The economic anthropologist as romantic bricoleur

More than 50 years after the writing of the papers assembled as Stone Age Economics, the author’s voice has been silenced. That immense contribution has been the subject of numerous reassessments. The volume contains all his important work in economic anthropology. Each chapter is teeming with ideas, and even seasoned teachers in this field will usually discover something new each time they revisit it. Looking at it again this year, I was astonished to realize that I used to use this book for teaching first-year undergraduates. Even for the brightest young sparks in Cambridge, to require the completion within a week of an essay evaluating Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (Mauss 2015 [1925]) in the light of the fourth chapter of Stone Age Economics(Sahlins 2004 [1972]) was asking rather a lot.

The Dialectics of Disembedding and Civil Society in Provincial Hungary

This essay applies Karl Polanyi's concepts of embedding and countermovement to provincial Hungary during and after socialism. Comprehensive state socialist repression in the 1950s was a politics-led disembedding. An economy-led countermovement began in the 1960s, later augmented by elite discourses of civil society. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of socialist embeddedness. Neoliberal configurations after 1990 dislocated both economic and associational life. The illiberal democracy of Viktor Orbán is a more consequential countermovement than the earlier countermovements to state socialism. The argument is illustrated with data from long-term fieldwork in southern Hungary, in the region of the Danube-Tisza Interfluve.

K-Means Partitioned Space Path Planning (KPSPP) for Autonomous Robotic Harvesting

A three-dimensional coverage path-planning algorithm is proposed for discrete harvesting machines. Although prior research has developed methods for coverage planning in continuous-crop fields, no such algorithm has been developed for discrete crops such as trees. The problem is formulated as a graph traversal problem and solved using graph techniques. Paths to facilitate autonomous operation are generated. A case study is formed around the novel tree-to-tree felling system developed by the University of Canterbury and Scion. This machine is being developed to manoeuvre through New Zealand's plantation forest to fell Pinus radiata trees on steep (≤ 45°) terrain. Algorithm performance is evaluated in 14 commercial plantation forests. Results indicate that a mean coverage of 84.43% was achieved.

Transition, tradition, and nostalgia; postsocialist transformations in a comparative framework

The concepts of transition and tradition have not been the object of much original theoretical work in recent Anglophone socio-cultural anthropology. The term transition has been applied loosely to the demise of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and their replacement by market economies and more pluralist forms of government. However, these objectives have proved elusive and most anthropologists therefore speak of open-ended "transformation processes" rather than a linear shift to capitalist democracy. Use of the concept of tradition has been much influenced by the work of historians on the "invention of tradition". This paper explores how societies, in particular elite groups, construct different types of tradition in the wake of historical caesurae. Paying particular attention to the concept of nostalgia, it compares perceptions of the past in Britain, where social change has been largely gradual, with those in empires and states which experienced sharp political discontinuities in the twentieth century. To explain and understand nostalgia for socialism in large sections of the population in many postsocialist states, it is necessary to investigate not only economic and social mobility and related material factors but also factors pertaining to identity, especially collective identities.

Faltering dialogue?

Both inside and outside Europe, many societies have drawn on their own textual traditions to generate bodies of knowledge possessing some affinity to comparative socio-cultural anthropology. The premise of this article is that even where the focus is restricted to one country or one nationality, such “national ethnography“ should be considered as a legitimate branch of a broadly conceived anthropological field, rather than belittled or denigrated. Under socialism, both native and foreign researchers carried out fieldwork in similar rural locations in Hungary. A dialogue began, but it seems to have weakened in recent years, despite the fact that access to the region has become incomparably easier. Another change is that Hungarian students are now able to study socio-cultural anthropology as a seperate program in a separate faculty, distinct from Hungarian néprajz. This article is critical of such developments and takes the Hungarian example to argue for the benefits of institutional unification. The resulting department would be larger and more cosmopolitan than the old departments of néprajz, but it would retain its local roots. The integration of “national ethnography“ into research and teaching programs in anthropology would facilitate the persistence of distinctive national, regional, and institution-specific intellectual traditions; such departments could also facilitate the work of fieldworkers from abroad.

