Journal articles: 'Warren (R.I.). Fire Department' – Grafiati (2024)

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NEWTON THE ALCHEMIST: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire" by William R. Newman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xx + 537 pages, including four appendices and an index. Hardcover; $39.95. ISBN: 9780691174877. *If there is one person associated with developments in the physical sciences, it is Isaac Newton (1642-1727). For many, he represents the culmination of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution: its point of convergence and simultaneously the point from which science began to exercise its full influence on society. His work is often considered as thoroughly modern: well-designed experiments; precise and clearly articulated mathematical-physical principles which invite deductions further tested by measurement and experiment; and great discoveries in astronomy (universal law of gravitation), in optics, in mechanics, and in mathematics (the calculus). For many, Newton provided the model for physical theory for the next two hundred years. *And yet, this generally accepted description of Newton fails to capture the tension and diversity in Newton's work. The discovery of Newton's alchemical manuscripts (containing no fewer than one million words) by the economist John Maynard Keynes at an auction at Sotheby's in 1936 partially lifted the veil. In 1947, Keynes offered his rather candid assessment of Newton's alchemical work: he "was not the first of the age of reason" but rather "the last of the magicians." *However, in the last two decades, we have come to understand and appreciate that alchemy was not simply deviant behavior by "magicians" or charlatans, but rather part and parcel of the make-up of the Scientific Revolution. Alchemy, or better, chymistry, was a central part of the early modern study of nature. One of the leaders of this historiographical revolution has been William Newman, distinguished professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University. [For more on this revolution, see my review of Lawrence Principe's book The Secrets of Alchemy in PSCF 66, no. 4 (2014): 258-59.] Newman has written several seminal books: for example, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (2006) and Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (2004). *Newton the Alchemist displays Newman's fifteen-year dedicated study of Newton's alchemical manuscripts. This is the book for anyone who wishes to understand the background, implementation, and experimentation characteristic of Newton's long and abiding interest in alchemy. Newman introduces us to a Newton who wished to be an adept alchemist (even as a student at the Free Grammar School in Grantham) and kept the alchemical fires burning throughout his life, not only in Trinity College at Cambridge University, but also as warden of the Royal Mint. Newman also shows that alchemy is not inherently unscientific or irrational, nor that Newton was an outlier. Such contemporary luminaries as Robert Boyle, Gottfried Leibniz, and John Locke were also involved in alchemical endeavors. *In the first chapter, "The Enigma of Newton's Alchemy: The Historical Reception," Newman addresses the claims of two of Newton's most illustrious interpreters: Richard Westfall and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. For Dobbs, Newton's belief in alchemical transmutation was a religious quest, with the "philosophic mercury" acting as a spirit mediating between the physical and divine realms. For Westfall, Newton's alchemical research, involving invisible forces acting at a distance, allowed him to develop his theory of universal gravitation, published in the Principia of 1687. Newman calls both claims into question based on his close reading of the extant alchemical papers, many of which Dobbs and Westfall were not able to see. Newman wishes to determine the "hidden material meaning of the text" (p. 46), rather than advance any broad metaphysical or soteriological claims on Newton's part. *In chapter 4, "Early Modern Alchemical Theory," Newman reveals how heavily influenced Newton was by European alchemists, above all by the Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius. Drawing on their experiments, Newton, in the 1670s, developed an all-encompassing geochemical theory of nature, according to which the earth functions as "a 'great animall' or rather an 'inanimate vegetable'" (p. 64). In Newton's view, this process explained gravitation (among many other things), although he would abandon this idea when he came to write the Principia. *In collaboration with others, many at Indiana University, Newman has organized, read, and carefully compared Newton's alchemical manuscripts. [Readers can see the results at www.chymistry.org.] In his analysis, Newman employs an approach which he calls "experimental history." This involves at least two elements: (1) a careful textual linguistic analysis of alchemical manuscripts and their experimental details; and (2) an effort to repeat the experiments in a modern laboratory setting. To understand alchemical manuscripts is indeed a challenging undertaking involving an understanding of "materials, technology, and tacit practices," as well as deciphering "hidden terms or Decknamen" used for chemical substances, and the intricate symbols employed to designate them (see "Symbols and Conventions," pp. xi-xvii). *Newman repeated many of Newton's experiments, revealing many of his laboratory practices for the first time. The results are sometimes spectacular (see, for example, the colored plates 4-10 between pages 314 and 315). They clearly show how dedicated Newton was in his efforts to improve his knowledge of the natural world. Newman's final assessment: "Nowhere in Newton's scientific work can we see the same degree of combined textual scholarship and experiment that we encounter in his alchemy" (p. 498). *What may we learn from reading Newton the Alchemist? One thing for sure: that our contemporary scientific textbooks and enlightened culture celebrating Newton's "positive" results--the astronomical "System of the World" and his three laws of motion in mechanics--are a one-sided picture of Newton's work and life. By blithely neglecting his interests in alchemy, cabbalism (number mysticism), theology, chronology, and biblical prophecy, as well as Newton's deep sense of vocation (calling), they all too frequently divide his work into two predetermined categories: science and pseudo-science. It is certain that Newton's alchemy is not pseudo-science. History, and scientific practice as well, are never, if ever, so tidy. Newton's passionate pursuit of a coherent worldview is a reminder to us of the rich context in which science is embedded. Newman's book underscores the fact that science, our science too, is impelled by deep commitments, social and political factors, and personal ambition and motives. *Reviewed by Arie Leegwater, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.

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Dzieje Ochotniczej Straży Pożarnej w Tuliszkowie sięgają 1878 r. Wówczas doszło do zorganizowania jednostki, która nie uzyskała zgody na rejestrację. Jesienią 1905 r. zawiązał się komitet, który doprowadził do założenia jednostki w mieście. Straż została zarejestrowana z dniem 19 lipca 1906 r. Pod koniec 1906 roku wybudowano pierwszą, drewnianą remizę, a w kolejnym roku założono orkiestrę. W 1910 r. oddano do użytku nową murowaną remizę. W okresie międzywojennym oprócz działalności statutowej, druhowie wykazywali dużą aktywność na rzecz miasta. Organizowano liczne imprezy o charakterze dochodowym, a w 1923 r. założono Koło Miłośników Sceny. Władze straży kładły nacisk na wyszkolenie i wyposażenie jednostki, strażacy brali także aktywny udział w działalności innych stowarzyszeń. Wielu druhów udzielało się także w miejskim samorządzie. Podczas II wojny światowej Niemcy wyposażyli jednostkę w samochód bojowy oraz dwie motopompy. Kilkoro strażaków zamordowano w obozach koncentracyjnych. Pierwszym powojennym prezesem jednostki został Józef Patrzykąt, jej współzałożyciel i były naczelnik. The history of the Volunteer Fire Department in Tuliszków in 1906-1945 The history of the Volunteer Fire Department in Tuliszków dates back to 1878. At that time there was founded unit that did not receive the consent for registration. In the autumn of 1905, a committee formed, which led to the establishment of a unit in the city. The Voluntary Fire Department was registered on 19 July 1906. At the end of 1906, the first wooden fire-station was built, and in the following year the orchestra was established. In 1910 a new brick fire-station was commissioned. In the interwar period, besides statutory activity, firefighters showed great activity for the city. Numerous lucrative events were organized and the Koło Miłośników Sceny was founded in 1923. The authorities insisted on the training and equipment of the unit, firefighters also took an active part in the activities of other social organizations. Many of the firefighters were also involved in the municipal government of the city. The Germans provided the unit with a fire truck and two fire pumps during the Second World War. Several firefighters were murdered in concentration camps. Józef Patrzykąt, the co-founder of the Volunteer Fire Department and former fire brigade chief, was the first post-war chairman of the Volunteer Fire Department in Tuliszków.

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Fire departments are expected to respond quickly and effectively to disasters by extinguishing fires and rescuing those in harm’s way, for example. They are also required to prevent fires and disasters by enforcing fire-prevention measures at hotels and care facilities and to monitor safety measures in facilities storing hazardous materials. Concerns have arisen that destructive disasters may occur due to environmental changes in local communities or due to the Tokyo Metropolitan earthquake or Nankai Trough earthquake. To ensure that fire departments use their firefighters, materials and equipment effectively to prevent or control fires and reduce damage of disasters, research and development (R&D) on fire safety and disaster preparedness must be conducted actively and resulting findings must be applied in advanced fire safety and disaster preparedness activities. Fire safety R&D in Japan is undertaken by the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster,which is the research organ of the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Here R&D is being conducted on safety measures for facilities storing hazardous materials, fire-fighting robot technology, and fire extinguishing techniques. Fire departments in major cities also study firefighting operations and advanced materials and equipment. Although the number of institutions directly conducting fire safety R&D is limited and allotted research and development budget is extremely small. Private-sector R&D in fire safety unfortunately cannot be described as vigorous because it focuses on equipment used by fire department personnel and fire-safety facilities required by law, such as fire engines and rescue materials and equipment, fire sensors, fire extinguishing systems, etc., whose market is limited. To conduct innovative fire extinguishing R&D on equipment that could dramatically improve fire-fighting efficiency, it is important to inform research institutions and private firms of the issues and needs in fire safety rather than to make efforts solely among organizations involved in fire safety and to conduct research by engaging a wide range of researchers from the pure sciences in practical technologies. The Fire and Disaster Management Agency of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications set up a competitive research funding effort in fiscal 2003 called Promoting Program for Scientific Fire and Disaster Prevention Technologies (Competitive Research Funding Program) to promote R&D based on the collaboration of industry, academia, and the national government. This competitive research program solicits research proposals for promoting advances in fire safety and disaster preparedness science and technology and achieving safe and secure society. It involves researchers in industry, academia, and government and provides funding for proposals considered worth promoting. Some 104 studies had been completed under this program by fiscal 2014. The Kitakyushu municipal fire department, for instance, proposed developing a fire extinguishing composition able to extinguish fires using only a small amount of water. After building a system for collaboration with the University of Kitakyushu and local industries, they developed such a composition based on a natural surfactant whose use has greatly reduced the environmental load and whose performance meets the needs of fire-fighting operations conducted by fire department personnel in general fires. The team earned the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award in the Fifth Merit Awards for Industry/Academia/Government Collaboration in fiscal 2007. In publishing the special issue on Fire and Disaster Prevention Technologies edited by Prof.Tomonori Kawano, Prof. Kazuya Uezu, and Prof. Takaaki Kato of the Research and Development Center of Fire and Environmental Safety, the University of Kitakyushu, it is shown that fire safety and disaster preparedness R&D undertaken by universities, local industries, and fire departments in Kitakyushu is proceeding on in an expanded scale. It is hoped that such undertakings and their findings will be extended to other areas, thus further promoting R&D in fire safety.

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Abstract Integration of biological control with other management tactics such as prescribed burning is often important for successful invasive weed control. A critical step in this integration is determining whether the agent can colonize postburn growth of the weed. Here, we investigated postburn colonization by biological control agents on regrowth of the invasive vine Lygodium microphyllum (Cav.) R. Br. (Lygodiaceae, Old World climbing fern) in Florida. We monitored regrowth and subsequent colonization of two agents already established in Florida—the gall-inducing mite Floracarus perrepae Knihinicki and Boczek (Acariformes: Eriophyidae) and the foliage-feeding moth Neomusotima conspurcatalis Warren (Lepidoptera: Crambidae)—following three prescribed burns. We provide the first report of natural colonization by the F. perrepae mite and N. conspurcatalis moth on postburn L. microphyllum regrowth, and this colonization typically began 5–9 mo postburn. Furthermore, we report that L. microphyllum can recover to prefire levels of percent cover in as little as 5 mo. Our findings indicate that biological control of L. microphyllum has the potential to be integrated with prescribed burns.

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Abstract Engineering and technical solutions to ensure fire safety of the building and protection of people by deterministic factors have been installed. The object of research is a building of public social purpose. Constructive and planning solutions for preventing the spread of fire in the building of an object of class K0 for fire danger are diagnosed. The enclosing structures of the room must have a fire resistance index of at least REI 150. Technical solutions for evacuation routes and passageways, equipment that guarantees reliable protection from fires, communication in the building, ensuring procedures that implement the effective functioning of the fire Department to eliminate the source of fire have been formulated. Technical solutions for fire protection and communication systems of the building are justified in detail. Compensating measures are recommended for public buildings with an excess of the standard height and in the presence of six underground floors. It is specifically recommended to increase the fire resistance limits of load-bearing structures, stiffness cores – stair and elevator nodes and fire barriers to R/REI 180 and to provide the building with a type 5 warning system.

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Abstract Introduction Most career firefighters in the US are allowed to rest and sleep, yet at the same time must be ready to respond to emergencies. We recently found that inter-daily rhythms in firefighter total sleep time (TST) and that the rhythms are related to their shift schedule. Considering the relationship between sleep duration and health outcomes, the purpose of this research is to assess the daily relationship between preceding TST and sleepiness throughout two popular fire department shift schedules. Methods Firefighters participated in a pre-experimental, longitudinal sleep study that assessed sleep over 18 days on the 24-hours on and 48-hours off (24/48) (n=22) and again 18 days, six-months after firefighters transitioned to the 48-hours on and 96-hours off (48/96) shift schedules (n=20). Daily TST was assessed using actigraphy and the Emergency Services Sleep Diary and daily sleepiness was assessed using the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), completed every afternoon at 1:00 PM. Results The results of the one-way repeated measures ANOVA for each schedule indicated a statistically significant difference in ESS scores among days within the 24/48 (F(2,42) = 8.56, p<0.01) and 48/49 shift schedule (F(5,95) = 7.40, p<0.05). Using pre-shift as baseline, differences of preceding TST and afternoon sleepiness were related in the 24/48 (r(64)= -.62, p ≤.001) and 48/96 (r(118)= -.54, p ≤.001) shift schedule. The greatest mean levels of sleepiness occurred on days in which firefighters commuted to and from the fire station. During non-workdays, mean afternoon sleepiness decreased as firefighters returned to baseline TST. Conclusion Firefighters experienced an inverse relationship between preceding TST and afternoon sleepiness. The least TST occurred on commute days; firefighters begin shift with insufficient sleep and drove home with insufficient sleep. Subsequently, firefighters experienced greatest levels of sleepiness during those afternoons. The findings of daily variation in TST and sleepiness highlight the importance for firefighters to prioritize sleep so that they begin shift well rested and commute home well rested. In addition, the implication of the results questions whether other acute health outcomes also vary within fire department shift schedules. Support (If Any)

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Police, fire, and emergency personnel rely on wireless networks to serve the public. Whether it is during a natural disaster, or just an ordinary calendar day, wireless nodes of varying types form the infrastructure that local, regional, and even national scale agencies use to communicate while keeping the population served safe and secure. In this article, Michael R. Bartolacci and Stanko Dimitrov present a network interdiction modeling approach that can be utilized for analyzing vulnerabilities in public service wireless networks; subject to hacking, terrorism, or destruction from natural disasters. They develop a case study for wireless networks utilized by the sheriff's department of Miami-Dade County in Florida in the United States. Finally, the authors' modeling approach—given theoretical budgets for the “hardening” of wireless network nodes and for would-be destroyers of such nodes—highlights parts of the network where further investment may prevent damage and loss of capacity.

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Abstract Introduction Circadian misalignment from sustained 24/7 operations and sleep loss are common occurrences in military operations, and operational demands can often lead to high levels of fatigue. Although the relationship between the circadian system and fatigue is well characterized, the relationship between magnitude of the circadian shift and fatigue during operational mission events has not been widely explored. Methods Twenty-one male participants aged 23.3±3.9 years (mean±SD) were recruited from a sample of active-duty Soldiers. The study consisted of a single day baseline data collection and then a month later the Soldiers participated in a sustained live-fire mission simulation consisting of a pre-mission day, the 72-hour live-fire exercise, and post-mission day. During the simulation, Soldiers completed the following mission events: Tactical Stress Marksmanship Assessment (TSMA), Individual Shooter Scenario (ISS), Small Unit Performance Analytics (SUPRA), Reconnaissance (RECON), infiltration and extraction ruck-march (INFIL/EXFIL RUCK), and RAID, to model actual combat or operational activities. Subjective fatigue was assessed using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS) after each mission event. Circadian phase was measured by salivary dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) at baseline and then again following the post-mission day. Half-hourly saliva samples were collected under dim light (<10lux) sedentary conditions. The circadian phase shift was calculated as the difference between the two DLMO collections. Results Twenty of the twenty-one participants advanced their circadian rhythm with a total mean shift of 0.91±0.88 SD hours. Of the six mission events, significant correlations were found between the magnitude of the phase shift and subjective fatigue for three of the events. The magnitude of the circadian phase shift was negatively correlated with fatigue for RECON r=-0.59 (p=0.008), RAID r=-0.55 (p=0.01), and EXFIL RUCK r=-0.44 (p=0.046). The amount of sleep in the 24 hours prior to each of these events had no significant correlation. Conclusion For the RECON, RAID, and RUCK, we found that the greater the magnitude of the phase shift, the less fatigue individuals endorsed. Yet, there was no significant relationship with sleep prior to the events. This suggests a potential greater need to consider the impact of the circadian system on military operations, especially with regard to circadian effects on fatigue. Support (If Any) Department of Defense Military Operational Medicine Research Program (MOMRP); DEVCOM SC

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ALL THINGS WISE AND WONDERFUL: A Christian Understanding of How and Why Things Happen, in Light of COVID-19 by E. Janet Warren. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2021. 208 pages + index. Paperback; $27.00. ISBN: 9781725292031. *In All Things Wise and Wonderful, E. Janet Warren develops a multidisciplinary, Christian understanding of causation with the hope that it will help us "to respond with integrity and compassion for those who suffer" (p. 182). Warren is not short on familiar examples of uncompassionate responses to suffering that are worth critiquing: "God caused the pandemic to teach us to be kind" (p. 127), "Everything happens for a reason" (p. 180), and "This tragedy happened to grow your faith" (p. 22). Warren argues that these symptoms point toward a common diagnosis: a false, "omni-causal" view of God, according to which God "causes everything that happens, including pandemics" (p. 31). *Chapter 1: Introduction lays the groundwork for the rest of the book in two ways: first, by giving a complex taxonomy of philosophical distinctions bearing on causation; second, by introducing (as Warren argues) the problematic practice of too easily explaining an event as the result of God's direct causal intervention (e.g., God provided a parking spot!) when mundane explanations suffice. The tension between the complexity of causation and the human tendency to gravitate toward simplistic (divine) explanations becomes the book's recurring theme. In chapter 2, Warren surveys biblical claims about causation, concluding that the Bible "does not give a simple account of causation," (p. 45) and encouraging the reader to "accept ambiguity and complexity" (p. 36) in the text rather than demanding a coherent biblical theory. *The third chapter, "What Does Christian Theology Say about Causation?" is the clear standout and would make a provocative discussion-piece for an undergraduate class on divine providence in a science and religion course. Warren contrasts two pictures of God, one in which God is an omni-causal, omni-controlling dictator of a deterministic world (pp. 57, 77) and another in which God is a servant king who relinquishes the option to utilize God's power in order to preserve space for indeterministic, creaturely freedom (pp. 53, 58). The strokes are intentionally broad, nudging the reader to see the potential ethical pitfalls of positing an omni-causal God. In particular, Warren worries that an omni-causal God would not be capable of being lovingly responsive to creaturely agents (p. 57). *In Warren's preferred picture, God builds a world that can host longstanding causal patterns without repeated divine intervention; once created, the world is, in some sense "self-causing" (p. 35) and does not require any special act of divine conservation. Although God does act in the world, God refrains from fully exercising his power to control in order to respect "the freedom he has granted to humans and the created order" (p. 60). *The contrasting portraits, however vivid, also preempt discussion of various middle views--one might distinguish between an omni-causing and omni-controlling God, for instance. Warren is also stronger on critique than on the details of her own positive proposal--perhaps by design. "The language of metaphor and analogies is more accessible," Warren writes, "than the language of philosophy or science" (p. 68). This is faithful to her refrain that real-world causal networks are messy and not easily wrapped in neat theological packaging, but it may prove frustrating to those readers eager to engage the details of a constructive project. *In chapter 4, Warren gives the reader a crash course in statistical concepts that are useful for understanding causation, quickly covering (for instance) base rates, regression to the mean, and the law of large numbers. Genuine chance is not incompatible with a kind of sovereignty, Warren argues; rather, God "created randomness" (p. 90) and is capable of guiding overarching events through it while fostering the vulnerability, excitement, and intellectual humility that comes with real chanciness. Chapter 5 asks what science says about causation. Notable--both for the audience it will attract and exclude--is Warren's commitment to take divine healings, demonic activity, and parapsychology seriously while also summarizing key concepts from quantum theory and medicinal practice. *In chapter 6, Warren turns to psychological explanations of why we jump to simple causal explanations. Drawing liberally from Kahneman,1 Warren introduces dual processing theory, distinguishing between our quick, automatic system 1 judgments and our reflective, deliberate system 2 judgments. Citing Barrett's hypersensitive agency detection device2 and Taleb's narrative fallacy,3 among other mechanisms, Warren suggests that causal explanations that invoke a narrative about God's intentions are often psychologically easy for us to jump to (via system 1). A reflective Christian should, Warren argues, be aware of this tendency and moderate our confidence in unreflective judgments about divine intervention in ordinary events. *Chapter 7 and the conclusion that follows take a pastoral turn and will be of special interest to church study groups. Alongside giving practical recommendations for exercising discernment, Warren concludes that "by better understanding the nature of causation and the nature of God's interaction with our wise and wonderful world, we can better evaluate how and why things happen, without glibly assuming God causes everything" (p. 177). *Warren's book could profitably be read by undergraduates in a science and religion course at a confessional college, with special attention given to the third chapter, which has points of contact with Polkinghorne,4 Bartholomew,5 Boyd,6 and Oord.7 But the book may be even more at home in study groups at (broadly) evangelical churches, where the writing's therapeutic lens can shine. Warren's easy prose is accessible as she hops without hesitation from the Bible to Polkinghorne to Aristotle to Bruce Almighty. *While the breadth of Warren's book is impressive, any interdisciplinary book is liable to engage more fully with some disciplines than others. It is no surprise that Warren's book is strongest when drawing on her expertise in medicine and theology and less so when discussing philosophy. *One philosophical concern for Warren's argument against an omni-causal God is the possibility of causation from nonaction. Some philosophers think that absences cause: My not watering the plant causes it to die; my not calling on his birthday causes Dad to be sad. In each of these cases, there is something I could have easily done that would have prevented the effect. But if absences cause, then there is a serious challenge for Warren's view. A powerful and wise (even if not classically omniscient) God can easily prevent most events from happening. God could easily have prevented me from getting that last parking spot or my friend from being infected with a virus. Perhaps, then, God's not preventing these events should number among their causes (or at least their explanations). *This need not be a criticism of the overall theological picture Warren develops--one in which God does not intend or directly intervene to prevent the normal operation of the world except (usually) for explicitly theological reasons. Rather, I suggest that how much leverage can be gained by critiquing the concept of an omni-causal God depends on substantive philosophical commitments about the nature of causation and how causation relates to other philosophical concepts such as explanation and responsibility. Perhaps a God as powerful and involved as traditional Christian theology posits can't help but be in close causal contact with the world--a God whose interventions, however sparingly placed, ripple far throughout the created world, either by preventing or by failing to prevent events that are well within God's power to stop. If so, then "God didn't cause that" may not often be strictly true. Even if God didn't specially intervene with the purpose of bringing the event about, saying "God didn't intend that," "God didn't plan that," or "God didn't want that" may be more honest. Retaining God's action or inaction as causes of mundane events--while complicating the story about divine intent and providence--may also allow us to vindicate the biblical practice of prayerful complaint against God's (in)action (with Job and the psalmist) as a therapeutically important and theologically understandable response to suffering while simultaneously allowing us to join Warren's critique of "comforting" clichés about God's specific purposes for particular harms. *But these are concerns about tactics within the context of a shared goal to enrich and complexify Christian understandings of causation. At its best, Warren's work therapeutically nudges the reader toward a healthy skepticism of over-easy ascriptions of God's direct causal intervention in the world. And this amidst an ambitious, interdisciplinary conceptual toolkit that weaves accessibly through theology, philosophy, statistics, psychology, and the sciences more broadly. *Notes *1Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Toronto, ON: Doubleday Canada, 2011). *2Justin L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief (New York: Free Press, 2012). *3Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010). *4John C. Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God's Interaction with the World, 2nd ed. (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2005). *5David J. Bartholomew, God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). *6Gregory A. Boyd, "The Open-Theism View," in Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views, ed. James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 13-47. *7Thomas Jay Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2015). *Reviewed by Christopher Willard-Kyle, Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK G12 8LP.

