett Hall, R. Hartman, and W. D. Lamont. Shorter discussions deal with works of A. L. Hillard, E. M. Adams, and K. Aschenbrenner. Liberal quotations from original sources are interspersed throughout the exposition. The clarification of issues is not always successful. The author does provide a good focus, however, for important passages from the works discussed. Regrettably, one finds an omission of the view of David Pole, the absence of a summary section on each theory discussed, and the absence of an index. Nevertheless, the students of value theory can find in this work a useful tool of research. The comprehensive scope provides a rich variety of contributions to the important field of value theory.—A.S.C. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott has written a wonderfully wise, urbane, honest, insightful, and provocative commentary on Aristotle's chief ethical work, theNicomachean Ethics. Some commentaries on ancient philosophical texts are line-by-line struggles to nail down the meaning of the text, as if the commentator were roofing a house in a high wind, one shingle at a time. Other commentaries are collections of essays, each inspired by a passage in the text, but each growing into a relatively self-contained discussion. Sparshott's commentary is neither of (...) these things. (shrink)

Adam Tooze’sWages of Destructionargues for the fundamental economic reasoning that brought Hitler and the Nazi elite to the conclusion that war and genocide were the twin means of achieving their ends. But what happens if we introduce culture into this equation, a term of clear importance to Hitler and to many of the individuals Tooze has identified as key to understanding the economic developments, not least of whom was Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer? Culture is a field of activity of (...) relatively little interest to Tooze. Conversely, such comprehensive views of Nazi Germany as Tooze’s that emphasise a deep political and economic analysis have equally been of little interest to cultural historians of the period, with few exceptions. How might Tooze’s fundamental arguments about the economic drive of the state help to explain specific kinds of architectural developments and sharpen a critical art-historical analysis? Conversely, how does the profoundly spatial nature of the implementation of policies he isolates demand an architectural or urban analysis from political and economic historians? By bringing Tooze’s argument to bear on culture, and architecture’s function to bear on Tooze, this article affirms his fundamental conclusions and yet complicates their implications for other disciplinary questions. In both cases, a comprehensive approach to Hitler’s Germany is called for, one that makes a critical intervention particularly in fields of cultural study that have avoided such a broad strategy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain, c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 150Leonard A. CurchinA. T. Fear. Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain, c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 150. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii 1 292 pp. 3 maps. Cloth, $75. (Oxford Classical Monographs)The Roman province of Baetica has not received a comprehensive treatment since R. Thouvenot’s Essai sur la province romaine de Bétique (Paris 1940; 2d ed. 1973). Since then, (...) important epigraphic finds such as the Tabula Irnitana (AE 1986, 333) and archaeological excavations have greatly modified our understanding of the structure of Roman cities in this province. Fear endeavors to assess the urban phenomenon in Roman Baetica in light of this new evidence. Rather than “Urbanization,” his subtitle might better have read “Urban Change,” since Baetica had already been largely urbanized by the Carthaginians and Iberians, and the real issue is how the native cities were affected by the Roman presence. The author himself concedes that Baetica had a “native urban tradition,” whereas there is “little firm evidence that Rome pursued an active urbanizing policy” (27–29). He also shows that while Romanization may have been passive from a Roman perspective, the inhabitants were actively involved in “bottom-up” initiatives to improve the status and amenities of their cities.An introductory chapter surveys Baetican geography and examines an anthropological model of colonialism. Since Fear later questions “whether the premisses of such a model... are in fact of any use when looking at the life of a Roman province” (274), it is unclear why he includes it at all. The next chapter discusses the characteristics of an ancient city, and (with a range of examples from Britain to Palestine) how urbanism was diffused in new areas. Listing the features of a city mentioned—but incidentally, rather than as a definition—in the Digest, Fear examines to what extent these are reflected in the laws of Urso and Irni. This seems an artificial and otiose exercise, since the colony of Urso and the municipium of Irni were unquestionably cities, even if the Urso law, for instance, contains no reference to bath houses. Moreover, Fear’s tendency to use interchangeably the terms “town” and “city” obscures the issue of urban definition; the pre-Roman oppida of the Baetican highlands may have been towns, but were not cities.Chapter 3 investigates the state of urbanism (including colonies like Carteia and Corduba) in southern Spain around 50 b.c. Fear challenges conventional opinion by discounting the conventus as a major factor in urbanization and by questioning whether mining brought large numbers of Italians to the province. He also shows that while the legends on local coinage were Latinized, the designs (bull, Melqart, Iberian cavalryman) remained pre-Roman. The next chapter asks whether the Late Republican colonies were really miniature replicas of Rome, as Aulus Gellius (16.13) suggests. Fear argues that while the colonies did imitate Rome in such features as law and public architecture, they were “content to adapt native structures” (104) in other areas. This was because the Baetican colonies were not founded on “greenfield” sites (such as Emerita in [End Page 143] Lusitania) but were superimposed on indigenous settlements, thereby including a substantial proportion of Spanish incolae who inevitably had an “Iberianizing” influence on the colonists.The chapter on the Julio-Claudian period is primarily an analysis of the elder Pliny’s list of Baetican privileged towns. Fear finds very few cases in which we can state with certainty whether municipia were of Roman or Latin status. He also maintains that the distinctive cognomina assigned to the cities did not confer legal status (contra M. I. Henderson, JRS 32 [1942] 6, who saw them as “flowery colonial titles”) but simply helped distinguish between homonymous place names. Chapter 6 considers the impact of the Flavian Municipal Law, which Fear sees as a general blueprint, a lawyer’s vision of what life should be like in a municipium. As such the law makes unrealistic assumptions, for instance (in the section on enrollment of iudices) that all the residents will have tria nomina. As for the effect of the law on the inhabitants... (shrink)

