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VALERI, Valerio, Classic Concepts in Anthropology, 280 pp., appendix, bibliography. Chicago: HAU Books, 2018. Paperback, $30.00. ISBN 9780990505082. VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, Eduardo, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds, 366 pp., bibliography, index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780990505037. ABRAMSON, Allen, and Martin HOLBRAAD, eds., Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, 336 pp., bibligraphical references, index. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9781526107183. WEIL, Shalva, ed., The Baghdadi Jews in India: Maintaining Communities, Negotiating Identities and Creating Super-Diversity, 202 pp., illustrations, notes, references. London: Routledge, 2019. eBook, $42.00. ISBN 9780367197872. STADLER, Nurit, Voices of the Ritual: Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land, 216 pp., notes, bibliography, index. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9780197501306. RUFFLE, Karen G., Everyday Shi‘ism in South Asia, 368 pp., illustrations, teaching appendix, glossary. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2021. Paperback, $45.00. ISBN 9781119357148. “MARIA MAGDALENA” EXHIBITION Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 25 June 2021–9 January 2022 ASIMOS, Vivian, Digital Mythology and the Internet's Monster: The Slender Man, 256 pp., figures, diagrams, bibliography, index. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Hardback, $100.00. ISBN 9781350181441. MORGAN, David, The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions, 268 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN 9781469662831. POLTORAK, Mike, dir., The Healer and the Psychiatrist, 2019. Documentary film, Tongan and English, color, 74 min. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. TREMLETT, Paul-François, Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change: Sovereignties and Disruptions, 200 pp., figures, notes, references, index. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Hardback, $110.00. ISBN 9781474272568. KENDALL, Laurel, Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places, 280 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Paperback, $34.95. ISBN 9780520298675. LANG, Natalie, Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion, 234 pp., illustrations, glossary, index. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. Hardback, $135.00. ISBN 9781800730274. JOHNSON, Andrew Alan, Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River, 208 pp., illustrations, notes, references, index. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Hardback, $99.95. ISBN 9781478009771.

Background Media have increasingly reported on the difficulties associated with end-of-life decision-making in patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DOC), contextualizing such dilemma in detailed accounts of the patient’s life. Two of the first stories debated in the scientific community were those related to the cases of two women, one American, the other Italian, who captured attention of millions of people in the first years of this third millennium. Methods Much has been written about the challenges of surrogate decision-making for patients in DOC, but less has been written comparing these challenges across legal systems and cultures. In our paper, we propose a systematic analysis of the final legal documents written by the American and Italian Courts in relation to the two cases, developing our discussion around three areas: the level of certainty/reliability of diagnosis and prognosis, the reconstruction of self-expression, time of illness and time of care. They are examples of the typical issues discussed by legal authors and allow us to understand the link and the difference between the legal and ethical perspectives. Results The legal approach to the two cases has some common elements: the need to be certain about the diagnosis and prognosis and the fact that the clinical criteria are necessary in determining the most appropriate treatments, although these criteria are not sufficient unless they are supplemented by the patient’s will. The issue of relations takes on importance both from a legal and an ethical point of view, but from two different perspectives. While ethics safeguards relationships by guaranteeing their differences and makes them reconcilable, law safeguards relationships by guaranteeing the cold forms of respect, equality, impartiality, symmetry, reciprocity, and irreversibility. In this perspective, the link between the time of care and the decision of the family members assumes importance. Conclusions The most interesting point that emerges from our analysis is the issue of relationships and how they affect decisions, both from a legal and ethical point of view. For this reason, during the patients’ hospitalization, it is necessary to identify ways in which they might give their opinion about the moral issues underlying their choices.

Some of the oldest texts of India’s classical Vedic age (1500–500 BCE) refer to soma, at the same time as a god, a plant, and a beverage of the gods themselves. The intoxicating elixir appears as a pivotal element in many ancient religious rituals, and yet its exact identification has eluded generations of scholars and seekers. Taking soma as a point of departure, this chapter explores the religious dimension of the use of drugs across the Asian continent, ranging from ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations to shamanism in Siberia. From the myth of mushroom consumption in shamanic rituals to the meditative use of cannabis by ascetics, this chapter critically surveys drug-related mythologies and practices, through a diversity of historical and ethnographic sources from ancient Asian civilizations.

his paper takes into account ideas about landscape and environment as they emerge from the study of beliefs, mythology and ritual activities of religious specialists of the Himalayan region, showing a deep and enduring web of relational entanglements between human and other-than-human communities. The notion of persoonhood seems, in fact, to transcend the human dimension in order to include a wider and larger set of other-than-human communities, including mountains, waters, plants, animals and other classes of beings.

This chapter aims to highlight a recurring set of topics, themes, and beliefs widely shared by several Himalayan cultures. In particular, the notions related to the web of relations entangling human and other-than-human communities, which constitute the epistemological framework to understand, explore, and discuss ideas, ideologies, and worldviews about the environment. In the Himalayas, in fact, the cosmos is thought to be parceled among several entities interacting with each other on a regular basis, each of them in charge of a specific sphere of influence. Landscape itself, moreover, could be sometimes represented as a living field of forces or a distinct, powerful entity.

The 2015 earthquake severely affected the Hyolmo, a Nepalese minority group, inhabiting two of the most affected areas: the Helambu valley in Sindhupalchowk district and the Kathmandu Valley. While...

During the 1960s and the 1970s, some studies postulated that Jacobs' Syndrome can lead to aggressive and/or criminal behavior, but the statistical certainty was questioned. In the 1990s new discoveries in neuroscience and genetics brought new attention to a possible biological component of deviance. In this context forensic psychiatrists were required to express opinions about a young Italian man afflicted by 47,XYY karyotype (Jacobs’ Syndrome) and Borderline Personality Disorder who had frequent violent behaviors against his relatives, being therefore accused of “abuse against family members or partners” (art. 572 Italian Penal Code). The Court disposed for an evaluation of his mental conditions, his imputability and his possible social dangerousness, analyzing the influences on behavior from both his mental and genetic conditions.

Through an analysis of colonial and orientalist literature, this article will show how South Asian fauna, through the lenses of Colonial enterprise, came to epitomize a whole system of social relations which can be easily tri-partite: the ruler, the ruled and the unruly. The complex colonial apparatus of dominance and repression clearly surfaces in many of the texts produced by the literates working, living or simply travelling through the British Indian Empire. Fascination for the wildest creatures of the jungle or the domesticated flocks reflected and re-shaped discourses about Western dominance. Eventually it entered European culture and modified our perception of South Asia. As long as the boundaries between the human and the non-human remain thin and blurred, non-human animals were rapidly equated to the human subjects of the Empire. The imperialist discourse, a mythology in the making, was made up of a series of performative utterances used to conveniently describe and to shape the new world. A world to be subjugated, tamed and ruled upon by a self-appointed superior authority. The living landscape of South Asia cannot escape the literary cage of the Empire. Human and nonhuman indigenous animals, or even the hybrid system they form, are discussed like a vast, uncharted and uncanny new territory to conquest with sword and pen alike. The article eventually argues that the colonialism of the mind exerted by the British Empire did not spare non-human animals and such perdurable effects still linger and affect uncritical policies of exploitation.