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Depression, anxiety and stress among emergency responders are emerging issues as they can affect psychological well-being. Firefighting is a highly stressful occupation and highly demanding in terms of physical and psychological capacities. As the studies on job stress factors and mental health among firefighters are significantly low in Malaysia, understanding the job stress factors among Malaysian firefighters has become substantially important. Such studies can create a scientific novelty and contribute to suitable intervention processes by the Malaysian government and Fire and Rescue Department Malaysia in ensuring the high efficiency of emergency responders at all times. Hence, this study aimed to determine the factors contributing to depression, anxiety and stress among firefighters in Malaysia. A cross-sectional study involving 82 firefighters from Grade A and Grade B stations in Kota Bharu, Kelantan was conducted, and a validated National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Generic Job Stress Questionnaire (NIOSH GJSQ) was used. The results indicated that physical environment, job future, job requirement, mental demand, workload and responsibility, as well as problem at work, conflict at work and self-esteem have a high possibility to be attributed as stress factors for firefighters. Additionally, the physical environment has the highest contribution as a stressor for firefighters at 79.8%. The findings also found that self-esteem is correlated to problem at work (r = 0.305) and job requirement (r = 0.276). In conclusion, this study has identified the contributing factors that influence the psychological well-being of firefighters in Malaysia. Therefore, it is suggested that further research should be conducted to prevent the arising of mental health problems among firefighters in Malaysia.

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AbstractIntroductionFirefighters are often exposed to stressful duty-related events and may experience extreme trauma. Such work-related stress can result in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is therefore important to understand the traumatic stress experienced by firefighters in the course of their work and to promote appropriate intervention when necessary.MethodsData were collected from 118 workers (all males) in the Fire Department of Akita City, Japan who had participated in the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Dai-Shinsai) rescue effort from March 11 through March 31, 2011. Study participants completed self-report surveys at three time intervals: shortly after return from the rescue effort, approximately two weeks after return from the rescue effort, and approximately one month after return from the rescue effort. The surveys included questions of demographics, physical complaints, medical history, and the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) Japanese version, in which a cut-off point of 24/25 was set to screen for PTSD.ResultsA total of 117 participants undertook the initial survey with a range of 0-36 points obtained on the IES-R score. For the initial survey, two of 117 participants scored ≥25 points. For the intermediate survey phase, a range of 0-19 was obtained for 116 participants and for the final survey phase, a range of 0-11 points was obtained for 114 participants.ConclusionContrary to expectations, the survey results showed no participant was judged to require prompt consultation for PTSD. The firefighters who participated in this study were in good mental health. However, more detailed study is required to ascertain whether these findings adequately and clearly reflect the mental health status of these participants.FushimiM. Posttraumatic stress in professional firefighters in Japan: rescue efforts after the Great East Japan Earthquake (Higashi Nihon Dai-Shinsai). Prehosp Disaster Med.2012;27(5):1-3.

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Fire blight, caused by Erwinia amylovora (Burr.) Winslow et al., affects plants in the Rosaceae family, which includes trees and shrubs in orchards, nurseries, and landscape plantations. During the springs and summers of 2008 and 2010, dying branches, necrotic leaves attached to shoots, and blighted twigs of meadowsweet (Spirea prunifolia) were observed at three different locations of landscape areas in Konya Province, Turkey. Disease incidence was approximately 1% on the plants during the surveys. Initial symptoms of reddish to brownish streaks on the shoots of infected plants were observed in spring. Nine representative bacterial strains were isolated from the lesions on shoots of seven meadowsweet plants on nutrient sucrose agar (NSA) medium and identified as E. amylovora on basis of biochemical, physiological (2,3) and molecular tests (1). Bacteria were gram-negative, rod shaped, aerobic, fermentative, yellow-orange on Miller and Scroth medium (2), positive for levan formation and acetoin production, did not grow at 36°C, positive for gelatin hydrolysis, and negative for esculin hydrolysis, indole, urease, catalase, oxidase, arginine dehydrolase, reduction of nitrate, acid production from lactose, and inositol. All strains were hypersensitive response-positive on tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum var. White Burley) plants. All strains were identified as E. amylovora using the species-specific primers set, A/B (1), by PCR assay, and by fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) profiles determined by Sherlock Microbial Identification System software (TSBA 6 v. 6.00; Microbial ID, Newark, DE) with similarity indices ranging from of 79 to 99%. Pathogenicity was tested by injecting of petioles and actively growing three shoot tips of 2-year-old S. prunifolia seedlings cv. number 29 using a 0.46 mm-diameter hypodermic needle with bacterial suspensions containing 108 CFU mL–1 in sterile distilled water (SDW) Plants were inoculated with each of the nine bacterial strains and two references strains, Ea29 and NCPPB 2791 (Selcuk University, Department of Plant Protection, Konya, Turkey). Symptoms resembling those associated with natural infection appeared on the inoculated plants 7 days after inoculation. Plants inoculated with SDW served as a negative control treatment, and no symptoms were observed on these plants. All tests were repeated three times with the same results. Bacterial re-isolations were attempted from the control plants as well as shoots and leaves inoculated with the two reference strains and the nine bacteria identified as E. amylovora. Bacteria isolated from inoculated plants were identified as E. amylovora using the biochemical, physiological, and molecular tests described above, but this bacterium was not isolated from the control plants. Phytosanitary measures must be taken to avoid spread of the pathogen to ornamentals in new landscape areas in Turkey. This report is important because infected Spirea spp. can be a potential inoculum source for other rosaceous ornamentals. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the occurrence of fire blight on meadowsweet in Turkey. References: (1) S. Bereswill et al. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 58:3522, 1992. (2) A. L. Jones and K. Geider. Laboratory Guide for Identification of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria, pp. 40-55. American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 2001. (3) R. A. Lelliott and D. E. Stead. Methods for Diagnosis of Bacterial Diseases of Plants (Methods in Plant Pathology). Oxford, UK, 1987.

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During the summers of 2008 and 2010, leaf and shoot blight, wilting of the tips of young infected shoots, and cankers with brown discoloration on twigs were observed on six dog rosehip (Rosa canina) plants from four different private orchards in Eregli district of Konya Province, Turkey. Disease incidence was estimated to be approximately 0.5% on rosehips over 2 years within all survey areas, and surveys showed that ~4 ha was infested. Bacteria isolated from diseased leaf and shoot tissues was macerated and streaked on nutrient sucrose agar (NSA) and King's medium B (KB). Typical light cream, levan-positive colonies developed on NSA medium after a 2-day incubation at 25°C. Colonies on KB were white and non-fluorescent (1). Bacterial strains were identified on the basis of biochemical, physiological (2), and molecular tests (3). Eleven representative bacterial strains isolated were gram-negative, rod-shaped, mucoid, fermentative, yellow-orange on Miller & Scroth medium, positive for levan formation and acetoin production, no growth at 36°C, positive for gelatin hydrolysis, and negative for esculin hydrolysis, indole, urease, catalase, oxidase, arginine dehydrolase, reduction of nitrate, and acid production from lactose and inositol. Two reference strains of Erwinia amylovora (Burr.) Winslow et al. (Ea43b and NCPPB 2791) obtained from culture collection of Selcuk University, Department of Plant Protection, Turkey, were used as positive controls. All strains induced a hypersensitive response in tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum cv. White Burley) plants within 24 h after inoculation with a 108 CFU/ml bacterial suspension in sterilized distilled water (SDW) (~50 μl), and the strains produced ooze on inoculated immature pear fruit slices cv. Ankara. All strains were identified as E. amylovora using the species-specific primers set A/B (A: 5′ CGGTTTTTAACGCTGGG 3′ and B: 5′ GGGCAAATACTCGGATT 3′) (3) by PCR assay to generate a 1-kb DNA fragment, and fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) profiles determined by Sherlock Microbial Identification System software with similarity indices ranging from 84 to 97%. Pathogenicity was tested by inserting a suspension (108 CFU/ml SDW) of each of the 11 bacterial strains and two references strains into actively growing shoot tips and petioles of 4-year-old plants of Rosa canina using a 0.46-mm-diameter hypodermic needle. Leaf and shoot blight symptoms resembling the natural infection were developed on the inoculated plants 7 to 10 days after inoculation. SDW was injected similarly as a negative control treatment, and no symptoms were observed on the control plants. All tests were repeated three times. Re-isolations were done from shoots and leaves of inoculated plants with the two reference strains and the 11 bacteria, and control plants. Obtaining bacteria were identified as E. amylovora using the biochemical, physiological, and molecular tests described above, but this bacterium was not isolated from the control plants. To our knowledge, this is the first report of E. amylovora on rosehip in Turkey. References: (1) R. A. Lelliott and D. E. Stead. Methods for Diagnosis of Bacterial Diseases of Plants (Methods in Plant Pathology). Oxford, UK, 1987. (2) A. L. Jones and K. Geider. Laboratory Guide for Identification of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria, Pp. 40-55, American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 2001. (3) S. Bereswill et al. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 58:3522, 1992.

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El trabajo de los bomberos es considerado como una de las profesiones con mayor exigencia física y predisposición a padecer estrés, debido a las exigentes condiciones de trabajo y la responsabilidad sobre vidas humanas. Los objetivos de la presente investigación fueron: (i) describir las exigencias cinemáticas, fisiológicas y de estrés en bomberos, y (ii) comparar estas exigencias en función de los años de experiencia. Ocho bomberos del parque del Ayuntamiento de Cartagena participaron voluntariamente, siendo divididos en dos grupos en función de la experiencia: (1) experimentados: >12 años (n=4); (2) noveles: <7 años (n=4). Se registraron las variables aceleración total (AcelT), frecuencia cardíaca media (FCmedia) y ratio simpático-parasimpático (R-S|Ps). Los resultados mostraron diferencias entre actividades, encontrando los mayores valores en deporte y salidas. En el análisis inter-grupos, se encontraron diferencias en las variables AcelT y FCmedia en deporte, siendo mayor en los bomberos experimentados (p<.05); y en la variable R-S|Ps en Práctica y Salida con urgencia (p<.05), siendo mayor en los noveles. En conclusión, los bomberos con menos experiencia sufren un mayor estrés durante la jornada laboral. Por tanto, es necesario la incorporación de personal cualificado para diseñar una planificación específica del entrenamiento y de las estrategias de afrontamiento ante la resolución de conflictos adaptadas a la situación real. The work of firefighters is considered one of the professions with greater physical demands and predisposition to suffer stress, due to the hazardous working conditions and the responsibility with human lives. The aims of the present study were to: (i) describe the kinematical, physiological and stress demands of firefighters, and (ii) compare these demands in relation to the experience years. Eight firefighters from the fire department of Cartagena participated voluntarily, dividing them into two groups: (1) experienced: >12 years (n=4); (2) novels: <7 years (n=4). The registered variables were total acceleration (AcelT), heart rate average (HRavg) and sympathetic-parasympathetic ratio (R-S|Ps). The results shown differences between activities, finding the highest values in sport and exits. In the between-groups comparison, differences in AcelT and HRavg in sport (p<.05), being higher in experienced group; and differences in R-S|Ps in practice and exits with urgency (p<.05), being higher in novels group. In conclusion, the firefighters with less experience suffer greater stress during workday. Therefore, it is necessary the incorporation of qualified staff to design specific training and coping strategies before the resolution of conflicts adapted to the real situation.

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This technical note summarizes a technical comparison of common testing procedures, as well as reviewed of the UN Test N` 5, for the assessment of the self-heating properties of cargoes and materials that has shown a clear trend on maritime fire and explosions events, as well as considering of external factors that can combine self-heating and emit flammable gases to conclude in an unlikely event affecting the security of crews and ships. A high understanding of the external factors effect on the cargo materials certainly will help the application of spontaneous reactions management actions (SRMA) on board of ships during the cargo sea passage. The intended comparison is based on laboratory, industry and field observations and data, whereas the among the external factors considered are, moisture content, stockpile procedure and aging, air velocities and moderate pressures internal and externally to the cargo material. The comparison results have shown that the self-heating and the flammable gas emissions has a common pattern when reacting with any oxygen available source, regardless the reactive material chemical composition. Keywords: reactive materials, self-heating, self-ignition, direct reduced iron fines, materials handling, UN test N` 5, maritime safety, spontaneous reactions, risk management. IMSBC Code , IMO. References [1]A. M. DeGennaro, M. W. Lohry, L. Martinelli, C. W. Rowley. Uncertainty Quantification for Cargo Hold Fires. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08540, USA. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. [2]L.L.Sloss Assessing and Managing Spontaneous Combustion of Coals. IEA Clean Coal Center (CCC 259). Oct. 2015. [3].A. Janes, G Marlair, D Carson, j. Chaneausx. Towards the improvement of UN Test N1 5 Method for the characterization of substances which in contact with water emit Flammable Gases. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries. Elsevier 2012, 25 (3), pp 524-534. [4]G. Rouget, B. Majidi, D. Picard, G. Gauvin, D. Ziegler, J. Mashreghi, and H. Alamdar. Electrical Resistivity Measurement of Petroleum co*ke Powder by Means of Four-Probe Method. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B. Vol. 48B, Oct. 2017-2543. [5]Y. Rubiela Hernández Puerto, M.Triviño Restrepo. El coque metalúrgico aplicado a protección catódica (Metallurgia coque applied to catodic protection). Revista del Instituto de Investigaciones FIGMMG. Vol. 10, Nº 20, 60-67 (2007) UNMSM I. [6]S. Narayan Jha, K. Narsaiah, A.L. Basediya, R.Sharma, P. Jaiswal, R. Kumar, and R. Bhardwaj. Measurement techniques and application of electrical properties for nondestructive quality evaluation of foods—a review. Food Sci Technol. 2011 Aug; 48(4): 387–411. [7]R. Fontes Araujo, J. Batisa Zonta, E. Fontes Araujo, E. Heberle, E, F. Miranda Garcia Zonta. Teste de Conductividade Eletrica para Smentes de Feijao Mungo Verde 1. Rev. Brasikleira de sem*ntes, Vol. 33, N` 1, pp123/130, 2011. [8]P.A. Eidem. Electric Resistivity of co*ke Beds. PhD Thesis. Norwegian University of Science and Technology Faculty of Natural Sciences and Technology Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Tronheim Oct. 2008. [9]N. Birks, et.al. - Mechanism in Corrosion Induced Auto-ignition of Direct Reduced Iron. Materials Science and Engineering Department, University of Pittsburgh. [10]Monitoring Implementation of the Hazardous and Noxious Substances Convention. Report on incidents involving HNS. Submitted by the United Kingdom. IMO 85th Session, Agenda item 5- LEG 85/INF.2, 19 September 2002.

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Every year, during dry season, Chiang Mai and other northern provinces of Thailand face the problem of haze which is mainly generated by the burning of agricultural waste and forest fire, contained high percentage of particulate matter. Particulate matter 10 (PM10), being very small in size, can be inhaled easily to the deepest parts of the human lung and throat respiratory functions. Due to this, it increases the risk of respiratory diseases mainly in the case of continuous exposure to this seasonal smog. MODIS aerosol images (MOD04) have been used for four weeks in March 2007 for generating the hazard map by linking to in-situ values of PM10. Simple linear regression model between PM10 and AOD got fair correlation with R² = 0.7 and was applied to transform PM10 pattern. The hazard maps showed the dominance of PM10 in northern part of Chiang Mai, especially in second week of March when PM10 level was three to four times higher than standard. The respiratory disease records and public health station of each village were collected from Provincial Public Health Department in Chiang Mai province. There are about 300 public health stations out of 2070 villages; hence thiessen polygon was created to determine the representative area of each public health station. Within each thiessen polygon, respiratory disease incident rate (RDIR) was calculated based on the number of patients and population. Global Moran's I was computed for RDIR to explore spatial pattern of diseases through four weeks of March. Moran's I index depicted a cluster pattern of respiratory diseases in 2nd week than other weeks. That made sense for a relationship between PM10 and respiratory diseases infections. In order to examine how PM10 affect the human respiratory system, geographically weighted regression model was used to observe local correlation coefficient between RDIR and PM10 across study area. The result captured a high correlation between respiratory diseases and high level of PM10 in northeast districts of Chiang Mai in second week of March.

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Washington State ranks fourth in the country in garlic (Allium sativum) production (2). The impact of viruses on garlic production may be significant in Washington State, but little is known about the occurrence or identity of specific viruses (2). The USDA-ARS Western Regional Plant Introduction Station (WRPIS) collects, maintains, and distributes garlic accessions. As part of the regeneration process, accessions are grown in field conditions at the WRPIS farm in Pullman, WA. In June 2004, several WRPIS accessions developed symptoms indicative of viral infection, primarily chlorotic spots and yellow stripes on leaves and scapes. Cultivars Georgia Fire and Georgia Crystal showed more than 90% incidence of symptomatic plants. Some chlorotic spots appeared similar to those caused by Iris yellow spot virus on other Allium spp. such as A. cepa. However, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), as well as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with IYSV-specific primers (1) did not reveal the presence of IYSV. Degenerate, group-specific primers to potyviruses (3) and carlaviruses (courtesy of S. D. Wyatt) were used on total nucleic acids extracted from each symptomatic plant with reverse transcription (RT)-PCR. The samples (n = 26) gave an RT-PCR product of the expected size with the group-specific potyvirus RT-PCR test. One sample was positive with the carlavirus group RT-PCR test. RT-PCR products from both tests were cloned and sequenced. Comparisons with sequences in GenBank showed that all but one had Onion yellow dwarf virus (OYDV), whereas one sample had a mixed infection of OYDV and Leek yellow stripe virus. Sequence analysis showed that the carlavirus was Garlic common latent virus. Sequence identities ranged from 95 to 99% for each of the viruses when compared with those available in GenBank. All samples were then tested for each of these viruses with commercially available antisera. Results of ELISA confirmed the findings of RT-PCR. To our knowledge, this is the first report for each of these garlic viruses from Washington State. This finding prompts the need for evaluating all garlic accessions for the potential impact of these viruses on garlic germ plasm conservation and distribution. References: (1) L. J. du Toit et al. Plant Dis. 88:222, 2004. (2) R. M. Hannan and E. J. Sorensen. Crop Profile for Garlic in Washington. Washington State University Coop Extension and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2002. (3) S. S. Pappu et al. J. Virol. Methods 41:9, 1993.