Civilizational analysis for beginners

The concept of civilization has not prospered in socio-cultural anthropology. Its origins lie in Enlightenment France, where it was used in both singular and plural forms, the universalist singular eventually prevailing in the decades leading up to the Revolution. Our discipline came to prefer pluralizing counter-currents of this universalism such as that associated with Johann Gottfried Herder. The key term in German was Kultur, though it was not widely used in the plural until the twentieth century, while Zivilisation referred to technological progress. For Edward Burnett Tylor in England, culture and civilization were synonymous. But even before the demise of the European colonial empires, most socio-cultural anthropologists were uncomfortable with the normative connotations of the latter. They preferred to carry out ethnographic studies within paradigms that represented the world as composed of more or less bounded societies with their more or less incommensurable cultures. With the abandonment of evolutionist paradigms, analyses of the emergence of civilization from primitive cultures were rendered redundant and repugnant.

Modeling the glucose regulatory system in extreme preterm infants

BACKGROUND

Premature infants represent a significant proportion of the neonatal intensive care population. Blood glucose homeostasis in this group is often disturbed by immaturity of endogenous regulatory systems and the stress of their condition. Hypo- and hyperglycemia are frequently reported in very low birth weight infants, and more mature infants often experience low levels of glycemia. A model capturing the unique fundamental dynamics of the neonatal glucose regulatory system could be used to develop better blood glucose control methods.

METHODS

A metabolic system model is adapted from adult critical care to the unique physiological case of the neonate. Integral-based fitting methods were used to identify time-varying insulin sensitivity and non-insulin mediated glucose uptake profiles. The clinically important predictive ability of the model was assessed by assuming insulin sensitivity was constant over prediction intervals of 1, 2 and 4h forward and comparing model-simulated versus actual clinical glucose values for all recorded interventions. The clinical data included 1091 glucose measurements over 3567 total patient hours, along with all associated insulin and nutritional infusion data, for N=25 total cases. Ethics approval was obtained from the Upper South A Regional Ethics Committee for this study.

RESULTS

The identified model had a median absolute percentage error of 2.4% [IQR: 0.9-4.8%] between model-fitted and clinical glucose values. Median absolute prediction errors at 1-, 2- and 4-h intervals were 5.2% [IQR: 2.5-10.3%], 9.4% [IQR: 4.5-18.4%] and 13.6% [IQR: 6.3-27.6%] respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The model accurately captures and predicts the fundamental dynamic behaviors of the neonatal metabolism well enough for effective clinical decision support in glycemic control. The adaptation from adult to a neonatal case is based on the data from the literature. Low prediction errors and very low fitting errors indicate that the fundamental dynamics of glucose metabolism in both premature neonates and critical care adults can be described by similar mathematical models.

Smith in Beijing, Stalin in Urumchi

The extraordinary growth rates of China’s “reform socialist” economy have helped to finance not only the United States’ debt but also large-scale transfers to the country’s underdeveloped regions. Yet violence in Tibet in 2008 was followed in July 2009 by major rioting in Xinjiang. This article approaches the latter events through the analysis of contemporary labor markets, socialist policies toward ethnic minorities, and the history of Xinjiang’s incorporation into the Manchu empire. Theoretical inspiration for this longue durée analysis is drawn from Adam Smith, via Giovanni Arrighi’s recent reassessment of the Smithian market model; anthropological work points to flaws in this vision.

Blood glucose controller for neonatal intensive care: virtual trials development and first clinical trials

BACKGROUND

Premature neonates often experience hyperglycemia, which has been linked to worsened outcomes. Insulin therapy can assist in controlling blood glucose (BG) levels. However, a reliable, robust control protocol is required to avoid hypoglycemia and to ensure that clinically important nutrition goals are met.

METHODS

This study presents an adaptive, model-based predictive controller designed to incorporate the unique metabolic state of the neonate. Controller performance was tested and refined in virtual trials on a 25-patient retrospective cohort. The effects of measurement frequency and BG sensor error were evaluated. A stochastic model of insulin sensitivity was used in control to provide a guaranteed maximum 4% risk of BG < 72 mg/dl to protect against hypoglycemia as well as account for patient variability over 1-3 h intervals when determining the intervention. The resulting controller is demonstrated in two 24 h clinical neonatal pilot trials at Christchurch Women's Hospital.

