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This essay explores the spiritual diagnosis of Black men in the American ghetto. The ghetto is viewed as a place of desolation, a place where nothing of value thrives—quite simply, a place where it is hard to grow. But is it also something more? By using the biblical story of Hagar and her son Ishmael being abandoned in the wilderness, the author argues that it is within deleterious environs, whether the wilderness or the ghetto, that one’s gift is discovered and then, through divine assistance, allowed to develop. This offers a useful tool in terms of spiritual diagnosis, especially for Black men, because one of the main criteria to be assessed becomes the person’s awareness of his gift and how the gift is being developed. In the end, Black men are encouraged to become more aware of their specific gift and the ways in which this gift, when properly cared for, develops—i.e., grows up—in such a way that it protects them, above all, in an uncaring environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By tracing the transformations of troubling exchanges in paid home care, this article examines how differently positioned individuals strive to build caring relations within potentially restrictive regimes of care. In paid home care in Chicago, older adults and their workers regularly participate in exchanges of money, time, and material goods. These gifts play a crucial role in building good care relationships that sustain participants' moral personhood. Amid widespread concern about vulnerable elders, home care agencies compete in a crowded marketplace by prohibiting these exchanges, even as they depend on them to strengthen relationships. Supervisors thus exercise discretion, sometimes reclassifying gift exchanges as punishable thefts. In this context, the commodification of care did not lead to the actual elimination of gift relations, but rather transformed gift relations into a suspicious and troublesome source of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of Middle and Late Woodland pottery (n = 313) and clay (n = 22) samples from northeastern Florida and southeastern Georgia are presented. Assemblages in this region include Swift Creek Complicated Stamped pottery that preserves unique evidence of social interactions through the inimitable qualities of designs stamped into vessel surfaces. Archaeologists have proffered various hypotheses to explain movement of ceramic vessels or the carved wooden paddles used in the manufacture of these vessels. This study tests these hypotheses and indicates that nonlocal vessels, particularly complicated stamped ones, were deposited almost exclusively in mortuary contexts, a pattern that requires new explanations for the role of pottery in social interactions. These data are being integrated with a larger project that aims to reveal the social processes that were tied to the manufacture, use, and distribution of pottery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories of emigrants from Laos and Cambodia living in the United States are charged with an awareness of material indebtedness to the dead, especially those who died violent or inadequately attended deaths during wartime. At stake in this indebtedness is a sociality of living and dead that involves ongoing responsibility and care. Lao, Khmer, Kmhmu, and Hmong emigrants address both wartime violence, and the structural violence of minoritization and poverty in the United States through a reciprocity of living and dead. This reciprocity is intercepted by the biopolitical protocol of hospitals and funeral homes, which negates the social existence of the dead in ways that echo violations of the dead during wartime. In the United States, violation of the dead is linked not just to sciences of sanitation and death causation, but to latent theological presumptions about body and spirit. The presumption of a radical rupture between corpse and spirit enables the treatment of the corpse as inert matter with a purely symbolic relationship to the social person. The separation of matter and spirit that organizes the biopolitical management of death is also linked to mourning practices that emphasize memorialization over a bodily intimacy with the dead as social beings. Furthermore, current critiques of biopolitics following Agamben, although useful for addressing the devaluation of the living, prove inadequate to address socialities of living and dead. It is through their concrete participation in social encounters with the dead that emigrants respond to the material reverberations of past violence in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new prominence given to science for economic growth and industry comes with an increased policy focus on the promotion of commodification and commercialization of academic science. This paper posits that this increased interest in commodification is a new steering mechanism for governing science. This is achieved by first outlining what is meant by the commodification of scientific knowledge through reviewing a selection of literatures on the concept of commodification. The paper concludes with a discussion of how commodification functions as a means for governing science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data relating to the rate of clinical pregnancy obtained with in-vitro fertilization - embryo transfer (IVF-ET) and gamete intra-Fallopian transfer (GIFT) are available for Australia, UK, USA and France. For IVF-ET the value is not affected by the indication but is affected by the age of the woman. The rate of spontaneous abortion, at ∼ 20–25% also increases with age and is an important consideration in view of the increased age of patients undergoing IVF-ET. A take-home baby rate of 30% is obtained from an estimated 70% of clinical pregnancies leading to live births and an estimate of 42.8% pregnancies after three attempts. The greater number of oocytes transferred with GIFT may be associated with the increased frequency of multiple pregnancies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]