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A Neotropical rust of the Myrtaceae, Puccinia psidii Winter, was described from Psidium guajava L., or guava, in Brazil in 1884 (1). It was first discovered in Hawaii on potted Metrosideros polymorpha Gaud. on Oahu in April 2005 (2) with pathogenicity and identity established (3). It spread quickly, and by January 2006, severe outbreaks of this rust occurred statewide on new leaves of Syzygium jambos (L.) Alston, or rose apple. Rose apple, a native to South and Southeast Asia, was introduced to Hawaii in 1825 and is locally abundant to invasive from just above sea level to as high as 1,000 m in elevation in wet sites. Healthy, reddish green immature leaves on new twigs become deformed, yellow-red, and covered with masses of yellow urediniospores following infection. As the disease progresses, infected leaves are blackened and defoliate, with no functional leaves formed. Stem tips and branches are killed and the canopy becomes progressively smaller. Repeated mortality of juvenile leaves was observed to kill 8 to12 m tall trees in the Haiku area of Maui. Wind dispersal of urediniospores resulted in heavy infection of even small groups of S. jambos isolated by 1 km or more and billions of urediniospores covered the ground under diseased trees. On Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu, trees with many dead branches are becoming common with concerns about the fire hazard of these dead trees surrounded by dry grasses. At low humidity levels, or on more mature leaves characterized by soft expanded yellow-green tissue, fewer, mostly circular spots are formed that do not expand. S. jambos is an example of a highly vulnerable host in Hawaii and represents one of approximately 3,500 species of Myrtaceae outside the Neotropics growing in Australasia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and tropical Africa, which have evolved unexposed to P. psidii. Severely infected S. jambos plants have been the major source of spores in the environment, exposing many Myrtaceae hosts to P. psidii. The pathogenicity of P. psidii has been consistent among and within islands with S. jambos severely infected and M. polymorpha, Melaleuca quinquenervia, Rhodomyrtus tomentosa, Myrtus communis, and Eugenia species commonly infected. Other hosts such as S. cumini, S. malaccense, and Myriciaria cauliflora are also infected, although guava and Eucalyptus spp. are rarely infected. Strain differences within P. psidii are suspected (4). In the tropics, it is rare for mature trees to be killed by a foliar pathogen, but given the devastation of new growth, death of more S. jambos trees is likely. References: (1) T. A. Coutinho et al. Plant Dis. 82:819, 1998. (2) E. M. Killgore and R. A. Heu. New Pest Advisory No. 05-04. Hawaii Department of Agriculture, 2007. (3) J. Y. Uchida et al. Plant Dis. 90:524, 2006. (4) S. Zhong et al. Mol. Ecol. Res. 8:348. 2008.

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Impulsionado pela problemática ambiental, que ora em muitos casos é conferida por ambientes de riscos e vulnerabilidades, o artigo que se segue tem como objetivo identificar, à luz da análise integrada do ambiente, os riscos e vulnerabilidades socioambientais na cidade de Picos/PI, além de servir como subsídio para um ordenamento territorial e governança do risco, sendo útil, por exemplo, para o Corpo de Bombeiros e a Defesa Civil no direcionamento das suas ações. Recorreu-se à Análise Integrada do Ambiente e ao Materialismo Histórico e Dialético, sustentados nos seguintes procedimentos metodológicos: leitura de bibliografia referente à temática (delineamento teórico-conceitual), observações in loco, levantamento fotográfico, mapeamento (por meio do software ArcGis 10.3) e de notícias de jornal. Os principais resultados apontaram cenários de riscos e vulnerabilidades (relacionadas à descaraterização do relevo e aos eventos de inundação do rio Guaribas) nas seguintes áreas: Centro, Canto da Várzea, Ipueiras, São José, Bomba, Aerolândia, Paroquial, Morros da Cidade de Deus, Morada do Sol e da Mariana. Tais áreas evidenciam a espacialização da população picoense em setores impróprios, fato esse intensificado pelo perfil socioeconômico dos seus moradores. Por fim, ressalta-se que os grupos sociais expostos aos riscos e vulnerabilidades possuem distintas capacidades de resiliência, tendo em vista o tempo de resposta diferenciado quanto ao enfrentamento dos riscos, sendo necessárias, assim, ações efetivas relacionadas à Defesa Civil e de avaliação de riscos dessas áreas frente aos eventos constatados neste estudo. Integrated analysis of the environment as a subsidy to identify socio-environmental risks and vulnerabilities in Picos/PI A B S T R A C TDriven by the environmental problem, which in many cases is conferred by risk and vulnerability environments, the following article aims to identify, in the light of the integrated environmental analysis, the socio-environmental risks and vulnerabilities in the city of Picos/PI, besides to serve as input for land use planning and governance risk and is useful, for example, the Fire Department and the Civil Defense in directing their actions. It appealed to the Integrated Analysis Environment and the Historical and Dialectical Materialism, sustained in the following methodological procedures: bibliography of reading on the subject (theoretical and conceptual design), on-site observations, photographic survey, mapping (through ArcGIS 10.3 software) and newspaper reports. The main results showed risk scenarios and vulnerabilities (related to relief decharacterization and the Guaribas river flood events) in the following areas: Centro, Canto da Várzea, Ipueiras, São José, Bomba, Aerolândia, Paroquial, Morros da Cidade de Deus, Morada do Sol and Mariana. These areas show the spatial distribution of population picoense in inappropriate sectors, a fact intensified by the socioeconomic profile of its residents. Finally, we emphasize that social groups exposed to the risks and vulnerabilities have different resiliency capabilities, in view of the time for each answer as to face the risks that are necessary, effective actions related to Civil Defense and risk assessment of these areas against the events observed in this study. Keywords: Environmental analysis; Diagnosis; Planning; Urban Environment; Dangers.

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Zinc iodide flow batteries (ZIFBs) are amongst the most promising chemistries to substitute the expensive and less energy intensive Vanadium Flow Batteries (VFBs). One of main problems related to this technology is the crossover of water due to the transport of Zn2+. One possible approach is the development of new ion-exchange membranes (IEMs). For practical applications they are required to possess high ionic conductivity, high thermal stability, long lifetime, and electrical insulation. The preparation of polymeric materials with such high-performance properties is still challenging and can lead to high prices, hindering their widespread use in energy conversion technologies. This is even more difficult when considering anion conducting membranes [1-3]. Polyketones (PK) are known to be high performance thermoplastic polymers with applications ranging from fire-retardants film coatings, packaging, and fibers, resulting from their high thermal and chemical stability. They can be obtained in high yields by copolymerization of inexpensive and readily available feedstocks such as ethylene and carbon monoxide. Our group proved that PK with alternating 1,4-dicarbonyl repeating units constitute an ideal starting point to access a wide class of modified polymers by simple Paal-Knorr cyclization, to gain pyrrole-N-bound functional groups stemming from the aliphatic backbone [4-5]. Different ion-conducting membranes have been developed and the effect of reaction conditions on their thermal properties, chemical stability, and their conductivity in a wide range of frequencies have been assessed by broadband electric spectroscopy to shed light on the conduction mechanisms [4, 6]. The more promising material developed has been tested in a single cell redox flow battery obtaining promising results. The proposed conducting polymers combine the thermal stability of the aliphatic PK structure with the chemical flexibility given by the groups derived from functionalized amines branching out, proving to be highly tailorable, with possible applications in current energy conversion technologies. Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank the Research Projects of Relevant National Interest (PRIN 2017) of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research “Novel Multilayered and Micro-Machined Electrode Nano-Architectures for Electrocatalytic Applications (Fuel Cells and Electrolyzers)” (Prot. 2017YH9MRK) and SID2020 Project of Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Padova “A New frontier in Hybrid Inorganic-Organic Membranes for Energy Conversion and Storage Devices” (Prot. BIRD201244) for funding. References [1] L. An, T.S. Zhao Eds., Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells, California, Principles, Materials and Systems, Springer Int. Publ. (2018); [2] G. Merle, M. Wessling, K. Nijmeijer, Journal of Membrane Science, 377 (2011) 1-35; J.R. Varcoe, P. Atanassov, D.R. Dekel, A.M. Herring, M.A. Hickner, P.A. Kohl, A.R. Kucernak, W.E. Mustain, K. Nijmeijer, K. Scott, T. Xu, L. Zhuang, Energy & Environmental Science, 7 (2014) 3135-3191; [3] N. Chen, Y.M. Lee, Progress in Polymer Science, 113 (2021) 101345. [4] G. Nawn, K. Vezzù, G. Cavinato, G. Pace, F. Bertasi, G. Pagot, E. Negro, V. Di Noto, Advanced Functional Materials, (2018) 1706522; [5] N. Ataollahi, K. Vezzù, G. Nawn, G. Pace, G. Cavinato, F. Girardi, P. Scardi, V. Di Noto, R. Di Maggio, Electrochimica Acta, 226 (2017) 148-157. [6] K. Vezzù, G. Nawn, G. Pagot, E. Negro, A. Nale, Y. Herve Bang, F. Conti, G. Cavinato, V. Di Noto, Electrochimica Acta, 319 (2019) 253-263.

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- Tim Behrend, Nancy K. Florida, Javanese literature in Surakarta manuscripts; Volume 2; Manuscripts of the Mangkunagaran palace. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 2000, 575 pp. - Harold Brookfield, Judith M. Heimann, The most offending soul alive; Tom Harrisson and his remarkable life. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998, 468 pp. - Harold Brookfield, Victor T. King, Rural development and social science research; Case studies from Borneo. Phillips, Maine: Borneo Research Council, 1999, xiii + 359 pp. [Borneo Research Council Proceedings Series 6.] - J.G. de Casparis, Roy E. Jordaan, The Sailendras in Central Javanese history; A survey of research from 1950 to 1999. Yogyakarta: Penerbitan Universitas Sanata Dharma, 1999, iv + 108 pp. - H.J.M. Claessen, Francoise Douaire-Marsaudon, Les premiers fruits; Parenté, identité sexuelle et pouvoirs en Polynésie occidentale (Tonga, Wallis et Futuna). Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1998, x + 338 pp. - Matthew Isaac Cohen, Andrew Beatty, Varieties of Javanese religion; An anthropological account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, xv + 272 pp. [Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 111.] - Matthew Isaac Cohen, Sylvia Tiwon, Breaking the spell; Colonialism and literary renaissance in Indonesia. Leiden: Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, University of Leiden, 1999, vi + 235 pp. [Semaian 18.] - Freek Colombijn, Victor T. King, Anthropology and development in South-East Asia; Theory and practice. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1999, xx + 308 pp. - Bernhard Dahm, Cive J. Christie, A modern history of South-East Asia; Decolonization, nationalism and seperatism. London: Tauris, 1996, x + 286 pp. - J. van Goor, Leonard Blussé, Pilgrims to the past; Private conversations with historians of European expansion. Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996, 339 pp., Frans-Paul van der Putten, Hans Vogel (eds.) - David Henley, Robert W. Hefner, Market cultures; Society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998, viii + 328 pp. - David Henley, James F. Warren, The Sulu zone; The world capitalist economy and the historical imagination. Amsterdam: VU University Press for the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam (CASA), 1998, 71 pp. [Comparative Asian Studies 20.] - Huub de Jonge, Laurence Husson, La migration maduraise vers l’Est de Java; ‘Manger le vent ou gratter la terre’? Paris: L’Harmattan/Association Archipel, 1995, 414 pp. [Cahier d’Archipel 26.] - Nico Kaptein, Mark R. Woodward, Toward a new paradigm; Recent developments in Indonesian Islamic thought. Tempe: Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 1996, x + 380 pp. - Catharina van Klinken, Gunter Senft, Referring to space; Studies in Austronesian and Papuan languages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, xi + 324 pp. - W. Mahdi, J.G. de Casparis, Sanskrit loan-words in Indonesian; An annotated check-list of words from Sanskrit in Indonesian and Traditional Malay. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri NUSA, Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, 1997, viii + 59 pp. [NUSA Linguistic Studies of Indonesian and Other Languages in Indonesia 41.] - Henk Maier, David Smyth, The canon in Southeast Asian literatures; Literatures of Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Richmond: Curzon, 2000, x + 273 pp. - Toon van Meijl, Robert J. Foster, Social reproduction and history in Melanesia; Mortuary ritual, gift exchange, and custom in the Tanga islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, xxii + 288 pp. - J.A. de Moor, Douglas Kammen, A tour of duty; Changing patterns of military politics in Indonesia in the 1990’s. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999, 98 pp., Siddharth Chandra (eds.) - Joke van Reenen, Audrey Kahin, Rebellion to integration; West Sumatra and the Indonesian polity, 1926-1998. Amsterdam University Press, 1999, 368 pp. - Heather Sutherland, Craig J. Reynolds, Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998, 70 pp. [The Frank H. Golay Memorial Lectures 2 and 3.], Ruth McVey (eds.) - Nicholas Tarling, Patrick Tuck, The French wolf and the Siamese lamb; The French threat to Siamese independence, 1858-1907. Bangkok: White Lotus, 1995, xviii + 434 pp. [Studies in Southeast Asian History 1.] - B.J. Terwiel, Andreas Sturm, Die Handels- und Agrarpolitik Thailands von 1767 bis 1932. Passau: Universität Passau, Lehrstuhl für Südostasienkunde, 1997, vii + 181 pp. [Passauer Beiträge zur Südostasienkunde 2.] - René S. Wassing, Koos van Brakel, A passion for Indonesian art; The Georg Tillmann collection at the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. Amsterdam. Royal Tropical Institute/Tropenmuseum, 1996, 128 pp., David van Duuren, Itie van Hout (eds.) - Edwin Wieringa, J. de Bruin, Een Leidse vriendschap; De briefwisseling tussen Herman Bavinck en Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 1875-1921. Baarn: Ten Have, 1999, 192 pp. [Passage 11.], G. Harinck (eds.)

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THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT OF AMERICAN HUMANISM by Stephen P. Weldon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 285 pages. Hardcover; $49.95. ISBN: 9781421438580. *The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism by Stephen Weldon recounts with approval the rise of non-theistic, and even antitheistic, thought in modern science. At the outset, I will confess to being a biased reviewer (perhaps, even, an antireviewer). If I were to tell this story, I would lament, rather than celebrate, the seemingly antireligious stance lauded in this history. I must also confess to being an active participant in this history, both as an amateur student in the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in the Presbyterian churches and in my own active involvement in faith-science discussions among evangelicals in the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). No historical account is objective--it will always reflect its author's perspective. This is true of this book and of this review. *Weldon tells the history episodically highlighting key people who contributed to this story. He begins in chapter 1, "Liberal Christianity and the Frontiers of American Belief," with Unitarians (theists/deists who reject the deity of Christ), liberal Protestants, and atheistic freethinkers. After a few chapters, he turns to a largely secular story dominated by philosophers rather than ministers. Chapter 12 presents charts that show how the 1933 Humanist Manifesto had 50% signatories who were liberal and Unitarian ministers, while the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II had only 21%. By the end of book, humanism becomes secular/atheistic humanism. Weldon describes humanism as "a view of the world that emphasizes human dignity, democracy as the ideal form of government, universal education, and scientific rationality" (p. 5). While not explicitly mentioned, but likely included in the phrase "scientific rationality," is atheism. The 1973 Humanist Manifest II begins with this theme in its opening article about religion: "We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans not God, nature not deity." *Chapter 2, "The Birth of Religious Humanism," tells the early 1900s story of ministers John Dietrich, Curtis Reese, and philosopher Roy Wood Sellers, all who were or became Unitarians. "'God-talk' was no longer useful." Unitarianism ends up being a haven for religious humanists, even for those who have eliminated traditional religious language. These are the roots of today's secular humanism. *In many ways, this era is the other side of the religious history of America that this journal's readers may know. The ASA has roots in the more conservative and traditional end of American Protestantism. The old Princeton Presbyterians, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, and B. B. Warfield, represent a strictly orthodox Christianity, but one open to the advances of modern science. One did not have to be theologically liberal to be proscience. The phenomenon of young-earth creationism is a relatively recent development. Conservative Protestants were not as opposed to conventional science as Weldon's treatment suggests. *The Humanist Manifesto (1933) is the subject of chapter 3, "Manifesto for an Age of Science." It was written by Unitarian Roy Wood Sellers and spearheaded by people associated with Meadville Theological School, a small Unitarian seminary, originally in Pennsylvania; after relocating, it had a close association with the University of Chicago. The Manifesto begins with the words, "The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes." The first affirmation is "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created." *"Philosophers in the Pulpit" (chap. 4) highlights the University of Columbia philosophy department and John Dewey, in particular. Dewey was one of the more prominent signers of the Humanist Manifesto and a leading advocate of philosophical pragmatism. This chapter also tells the story of Felix Adler, also associated with Columbia, and the founder of Ethical Culture, an organization with nontheistic, Jewish roots. *"Humanists at War" (chap. 5) and "Scientists on the World Stage" (chap. 6) recount the increased secularization of humanism. Humanists in the 1940s increasingly struggled with the religious character of humanism. Should the category of religion be used at all? During this era, natural scientists, such as evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and Drosophila geneticist Hermann Muller, rather than philosophers, led the most prominent forms of humanism. This humanism was increasingly secular, scientific, and even atheistic. *Weldon is not hesitant to expose the foibles of this movement. Chapter 7, "Eugenics and the Question of Race," traces how selective population control became part of the conversation. In addition to Huxley and Muller, Margaret Sanger is also part of this story. Philosopher Paul Kurtz makes his first appearance in this chapter and continues to be a significant player in the rest of the book. He was the editor of the Humanist Manifesto and used its pages to explore the question of race and IQ. *Chapter 8, entitled "Inside the Humanist Counter'culture," describes a period dominated by questions of human sexuality and psychology. Weldon's use of the word "counterculture" is apt. In the 1960s, the feminist Patricia Robertson and lawyer/activist Tolbert McCarroll expressed the zeitgeist of the sexual revolution. The psychology of Carl Rogers, Erich Fromm, and Abraham Maslow moved humanism from a more objective/scientific focus to a more experiential one. They are representatives of the third force (or humanistic) school of psychology, in contrast to Freudian psychoanalysis or Skinnerian behaviorism. Although agreement was rare, by the end of the decade, under Paul Kurtz (influenced by B. F. Skinner), the public face of humanism returned to a more scientific leaning. *Chapter 9, "Skeptics in the Age of Aquarius," is one chapter where I found myself, as a traditional evangelical, to be in nearly complete agreement. This chapter describes how New Age beliefs, along with an ascending occultism, came under fire from the scientific humanists under the leadership of Paul Kurtz. Weldon even cites a Christianity Today article that makes common cause with the secular humanists in their resistance to the growing occultism of western culture. I found this chapter to be a useful critique of New Age thinking. *"The Fundamentalist Challenge" (chap. 10) and "Battling Creationism and Christian Pseudoscience" (chap. 11) recount the clash between secular evolutionists and fundamentalist creationists, especially regarding the public-school science curriculum and the teaching of evolution. Here the author clearly demonstrates his prosecularist/anti-fundamentalist inclinations. On a more personal note, the mention of Francis Schaeffer, R. J. Rushdoony, and Cornelius Van Til, strikes at my own history. While some elements of this conservative Presbyterianism were clearly anti-evolutionist, others in the conservative Reformed camp were open to the proscience (including evolutionary biology) views of Warfield and Hodge, even in the early days of anti-evolutionism among fundamentalists. While some in the ASA would count themselves among young-earth creationists or flood geologists, the majority are open to old-earth geology and even to evolutionary biology. The reaction of Weldon himself, and other critics of this era, seems more akin to a religious fundamentalism of its own--albeit a fundamentalism of naturalism. Fundamentalists are not the only ones engaging in a culture war. My own view is that old-earth geology, old universe (big bang) cosmology, and evolutionary biology should be taught as the mainstream scientific consensus even in private religious schools. But dissent and disagreement should be allowed among teachers and students alike. Sometimes it seems to me that these fundamentalist creationists and atheistic evolutionists are all more interested in indoctrination than education. *Embedded in chapter 10 is the history of the Humanist Manifesto II (coauthored by Paul Kurtz). It clearly espouses positions antithetical to traditional Christian orthodoxy, especially in the explicit anti-theistic and prosexual revolution statements. But it is striking to me how much agreement I can find with people who so strongly disagree with traditional Christian faith. This tells me two things: while fundamental religious differences may exist between people, there is something about being human in this world that brings Christians and non-Christians together on many very fundamental questions such as liberty, human dignity, friendship, and peaceful co-existence. Such values are not the unique provenance of humanists or Christians or other religious groups. The second thing is that we are much better at emphasizing differences and seeking to force others to conform to our way than we are at tolerating differences and persuading those who disagree. *The opening of chapter 12, "The Humanist Ethos of Science and Modern America," brought me once again to a personal reflection that is relevant in reviewing this book. My own love of the natural sciences can be traced to Sagan, Asimov, Clarke, Gould, Dawkins, and others who brought the wonder of science to the broader public. Without denying their a-religious, and even antireligious posture, it is noteworthy that the truths about the natural world are independent of who discovered them or communicates them. And they are wondrous whether or not you acknowledge the hand of God in creating them. The process of science works whether the world was created by God or is the result of properties of the universe that just are. It is interesting to me that a brief discussion of post-modernism appears in this chapter. Postmodernism's undermining of the objectivity of natural science leads one to wonder whether this undermines the whole book by hinting that a postmodernist perspective is the consistent non'religious/atheist view. In contrast, the ASA's faith statement states: "We believe that in creating and preserving the universe God has endowed it with contingent order and intelligibility, the basis of scientific investigation." According to Christians, natural science is possible because creation is orderly and intelligible. Atheists and skeptics simply assert the world's orderliness and intelligibility. *Like myself, readers of this journal are likely to have a different perspective on the events traced in Weldon's book. Nevertheless, the history recounted here helps us to see why there is such a divide between science and those who continue to be influenced by more conservative religious views. As such, it is a worthwhile read and of interest to those who follow the science-faith literature. *Reviewed by Terry Gray, Instructor in Chemistry, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523.

