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The study illustrates how the German-speaking author Cătălin Dorian Florescu challenges simplistic identity constructs in his short story collection Der Nabel der Welt (2017), thus transcending the label of a writer who merely exoticizes the Eastern-European other, as some critics have previously asserted. Employing Lotman's model of the semiosphere as framework for analysis, this paper offers an interpretation of Florescu's fictionalized border areas as spaces of cultural bilingualism and signification recoding for the ›Self‹ (i.e., the Western European elite culture) and the ›Foreign‹ (i.e., the migrant milieu from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might one make sense of the intimate but often assumed connection between social inequality and social death? In this paper, I offer an answer. It develops in stages. First, I set out in some detail an account of person prominent in sub-Saharan African thought systems, specifically the version of it found in the writings of Ifeanyi Menkiti. Second, I show how this account entails both that persons are social entities and that consequently they belong in a social ontology. Third, I suggest a perspective on Orlando Patterson's notion of social death and then show how Menkiti's account of persons as psycho-social entities can provide ontological grounding for the phenomenon of social death. Roughly, the overarching claim is that rather than merely disrespect their victims, oppressive forms of social inequality essentially depersonalise them in the sense at issue in Patterson's social death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper addresses the issue of the relative absence of anthropologists in the formulation of HIV/AIDS policy and research in Africa. Initially, taking an historical perspective, it looks at the development of the main policy-making forums in the USA before turning to the more recent establishment of UNAIDS and its dominant role in setting the agenda for Africa. The implications for anthropological research are then considered in order to shed light on the reluctance which can be discerned in the discipline to get involved in research on AIDS. Turning to specific case material, the paper then examines AIDS educational strategies in Botswana to provide an illustration of the potential insights anthropology can bring to explain the success or failure of such campaings. Stressing the importance of the cultural constructions of the disease, it shows how the western AIDS message is interpreted by local populations not as neutral scientific „fact“ but as an aspect of political and ideological domination. In turn, this discussion raises the issue of the coexistence of different belief systems, especially in the sphere of medicine, their interrelations and the social contexts in which response to western messages is antagonistic as opposed to complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces this issue of the journal, which discusses environmental factors, particularly global environmental change, of migration patterns and movements, with several contributions focusing on Africa.

Reviews and announcements of publications, conferences, and other events in the social sciences are presented, including about an exhibition about social movements in Munich, Germany, in the 1970s, entitled "Wem gehört die Stadt?" and on view until September 1, 2013, in Munich, the World Social Forum conference in Tunis, Tunesia, from March 26-30, 2013, and the working paper "Wie mit Homophobie Politik gemacht wird: Menschenrechte und Verfolgung von LSBTI-Aktivist_innen in Afrika," by Rita Schäfer and Eva Range, part of the FES Internationale Politikanalyse series.

The establishment of a military command for Africa (US AFRICOM) symbolizes the radical repositioning of the US military. Facilitated by the consensus in contemporary Western foreign policies - that there can be no development without security - over the last ten years the US military has expanded its activities into civilian domains including development and conflict prevention. As a reaction to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, recent US military doctrines on counterinsurgency and stability operations have singled out the need for more civilian and long-term activities as a precondition for success. AFRICOM has put most of these „military innovations" into practice. Due to the command's focus on development activities, on civil-military coordination and its proposed engagement in non-war situations, in military circles AFRICOM is seen as a role model for future military practices. This paper problematizes the military's expanding mandate and discusses its implications. It argues that the military's increasing engagement in issues of governance and development deeply blurs the normative boundary between the military and the civilian and exposes development as a technology of security. Furthermore, the military's repositioning follows the dominant securitization of so- called „fragile states" and classifies social spaces along Western strategic interests. As a consequence, targeted communities find it hard to separate development efforts aimed at countering poverty and those aimed at countering insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]