RESULTS

Time in the 72-126 mg/dl BG band was increased by 103-161% compared to retrospective clinical control for virtual trials of the controller, with fewer hypoglycemic measurements. Controllers were robust to BG sensor errors. The model-based controller maintained glycemia to a tight target control range and accounted for interpatient variability in patient glycemic response despite using more insulin than the retrospective case, illustrating a further measure of controller robustness. Pilot clinical trials demonstrated initial safety and efficacy of the control method.

CONCLUSIONS

A controller was developed that made optimum use of the very limited available BG measurements in the neonatal intensive care unit and provided robustness against BG sensor error and longer BG measurement intervals. It used more insulin than typical sliding scale approaches or retrospective hospital control. The potential advantages of a model-based approach demonstrated in simulation were applied to initial clinical trials.

Reproduction and Inheritance: Goody Revisited

According to Jack Goody, in a body of work that dates back to the 1950s, differences in the mode of inheritance between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa have multiple connections to domestic groups, kin terminology, politics and stratification, and above all, productive systems. Goody's theory is built on evolutionist assumptions and draws in part on statistical analysis of the Ethnographic Atlas. Theoretically and methodologically unfashionable among sociocultural anthropologists, his work has been largely ignored in recent decades. This article considers the standard criticisms and reviews pertinent recent work on kinship and property in rural Europe and in legal anthropology. Inheritance was supposed to lose its fundamental social significance in socialist societies, and it also came to play a smaller role in the social reproduction of advanced capitalist societies. However, this eclipse may prove to be temporary, and a reengagement with the topic on the part of anthropologists is overdue.

Dynamic models of ARDS lung mechanics for optimal patient ventilation

Mechanical ventilation is often used to treat patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). However, the optimal setting is still controversial, and physicians often rely on experience and intuition. The purpose of this research is to develop a model of the essential lung mechanics to help determining the optimal ventilator setting in clinical situations. The model is a compilation of physiologically based mechanics parameters, which are adjustable to represent patient specific conditions. Further investigation improvements are required, however it shows good initial for eventual clinical use.

Targeted glycemic reduction in critical care using closed-loop control

BACKGROUND

Critically ill patients are often hyperglycemic and extremely diverse in their dynamics. Consequently, fixed protocols and sliding scales can result in error and poor control. Tight glucose control has been shown to significantly reduce mortality in critical care. An improved physiological system model of the glucose-insulin dynamics of a critical care patient is used to develop an adaptive tight glucose control protocol that accounts for variable patient dynamics, and is verified in limited clinical trials.

METHODS

A physiologically based two-compartment system model that accounts for time-varying insulin sensitivity, time-varying endogenous glucose removal, and two saturation kinetics mechanisms is developed. A bolus-based adaptive control protocol is developed that monitors the physiological status of a critically ill patient, enabling tight glycemic regulation to preset glycemic targets. The model and protocol are verified in three, 5-h preliminary proof-of-concept clinical trials. Ethics approval was granted by the Canterbury Ethics Committee (Christchurch, New Zealand).

RESULTS

Preset glycemic targets are achieved with an average absolute error of 9%, with 75% of all targets achieved within the 7% measurement error. Absolute errors greater than 7% ranged from 17% to 21%.

CONCLUSIONS

Tight stepwise control was exhibited in all cases, and the adaptive system was able to match the model and observed patient dynamics. Most errors are associated with external perturbations such as drug therapies, or mismodeled parameters that can be easily adjusted with longer trials and/or more data per hour. The overall result is targeted stepwise tight glycemic regulation using insulin boluses.

Adaptive bolus-based targeted glucose regulation of hyperglycaemia in critical care

Tight regulation of blood glucose can significantly reduce mortality in critical illness. Critically ill patients are extremely diverse in the dynamics of their hyperglycaemia. Hence, responses can vary significantly, due to variations in insulin levels, effective insulin utilization, glucose absorption and other factors. Consequently, fixed protocols and sliding scales can result in error, given this large variation in patient dynamics. A two-compartment glucose-insulin system model that accounts for time-varying insulin sensitivity and endogenous glucose removal, along with two different saturation kinetics, is developed and tested in preliminary proof-of-concept clinical trials for adaptive control of blood glucose levels. The adaptive control algorithm developed in this research monitors the physiological status of a critically ill patient, allowing real-time, tight glycaemic regulation. The bolus-based insulin administration provides a safe approach to glucose level management. The ability to track changing physiological status and account for insulin transport and effect saturation enabled targeted stepwise reduction in glycaemic levels in three test cases.