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Forest ecosystems are depleting and heading towards degradation which would adversely affect the world's socio-economic harmony. Various disasters disturb the cordial relationship of the flora and fauna and impose imbalance in the ecology as a whole; forest fire is one of its kind. India has witnessed a 125% rise in forest fire occurrences between the years 2015 and 2017. This paper presents a study of various factors and the analysis of forest fire in Sikkim. The period of 10 years, forest fire incidences, i.e., from the year 2004 to the year 2014 have been considered for the study. The forest fire data was collected from Forest and Environment Department, Government of Sikkim, and preliminary processing was performed to check for anomalies. The study observed that there has been an increased forest fire incidence over the years and highest being in the year 2009. These fire incidences have damaged a total area of 5,047.16 ha of land damaging various flora and fauna. It was observed that the maximum forest fire cases are below an altitude of 1500m, during winter months (December to February extending to March) and in sub-tropical Sal (Shorea robusta) forest. West district of Sikkim recorded the highest number of forest fire incidences and area covered followed by south and east districts; the north district was least affected. As per the visual interpretation of forest fire incidence data and literature review, the main factors responsible for forest fire in Sikkim are low rainfall, dry winter season, and type of vegetation. Also, a linear regression was performed between weather factors like average temperature (°C), relative humidity (%), and wind velocity (Km/h) on incidences of forest fire between the year 2009-2014 (n=389). It was found that the average temperature (r=0.37, Slope=9.59 and SD= ±12.00) and relative humidity (r=-0.6, Slope=-4.52, and SD=±2.68) plays a moderate linear relationship in influencing the incidences of forest fires. However, wind velocity showed almost a flat curve indicating its minimal role in influencing forest fire incidences. Parameter modelling and preparation of forest fire risk zone map would be an effective tool in preventing and managing forest fire in Sikkim.

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Lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) is a widely known leave vegetable. This vegetable is so rich in nutrient contents particularly vitamins and minerals that people can consume it to meet their nutrient requirements. This study was aimed at assessing the effects of sea grass organic fertilizer administration on the growth and production of lettuce. The study was conducted at the trial farm of Department of Agrotechnology, Faculty of Agriculture, Djuanda University, Bogor from March to April 2014. A completely randomized design with two factors consisting of lettuce variety (V) and sea grass organic fertilizer (R) was used. The varieties of lettuce consisted of curly lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. New grand rapid) (V1) and red lettuce (Lactuca sativa var. new red fire) (V2). Sea grass organic fertilizer (R) was given in three levels, namely no fertilizer (R0), 500 kg/ha (0.5 recommended rate) (R1), 1000 kg/ha (1.0 recommended rate) (R2), 1500 kg/ha (1.5 recommended rate) (R3), and 2000 kg/ha (2.0 recommended rate) (R4). Keywords: lettuce variety, sea grass organic fertilizer, growth and production.

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With the rapid developments in the manufacturing industry, micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) need to equip with smart manufacturing (SM) technologies to keep abreast with the fourth industrial revolution (FIRe). This paper sought to assess the level of SM awareness among MSMEs in the Philippines and its correlation to technology uptake. The data were obtained from the survey gathered from 496 cooperators of the Department of Science and Technology’s (DOST) Small Enterprises Technology Program (SETUP), a government initiative that assists MSMEs in upgrading technologies. This study employed mixed methods of quantitative [principal component analysis (PCA), index construction, and Pearson’s r test] and qualitative [triangulation method using key informant interviews (KII)] analyses to provide an understanding of the variations of awareness and adoption of nine SM-enabling technologies. The degree of differences was classified into high, average, below average, and poor. Results revealed that medium-sized companies have a higher level of awareness and adoption than micro and small businesses. However, MSMEs have generally poor technological knowledge and implementation of SM. Among the SM technologies, cloud computing and 3D printing are the most critical technologies that can explain the variability of awareness and adoption. These findings can contribute to the plans of DOST to upgrade the SETUP program that aligns with the emerging need of FIRe.

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The purpose of this study was to determine how the effect of training and work discipline on the performance of officers at the Samarinda City Fire Department. This research is a research using quantitative descriptive method. Sources of data used in this study are primary data and secondary data, with data collection techniques in the form of observation, interviews, questionnaires. The sample in this study amounted to 117 respondents using the Slovin formula. The statistical method used in this study is multiple linear regression analysis using SPSS version 23. The results of this study show that partially the training variable has an effect but is not significant on the performance of firefighters in Samarinda City and the discipline variable has an effect and is significant on the performance of firefighters. Simultaneously training and work discipline have a significant effect on the performance of firefighters in Samarinda City. The value of Adjusted R Square is 0.492, which means that all independent variables can explain 49.2% of the dependent variable, while the remaining 50.8% can be explained by other factors not tested in this study.

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Abstract: Recently, there were many disasters that led to large numbers of human victims. Identification is important not only to analyze the cause of death, but also to provide psychological tranquility for the families with certainty of the victim identity. Tooth is resistant to high temperature due to its less organic tissue, therefore, it is very helpful in the identification of the victim on fire. Dental examination is an accurate and easily done method for the identification of a dead victim. This study was aimed to obtain the profile of dental examination in the identification of the dead victims at the Forensic and Medicolegal Department, Prof. Dr. R. D. Kandou Hospital Manado, from 2010 through 2015. This was a retrospective study. The result showed that there were 378 deaths in that period. There were 8 dead victims with dental examination; one of them had no identity. Conclusion: Most dead victims with dental examination at Prof. Dr. R. D. Kandou Hospital Manado had their identities.Keywords: identification of dead bodies, tooth examinationAbstrak: Beberapa tahun terakhir ini banyak kejadian bencana yang menyebabkan jumlah korban manusia yang besar. Proses identifikasi menjadi penting bukan hanya untuk menganalisis penyebab suatu kematian, namun juga upaya untuk memberikan ketenangan psikologis pada keluarga dengan adanya kepastian identitas korban. Gigi memiliki ketahanan terhadap temperatur yang tinggi sehingga sangat bermanfaat dalam identifikasi pada korban terbakar. Hal ini disebabkan sedikitnya jaringan organik yang dikandungnya. Pemeriksaan gigi dalam pengenalan jenazah merupakan metode yang akurat dan mudah dilakukan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui gambaran pemeriksaan gigi untuk identifikasi korban meninggal di Bagian Kedokteran Forensik dan Medikolegal RSUP Prof. Dr. R. D. Kandou Manado periode tahun 2010-2015. Jenis penelitian ini ialah retrospektif. Hasil penelitian mendapatkan data 378 korban meninggal yang masuk di Bagian Kedokteran Forensik dan Medikolegal RSUP Prof. Dr. R. D. Kandou Manado pada tahun 2010-2015. Terdapat 8 korban meninggal dengan pemeriksaan gigi; 1 korban tidak memiliki identitas. Simpulan: Sebagian besar korban meninggal dengan pemeriksaan gigi di RSUP Prof. Dr. R. D. Kandou Manado memiliki identitas.Kata kunci: identifikasi jenazah, pemeriksaan gigi

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Abstract Objectives While it is known that specific components of diet namely fiber, fatty acids, or polyphenols can modulate the gut microbiota, literature describing the influence of a specific dietary pattern such as the Mediterranean Diet (MD) on enteric microbiota especially in relation to health are scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether a MD intervention and the adherence to MD influences the gut fecal microbial composition in firefighters participating in Feeding America's Bravest, a randomized control trial. Methods Participants were firefighters who received a MD Nutritional Intervention (n = 22) or standard dietary advice (n = 24) as part of a cluster-randomized, controlled trial for 12 months. A lifestyle and food frequency questionnaire was administered and adherence scores to the MD were calculated (PREDIMED and Modified MD Score). Bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing was performed from fecal samples, and the microbial composition was analyzed with a bioinformatics pipeline implemented using QIIME 2. R software was used for linear modeling. Results The predominant bacteria phyla in both groups were Firmicutes (52.9%), Bacteroidetes (39.8%), Proteobacteria (3.5%), and Actinobacteria (2.0%). A significant increase in the genus Prevotella was found in those in the intervention group (1.45 log-fold, P = 0.018) compared to controls. Furthermore, linear modeling revealed that higher adherence to MD was associated with lower abundance of Lachnospiriceae UCG-010 (R2 = 0.205, P < 0.001) and Eubacterium ventriosum group (R2 = 0.101, P = 0.016). There were no significant differences in alpha or beta diversity between the control and intervention group. Conclusions A MD intervention as well as higher adherence influence gut microbiota composition; specifically, Prevotella, a genus previously associated with plant-rich diets, was significantly higher in the intervention group. Additionally, higher adherence to MD was associated with multiple genera of bacteria previously involved in SCFA production, which may help elucidate the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean Diet. Funding Sources Grant support: EMW-2014-FP-00612, US Department of Homeland Security and Ohio University Startup funds. Trial Registration Number: NCT02941757

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Abstract Background Heatwaves, air pollution and their effects on children’s health can vary temporally and spatially. With the emergence of advanced methods such as machine learning, there is an opportunity to improve prediction of children’s health events associated with those exposures. Methods Daily records on emergency department attendances (EDA) for children &lt;15 years, heatwaves, landscape fire burns and air pollutants (CO, SO2, NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5) were collected for Western Australia, 2006-2015. Decision tree, random forest (RF) and geographical RF (GRF) were compared to predict EDA, identify important risk factors and locations at elevated risk. Validation was performed by comparing actual and predicted EDA. Results RF was the best model with the lowest root mean squared error (MSE). The best RF validation model had an r-squared (R2) =0.95. The percentage increase in MSE indicated that PM10 and PM2.5 were important predictors of EDA for all children. Number of burns was more important in 5-9 year age group than other groups. GRF models (R2 0.90-0.98) showed that heatwave and PM2.5 were the important predictors in southern part of the study area for all age groups. Conclusions The importance of risk factors to predict EDA was varied by age groups and locations. Such differences are important when developing targeted health promotion strategies tailored to age groups and geographical locations. Key messages RF predicted EDA better than other models. Evaluation of spatial variation of heatwave and air quality effects on EDA for children by GRF modelling is useful to identify at risk geographical locations.

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Objective: This panel will:● Discuss the importance of identifying and developing success stories● Highlight successes from state and local health departments to show how syndromic surveillance activities enhance situational awareness and address public health concerns● Encourage discussion on how to further efforts for developing and disseminating success storiesIntroduction: Syndromic surveillance uses near-real-time emergency department and other health care data for enhancing public health situational awareness and informing public health activities. In recent years, continued progress has been made in developing and strengthening syndromic surveillance activities. At the national level, syndromic surveillance activities are facilitated by the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), a collaboration among state and local health departments, the CDC, other federal organizations, and other organizations that enabled collection of syndromic surveillance data in a timely manner, application of advanced data monitoring and analysis techniques, and sharing of best practices. This panel will highlight the importance of success stories. Examples of successes from state and local health departments will be presented and the audience will be encouraged to provide feedback.Description: ●Success stories – acknowledging and informing syndromic surveillance practiceThis presentation will discuss the importance of success stories for NSSP focused on increasing syndromic surveillance representativeness, improving data quality, and strengthening syndromic surveillance practices among grant recipients and partners. From the beginning of the program, the identification of success stories has been an important part of the efforts to develop knowledge base that better guide syndromic surveillance program activities.●NJ and BioSense – Making The Connection The New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) uses Health Monitoring’s EpiCenter as its primary ED data for syndromic surveillance. This data is also submitted to CDC’s NSSP BioSense Platform. In April 2017, a spike in ED Visits of Interest was identified by a CDC NSSP subject matter expert and brought to the attention of NJDOH’s data analyst. Data showed an increase in “Exposure” and “School Exposure” chief complaints in two contiguous counties. News reports showed the visits resulted from a dormitory fire at a university in the area. The NSSP and NJDOH staff collaboration integrated data from both NJDOH’s EpiCenter and CDC’s BioSense Platform for further investigation. This activity shows BioSense Platform’s potential as an additional syndromic surveillance tool because of its different classifications and keyword groupings.●Evaluation and Performance Measures at the Utah Department of HealthSyndromic surveillance related evaluation activities at the Utah Department of Health requires collaboration between subject matter experts and system users from the UT-NSSP workgroup. The progress is examined quarterly and outcomes compared with the short-, mid-, and long-term outcomes listed in the NSSP logic model to ensure activities are in sync with the program’s overall goals. Throughout the budget year, a variety of tools were used to keep track of the progress. During this session, challenges and successes, lessons learned, and effective strategies will be discussed.●NSSP R tool Data Download Useful in NHThe New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (NH DHHS) uses the state-wide Automated Hospital Emergency Department Data (AHEDD) system as its primary syndromic surveillance system. A copy of this data is submitted to CDC’s NSSP BioSense Platform. In July of 2017, NH worked with the NSSP vendor, CDC staff, a jurisdictional expert, NH Division of Information Technology staff, and an external vendor to create an “R” software download in CSV format and home-based NSSP Cognos report. This allowed NH DHHS staff to compare these data to the home-based data and ultimately, it proved to be an important step in the NSSP data quality assessment process.●Achieving success to improve data quality through collaborative Community of Practice partnerships The Data Quality Committee is a forum to identify, discuss, and attempt to address syndromic surveillance data quality issues. Maintaining data quality for the chief complaint field is a priority as it can impact the creation and refinement in the successful application of a syndrome definition for one of the fundamental data elements. An issue was observed in the Arizona data in the BioSense Platform, where chief complaint was being truncated at 200 characters. Through efforts to build relationships from the committee in the Community of Practice, Arizona was able to discover the root causes for the issue, assess if it affected other jurisdictions, and work with the partners to find a feasible resolution. This talk will discuss how this collaborative approach helped improve data quality.How the Moderator Intends to Engage the Audience in Discussions on the Topic: The moderator will introduce the session and the panelists, and will invite questions and comments from the audience.

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Niemal każda miejscowość ma w swoich dziejach osoby, które zapisały się w niej w sposób szczególny. Bez wątpienia taką postacią w przypadku Kun (pow. turecki) był Alfred Delong – nauczyciel, strażak, społecznik. Był twórcą wielu organizacji społecznych w tej miejscowości – między innymi straży pożarnej. Był budowniczym domu ludowego, w którym swoją siedzibę miała również szkoła. Gros jego życia związane było z wojskiem i jako żołnierz złożył ofiarę swojego życia w bitwie nad Bzurą, we wrześniu 1939 r. Mieszkańcy nie zapomnieli jednakże jego zasług i uczynili go patronem miejscowej szkoły. Niestety pełne otworzenie jego biografii napotyka na przeszkody ze względu na skąpą ilość materiału źródłowego. Zachowała się tylko teczka personalno-odznaczeniowa w zasobie Centralnego Archiwum Wojskowego w Warszawie-Rembertowie, która posłużyła za podstawę opracowania niniejszego artykułu. Pozostały tylko szczątkowe materiały dotyczące jego pracy jako nauczyciela i jako strażaka. Alfred Delong (1902-1939) – Soldier, Teacher, Fireman, Community Worker Almost every town has people who have made a special mark in its history. Undoubtedly, Alfred Delong, a teacher, fireman and community worker, was such a person in the case of Kun (the district of Turek). He was the founder of many social organizations in this village - including the fire department. He was the builder of the folk house, which also housed the school. Most of his life was connected with the army and as a soldier he sacrificed his life in the battle of Bzura in September 1939. However, the inhabitants did not forget his merits and made him the patron of the local school. Unfortunately, the full opening of his biography faces obstacles due to the scanty amount of source material. Only the personnel and honour file in the collection of the Central Military Archive in Warsaw-Rembertów that served as the basis for the preparation of this article has survived. Only residual material regarding his work as a teacher and as a firefighter remains.

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ObjectiveTo better understand the importance of monitoring responders during public health emergencies and to learn how the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) developed and deployed an electronic responder monitoring tool.IntroductionDuring an emergency, the state of Georgia depends on public health staff and volunteers to respond. It is imperative that staff are safe before, during and after deployment. Emergency response workers must be protected from the hazardous conditions that disasters and other emergencies create1. In October 2016 and September 2017, Hurricanes Matthew and Irma caused widespread evacuation of Georgia residents, initiating a tremendous sheltering effort. Hundreds of public health responders were deployed to assist with sheltering and other aspects of the response. DPH rapidly developed a novel electronic Responder Safety, Tracking and Resilience module, which was used to track public health responders and monitor their health and safety while deployed.MethodsDPH rapidly developed a novel electronic Responder Safety, Tracking, and Resilience module (R-STaR), within the existing State Electronic Notifiable Disease Surveillance System to monitor the health and safety of responders. R-STaR was originally used during Hurricane Matthew, where it was launched the day of the storm, and was launched again four days before Hurricane Irma made landfall. Responders were emailed a web-based link to register, indicating demographic information, contact information, work location, subject area, vaccination status, and whether they considered themselves mentally and physically fit to deploy. Responders then received a daily email with a link to document their daily deployment location, duties, and whether they had any hazardous exposures, illness, or injuries while deployed. A post-deployment survey was sent to responders after Hurricane Matthew to solicit feedback about the responder safety module.ResultsDuring Hurricane Matthew, 128 responders representing 11 Georgia Public Health Districts registered in R-STaR. Seven responders reported illness or injury and were contacted to determine if medical services were needed; all remained healthy post-deployment. During Hurricane Irma, 1240 responders representing DPH and 16 Public Health Districts, and other employers, including law enforcement, fire, and education, registered in R-STaR. Of 472 responders completing daily health checks during their Irma deployment, 48 reported an injury, illness, or exposure, and were contacted to determine if services were needed. The daily health checks led to the identification of an outbreak of influenza in one of the shelters and resulted in vaccination or antiviral prophylaxis administration to 76 responders. Fifty responders to Hurricane Matthew completed the post-deployment survey; 95% found R-STaR easy to use, and 92% indicated that they liked being monitored. Supervisors indicated that the module could be used to: 1) roster and credential responders prior to an event; 2) track where responders are, monitor their health and safety during an event, and quantify the human resources deployed during a declared emergency; and, 3) to distribute post-response responder resources, monitor responder health, and gather information for after-action reports.ConclusionsR-STaR was widely used and well received despite being implemented with no prior training, with a dramatic increase in the number of responders registering from the first implementation in 2016 to the second implementation in September 2017. Monitoring responder health and safety is crucial to responding to and preventing outbreaks during a response, and ensuring responders get appropriate mental and physical support after a deployment. Lessons learned from both events will be used to create a just-in-time training curriculum, and develop a more robust R-STaR, which will enable responder rostering, credentialing, tracking and monitoring before, during, and after an event to ensure the health and safety of our responders as well as for future planning.References1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2017). EMERGENCY RESPONDER HEALTH MONITORING AND SURVEILLANCE (ERHMS). Retrieved from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/erhms/default.html.

