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The paper examines the impact of genetic research on the religious identity of the Bene Israel Indian Jewish community and the Lemba Judaising group of southern Africa. It demonstrates how DNA tests which happened to support the possibility of the communities' legends of origin affected their self-perception, the way they are viewed by their neighbors, and their image in the West. It is argued that in both cases what accounted most for the Bene Israel and Lemba responses to the tests was the way the results were portrayed in the mass media, the history of the development of Judaism in their communities, and the local realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing Somali narratives of emotion and suffering with literature about emotion in relation to trauma and "the refugee experience," this paper contributes to the understanding of emotion, suffering, and trauma in different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, and interrogates the roles and methods of ethnographies of trauma in situations of high political, social, and economic stakes. In the mid-1990s, emotional distress among Ethiopian Somali returnees was about social rupture and injustice and not simply about private suffering. Emotion is critical to creating, recognizing, reinforcing, and mobilizing the moral webs on which both individual and collective survival depend. In the aftermath of dispossession and war, and amidst ongoing hunger and destitution, certain expressions of emotion carry a particularly important valence: anger, passion, and rhetorics of demoralization revolving around a collective narrative of dispossession and demands for restitution. "Experience near" descriptions of Somali emotion expressions cannot be conflated with "psychological" analyses or "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Somali refugee narratives index and challenge the embodiment in lived experience of local, national, and global institutions' (in)action and inequality. To the extent that academic debates over emotion and trauma help to shape, reinforce, or challenge the assumptions and practices of institutions affecting millions of lives, we researchers must address in our analyses the practical and political implications of how we interpret and write about emotion, trauma, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research with Somalis, within aid organizations, and within health care facilities in the Somali Region of Ethiopia, this article argues that what is called "global health diplomacy," despite its origins and articulations in interstate politics, is fundamentally local and interpersonal. As evidence, I outline two very different health programs in the Somali Region of Ethiopia, and how, in each, existing animosities and political grievances were either reinforced or undermined. I argue that the provision of health care in politically insecure and post-conflict settings like the Somali Region of Ethiopia is precarious but pivotal: medical encounters have the potential to either worsen the conditions in which conflicts and crises recur, or build new interpersonal and governmental relations of trust. Effective global health diplomacy, therefore, cannot be limited to building clinics and donating medicine, but must also explicitly include building positive relationships of trust between oppositional groups within clinical spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on qualitative and quantitative research to examine the relationship between the consumption of khat, symptoms of depression and anxiety and the experience of time among young men in urban Ethiopia. Young men claim that khat, a mild stimulant, both causes and alleviates symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, our quantitative data indicate that there is not a direct relationship between khat and symptoms of depression and anxiety. We analyze this apparent contradiction in terms of young men's experiences of time. Long-term ethnographic research indicates that khat consumption and mental distress have a close relationship with young men's temporal problems. In a context of high urban unemployment, young men struggle to negotiate overabundant amounts of unstructured time in the present and place themselves within a narrative in which they are progressing toward future aspirations. These temporal struggles generate symptoms of depression and anxiety. For young men, khat consumption functions to reposition them in relation to time, both in the present and the future. Ultimately, we argue that the relationship between khat and time has implications for the economic issues that underlie young people's symptoms of depression and anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1984 and 1996, public health authorities in Israel maintained a secret policy of discarding blood donations made by Ethiopian-Israeli citizens and immigrants. Officials later attempted to justify this policy on the grounds that immigrants from Ethiopia were subject to high rates of infectious disease (especially HIV). In 1996, this led to an explosive and violent confrontation between Ethiopian-Israeli protestors and agents of the state, including police and public health authorities. This essay explores the cultural and political context of that confrontation, including the discourse of political violence which it occasioned. The conflict between Ethiopian-Israelis and the state was located within a wider set of political contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was linked to it through a shared trope of "spilled blood" common to both. Cultural analyses which ignore this dynamic political context are in danger of seriously misrepresenting the meaning of the "Blood Affair" to its participants. At the same time, this essay also engages a critical analysis of the public health policies which led to the crisis. Public health and nationalist discourse reinforced one another at the expense of Ethiopian immigrants in general, and so-called "Feres Mura" Ethiopians in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]