Both food preferences and food frequency scores predict fat intakes of women with breast cancer

OBJECTIVE

To determine whether self-reported frequencies of food use were linked to self-reported preferences for the same foods. The hypothesis was that both food frequencies and food preferences can predict nutrient intakes.

RESPONDENTS

Participants were adult women patients (n = 339), recruited through the University of Michigan Breast Care Center. The sample included both persons with breast cancer and persons who were cancer-free.

DESIGN

All women completed a 98-item food frequency questionnaire and rated preferences for many of the same foods using a 9-point category scale. Percent energy from fat and saturated fat, and intakes of dietary fiber and vitamin C were estimated from analyses of 4-day food records.

STATISTICAL ANALYSES

Pearson correlations coefficients were used for data analysis.

RESULTS

Dislike was a strong predictor of nonuse. In contrast, the more preferred foods were also reported as more frequently consumed. Significant correlations between preference and frequency scores were obtained for virtually all item pairs. Median Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.30 (range 0.04 to 0.56). Correlations improved when foods were aggregated into the chief dietary sources of fat, saturated fat, and vitamin C. Food frequencies and food preferences showed the same strength of association with percent energy from fat and saturated fat (r = 0.20 to 0.25). Food frequencies showed a stronger association with vitamin C intakes than did preferences for vegetables and fruit.

APPLICATIONS

Food preferences may provide a potential alternative to the food frequency approach.

Taste and food preferences as predictors of dietary practices in young women

OBJECTIVE

To investigate links between taste responses, self-reported food preferences and selected dietary outcomes in young women.

METHODS

Subjects were 159 women, with a mean age of 27.0 years. Taste responses were measured using aqueous solutions of 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) and sucrose. All subjects completed a 171-item food preference checklist, using nine-point category scales. Food preference data were reduced using principal components factor analyses, with the internal consistency of factor-based subscales established using Cronbach's alpha. Dietary intakes, available for a subset of 87 women, were based on 3 days of food records. Estimated intakes of carbohydrate, fibre and beta-carotene were the key dietary outcome variables.

RESULTS

Genetically-mediated sensitivity to the bitter taste of PROP was associated with reduced preferences for Brussels sprouts, cabbage, spinach and coffee beverages. Higher preferences for sucrose in water were associated with increased preferences for sweet desserts. Food preferences, in turn, were associated with measures of current diet. Reduced acceptability of vegetables and fruits was associated with lower estimated intakes of carbohydrate, fibre and beta-carotene.

CONCLUSIONS

Taste responses to sucrose and PROP were predictive of some food preferences. Food preferences, in turn, were associated with food consumption patterns. Given that taste responsiveness to PROP is an inherited trait, there may be further links between genetic taste markers, eating habits and the selection of healthful diets.

Food preferences and reported frequencies of food consumption as predictors of current diet in young women

BACKGROUND

Self-reported food preferences and frequencies of food consumption have served as proxy measures of the current diet in consumer research and in nutritional epidemiology studies, respectively.

OBJECTIVE

The objective was to determine whether food preferences and food-frequency scores are associated variables that are predictive of nutrient intakes.

DESIGN

College-age women (n = 87) completed a 98-item food-frequency questionnaire and rated preferences for many of the same foods on a 9-point category scale. Estimated intakes of fat, fiber, and vitamin C were obtained by using 3-d food records.

RESULTS

For virtually all item pairs tested, food preferences and reported frequencies of consumption of the same foods were significantly correlated with each other. The median Pearson correlation coefficient was 0.40 (range: -0.04 to 0.62). Correlations improved when foods were aggregated into factor-based food groups. The slope of the relation between food preferences and frequency of consumption varied with food category. Both food preferences and food frequencies predicted dietary outcomes. Fat consumption was predicted equally well by either approach in a multiple regression model. Intakes of fiber and vitamin C were better predicted by food-frequency scores than by stated preferences for vegetables and fruit.

CONCLUSIONS

Reported frequencies of food consumption, the core of the food-frequency approach, were associated with food likes and dislikes. Food preferences were a predictor of dietary intakes and may provide an alternative to the food-frequency approach for dietary intake assessment.