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IntroductionBushfires have taken numerous lives and destroyed communities throughout Australia over many years. Catastrophic fire weather alerts have occurred during the Australian summer of 2012–13, and long-term forecasts predict increased bushfire events throughout several areas of Australia. This article highlights how organisational and individual responses to bushfire in Australia often entail creative responses—either improvised responses at the time of bushfire emergencies or innovative (organisational, strategic, or technological) changes which help protect the community from, or mitigate against, future bushfire catastrophes. These improvised or innovative responses include emergency communications systems, practices, and devices. This article reports on findings from a research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using Community Engagement and Enhanced Visual Information to Promote FireWatch Satellite Communications as a Support for Collaborative Decision-making. FireWatch is a Web-based public information product based on near real time satellite data produced by the West Australian (WA) Government entity, Landgate. The project researches ways in which remote and regional publics can be engaged and mobilised through the development of a more user-friendly FireWatch site to make fire information accessible and usable, allowing a community-focused response to risk.The significance of the research project is evident both in how it addresses the important and life-threatening challenge of bushfires; and also in how Australia’s increasingly hot, dry, long summers are adding to historically-established risks. This innovative project uses an iterative, participatory design process incorporating action-research practices. This will ensure that the new Firewatch interface is redesigned, tested, observed, and reflected upon multiple times—and will incorporate the collective creativity of users, designers, and researchers.The qualitative findings reported on in this article are based on 19 interviews with community members in the town of Kununurra in the remote Kimberley region of WA. The findings are positioned within a reconceptualised framework in which creativity is viewed as an essential component of successful emergency responses. This includes, we argue, two critical aspects of creativity: improvisation during a catastrophic event; and ongoing innovation to improve future responses to catastrophes—including communication practices and technologies. This shifts the discourse within the literature in relation to the effective management and community responses to the changing phenomenon of fire catastrophes. Findings from the first round of interviews, and results of enquiries into previous bushfires in Australia, are used to highlight how these elements of creativity often entail a collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general. An additional focus is on the importance of the critical use of communication during a bushfire event.ImprovisationThe notion of "improvisation" is often associated with artistic performance. Nonetheless, improvisation is also integral to making effectual responses during natural catastrophes. “Extreme events present unforeseen conditions and problems, requiring a need for adaptation, creativity, and improvisation while demanding efficient and rapid delivery of services under extreme conditions” (Harrald 257).Catastrophes present us with unexpected scenarios and require rapid, on the spot problem solving and “even if you plan for a bushfire it is not going to go to plan. When the wind changes direction there has to be a new plan” (Jeff. Personal Interview. 2012). Jazz musicians or improvisational actors “work to build their knowledge across a range of fields, and this knowledge provides the elements for each improvisational outcome” (Kendra and Wachendorf 2). Similarly, emergency responders’ knowledge and preparation can be drawn “upon in the ambiguous and dynamic conditions of a disaster where not every need has been anticipated or accounted for” (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2). Individuals and community organisations not associated with emergency services also improvise in a creative and intuitive manner in the way they respond to catastrophes (Webb and Chevreau). For example, during the 9/11 terrorism catastrophe in the USA an assorted group of boat owners rapidly self-organised to evacuate Lower Manhattan. On their return trips, they carried emergency personnel and supplies to the area (Kendra and Wachendorf 5). An interviewee in our study also recalls bush fire incidents where creative problem solving and intuitive decision-making are called for. “It’s like in a fire, you have to be thinking fast. You need to be semi self-sufficient until help arrives. But without doing anything stupid and creating a worse situation” (Kelly. Personal Interview. 2012). Kelly then describes the rapid community response she witnessed during a recent fire on the outskirts of Kununurra, WA.Everyone had to be accounted for, moving cars, getting the tractors out, protecting the bores because you need the water. It happens really fast and it is a matter of rustling everyone up with the machinery. (2012)In this sense, the strength of communities in responding to catastrophes or disasters “results largely from the abilities of [both] individuals and organisations to adapt and improvise under conditions of uncertainty” (Webb and Chevreau 67). These improvised responses frequently involve a collective creativity—where groups of neighbours or emergency workers act in response to the unforseen, often in a unified and self-organising manner. InnovationCatastrophes also stimulate change and innovation for the future. Disasters create a new environment that must be explored, assessed, and comprehended. Disasters change the physical and social landscape, and thereby require a period of exploration, learning, and the development of new approaches. (Kendra and Wachtendorf 6)These new approaches can include organisational change, new response strategies, and technologies and communication improvements. Celebrated inventor Benjamin Franklin, for instance, facilitated the formation of the first Volunteer Fire department in the 1850s as a response to previous urban fire catastrophes in the USA (Mumford 258). This organisational innovation continues to play an instrumental part in modern fire fighting practices. Indeed, people living in rural and remote areas of Australia are heavily reliant on volunteer groups, due to the sparse population and vast distances that need to be covered.As with most inventions and innovations, new endeavours aimed at improving responses to catastrophes do not occur in a vacuum. They “are not just accidents, nor the inscrutable products of sporadic genius, but have abundant and clear causes in prior scientific and technological development” (Gifillian 61). Likewise, the development of our user-friendly and publically available FireWatch site relies on the accumulation of preceding inventions and innovations. This includes the many years spent developing the existing FireWatch site, a site dense in information of significant value to scientists, foresters, land managers, and fire experts.CommunicationsOften overlooked in discussions regarding emergency communications is the microgeographical exchanges that occur in response to the threat of natural disasters. This is where neighbours fill the critical period before emergency service responders can appear on site. In this situation, it is often local knowledge that underpins improvised grassroots communication networks that inform and organise the neighbourhood. During a recent bushfire on peri-rural blocks on the outskirts of Kununurra, neighbours went into action before emergency services volunteers could respond.We phoned around and someone would phone and call in. Instead of 000 being rung ten times, make sure that one person rang it in. 40 channel [CB Radio] was handy – two-way communication, four wheelers – knocking on doors making sure everyone is out of the house, just in case. (Jane. Personal Interview. 2012) Similarly, individuals and community groups have been able to inform and assist each other on a larger scale via social network technologies (SNTs). This creative application of SNTs began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 when individuals created wikis in order to find missing persons (Palen and Lui). Twitter has experienced considerable growth and was used freely during the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Australia. Studies of tweeting activity during these fires indicate that “tweets made during Black Saturday are laden with actionable factual information which contrasts with earlier claims that tweets are of no value made of mere random personal notes” (Sinnappan et al. n.p.).Traditionally, official alerts and warnings have been provided to the public via television and radio. However, several inquiries into the recent bushfires within Australia show concern “with the way in which fire agencies deliver information to community members during a bushfire...[and in order to] improve community safety from bushfire, systems need to be implemented that enable community members to communicate information to fire agencies, making use of local knowledge” (Elsworth et al. 8).Technological and social developments over the last decade mean the public no longer relies on a single source of official information (Sorensen and Sorensen). Therefore, SNTs such as Twitter and Facebook are being used by the media and emergency authorities to make information available to the public. These SNTs are dynamic, in that there can be a two-way flow of information between the public and emergency organisations. Nonetheless, there has been limited use of SNTs by emergency agencies to source information posted by in situ residents, in order to help in decision-making (Freeman). Organisational use of multiple communication channels and platforms to inform citizens about bushfire emergencies ensures a greater degree of coverage—in case of communication systems breakdowns or difficulties—as in the telephone alert system breakdown in Kelmscott-Roleystone, WA or a recent fire in Warrnambool, Victoria which took out the regional telephone exchange making telephone calls, mobiles, landlines, and the Internet non-operational (Johnson). The new FireWatch site will provide an additional information option for rural and remote Australians who, often rely on visual sightings and on word-of-mouth to be informed about fires in their region. “The neighbour came over and said - there is a fire, we’d better get our act together because it is going to hit us. No sooner than I turned around, I thought sh*t, here it comes” (Richard. Personal Interview. 2012). The FireWatch ProjectThe FireWatch project involves the redevelopment of an existing FireWatch website to extend the usability of the product from experts to ordinary users in order to facilitate community-based decision-making and action both before and during bushfire emergencies. To this purpose, the project has been broken down to two distinct, yet interdependent, strands. The community strand involves collaboration within a community (in this case the Kununurra community) in order to carry out a community-centred approach to further development of the site. The design strand involves the development of an intuitive and accessible Web presentation of complex information in clear, unambiguous ways to inform action in stressful circ*mstances. At this stage, a first round of 19 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders has been conducted in Kununurra to determine fire-related information-seeking behaviours, attitudes to mediated information services in the region, as well as user feedback on a prototype website developed in the design strand of the project. Stakeholders included emergency services personnel (payed and volunteer), shire representatives, tourism operators, small business operators (including tourism operators), a forest manager, a mango farmer, an Indigenous ranger team manager as well as general community members. Interviewees reported dissatisfaction with current information systems. They gave positive feedback about the website prototype. “It’s very much, very easy to follow” (David. Personal Interview. 2012). “It looks so much better than [the old site]. You couldn’t get in that close on [the other site]. It is fantastic” (Lance. Personal Interview. 2012). They also added thought-provoking contributions to the design of the website (to be discussed later).Residents of Kununurra who were interviewed for this research project found bushfire warning communications unsatisfactory, especially during a recent fire on the outskirts of town. People who called 000 had difficulties passing the information on, having to explain exactly where Kununurra was and the location of fires to operators not familiar with the area. When asked how the Kununurra community gets their fire information a Shire representative explained: That is not very good at the moment. The only other way we can think about it is perhaps more updates on things like Facebook, perhaps on a website, but with this current fire there really wasn’t a lot of information and a lot of people didn’t know what was going on. We [the shire] knew because we were talking to the [fire] brigades and to FESA [Fire and Emergency Services Authority] but most residents didn’t have any idea and it looks pretty bad. (Ginny. Personal Interview. 2012) All being well, the new user-friendly FireWatch site will add another platform through which fire information messages are transmitted. Community members will be offered continuously streamed bushfire location information, which is independent of any emergency services communication systems. In particular, rural and remote areas of Australia will have fire information at the ready.The participatory methodology used in the design of the new FireWatch website makes use of collaborative creativity, whereby users’ vision of the website and context are incorporated. This iterative process “creates an equal evolving participatory process between user and designer towards sharing values and knowledge and creating new domains of collective creativity” (Park 2012). The rich and sometimes contradictory suggestions made by interviewees in this project often reflected individual visions of the tasks and information required, and individual preferences regarding the delivery of this information. “I have been thinking about how could this really work for me? I can give you feedback on what has happened in the past but how could it work for me in the future?” (Keith. Personal Interview. 2012). Keith and other community members interviewed in Kununurra indicated a variety of extra functions on the site not expected by the product designers. Some of these unexpected functions were common to most interviewees such as the great importance placed on the inclusion of a satellite view option on the site map (example shown in Figure 1). Jeremy, a member of an Indigenous ranger unit in the Kununurra area, was very keen to incorporate the satellite view options on the site. He explained that some of the older rangers:can’t use GPSs and don’t know time zones or what zones to put in, so they’ll use a satellite-style view. We’ll have Google Earth up on one [screen], and also our [own] imagery up on another [screen] and go that way. Be scrolling in and see – we’ve got a huge fire scar for 2011 around here; another guy will be on another computer zoning in and say, I think it is here. It’s quite simplistic but it works. (Personal Interview. 2012) In the case above, where rangers are already switching between computer screens to incorporate a satellite view into their planning, the importance of a satellite view layer on the FireWatch website makes user context an essential part of the design process. Incorporating many layers on one screen, as recommended by participants also ensures a more elegant solution to an existing problem.Figure 1: Satellite view in the Kununurra area showing features such as gorges, rivers, escarpments and dry riverbedsThis research project will involve further consultation with participants (both online and offline) regarding bushfire safety communications in their region, as well as the further design of the site. The website will be available over multiple devices (for example desktops, smart phones, and hand held tablet devices) and will be launched late this year. Further work will also be carried out to determine if social media is appropriate for this community of users in order to build awareness and share information regarding the site.Conclusion Community members improvise and self-organise when communicating fire information and organising help for each other. This can happen at a microgeographical (neighbourhood) level or on a wider level via social networking sites. Organisations also develop innovative communication systems or devices as a response to the threat of bushfires. Communication innovations, such as the use of Twitter and Facebook by fire emergency services, have been appropriated and fine-tuned by these organisations. Other innovations such as the user-friendly Firewatch site rely on previous technological developments in satellite-delivered imagery—as well as community input regarding the design and use of the site.Our early research into community members’ fire-related information-seeking behaviours and attitudes to mediated information services in the region of Kununurra has found unexpectedly creative responses, which range from collective creativity on the part of emergency responders or the community in general during events to creative use of existing information and communication networks. We intend to utilise this creativity in re-purposing FireWatch alongside the creative work of the designers in the project.Although it is commonplace to think of graphic design and new technology as incorporating creativity, it is rarely acknowledged how frequently these innovations harness everyday perspectives from non-professionals. In the case of the FireWatch developments, the creativity of designers and technologists has been informed by the creative responses of members of the public who are best placed to understand the challenges posed by restricted information flows on the ground in times of crisis. In these situations, people respond not only with new ideas for the future but with innovative responses in the present as they communicate with each other to deal with the challenge of a fast-moving and unpredictable situation. Such improvisation, honed through close awareness of the contours and parameters of both community and communication, are one of the ways through which people help keep themselves and each other safe in the face of dramatic developments.ReferencesElsworth, G., and K. Stevens, J. Gilbert, H. Goodman, A Rhodes. "Evaluating the Community Safety Approach to Bushfires in Australia: Towards an Assessment of What Works and How." Biennial Conference of the Eupopean Evaluation Society, Lisbon, Oct. 2008. Freeman, Mark. "Fire, Wind and Water: Social Networks in Natural Disasters." Journal of Cases on Information Technology (JCIT) 13.2 (2011): 69–79.Gilfillan, S. Colum. The Sociology of Invention. Chicago: Follett Publishing, 1935.Harrald, John R. "Agility and Discipline: Critical Success Factors for Disaster Response." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604.1 (2006): 256–72.Johnson, Peter. "Australia Unprepared for Bushfire”. Australian Broadcasting Corporation 17 Dec. 2012. 3 Jan. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/12/17/3654075.htm›.Keelty, Mick J. "A Shared Responsibility: the Report of the Perth Hills Bushfires February 2011". Department of Premier and Cabinet, Government of Western Australia, Perth.Kendra, James, and Tricia Wachtendorf. "Improvisation, Creativity, and the Art of Emergency Management." NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Understanding and Responding to Terrorism: A Multi-Dimensional Approach. Washington, DC, 8-9 Sep. 2006.———. "Creativity in Emergency Response after the World Trade Centre Attack". Amud Conference of the International Emergency Management Society. University of Delaware. 14-17 May 2002. Mumford, Michael D. "Social Innovation: Ten Cases from Benjamin Franklin." Creativity Research Journal 14.2 (2002): 253–66.Palen, Leysia, and Sophia.B. Liu. "Citizen Communications in Crisis: Anticipating a Future of ICT-Supported Public Participation." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, 28 Apr. - 3 May 2007.Park, Ji Yong. "Design Process Excludes Users: The Co-Creation Activities between User and Designer." Digital Creativity 23.1 (2012): 79–92. Sinnappan, Suku, Cathy Farrell, and Elizabeth Stewart. "Priceless Tweets! A Study on Twitter Messages Posted During Crisis: Black Saturday." Proceedings of 21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2010). Brisbane, Australia, 1-3 Dec 2010.Sorensen, John H., and Barbara Vogt Sorensen. "Community Processes: Warning and Evacuation." Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidán Rodríguez, Enrico Louis Quarantelli, and Russell Rowe Dynes. New York: Springer, 2007. 183–99.Webb, Gary R., and Francois-Regis Chevreau. "Planning to Improvise: The Importance of Creativity and Flexibility in Crisis Response." International Journal of Emergency Management 3.1 (2006): 66–72.

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IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual hom*ologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. No less than having a body is coextensive with being human, so too is dying, with the consequence that investigating the intersection of both areas is likely to reveal insights into issues of universal cultural concern. For this reason, we advocate the study of mortuary practices as an evolving record of how various cultures understand human corporeality by way of external objects.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Barrett, John C. “The Living, the Dead and the Ancestors: Neolithic and Bronze Age Mortuary Practices.” The Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age: Recent Trends. Eds. John. C. Barrett and Ian. A. Kinnes. 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Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Kerényi, Karl. “Kore.” The Science of Mythology. Trans. Richard F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1985. 119–183.Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1990.McCarthy, Margaret. “2003:0195 - Castlehyde, Co. Cork.” Excavations.ie. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 4 July 2003. 12 Jan. 2016 <http://www.excavations.ie/report/2003/Cork/0009503/>.McCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans: Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.Morris, Ian. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Musgrove, Jonathan. “Dust and Damn'd Oblivion: A Study of Cremation in Ancient Greece.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 85 (1990), 271-299.Mylonas, George. “Burial Customs.” A Companion to Homer. Eds. Alan Wace and Frank. H. Stubbings. London: Macmillan, 1962. 478-488.Nock, Arthur. D. “Hellenistic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments.” Mnemosyne 1 (1952): 177–213.Rebay-Salisbury, Katherina. "Cremations: Fragmented Bodies in the Bronze and Iron Ages." Body Parts and Bodies Whole: Changing Relations and Meanings. Eds. Katherina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie. L. S. Sørensen, and Jessica Hughes. Oxford: Oxbow, 2010. 64-71.———. “Inhumation and Cremation: How Burial Practices Are Linked to Beliefs.” Embodied Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on Technology and Belief. Eds Marie. L.S. Sørensen and Katherina Rebay-Salisbury. Oxford: Oxbow, 2012. 15-26.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. Nottingham: SAGE, 2012.Smith, Julia M.H. “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200).” Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 143–167.Sofaer, Joanna R. The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Sørensen, Marie L.S., and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury. “From Substantial Bodies to the Substance of Bodies: Analysis of the Transition from Inhumation to Cremation during the Middle Bronze Age in Europe.” Past Bodies: Body-Centered Research in Archaeology. Eds. Dušan Broić and John Robb. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008. 59–68.Sowa, Cora Angier. Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1984.Toynbee, Jocelyn M.C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.Waddell, John. The Bronze Age Burials of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 1990.———. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 2005.Walker, Philip L., Kevin W.P. 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Red bayberry (Myrica rubra (Lour.) Siebold & Zucc.), small trees, evergreen, dioecious, natively grows in evergreen broad-leaved forests at elevation of 1580-1875 m a.s.l., and can survive in low nutrient soil at Cao Ma Po commune, Quan Ba district, Ha Giang province. Some data on morphology, phenology, population structure, natural regeneration and distribution of Red baybery, climatic characteristics, physical and chemical properties of soil, and vegetation structure of forests having Myrica rubra occurrence are presented in this paper. Keywords Red bayberry, Myrica rubra, biology, ecology, conservation, Ha Giang, Vietnam References [1] Lu A. & Bornstein A. J., Myricaceae in Wu Z. Y. & Raven P. H. (eds.). Flora of China Vol. 4, Science Press & Missouri Botanical Garden Press, Beijing & St. Louis, 1999, pp. 275-276.[2] He X. H., Chen L. 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Q., Antioxidant and antiproliferative activities of proanthocyanidins from Chinese bayberry (Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc.) leaves, Journal of Functional Foods, 27, 2016, pp. 645-654.[12] Kim H. H., Kim D. H., Kim M. H., Oh M. H., Kim S. R., et al., Flavonoid constituents in the leaves of Myrica rubra Sieb. et Zucc. with anti-inflammatory activity, Archives of Pharmacal Research, 36(12), 2013, pp. 1533-1540.[13] Kuo P. L., Hsu Y. L., Lin T. C., Lin L. T. & Lin C. C., Induction of apoptosis in human breast adenocarcinoma MCF-7 cells by prodelphinidin B-2 3,3'-di-O-gallate from Myrica rubra via Fas-mediated pathway, Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology 56(11), 2004, pp. 1399-1406.[14] Sun C. D., Zheng Y. X., Chen Q. J., Tang X. L., Jiang M., Zhang J. K., Li X. & Chen K. S., Purification and anti-tumour activity of cyanidin-3-O-glucoside from Chinese bayberry fruit, Food Chemistry, 131(4), 2012, pp. 1287-1294.[15] Sun C. D., Huang H. Z., Xu C. J., Li X. & Chen K. 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IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a hom*ogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times hom*ogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at co*ckle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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This article is concerned with dance as an embodied form of collective remembering in the Andean department of Ayacucho in Peru. Andean dance and fiesta are inextricably linked with notions of identity, cultural heritage and history. Rather than being simply aesthetic —steps to music or a series of movements — dance is readable as being a deeper embodiment of the broader struggles and concerns of a people. As anthropologist Zoila Mendoza writes, in post-colonial countries such as those in Africa and Latin America, dance is and was a means “through which people contested, domesticated and reworked signs of domination in their society” (39). Andean dance has long been a space of contestation and resistance (Abercrombie; Bigenho; Isbell; Mendoza; Stern). It also functions as a repository, a dynamic archive which holds and tells the collective narrative of a cultural time and space. As Jane Cowan observes “dance is much more than knowing the steps; it involves both social knowledge and social power” (xii). In cultures where the written word has not played a central role in the construction and transmission of knowledge, dance is a particularly rich resource for understanding. “Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing” (Taylor 3). This is certainly true in the Andes of Peru where dance, music and fiesta are central to social, cultural, economic and political life. This article combines the areas of cultural memory with aspects of dance anthropology in a bid to reveal what is often unspoken and discover new ways of accessing and understanding non-verbal forms of memory through the embodied medium of dance. In societies where dance is integral to daily life the dance becomes an important resource for a deeper understanding of social and cultural memory. However, this characteristic of the dance has been largely overlooked in the field of memory studies. Paul Connerton writes, “… that there is an aspect of social memory which has been greatly ignored but is absolutely essential: bodily social memory” (382). I am interested in the role of dance as a site memory because as a dancer I am acutely aware of embodied memory and of the importance of dance as a narrative mode, not only for the dancer but also for the spectator. This article explores the case study of rural carnival performed in the city of Huamanga, in the Andean department of Ayacucho and includes interviews I conducted with rural campesinos (this literally translates as people from the country, however, it is a complex term imbedded with notions of class and race) between June 2009 and March 2010. Through examining the transformative effect of what I call the chorography of place, I argue that rural campesinos embody the memory of place, dancing that place into being in the urban setting as a means of remembering and maintaining connection to their homeland and salvaging cultural heritage.The department of Ayacucho is located in the South-Central Andes of Peru. The majority of the population are Quechua-speaking campesinos many of whom live in extreme poverty. Nestled in a cradle of mountains at 2,700 meters above sea level is the capital city of the same name. However, residents prefer the pre-revolutionary name of Huamanga. This is largely due to the fact that the word Ayacucho is a combination of two Quechua words Aya and Kucho which translate as Corner of the Dead. Given the recent history of the department it is not surprising that residents refer to their city as Huamanga instead of Ayacucho. Since 1980 the department of Ayacucho has become known as the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the ensuing 20 years of political violence between Sendero and counter insurgency forces. In 2000, the interim government convened the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC – CVR Spanish). In 2003, the TRC released its report which found that over 69,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes (CVR). Those most affected by the violence and human rights abuses were predominantly from the rural population of the central-southern Andes (CVR). Following the release of the TRC Report the department of Ayacucho has become a centre for memory studies investigations and commemorative ceremonies. Whilst there are many traditional arts and creative expressions which commemorate or depict some aspect of the violence, dance is not used it this way. Rather, I contend that the dance is being salvaged as a means of remembering and connecting to place. Migration Brings ChangeAs a direct result of the political violence, the city of Huamanga experienced a large influx of people from the surrounding rural areas, who moved to the city in search of relative safety. Rapid forced migration from the country to the city made integration very difficult due to the sheer volume of displaced populations (Coronel 2). As a result of the internal conflict approximately 450 rural communities in the southern-central Andes were either abandoned or destroyed; 300 of these were in the department of Ayacucho. As a result, Huamanga experienced an enormous influx of rural migrants. In fact, according to the United Nations International Human Rights Instruments, 30 per cent of all people displaced by the violence moved to Ayacucho (par. 39). As campesinos moved to the city in search of safety they formed new neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. Although many are now settled in Huamanga, holding professional positions, working in restaurants, running stalls, or owning shops, most maintain strong links to their community of origin. The ways in which individuals sustain connection to their homelands are many and varied. However, dance and fiesta play a central role in maintaining connection.During the years of violence, Sendero Luminoso actively prohibited the celebration of traditional ceremonies and festivals which they considered to be “archaic superstition” (Garcia 40). Reprisals for defying Sendero Luminoso directives were brutal; as a result many rural inhabitants restricted their ritual practices for fear of the tuta puriqkuna or literally, night walkers (Ritter 27). This caused a sharp decline in ritual custom during the conflict (27).As a result, many Ayacuchano campesinos feel they have been robbed of their cultural heritage and identity. There is now a conscious effort to rescatar y recorder or to salvage and remember what was been taken from them, or, in the words of Ruben Romani, a dance teacher from Huanta, “to salvage what was killed during the difficult years.”Los Carnavales Ayacuchanos Whilst carnival is celebrated in many parts of the world, the mention of carnival often evokes images of scantily clad Brazilians dancing to the samba rhythms in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or visions of elaborate floats and extravagant costumes. None of these are to be found in Huamanga. Rather, the carnival dances celebrated by campesinos in Huamanga are not celebrations of ‘the now’ or for the benefit of tourists, but rather they are embodiments of the memory of a lost place. During carnival, that lost or left homeland is danced into being in the urban setting as a means of maintaining a connection to the homeland and of salvaging cultural heritage.In the Andes, carnival coincides with the first harvest and is associated with fertility and giving thanks. It is considered a time of joy and to be a great leveller. In Huamanga carnival is one of the most anticipated fiestas of the year. As I was told many times “carnival is for everyone” and “we all participate.” From the old to the very young, the rich and poor, men and women all participate in carnival."We all participate." Carnavales Rurales (rural carnival) is celebrated each Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival before Lent. Campesinos from the same rural communities, join together to form comparsas, or groups. Those who participate identify as campesinos; even though many participants have lived in the city for more than 20 years. Some of the younger participants were born in the city. Whilst some campesinos, displaced by the violence, are now returning to their communities, many more have chosen to remain in Huamanga. One such person is Rómulo Canales Bautista. Rómulo dances with the comparsa Claveles de Vinchos.Rómulo Bautista dancing the carnival of VinchosOriginally from Vinchos, Rómulo moved to Huamanga in search of safety when he was a boy after his father was killed. Like many who participate in rural carnival, Rómulo has lived in Huamanga for a many years and for the most part he lives a very urban existence. He completed his studies at the university and works as a professional with no plans to return permanently to Vinchos. However, Rómulo considers himself to be campesino, stating “I am campesino. I identify myself as I am.” Rómulo laughed as he explained “I was not born dancing.” Since moving to Huamanga, Rómulo learned the carnival dance of Vinchos as a means of feeling a connection to his place of origin. He now participates in rural carnival each year and is the captain of his comparsa. For Rómulo, carnival is his cultural inheritance and that which connects him to his homeland. Living and working in the urban setting whilst maintaining strong links to their homelands through the embodied expressions of fiesta, migrants like Rómulo negotiate and move between an urbanised mestizo identity and a rural campesino identity. However, for rural migrants living in Huamanga, it is campesino identity which holds greater importance during carnival. This is because carnival allows participants to feel a visceral connection to both land and ancestry. As Gerardo Muñoz, a sixty-seven year old migrant from Chilcas explained “We want to make our culture live again, it is our patrimony, it is what our grandfathers have left us of their wisdom and how it used to be. This is what we cultivate through our carnival.”The Plaza TransformedComparsa from Huanta enter the PlazaEach Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival the central Plaza is transformed by the dance, music and song of up to seventy comparsas participating in Carnavales Rurales. Rural Carnival has a transformative effect not only on participants but also on the wider urban population. At this time campesinos, who are generally marginalised, discounted or actively discriminated against, briefly hold a place of power and respect. For a few hours each Sunday they are treated as masters of an ancient art. It is no easy task to conjure the dynamic sensory world of dance in words. As Deidre Sklar questions, “how is the ineffable to be made available in words? How shall I draw out the effects of dancing? Imperfectly, and slowly, bit by bit, building fragments of sensation and association so that its pieces lock in with your sensory memories like a jigsaw puzzle” (17).Recalling the DanceAs comparsas arrive in the Plaza there is creative chaos and the atmosphere hums with excitement as more and more comparsas gather for the pasecalle or parade. At the corner of the plaza, the deafening crack of fire works, accompanied by the sounds of music and the blasting of whistles announce the impending arrival of another comparsa. They are Los Hijos de Chilcas from Chilcas in La Mar in the north-east of the department. They proudly dance and sing their way into the Plaza – bodies strong, their movements powerful yet fluid. Their heads are lifted to greet the crowd, their chests wide and open, eyes bright with pride. Led by the capitán, the dancers form two long lines in pairs the men at the front, followed by the women. All the men carry warakas, long whips of plaited leather which they crack in the air as they dance. These are ancient weapons which are later used in a ritual battle. They dance in a swinging stepping motion that swerves and snakes, winds and weaves along the road. At various intervals the two lines open out, doubling back on themselves creating two semicircles. The men wear frontales, pieces of material which hang down the front of the legs, attached with long brightly coloured ribbons. The dancers make high stepping motions, kicking the frontales up in the air as they go; as if moving through high grasses. The ribbons swish and fly around the men and they are clouded in a blur of colour and movement. The women follow carrying warakitas, which are shorter and much finer. They hold their whips in two hands, stretched wide in front of their bodies or sweeping from side to side above their heads. They wear large brightly coloured skirts known as polleras made from heavy material which swish and swoosh as they dance from side to side – step, touch together, bounce; step, touch together, bounce. The women follow the serpent pattern of the men. Behind the women are the musicians playing guitars, quenas and tinyas. The musicians are followed by five older men dressed in pants and suit coats carrying ponchos draped over the right shoulder. They represent the traditional community authorities known as Varayuq and karguyuq. The oldest of the men is carrying the symbols of leadership – the staff and the whip.The Choreography of PlaceFor the members of Los Hijos de Chilcas the dance represents the topography of their homeland. The steps and choreography are created and informed by the dancers’ relationship to the land from which they come. La Mar is a very mountainous region where, as one dancer explained, it is impossible to walk a straight line up or down the terrain. One must therefore weave a winding path so as not to slip and fall. As the dancers snake and weave, curl and wind they literally dance their “place” of origin into being. With each swaying movement of their body, with each turn and with every footfall on the earth, dancers lay the mountainous terrain of La Mar along the paved roads of the Plaza. The flying ribbons of the frontales evoke the long grasses of the hillsides. “The steps are danced in the form of a zigzag which represents the changeable and curvilinear paths that join the towns, as well as creating the figure eight which represents the eight anexos of the district” (Carnaval Tradicional). Los Hijos de ChilcasThe weaving patterns and the figure eights of the dance create a choreography of place, which reflects and evoke the land. This choreography of place is built upon with each step of the dance many of which emulate the native fauna. One of the dancers explained whilst demonstrating a hopping step “this is the step of a little bird” common to La Mar. With his body bent forward from the waist, left hand behind his back and elbow out to the side like a wing, stepping forward on the left leg and sweeping the right leg in half circle motion, he indeed resembled a little bird hopping along the ground. Other animals such as the luwichu or deer are also represented through movement and costume.Katrina Teaiwa notes that the peoples of the South Pacific dance to embody “not space but place”. This is true also for campesinos from Chilcas living in the urban setting, who invoke their place of origin and the time of the ancestors as they dance their carnival. The notion of place is not merely terrain. It includes the nature elements, the ancestors and those who also those who have passed away. The province of La Mar was one of the most severely affected areas during the years of internal armed conflict especially during 1983-1984. More than 1,400 deaths and disappearances were reported to the TRC for this period alone (CVR). Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes and in many communities it became impossible to celebrate fiestas. Through the choreography of place dancers transform the urban streets and dance the very land of their origin into being, claiming the urban streets as their own. The importance of this act can not be overstated for campesinos who have lost family members and were forced to leave their communities during the years of violence. As Deborah Poole has noted dance is “…the active Andean voice …” (99). As comparsa members teach their children the carnival dance of their parents and grandparents they maintain ancestral connections and pass on the stories and embodied memories of their homes. Much of the literature on carnival views it as a release valve which allows a temporary freedom but which ultimately functions to reinforce established structures. This is no longer the case in Huamanga. The transformative effect of rural carnival goes beyond the moment of the dance. Through dancing the choreography of place campesinos salvage and restore that which was taken from them; the effects of which are felt by both the dancer and spectator.ConclusionThe closer examination of dance as embodied memory reveals those memory practices which may not necessarily voice the violence directly, but which are enacted, funded and embodied and thus, important to the people most affected by the years of conflict and violence. In conclusion, the dance of rural carnival functions as embodied memory which is danced into being through collective participation; through many bodies working together. Dancers who participate in rural carnival have absorbed the land sensorially and embodied it. Through dancing the land they give it form and bring embodied memory into being, imbuing the paved roads of the plaza with the mountainous terrain of their home land. For those born in the city, they come to know their ancestral land through the Andean voice of dance. The dance of carnival functions in a unique way making it possible for participants recall their homelands through a physical memory and to dance their place into being wherever they are. This corporeal memory goes beyond the normal understanding of memory as being of the mind for as Connerton notes “images of the past are remembered by way of ritual performances that are ‘stored’ in a bodily memory” (89). ReferencesAbercrombie, Thomas A. “La fiesta de carnaval postcolonial en Oruro: Clase, etnicidad y nacionalismo en la danza folklórica.” Revista Andina 10.2 (1992): 279-352.Carnaval Tradicional del Distrito de Chilcas – La Mar, Comparsas de La Asociación Social – Cultural “Los Hijos de Chilcas y Anexos”, pamphlet handed to the judges of the Atipinakuy, 2010.CVR. Informe Final. Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003. 1 March 2008 < http://www.cverdad.org.pe >.Bigenho, Michelle. “Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State.” American Ethnologist 26.4 (1999): 95-80.Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1989.Coronel Aguirre, José, M. Cabrera Romero, G. Machaca Calle, and R. Ochatoma Paravivino. “Análisis de acciones del carnaval ayacuchano – 1986.” Carnaval en Ayacucho, CEDIFA, Investigaciones No. 1, 1986.Cowan, Jane. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.Garcia, Maria Elena. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education and Multicultural Development in Peru. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.Isbelle, Billie Jean. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1985.Mendoza, Zoila S. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Poole, Deborah. “Andean Ritual Dance.” TDR 34.2 (Summer 1990): 98-126.Ritter, Jonathan. “Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11.1 (2002): 9-42.Sklar, Deidre. “‘All the Dances Have a Meaning to That Apparition”: Felt Knowledge and the Danzantes of Tortugas, New Mexico.” Dance Research Journal 31.2 (Autumn 1999): 14-33.Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Teaiwa, Katerina. "Challenges to Dance! Choreographing History in Oceania." Paper for Greg Denning Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 14 Oct. 2010.United Nations International Human Rights Instruments. Core Document Forming Part of the Reports of States Parties: Peru. 27 June 1995. HRI/CORE/1/Add.43/Rev.1. 12 May 2012 < http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6ae1f8.html >.