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and (...) increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

Objectives: To compare attitudes of medical and law students toward informing a cancer patient about diagnosis and prognosis and to examine whether differences are related to different convictions about benefit or harm of information.Setting and design: Anonymous questionnaires were distributed to convenience samples of students at the University of Geneva containing four vignettes describing a cancer patient who wishes, or alternatively, who does not wish to be told the truth.Participants: One hundred and twenty seven medical students and 168 law students.Main (...) outcome measures: Five point Likert scale of responses to the vignettes ranging from “certainly inform” to “certainly not inform” the patient.Results: All medical students and 96% of law students favoured information about the diagnosis of cancer if the patient requests it. Seventy four per cent of medical students and 82% of law students favoured informing a cancer patient about his or her prognosis . Thirty five per cent of law students and 11.7% of medical students favoured telling about the diagnosis and 25.6% of law students and 7% of medical students favoured telling about the prognosis even if the patient had clearly expressed his wish not to be informed. Law students indicated significantly more often than medical students reasons to do with the patient’s good, legal obligations, and the physician’s obligation to tell the truth, and significantly less often than medical students that their attitude had been determined predominantly by respect for the autonomous choice of the patient.Conclusion: Differences in attitudes according to the type of case and the type of studies were related to convictions about the benefit or harm to the patient caused by being given information. The self reported reasons of future physicians and future lawyers are helpful when considering means to achieve a better acceptance of patients’ right to know and not to know. (shrink)

If anthropogenesis was a transition from nature to society and the Neolithic revolution culminated in the breakthrough of human beings into history, then the appearance of cities on our planet, the "urban revolution," marked the rise of civilization, mankind's induction into the spiritual universe. The rise of cities marks the onset of what K. Jaspers called the Axial Period" (eighth-second centuries B.C.). This is the period in which the spiritual preconditions of humanity took shape: the Bible, the Iliad and (...) Odyssey, ancient philosophy and Greek culture, the Upanishads, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and Confucianism. In world culture the city proved itself as a powerful mediator between the earth and the heavens. (shrink)