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Abstract:

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). Instead of being demolished, Brutalist objects that are no longer considered appropriate as residences could be repurposed for creative, cultural, or academic use, where their challenging corporeal effects could contribute to a stimulating or even thrilling environment.ReferencesAllen, Edward, and Joseph Iano. Fundamentals of Building Construction: Materials and Methods. 6th ed. 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London: Macmillan, 1865.Carroll, Rory. “How Did This Become the Height of Fashion?” The Guardian, 11 Mar. 1999. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/mar/11/features11.g28>.Carter, Claire. “London Tower Blocks Given Listed Building Status.”Daily Telegraph, 10 Jul. 2013. 16 Feb. 2016<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/10170663/London-tower-blocks-given-listed-building-status.html>.Chang, Heewon. Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2008.Clement, Alexander. Brutalism: Post-War British Architecture. Marlborough: Crowood Press, 2012.Cooper, Niall, Joe Fleming, Peter Marcus, Elsie Michie, Craig Russell, and Brigitte Soltau. “Lessons from Hulme.” Reports, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1 Sep. 1994. 16 Feb. 2016 <https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/lessons-hulme>.Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Architect as Totalitarian: Le Corbusier’s Baleful Influence.” Oh to Be in England. The City Journal, Autumn 2009. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_otbie-le-corbusier.html>.Denzin, Norman K. “Analytic Autoethnography, or Déjà Vu All Over Again.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4 (2006): 419-28.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.emerald, elke, and Lorelei Carpenter. “Vulnerability and Emotions in Research: Risks, Dilemmas, and Doubts.” Qualitative Inquiry 21.8 (2015): 741-50.Glancey, Jonathan. “A Great Place To Live.” The Guardian, 7 Sep. 2001. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/07/arts.highereducation>.Goldfinger, Ernö. “The Sensation of Space,” reprinted in Dunnet, James and Gavin Stamp, Ernö Goldfinger. London: Architectural Association Press, 1983.Hanley, Lynsey. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta, 2012.“High Rise Dreams.” Time Shift. BB4, Bristol. 19 Jun. 2003.Joas, Hans. “The Intersubjective Constitution of the Body-Image.” Human Studies 6.1 (1983): 197-204.Johnson, Sophia A. “‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015).Manan, Mohd. S.A., and Chris L. Smith. “Beyond Building: Architecture through the Human Body.” Alam Cipta: International Journal on Sustainable Tropical Design Research and Practice 5.1 (2012): 35-42.Meades, Jonathan. “The Incredible Hulks: Jonathan Meades’ A-Z of Brutalism.” The Guardian, 13 Feb. 2014. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan-meades-brutalism-a-z>.Moran, Joe. “Housing, Memory and Everyday Life in Contemporary Britain.” Cultural Studies 18.4 (2004): 607-27.Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 1996.Niesewand, Nonie. “Architecture: What Zaha Hadid Next.” The Independent, 1 Oct. 1998. 16Feb. 2016 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture-what-zaha-hadid-next-1175631.html>.Power, Anne. Hovels to Highrise: State Housing in Europe Since 1850. Taylor & Francis, 2005.Segall, Marshall H., Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits. “Cultural Differences in the Perception of Geometric Illusions.” Science 139.3556 (1963): 769-71.Singh, Anita. “Lord Rogers Would Live on This Estate? Let Him Be Our Guest.” The Telegraph, 20 Jun. 2015. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/11687078/Lord-Rogers-would-live-on-this-estate-Let-him-be-our-guest.html>.Smithson, Alison, and Peter Smithson. “But Today We Collect Ads.” Reprinted in L’Architecture Aujourd’hui Jan./Feb (2003): 44.Smithson, Alison, and Peter Smithson. “Conversation with Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry.” Zodiac 4 (1959): 73-81.Sroat, Helen. “Brutalism: An Architecture of Exhilaration.” Presentation at the Paul Rudolph Symposium. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, MA, 13 Apr. 2005. Stadler, Laurent. “‘New Brutalism’, ‘Topology’ and ‘Image:’ Some Remarks on the Architectural Debates in England around 1950.” The Journal of Architecture 13.3 (2008): 263-81.The Great British Housing Disaster. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC Documentaries. BBC, London. 4 Sep. 1984.The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Dir. Chad Friedrichs. First Run Features, 2012.

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Abstract:

Over the past century, many books for general readers have styled sharks as “monsters of the deep” (Steele). In recent decades, however, at least some writers have also turned to representing how sharks are seriously threatened by human activities. At a time when media coverage of shark sightings seems ever increasing in Australia, scholarship has begun to consider people’s attitudes to sharks and how these are formed, investigating the representation of sharks (Peschak; Ostrovski et al.) in films (Le Busque and Litchfield; Neff; Schwanebeck), newspaper reports (Muter et al.), and social media (Le Busque et al., “An Analysis”). My own research into representations of surfing and sharks in Australian writing (Brien) has, however, revealed that, although reporting of shark sightings and human-shark interactions are prominent in the news, and sharks function as vivid and commanding images and metaphors in art and writing (Ellis; Westbrook et al.), little scholarship has investigated their representation in Australian books published for a general readership. While recognising representations of sharks in other book-length narrative forms in Australia, including Australian fiction, poetry, and film (Ryan and Ellison), this enquiry is focussed on non-fiction books for general readers, to provide an initial review. Sampling holdings of non-fiction books in the National Library of Australia, crosschecked with Google Books, in early 2021, this investigation identified 50 Australian books for general readers that are principally about sharks, or that feature attitudes to them, published from 1911 to 2021. Although not seeking to capture all Australian non-fiction books for general readers that feature sharks, the sampling attempted to locate a wide range of representations and genres across the time frame from the earliest identified text until the time of the survey. The books located include works of natural and popular history, travel writing, memoir, biography, humour, and other long-form non-fiction for adult and younger readers, including hybrid works. A thematic analysis (Guest et al.) of the representation of sharks in these texts identified five themes that moved from understanding sharks as fishes to seeing them as monsters, then prey, and finally to endangered species needing conservation. Many books contained more than one theme, and not all examples identified have been quoted in the discussion of the themes below. Sharks as Part of the Natural Environment Drawing on oral histories passed through generations, two memoirs (Bradley et al.; Fossa) narrate Indigenous stories in which sharks play a central role. These reveal that sharks are part of both the world and a wider cosmology for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Clua and Guiart). In these representations, sharks are integrated with, and integral to, Indigenous life, with one writer suggesting they are “creator beings, ancestors, totems. Their lifecycles reflect the seasons, the landscape and sea country. They are seen in the movement of the stars” (Allam). A series of natural history narratives focus on zoological studies of Australian sharks, describing shark species and their anatomy and physiology, as well as discussing shark genetics, behaviour, habitats, and distribution. A foundational and relatively early Australian example is Gilbert P. Whitley’s The Fishes of Australia: The Sharks, Rays, Devil-fish, and Other Primitive Fishes of Australia and New Zealand, published in 1940. Ichthyologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney from the early 1920s to 1964, Whitley authored several books which furthered scientific thought on sharks. Four editions of his Australian Sharks were published between 1983 and 1991 in English, and the book is still held in many libraries and other collections worldwide. In this text, Whitley described a wide variety of sharks, noting shared as well as individual features. Beautiful drawings contribute information on shape, colouring, markings, and other recognisable features to assist with correct identification. Although a scientist and a Fellow and then President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Whitley recognised it was important to communicate with general readers and his books are accessible, the prose crisp and clear. Books published after this text (Aiken; Ayling; Last and Stevens; Tricas and Carwardine) share Whitley’s regard for the diversity of sharks as well as his desire to educate a general readership. By 2002, the CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.) also featured numerous striking photographs of these creatures. Titles such as Australia’s Amazing Sharks (Australian Geographic) emphasise sharks’ unique qualities, including their agility and speed in the water, sensitive sight and smell, and ability to detect changes in water pressure around them, heal rapidly, and replace their teeth. These books also emphasise the central role that sharks play in the marine ecosystem. There are also such field guides to sharks in specific parts of Australia (Allen). This attention to disseminating accurate zoological information about sharks is also evident in books written for younger readers including very young children (Berkes; Kear; Parker and Parker). In these and other similar books, sharks are imaged as a central and vital component of the ocean environment, and the narratives focus on their features and qualities as wondrous rather than monstrous. Sharks as Predatory Monsters A number of books for general readers do, however, image sharks as monsters. In 1911, in his travel narrative Peeps at Many Lands: Australia, Frank Fox describes sharks as “the most dangerous foes of man in Australia” (23) and many books have reinforced this view over the following century. This can be seen in titles that refer to sharks as dangerous predatory killers (Fox and Ruhen; Goadby; Reid; Riley; Sharpe; Taylor and Taylor). The covers of a large proportion of such books feature sharks emerging from the water, jaws wide open in explicit homage to the imaging of the monster shark in the film Jaws (Spielberg). Shark!: Killer Tales from the Dangerous Depths (Reid) is characteristic of books that portray encounters with sharks as terrifying and dramatic, using emotive language and stories that describe sharks as “the world’s most feared sea creature” (47) because they are such “highly efficient killing machines” (iv, see also 127, 129). This representation of sharks is also common in several books for younger readers (Moriarty; Rohr). Although the risk of being injured by an unprovoked shark is extremely low (Chapman; Fletcher et al.), fear of sharks is prevalent and real (Le Busque et al., “People’s Fear”) and described in a number of these texts. Several of the memoirs located describe surfers’ fear of sharks (Muirhead; Orgias), as do those of swimmers, divers, and other frequent users of the sea (Denness; de Gelder; McAloon), even if the author has never encountered a shark in the wild. In these texts, this fear of sharks is often traced to viewing Jaws, and especially to how the film’s huge, bloodthirsty great white shark persistently and determinedly attacks its human hunters. Pioneer Australian shark expert Valerie Taylor describes such great white sharks as “very big, powerful … and amazingly beautiful” but accurately notes that “revenge is not part of their thought process” (Kindle version). Two books explicitly seek to map and explain Australians’ fear of sharks. In Sharks: A History of Fear in Australia, Callum Denness charts this fear across time, beginning with his own “shark story”: a panicked, terror-filled evacuation from the sea, following the sighting of a shadow which turned out not to be a shark. Blake Chapman’s Shark Attacks: Myths, Misunderstandings and Human Fears explains commonly held fearful perceptions of sharks. Acknowledging that sharks are a “highly emotive topic”, the author of this text does not deny “the terror [that] they invoke in our psyche” but makes a case that this is “only a minor characteristic of what makes them such intriguing animals” (ix). In Death by Coconut: 50 Things More Dangerous than a Shark and Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid of the Ocean, Ruby Ashby Orr utilises humour to educate younger readers about the real risk humans face from sharks and, as per the book’s title, why they should not be feared, listing champagne corks and falling coconuts among the many everyday activities more likely to lead to injury and death in Australia than encountering a shark. Taylor goes further in her memoir – not only describing her wonder at swimming with these creatures, but also her calm acceptance of the possibility of being injured by a shark: "if we are to be bitten, then we are to be bitten … . One must choose a life of adventure, and of mystery and discovery, but with that choice, one must also choose the attendant risks" (2019: Kindle version). Such an attitude is very rare in the books located, with even some of the most positive about these sea creatures still quite sensibly fearful of potentially dangerous encounters with them. Sharks as Prey There is a long history of sharks being fished in Australia (Clark). The killing of sharks for sport is detailed in An American Angler in Australia, which describes popular adventure writer Zane Grey’s visit to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s to fish ‘big game’. This text includes many bloody accounts of killing sharks, which are justified with explanations about how sharks are dangerous. It is also illustrated with gruesome pictures of dead sharks. Australian fisher Alf Dean’s biography describes him as the “World’s Greatest Shark Hunter” (Thiele), this text similarly illustrated with photographs of some of the gigantic sharks he caught and killed in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from being killed during pleasure and sport fishing, sharks are also hunted by spearfishers. Valerie Taylor and her late husband, Ron Taylor, are well known in Australia and internationally as shark experts, but they began their careers as spearfishers and shark hunters (Taylor, Ron Taylor’s), with the documentary Shark Hunters gruesomely detailing their killing of many sharks. The couple have produced several books that recount their close encounters with sharks (Taylor; Taylor, Taylor and Goadby; Taylor and Taylor), charting their movement from killers to conservationists as they learned more about the ocean and its inhabitants. Now a passionate campaigner against the past butchery she participated in, Taylor’s memoir describes her shift to a more respectful relationship with sharks, driven by her desire to understand and protect them. In Australia, the culling of sharks is supposedly carried out to ensure human safety in the ocean, although this practice has long been questioned. In 1983, for instance, Whitley noted the “indiscriminate” killing of grey nurse sharks, despite this species largely being very docile and of little threat to people (Australian Sharks, 10). This is repeated by Tony Ayling twenty-five years later who adds the information that the generally harmless grey nurse sharks have been killed to the point of extinction, as it was wrongly believed they preyed on surfers and swimmers. Shark researcher and conservationist Riley Elliott, author of Shark Man: One Kiwi Man’s Mission to Save Our Most Feared and Misunderstood Predator (2014), includes an extremely critical chapter on Western Australian shark ‘management’ through culling, summing up the problems associated with this approach: it seems to me that this cull involved no science or logic, just waste and politics. It’s sickening that the people behind this cull were the Fisheries department, which prior to this was the very department responsible for setting up the world’s best acoustic tagging system for sharks. (Kindle version, Chapter 7) Describing sharks as “misunderstood creatures”, Orr is also clear in her opposition to killing sharks to ‘protect’ swimmers noting that “each year only around 10 people are killed in shark attacks worldwide, while around 73 million sharks are killed by humans”. She adds the question and answer, “sounds unfair? Of course it is, but when an attack is all over the news and the people are baying for shark blood, it’s easy to lose perspective. But culling them? Seriously?” (back cover). The condemnation of culling is also evident in David Brooks’s recent essay on the topic in his collection of essays about animal welfare, conservation and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams. This disapproval is also evident in narratives by those who have been injured by sharks. Navy diver Paul de Gelder and surfer Glen Orgias were both bitten by sharks in Sydney in 2009 and both their memoirs detail their fear of sharks and the pain they suffered from these interactions and their lengthy recoveries. However, despite their undoubted suffering – both men lost limbs due to these encounters – they also attest to their ongoing respect for these creatures and specify a shared desire not to see them culled. Orgias, instead, charts the life story of the shark who bit him alongside his own story in his memoir, musing at the end of the book, not about himself or his injury, but about the fate of the shark he had encountered: great whites are portrayed … as pathological creatures, and as malevolent. That’s rubbish … they are graceful, mighty beasts. I respect them, and fear them … [but] the thought of them fighting, dying, in a net upsets me. I hope this great white shark doesn’t end up like that. (271–271) Several of the more recent books identified in this study acknowledge that, despite growing understanding of sharks, the popular press and many policy makers continue to advocate for shark culls, these calls especially vocal after a shark-related human death or injury (Peppin-Neff). The damage to shark species involved caused by their killing – either directly by fishing, spearing, finning, or otherwise hunting them, or inadvertently as they become caught in nets or affected by human pollution of the ocean – is discussed in many of the more recent books identified in this study. Sharks as Endangered Alongside fishing, finning, and hunting, human actions and their effects such as beach netting, pollution and habitat change are killing many sharks, to the point where many shark species are threatened. Several recent books follow Orr in noting that an estimated 100 million sharks are now killed annually across the globe and that this, as well as changes to their habitats, are driving many shark species to the status of vulnerable, threatened or towards extinction (Dulvy et al.). This is detailed in texts about biodiversity and climate change in Australia (Steffen et al.) as well as in many of the zoologically focussed books discussed above under the theme of “Sharks as part of the natural environment”. The CSIRO’s Field Guide to Australian Sharks & Rays (Daley et al.), for example, emphasises not only that several shark species are under threat (and protected) (8–9) but also that sharks are, as individuals, themselves very fragile creatures. Their skeletons are made from flexible, soft cartilage rather than bone, meaning that although they are “often thought of as being incredibly tough; in reality, they need to be handled carefully to maximise their chance of survival following capture” (9). Material on this theme is included in books for younger readers on Australia’s endangered animals (Bourke; Roc and Hawke). Shark Conservation By 1991, shark conservation in Australia and overseas was a topic of serious discussion in Sydney, with an international workshop on the subject held at Taronga Zoo and the proceedings published (Pepperell et al.). Since then, the movement to protect sharks has grown, with marine scientists, high-profile figures and other writers promoting shark conservation, especially through attempts to educate the general public about sharks. De Gelder’s memoir, for instance, describes how he now champions sharks, promoting shark conservation in his work as a public speaker. Peter Benchley, who (with Carl Gottlieb) recast his novel Jaws for the film’s screenplay, later attested to regretting his portrayal of sharks as aggressive and became a prominent spokesperson for shark conservation. In explaining his change of heart, he stated that when he wrote the novel, he was reflecting the general belief that sharks would both seek out human prey and attack boats, but he later discovered this to be untrue (Benchley, “Without Malice”). Many recent books about sharks for younger readers convey a conservation message, underscoring how, instead of fearing or killing sharks, or doing nothing, humans need to actively assist these vulnerable creatures to survive. In the children’s book series featuring Bindi Irwin and her “wildlife adventures”, there is a volume where Bindi and a friend are on a diving holiday when they find a dead shark whose fin has been removed. The book not only describes how shark finning is illegal, but also how Bindi and friend are “determined to bring the culprits to justice” (Browne). This narrative, like the other books in this series, has a dual focus; highlighting the beauty of wildlife and its value, but also how the creatures described need protection and assistance. Concluding Discussion This study was prompted by the understanding that the Earth is currently in the epoch known as the Anthropocene, a time in which humans have significantly altered, and continue to alter, the Earth by our activities (Myers), resulting in numerous species becoming threatened, endangered, or extinct. It acknowledges the pressing need for not only natural science research on these actions and their effects, but also for such scientists to publish their findings in more accessible ways (see, Paulin and Green). It specifically responds to demands for scholarship outside the relevant areas of science and conservation to encourage widespread thinking and action (Mascia et al.; Bennett et al.). As understanding public perceptions and overcoming widely held fear of sharks can facilitate their conservation (Panoch and Pearson), the way sharks are imaged is integral to their survival. The five themes identified in this study reveal vastly different ways of viewing and writing about sharks. These range from seeing sharks as nothing more than large fishes to be killed for pleasure, to viewing them as terrifying monsters, to finally understanding that they are amazing creatures who play an important role in the world’s environment and are in urgent need of conservation. This range of representation is important, for if sharks are understood as demon monsters which hunt humans, then it is much more ‘reasonable’ to not care about their future than if they are understood to be fascinating and fragile creatures suffering from their interactions with humans and our effect on the environment. Further research could conduct a textual analysis of these books. In this context, it is interesting to note that, although in 1949 C. Bede Maxwell suggested describing human deaths and injuries from sharks as “accidents” (182) and in 2013 Christopher Neff and Robert Hueter proposed using “sightings, encounters, bites, and the rare cases of fatal bites” (70) to accurately represent “the true risk posed by sharks” to humans (70), the majority of the books in this study, like mass media reports, continue to use the ubiquitous and more dramatic terminology of “shark attack”. The books identified in this analysis could also be compared with international texts to reveal and investigate global similarities and differences. While the focus of this discussion has been on non-fiction texts, a companion analysis of representation of sharks in Australian fiction, poetry, films, and other narratives could also be undertaken, in the hope that such investigations contribute to more nuanced understandings of these majestic sea creatures. 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Abstract:

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond hom*o sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting hom*o sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

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Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash INTRODUCTION In this collection of narratives, the authors describe their own experiences with and reflections on healthcare worker vaccine hesitancy. The narratives explore each author’s engagement with different communities experiencing vaccine hesitancy, touching on reasons for hesitancy, proposed solutions, and legal aspects. Author’s names appear above their narratives. l. Johanna T. Crane Vaccine hesitancy, defined as “a delay of acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite the availability of vaccination services,”[1] is a worldwide but locally shaped phenomenon that pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic.[2] Contrary to some portrayals, vaccine hesitancy is not the same as the more absolute antivaccination stance, or what some call “anti-vax.” Many people who are hesitant are not ideologically opposed to vaccines. Hesitancy is also sometimes framed as anti-science, yet reluctance to vaccinate is often about managing risk, trustworthiness, and doubt in the context of uncertainty; it represents an effort to “talk back to science” about unaddressed needs and concerns.[3] In the US, the newness of the vaccines, the unprecedented speed at which they were developed, and their remaining under emergency use authorization at first complicated public confidence. Political polarization and racial and social inequality shape vaccine acceptance and public distrust as well. While vaccine acceptance has increased in the months since the vaccines first became available, many eligible individuals have not yet been vaccinated, including a significant number of healthcare workers.[4] Vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers may seem surprising, especially given their frontline experience – I confess that it surprised me at first. But when I began interviewing health care workers for a study on COVID vaccine roll-out at community health centers, I learned to take a more complex view. Although the study was focused on patient vaccine access,[5] many of the frontline health care workers we spoke with also described hesitancy among some of their colleagues (and, in a few cases, themselves). From these conversations, I learned that these “healthcare heroes” are also regular people and members of communities. Their concerns about COVID vaccination often reflect the prevailing concerns advanced in their communities, such as worries about vaccine side effects and safety. Like other workers, some fear missing work and losing income, as not all healthcare employers offer paid time off for vaccination or recovery. (Importantly, reluctance to vaccinate is highest among healthcare workers in lower-paid positions with little job security, such as clerks, housekeepers, patient care assistants, and home health aides.)[6] For some healthcare workers of color, the protection offered by the vaccine sits in tension with both current and historical experiences of medical abuse and neglect. Some interviewees, fully vaccinated themselves, rejected the framework of “hesitancy” entirely, arguing that Black and Brown reluctance to be vaccinated first should be understood through the lens of “self-protection”. Due to the nature of their work, healthcare workers have faced great social pressure to vaccinate and vaccinate first. This is understandable, given that vaccination against COVID-19 protects not only workers themselves but aligns with the ethical duty to prevent harm to patients by reducing the risk of transmission in healthcare settings. When the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines under emergency use authorization in December 2020, many healthcare workers were extremely grateful to be designated “1a” – the first group prioritized to receive the shots.[7] For many bioethicists, prioritization of healthcare workers represented a recognition of the extreme risks that many front-line workers had endured since the onset of the pandemic, including critical shortages in PPE. But it is important to remember that for some workers, going first may have felt like serving as guinea pigs for new vaccines that had yet to be granted full FDA approval. For these individuals, the expectation that they would vaccinate first may have felt like an additional risk rather than a reward. Healthcare workers who are hesitant to vaccinate may feel ashamed or be subject to shaming by others;[8] this may make it difficult to discuss their concerns in the workplace. Throughout the pandemic, healthcare workers have been lauded as “heroes”, and some healthcare employers have promoted vaccination among their workforce as a “heroic” action. This messaging implies that waiting to vaccinate is shameful or cowardly and is echoed in opinion pieces and op-eds describing unvaccinated people as “selfish” or “free riders.”[9] By fostering the proper dialogue, we can respond respectfully to hesitancy among healthcare workers while still working towards the goal of increased vaccination. We in the bioethics and medical community should be willing to listen to our colleagues’ concerns with respect. Top-down approaches aimed at “correcting” hesitancy cannot address the more fundamental issues of trust that are often at stake. Instead, there must be dialogue over time. Conversations with a trusted healthcare provider have a crucial role.[10] Blaming and shaming rhetoric, whether explicit or implicit, gets us nowhere – in fact, it likely moves us backward by likely exacerbating any existing distrust or resentment that workers may hold toward their employers.[11] Lastly, the onus of trust must be with institutions, not individuals. There is a lot of talk about getting communities of color, and Black people, particularly, to "trust" healthcare institutions and the COVID vaccines. This racializes trust and puts the burden on harmed communities rather than on institutions acting in trustworthy ways.[12] Dialogue, respect, and trustworthiness must guide us even in the new era of workplace mandates. Mandates make these strategies even more important as we look toward an uncertain future. As Heidi Larson, founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, recently said, “We should not forget that we are making people's future history now. Are people going to remember that they were treated respectfully and engaged?”[13] ll. Kara Simpson Since the release of the vaccine for COVID-19 in late 2020, there have been robust discussions within the medical community, the media, and political arenas about vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers. The public became aware that healthcare workers, the first group to become eligible for the vaccine, were not rushing to “take the shot.” Many people’s opinions were aligned by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and political affiliation. People of color were one of the first groups to be labeled vaccine hesitant as our experiences of distrust of the medical community and the politicization of the vaccine explained the low turnout.[14] It was not uncommon to hear, “this vaccine just came out; let’s wait and see if there are side effects.” Interestingly, many people in the healthcare community and in the public did not understand why healthcare workers of color remained hesitant. Trust is a vital component of any viable relationship, especially in the clinical realm. To have successful health outcomes, it is essential for clinicians to build trusting relationships with their patients and peers. Many people of color are distrustful towards the medical institution due to the years of systemic racism and abuses that they have experienced, witnessed, or learned about. Healthcare workers of color are not excluded from the experiences of their communities outside of work. In fact, I assert that healthcare of color may have an additional burden of hesitation because of their lived experiences of distrust in receiving care and inequality within their professional environment. These dual traumas can work in tandem to strengthen hesitancy. I assert that building trusting clinical relationships will address hesitancy over time. Currently, many healthcare workers are worried about vaccine mandates. For a group of people that have experienced intergenerational enslavement and marginalization, mandates feel coercive and serve as a reminder of how “lesser” bodies are considered unworthy of voice, fundamental human rights, independent decision making. To call the vaccine mandate paternalistic would be an understatement. An unintended result of vaccine mandates will be the reinforcement of hesitancy and distrust of the medical institution as trust and coercion cannot coexist. This mandate will give more power to the conspiracy theories and harm those who already do not seek or receive adequate health care because of systemic inequalities. Furthermore, mandates can also dissuade people of color from becoming healthcare workers, and others may leave the field. In essence, vaccine hesitancy is a symptom of a much larger problem: the distrust of the medical establishment. As bioethicists, our mission should be to support interventions that foster “trustworthiness” of the institutions rather than those that cause trauma. Several organizations have proposed mask mandates and weekly testing as a measure to protect the population at large and still respect the autonomy of the unvaccinated.[15] lll. Jennifer Breznay I work in a very large community teaching hospital in Brooklyn, and we were extremely hard hit by COVID in March 2020. I worked on inpatient medical units and witnessed a lot of suffering. And after nine months of fear and despair about COVID’s toll, I felt tremendous frustration in December when I heard that many healthcare workers would reject the vaccine. As the co-chair of the Bioethics Committee, I drafted a statement recommending vaccination for all employees. When the draft was revised and approved by the Bioethics Committee, I began to discuss it with employees, and I appreciated different perspectives I had not heard before. In the end, rather than releasing the statement, we directed our efforts at creating a dialogue. I also volunteer at a not-for-profit which operates seven early childhood education centers in Northern Brooklyn. The Executive Director invited me to collaborate on strategies to encourage staff vaccination, and we decided to offer a Zoom conference to 20 members of the staff. I was extremely nervous about how the audience would perceive me, a white doctor whom they did not know. I felt awkward about coming to them with an agenda. And there was also the question of whether I was an appropriate messenger compared to a person of color. Yet, I felt like I shouldn't back away from this. So, I chose to simply disclose my discomfort at the beginning of the Zoom. I said, “Thanks for having me. You know, as a white physician, I understand you might have concerns about trusting what I say. Four hundred years of inequity and abuse by the healthcare system can create a lot of mistrust, but I’m here to try to answer your questions.” Ultimately the Executive Director reported that the Zoom was successful in stimulating a lot of conversation among the staff about the vaccine. I think the critical piece is the intimate but open conversation, where you can elicit values. lV. Ashley L. Stewart In the rural areas of our state, healthcare institutions are inextricably tied to their communities. Rural hospitals hire from, serve, and function in the community where they are located. Successful implementation of a vaccine roll-out in such rural areas requires explicit recognition of the role and influence of the community. After identifying issues common to the area, rural institutions can address them. Even when rural institutions find that healthcare worker concerns seem to be unique or personal, they are often related to the larger concerns of the community.[16] Community-based increased vaccine hesitancy may coincide with an underlying issue, such as lack of information rather than principled or experience-based resistance.[17] When the vaccines became available, rural vaccination coordinators encountered a wealth of misinformation that left many people initially undecided. Compounding this lack of information, workers expressed a sense of fear about the professional consequences of voicing concerns, especially in tight-knit communities. Many workers expressed concern about being judged merely for sharing their questions or decisions.[18] They also felt that saying or doing something to promote the value of vaccination might change their relationship with members of the community where they live and work.[19] As there was a fear of engaging in productive conversations, it was difficult for them to find valuable information, and the lack of information discouraged them from being vaccinated. Vaccine coordinators wanted to get information to the entire community based on the most current research and release unbiased, consistent, and timely information from sources all people in the community could trust, including from multiple sources at once. Communication must focus on answering many types of questions, which must often be done in private or anonymously. Where poorly supported or incorrect information is widely available, sharing objective information is crucial to turning the tide of distrust. If the healthcare community dismisses concerns or assumes that answering questions based on misinformation is a waste of time, the community-based institutions will further the distrust. Some may feel that vaccine coordinators should not address misinformation directly, yet avoidance has been widely unsuccessful.[20] Being respectful and non-judgmental in answering questions posed by people who do not know what is true can be hard, but in rural communities, answering completely and honestly without judgment is a critical component of any effort to inform people. Telling people to get vaccinated “for the greater good” can sound the same as being told not to get a vaccine because it is “bad” if both sources of information fail to back up their claims. Ultimately rural institutions are respected because they are a resource to their communities, a priority we must preserve. It is also critical to treat everyone respectfully regardless of vaccine status.[21] People may perceive mandates, divisive policies, or disrespectful treatment of people based on vaccination status as discriminatory or coercive, weakening the appeal of vaccination. Such practices may make people less trusting and more anchored to their position as they come to see vaccination proponents as untrustworthy or authoritarian. We must work to maintain respect for human autonomy. Using unethical means to achieve even a just end will not lead to a “greater good” but rather to the perception that people in positions of authority would achieve a result “by any means necessary.” V. David N. Hoffman The central moral quandary that arises whenever vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers is discussed is whether workers who refuse to get vaccinated should or could be fired. We should clarify that we are applying a definition of mandate in the employment context for private employers, the violation of which results in loss of employment. Government-controlled provider organizations are just now weighing in on this topic and are generally pursuing strategies that impose periodic, usually weekly, testing requirements for those workers who decline to get vaccinated. In the private sector, employers can require their employees to do a great many things as a condition of employment, and one of them is to get vaccinated against COVID -19. In the most prominent case to date, just such a mandate gave rise to a lawsuit in Texas involving Houston Methodist Hospital. In that case, 170 employees asserted that an employer should not be allowed to force them to get vaccinated. The judge held that, while no employer can force an employee to get vaccinated, no employer is obligated to continue the employment of any employee who declines to follow rules established by that employer, including the obligation to get vaccinated.[22] In Texas, what the judge said is you are not being forced to get vaccinated, but your employer is allowed to set limits and conditions on employment, including vaccination. Employees do not have an obligation to get vaccinated, but they also have no right to their jobs. That is because of a widely misunderstood legal concept: “employment at will.” Employment at will sounds like a rule that employees can do what they want at work, but in fact, employment at will means only that you can quit your job whenever you want (we do not permit indentured servitude). At the same time, your employer can fire you at any time, for any reason or no reason, unless the reason is a pretext and involves one of the protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and in some jurisdictions gender orientation, gender identity). Generally, any employers, including hospitals, can decide that if someone is not willing to get a vaccination, or if they are not willing to complete sexual harassment training or participate in the hospital’s infection control program, that is the employee’s right, but it will mean that an employer can similarly decline to continue providing employment. The evolution of this hesitancy discussion will be influenced by the narrower debate playing out in the court of public opinion, and the courts of law, over the enforceability of New York’s recently enacted vaccine mandate. Regardless of whether that mandate survives, with or without medical and religious exemptions, healthcare employers will be left with a profound ethical dilemma. At the end of all the litigation, if there is a religious exemption, employers will always be burdened with the responsibility to determine whether an individual employee has asserted a genuine and sincere religious objection to vaccination and whether the employer is able to provide an accommodation that is safe and effective in protecting the interests of co-workers and patients. The anticipated federal mandate, which reportedly will have a test/mask alternative, will only make this ethical task more challenging. This leads to the final point in this analysis, which is that while private employers, including hospitals, can deprive an individual of their employment if those individuals refuse to get vaccinated, just because an employer can do so does not mean it should do so.[23] - [1] MacDonald NE. Vaccine hesitancy: Definition, scope and determinants. Vaccine. 2015;33(34):4161-4164. doi:10.1016/j.vaccine.2015.04.036 [2] Larson HJ, de Figueiredo A, Xiahong Z, et al. The State of Vaccine Confidence 2016: Global Insights Through a 67-Country Survey. EBioMedicine. 2016;12:295-301. doi:10.1016/j.ebiom.2016.08.042 [3] Larson H. Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start - and Why They Don’t Go Away. Oxford University Press; 2020; Benjamin R. Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics. Sci Technol Hum Values. 2016;41(6):967-990. doi:10.1177/0162243916656059 [4] Deepa Shivaram, In The Fight Against COVID, Health Workers Aren't Immune To Vaccine Misinformation September 18, 2021. NPR Special Series: The Coronavirus. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/18/1037975289/unvaccinated-covid-19-vaccine-refuse-nurses-heath-care-workers [5] Crane JT, Pacia D, Fabi R, Neuhaus C, and Berlinger N. Advancing Covid vaccination equity at Federally Qualified Health Centers: A rapid qualitative review. Accepted and awaiting publication at JGIM. [6] Ashley Kirzinger. “KFF/The Washington Post Frontline Health Care Workers Survey - Vaccine Intentions.” KFF, 22 Apr. 2021, https://www.kff.org/report-section/kff-washington-post-frontline-health-care-workers-survey-vaccine-intentions/. [7] Johanna Crane, Samuel Reis-Dennis and Megan Applewhite. “Prioritizing the ‘1a’: Ethically Allocating Scarce Covid Vaccines to Health Care Workers.” The Hastings Center, 21 Dec. 2020, https://www.thehastingscenter.org/prioritizing-the-1a-ethically-allocating-covid-vaccines-to-health-care-workers/. [8] “'I'm Not an Anti-Vaxxer, but...' US Health Workers' Vaccine Hesitancy Raises Alarm.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 10 Jan. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/10/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-us-health-workers. [9] Gerson M. If you are healthy and refuse to take the vaccine, you are a free-rider. Washington Post. April 15, 2021. [10] Crane JT, Pacia D, Fabi R, Neuhaus C, and Berlinger N. Advancing Covid vaccination equity at Federally Qualified Health Centers: A rapid qualitative review. Accepted and awaiting publication at JGIM. [11] Larson H. Stuck : How Vaccine Rumors Start - and Why They Don’t Go Away. Oxford University Press; 2020. [12] Benjamin R. Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’ in Biomedicine. Sociology Compass. 2014;8(6):755-769. doi:10.1111/soc4.12167; Warren RC, Forrow L, David Augustin Hodge S, Truog RD. Trustworthiness before Trust — Covid-19 Vaccine Trials and the Black Community. N Engl J Med. Published online October 16, 2020. doi:10.1056/NEJMp2030033 [13] Offri D. Heidi Larson, Vaccine Anthropologist. New Yorker. Published online June 12, 2021. Accessed August 11, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/heidi-larson-vaccine-anthropologist [14] Razai M S, Osama T, McKechnie D G J, Majeed A. Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Ethnic Minority Groups. BMJ 2021; 372 :n513 doi:10.1136/bmj.n513 [15] Dasgupta, Sharoda, et al. “Differences in Rapid Increases in County-Level COVID-19 Incidence by Implementation of Statewide Closures and Mask Mandates — United States, June 1–September 30, 2020.” Annals of Epidemiology, vol. 57, Sept. 2021, pp. 46–53., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2021.02.006. [16] Do, Tuong Vi C et al. “COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance Among Rural Appalachian Healthcare Workers (Eastern Kentucky/West Virginia): A Cross-Sectional Study.” Cureus vol. 13,8 e16842. 2 Aug. 2021, doi:10.7759/cureus.16842; Danabal, K.G.M., Magesh, S.S., Saravanan, S. et al. Attitude towards COVID 19 vaccines and vaccine hesitancy in urban and rural communities in Tamil Nadu, India – a community-based survey. BMC Health Serv Res 21, 994 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-021-07037-4 [17] Scott C. Ratzan MD, MPA, MA, Lawrence O. Gostin JD, Najmedin Meshkati PhD, CPE, Kenneth Rabin PhD & Ruth M. Parker MD (2020) COVID-19: An Urgent Call for Coordinated, Trusted Sources to Tell Everyone What They Need to Know and Do, Journal of Health Communication, 25:10, 747-749, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2020.1894015 [18] Huang, Pien. “Some Health Care Workers Are Wary of Getting COVID-19 Vaccines.” NPR, NPR, 1 Dec. 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/01/940158684/some-health-care-workers-are-wary-of-getting-covid-19-vaccines. Portnoy, Jenna. “Several Hundred Virginia Health-Care Workers Have Been Suspended or Fired over Coronavirus Vaccine Mandates.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 4 Oct. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/covid-vaccine-mandate-hospitals-virginia/2021/10/01/b7976d16-21ff-11ec-8200-5e3fd4c49f5e_story.html. [19] Jennifer A. Lueck & Alaina Spiers (2020) Which Beliefs Predict Intention to Get Vaccinated against COVID-19? A Mixed-Methods Reasoned Action Approach Applied to Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, 25:10, 790-798, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2020.1865488 [20] Lockyer, Bridget, et al. “Understanding Covid-19 Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy in Context: Findings from a Qualitative Study Involving Citizens in Bradford, UK.” Health Expectations, vol. 24, no. 4, 4 May 2021, pp. 1158–1167., https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.22.20248259. Scott C. Ratzan & Ruth M. Parker (2020) Vaccine Literacy—Helping Everyone Decide to Accept Vaccination, Journal of Health Communication, 25:10, 750-752, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2021.1875083. [21] Zimmerman, Anne. Columbia Academic Commons, 2020, Toward a Civilized Vaccination Discussion: Abandoning the False Assumption That Scientific Goals Are Shared by All, https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-rzh0-1f73. [22] Bridges, et al v. Houston Methodist Hospital et al, https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/districtcourts/texas/txsdce/4:2021cv01774/1830373/18 [23] David N. Hoffman, “Vaccine Mandates for Health Care Workers Raise Several Ethical Dilemmas,” Hasting Center Bioethics Forum. August 2021. https://www.thehastingscenter.org/vaccine-mandates-for-health-care-workers-raise-several-ethical-dilemmas/

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In Ireland today, we eat more pigmeat per capita, approximately 32.4 kilograms, than any other meat, yet you very seldom if ever see a pig (C.S.O.). Fat and flavour are two words that are synonymous with pig meat, yet scientists have spent the last thirty years cross breeding to produce leaner, low-fat pigs. Today’s pig professionals prefer to use the term “pig finishing” as opposed to the more traditional “pig fattening” (Tuite). The pig evokes many themes in relation to cuisine. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in his essay Dissertation upon Roast Pig, cites Confucius in attributing the accidental discovery of the art of roasting to the humble pig. The pig has been singled out by many cultures as a food to be avoided or even abhorred, and Harris (1997) illustrates the environmental effect this avoidance can have by contrasting the landscape of Christian Albania with that of Muslim Albania.This paper will focus on the pig in Irish cuisine and culture from ancient times to the present day. The inspiration for this paper comes from a folklore tale about how Saint Martin created the pig from a piece of fat. The story is one of a number recorded by Seán Ó Conaill, the famous Kerry storyteller and goes as follows:From St Martin’s fat they were made. He was travelling around, and one night he came to a house and yard. At that time there were only cattle; there were no pigs or piglets. He asked the man of the house if there was anything to eat the chaff and the grain. The man replied there were only the cattle. St Martin said it was a great pity to have that much chaff going to waste. At night when they were going to bed, he handed a piece of fat to the servant-girl and told her to put it under a tub, and not to look at it at all until he would give her the word next day. The girl did so, but she kept a bit of the fat and put it under a keeler to find out what it would be.When St Martin rose next day he asked her to go and lift up the tub. She lifted it up, and there under it were a sow and twelve piglets. It was a great wonder to them, as they had never before seen pig or piglet.The girl then went to the keeler and lifted it, and it was full of mice and rats! As soon as the keeler was lifted, they went running about the house searching for any hole that they could go into. When St Martin saw them, he pulled off one of his mittens and threw it at them and made a cat with that throw. And that is why the cat ever since goes after mice and rats (Ó Conaill).The place of the pig has long been established in Irish literature, and longer still in Irish topography. The word torc, a boar, like the word muc, a pig, is a common element of placenames, from Kanturk (boar’s head) in West Cork to Ros Muc (headland of pigs) in West Galway. The Irish pig had its place in literature well established long before George Orwell’s English pig, Major, headed the dictatorship in Animal Farm. It was a wild boar that killed the hero Diarmaid in the Fenian tale The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne, on top of Ben Bulben in County Sligo (Mac Con Iomaire). In Ancient and Medieval Ireland, wild boars were hunted with great fervour, and the prime cuts were reserved for the warrior classes, and certain other individuals. At a feast, a leg of pork was traditionally reserved for a king, a haunch for a queen, and a boar’s head for a charioteer. The champion warrior was given the best portion of meat (Curath Mhir or Champions’ Share), and fights often took place to decide who should receive it. Gantz (1981) describes how in the ninth century tale The story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, Cet mac Matach, got supremacy over the men of Ireland: “Moreover he flaunted his valour on high above the valour of the host, and took a knife in his hand and sat down beside the pig. “Let someone be found now among the men of Ireland”, said he, “to endure battle with me, or leave the pig for me to divide!”It did not take long before the wild pigs were domesticated. Whereas cattle might be kept for milk and sheep for wool, the only reason for pig rearing was as a source of food. Until the late medieval period, the “domesticated” pigs were fattened on woodland mast, the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut and whitethorn, giving their flesh a delicious flavour. So important was this resource that it is acknowledged by an entry in the Annals of Clonmacnoise for the year 1038: “There was such an abundance of ackornes this yeare that it fattened the pigges [runts] of pigges” (Sexton 45). In another mythological tale, two pig keepers, one called ‘friuch’ after the boars bristle (pig keeper to the king of Munster) and the other called ‘rucht’ after its grunt (pig keeper to the king of Connacht), were such good friends that the one from the north would bring his pigs south when there was a mast of oak and beech nuts in Munster. If the mast fell in Connacht, the pig-keeper from the south would travel northward. Competitive jealousy sparked by troublemakers led to the pig keepers casting spells on each other’s herds to the effect that no matter what mast they ate they would not grow fat. Both pig keepers were practised in the pagan arts and could form themselves into any shape, and having been dismissed by their kings for the leanness of their pig herds due to the spells, they eventually formed themselves into the two famous bulls that feature in the Irish Epic The Táin (Kinsella).In the witty and satirical twelfth century text, The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Aisling Mhic Conglinne), many references are made to the various types of pig meat. Bacon, hams, sausages and puddings are often mentioned, and the gate to the fortress in the visionary land of plenty is described thus: “there was a gate of tallow to it, whereon was a bolt of sausage” (Jackson).Although pigs were always popular in Ireland, the emergence of the potato resulted in an increase in both human and pig populations. The Irish were the first Europeans to seriously consider the potato as a staple food. By 1663 it was widely accepted in Ireland as an important food plant and by 1770 it was known as the Irish Potato (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher). The potato transformed Ireland from an under populated island of one million in the 1590s to 8.2 million in 1840, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. Two centuries of genetic evolution resulted in potato yields growing from two tons per acre in 1670 to ten tons per acre in 1800. A constant supply of potato, which was not seen as a commercial crop, ensured that even the smallest holding could keep a few pigs on a potato-rich diet. Pat Tuite, an expert on pigs with Teagasc, the Irish Agricultural and Food Development Authority, reminded me that the potatoes were cooked for the pigs and that they also enjoyed whey, the by product of both butter and cheese making (Tuite). The agronomist, Arthur Young, while travelling through Ireland, commented in 1770 that in the town of Mitchelstown in County Cork “there seemed to be more pigs than human beings”. So plentiful were pigs at this time that on the eve of the Great Famine in 1841 the pig population was calculated to be 1,412,813 (Sexton 46). Some of the pigs were kept for home consumption but the rest were a valuable source of income and were shown great respect as the gentleman who paid the rent. Until the early twentieth century most Irish rural households kept some pigs.Pork was popular and was the main meat eaten at all feasts in the main houses; indeed a feast was considered incomplete without a whole roasted pig. In the poorer holdings, fresh pork was highly prized, as it was only available when a pig of their own was killed. Most of the pig was salted, placed in the brine barrel for a period or placed up the chimney for smoking.Certain superstitions were observed concerning the time of killing. Pigs were traditionally killed only in months that contained the letter “r”, since the heat of the summer months caused the meat to turn foul. In some counties it was believed that pigs should be killed under the full moon (Mahon 58). The main breed of pig from the medieval period was the Razor Back or Greyhound Pig, which was very efficient in converting organic waste into meat (Fitzgerald). The killing of the pig was an important ritual and a social occasion in rural Ireland, for it meant full and plenty for all. Neighbours, who came to help, brought a handful of salt for the curing, and when the work was done each would get a share of the puddings and the fresh pork. There were a number of days where it was traditional to kill a pig, the Michaelmas feast (29 September), Saint Martins Day (11 November) and St Patrick’s Day (17 March). Olive Sharkey gives a vivid description of the killing of the barrow pig in rural Ireland during the 1930s. A barrow pig is a male pig castrated before puberty:The local slaughterer (búistéir) a man experienced in the rustic art of pig killing, was approached to do the job, though some farmers killed their own pigs. When the búistéirarrived the whole family gathered round to watch the killing. His first job was to plunge the knife in the pig’s heart via the throat, using a special knife. The screeching during this performance was something awful, but the animal died instantly once the heart had been reached, usually to a round of applause from the onlookers. The animal was then draped across a pig-gib, a sort of bench, and had the fine hairs on its body scraped off. To make this a simple job the animal was immersed in hot water a number of times until the bristles were softened and easy to remove. If a few bristles were accidentally missed the bacon was known as ‘hairy bacon’!During the killing of the pig it was imperative to draw a good flow of blood to ensure good quality meat. This blood was collected in a bucket for the making of puddings. The carcass would then be hung from a hook in the shed with a basin under its head to catch the drip, and a potato was often placed in the pig’s mouth to aid the dripping process. After a few days the carcass would be dissected. Sharkey recalls that her father maintained that each pound weight in the pig’s head corresponded to a stone weight in the body. The body was washed and then each piece that was to be preserved was carefully salted and placed neatly in a barrel and hermetically sealed. It was customary in parts of the midlands to add brown sugar to the barrel at this stage, while in other areas juniper berries were placed in the fire when hanging the hams and flitches (sides of bacon), wrapped in brown paper, in the chimney for smoking (Sharkey 166). While the killing was predominantly men’s work, it was the women who took most responsibility for the curing and smoking. Puddings have always been popular in Irish cuisine. The pig’s intestines were washed well and soaked in a stream, and a mixture of onions, lard, spices, oatmeal and flour were mixed with the blood and the mixture was stuffed into the casing and boiled for about an hour, cooled and the puddings were divided amongst the neighbours.The pig was so palatable that the famous gastronomic writer Grimod de la Reyniere once claimed that the only piece you couldn’t eat was the “oink”. Sharkey remembers her father remarking that had they been able to catch the squeak they would have made tin whistles out of it! No part went to waste; the blood and offal were used, the trotters were known as crubeens (from crúb, hoof), and were boiled and eaten with cabbage. In Galway the knee joint was popular and known as the glúiníns (from glún, knee). The head was roasted whole or often boiled and pressed and prepared as Brawn. The chitterlings (small intestines) were meticulously prepared by continuous washing in cool water and the picking out of undigested food and faeces. Chitterlings were once a popular bar food in Dublin. Pig hair was used for paintbrushes and the bladder was occasionally inflated, using a goose quill, to be used as a football by the children. Meindertsma (2007) provides a pictorial review of the vast array of products derived from a single pig. These range from ammunition and porcelain to chewing gum.From around the mid-eighteenth century, commercial salting of pork and bacon grew rapidly in Ireland. 1820 saw Henry Denny begin operation in Waterford where he both developed and patented several production techniques for bacon. Bacon curing became a very important industry in Munster culminating in the setting up of four large factories. Irish bacon was the brand leader and the Irish companies exported their expertise. Denny set up a plant in Denmark in 1894 and introduced the Irish techniques to the Danish industry, while O’Mara’s set up bacon curing facilities in Russia in 1891 (Cowan and Sexton). Ireland developed an extensive export trade in bacon to England, and hams were delivered to markets in Paris, India, North and South America. The “sandwich method” of curing, or “dry cure”, was used up until 1862 when the method of injecting strong brine into the meat by means of a pickling pump was adopted by Irish bacon-curers. 1887 saw the formation of the Bacon Curers’ Pig Improvement Association and they managed to introduce a new breed, the Large White Ulster into most regions by the turn of the century. This breed was suitable for the production of “Wiltshire” bacon. Cork, Waterford Dublin and Belfast were important centres for bacon but it was Limerick that dominated the industry and a Department of Agriculture document from 1902 suggests that the famous “Limerick cure” may have originated by chance:1880 […] Limerick producers were short of money […] they produced what was considered meat in a half-cured condition. The unintentional cure proved extremely popular and others followed suit. By the turn of the century the mild cure procedure was brought to such perfection that meat could [… be] sent to tropical climates for consumption within a reasonable time (Cowan and Sexton).Failure to modernise led to the decline of bacon production in Limerick in the 1960s and all four factories closed down. The Irish pig market was protected prior to joining the European Union. There were no imports, and exports were subsidised by the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The Department of Agriculture started pig testing in the early 1960s and imported breeds from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The two main breeds were Large White and Landrace. Most farms kept pigs before joining the EU but after 1972, farmers were encouraged to rationalise and specialise. Grants were made available for facilities that would keep 3,000 pigs and these grants kick started the development of large units.Pig keeping and production were not only rural occupations; Irish towns and cities also had their fair share. Pigs could easily be kept on swill from hotels, restaurants, not to mention the by-product and leftovers of the brewing and baking industries. Ed Hick, a fourth generation pork butcher from south County Dublin, recalls buying pigs from a local coal man and bus driver and other locals for whom it was a tradition to keep pigs on the side. They would keep some six or eight pigs at a time and feed them on swill collected locally. Legislation concerning the feeding of swill introduced in 1985 (S.I.153) and an amendment in 1987 (S.I.133) required all swill to be heat-treated and resulted in most small operators going out of business. Other EU directives led to the shutting down of thousands of slaughterhouses across Europe. Small producers like Hick who slaughtered at most 25 pigs a week in their family slaughterhouse, states that it was not any one rule but a series of them that forced them to close. It was not uncommon for three inspectors, a veterinarian, a meat inspector and a hygiene inspector, to supervise himself and his brother at work. Ed Hick describes the situation thus; “if we had taken them on in a game of football, we would have lost! We were seen as a huge waste of veterinary time and manpower”.Sausages and rashers have long been popular in Dublin and are the main ingredients in the city’s most famous dish “Dublin Coddle.” Coddle is similar to an Irish stew except that it uses pork rashers and sausage instead of lamb. It was, traditionally, a Saturday night dish when the men came home from the public houses. Terry fa*gan has a book on Dublin Folklore called Monto: Murder, Madams and Black Coddle. The black coddle resulted from soot falling down the chimney into the cauldron. James Joyce describes Denny’s sausages with relish in Ulysses, and like many other Irish emigrants, he would welcome visitors from home only if they brought Irish sausages and Irish whiskey with them. Even today, every family has its favourite brand of sausages: Byrne’s, Olhausens, Granby’s, Hafner’s, Denny’s Gold Medal, Kearns and Superquinn are among the most popular. Ironically the same James Joyce, who put Dublin pork kidneys on the world table in Ulysses, was later to call his native Ireland “the old sow that eats her own farrow” (184-5).The last thirty years have seen a concerted effort to breed pigs that have less fat content and leaner meat. There are no pure breeds of Landrace or Large White in production today for they have been crossbred for litter size, fat content and leanness (Tuite). Many experts feel that they have become too lean, to the detriment of flavour and that the meat can tend to split when cooked. Pig production is now a complicated science and tighter margins have led to only large-scale operations being financially viable (Whittemore). The average size of herd has grown from 29 animals in 1973, to 846 animals in 1997, and the highest numbers are found in counties Cork and Cavan (Lafferty et al.). The main players in today’s pig production/processing are the large Irish Agribusiness Multinationals Glanbia, Kerry Foods and Dairygold. Tuite (2002) expressed worries among the industry that there may be no pig production in Ireland in twenty years time, with production moving to Eastern Europe where feed and labour are cheaper. When it comes to traceability, in the light of the Foot and Mouth, BSE and Dioxin scares, many feel that things were much better in the old days, when butchers like Ed Hick slaughtered animals that were reared locally and then sold them back to local consumers. Hick has recently killed pigs for friends who have begun keeping them for home consumption. This slaughtering remains legal as long as the meat is not offered for sale.Although bacon and cabbage, and the full Irish breakfast with rashers, sausages and puddings, are considered to be some of Ireland’s most well known traditional dishes, there has been a growth in modern interpretations of traditional pork and bacon dishes in the repertoires of the seemingly ever growing number of talented Irish chefs. Michael Clifford popularised Clonakilty Black Pudding as a starter in his Cork restaurant Clifford’s in the late 1980s, and its use has become widespread since, as a starter or main course often partnered with either caramelised apples or red onion marmalade. Crubeens (pigs trotters) have been modernised “a la Pierre Kaufman” by a number of Irish chefs, who bone them out and stuff them with sweetbreads. Kevin Thornton, the first Irish chef to be awarded two Michelin stars, has roasted suckling pig as one of his signature dishes. Richard Corrigan is keeping the Irish flag flying in London in his Michelin starred Soho restaurant, Lindsay House, where traditional pork and bacon dishes from his childhood are creatively re-interpreted with simplicity and taste.Pork, ham and bacon are, without doubt, the most traditional of all Irish foods, featuring in the diet since prehistoric times. Although these meats remain the most consumed per capita in post “Celtic Tiger” Ireland, there are a number of threats facing the country’s pig industry. Large-scale indoor production necessitates the use of antibiotics. European legislation and economic factors have contributed in the demise of the traditional art of pork butchery. Scientific advancements have resulted in leaner low-fat pigs, many argue, to the detriment of flavour. Alas, all is not lost. There is a growth in consumer demand for quality local food, and some producers like J. Hick & Sons, and Prue & David Rudd and Family are leading the way. The Rudds process and distribute branded antibiotic-free pig related products with the mission of “re-inventing the tastes of bygone days with the quality of modern day standards”. Few could argue with the late Irish writer John B. Keane (72): “When this kind of bacon is boiling with its old colleague, white cabbage, there is a gurgle from the pot that would tear the heart out of any hungry man”.ReferencesCowan, Cathal and Regina Sexton. Ireland's Traditional Foods: An Exploration of Irish Local & Typical Foods & Drinks. Dublin: Teagasc, 1997.C.S.O. Central Statistics Office. Figures on per capita meat consumption for 2009, 2010. Ireland. http://www.cso.ie.Fitzgerald, Oisin. "The Irish 'Greyhound' Pig: an extinct indigenous breed of Pig." History Ireland13.4 (2005): 20-23.Gantz, Jeffrey Early Irish Myths and Sagas. New York: Penguin, 1981.Harris, Marvin. "The Abominable Pig." Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. 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