Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. (...) Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...

TEST is a novel taxonomy of knowledge representations based on three distinct hierarchically organized representational features: Tropism, Embodiment, and Situatedness. Tropic representational features reflect constraints of the physical world on the agent's ability to form, reactivate, and enrich embodied (i.e., resulting from the agent's bodily constraints) conceptual representations embedded in situated contexts. The proposed hierarchy entails that representations can, in principle, have tropic features without necessarily having situated and/or embodied features. On the other hand, representations that are situated and/or embodied (...) are likely to be simultaneously tropic. Hence, although we propose tropism as the most general term, the hierarchical relationship between embodiment and situatedness is more on a par, such that the dominance of one component over the other relies on the distinction between offline storage versus online generation as well as on representation-specific properties. (shrink)

In Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, we defended the following claims: Not only states of affairs, or facts, but also concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value ; The final value of a concrete object need not be intrinsic, i.e., it need not be exclusively based on the internal properties of its bearer; The final value of a concrete object is not reducible to the value of some states of affairs that involve the object in question. Our arguments (...) for – have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value , which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive , it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

As one of the most widely read genres of literature, travel writing plays a crucial role in forming popular images and understandings of foreign places and foreign peoples. This essay examines the dominant images of rainforests and rainforest peoples portrayed in accounts of travels in tropical America published in National Geographic. Special attention is paid to the issues of how particular representations are privileged in this magazine's travel accounts and how these representations relate to questions of authority and power. The (...) analysis shows that the prevailing representations of the tropical forests and tropical forest-dwellers in the travel accounts of National Geographic rely on historically changing, but equally categorical distinctions between 'good' and 'bad', and 'natural' and 'unnatural'. (shrink)

This article traces Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism through the concept of alienation, which is central to the Marxist-Hegelian tradition. The idea of restoring human creative powers, which take on an alien character under particular historical conditions, deeply shaped Césaire’s analysis of French colonial assimilation, which compelled the Black colonized subjects to identify with French bourgeois culture instead of taking revolutionary action against capitalism. Situating Césaire within the intellectual milieu of interwar Paris, this piece draws out his links with the (...) Marxist intellectual group called the Philosophies, which first published Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts in France in 1929, and with Alexandre Kojѐve’s Marxian reading of Hegel. The concern with alienation would persist in Césaire’s later writings in the 1950s and the 1960s, where the concept is engaged through a theory of culture, defined as the creative life of a collectivity. This theory supplies the conceptual basis for Césaire’s idea of “tropical Marxism,” which he discusses during his trip to Cuba in 1968. Tropical Marxism emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies and opposed any alien top-down impositions of the doctrine by European communists. By situating Césaire in a Marxist-Hegelian intellectual genealogy, we glean a crucial component of his thinking, going beyond his affiliation with surrealism and his experience with the French Communist Party. We also come to see alienation as a rich concept belonging to the tradition of anticolonial political theorizing. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay traces the ambivalent work of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation borne in the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a tableau of estrangement in the shared (...) vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah–in its articulations of soul, community, and world always already shadowed by their undoing–we then situate these four scenes along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value, which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question. Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano-inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention is given to a (...) yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive, it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

The authors of this paper earlier argued that concrete objects, such as things or persons, may have final value (value for their own sake), which is not reducible to the value of states of affairs that concern the object in question.Our arguments have been challenged. This paper is an attempt to respond to some of these challenges, viz. those that concern the reducibility issue. The discussion presupposes a Brentano‐inspired account of value in terms of fitting responses to value bearers. Attention (...) is given to a yet another type of reduction proposal, according to which the ultimate bearers of final value are abstract particulars (so‐called tropes) rather than abstract states or facts. While the proposal is attractive ((fone entertains the existence of tropes), it confronts serious difficulties. To recognise tropes as potential bearers of final value, along with other objects, is one thing; but to reduce the final value of concrete objects to the final value of tropes is another matter. (shrink)

Almost everyone in the developed world wants the logging of tropical rain forests to stop. Like Antarctica, they are said to be much too important and much too valuable to be utilized just for development and are said to be part of a global heritage. However, it is not that simple. People in the developing world consider our criticisms to be ill-informed, patronizing, and self-serving. We are seen as having “dirty hands.” They hold that we neither have nor deserve moral (...) standing as critics until we change our trade policies, rhetoric, and extravagant lifestyles. (shrink)

The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

Many countries in Africa, and more generally those in the Global South with tropical areas, are plagued by illnesses that the wealthier parts of the world (mainly ‘the West’) neither suffer from nor put systematic effort into preventing, treating or curing. What does an ethic with a recognizably African pedigree entail for the ways various agents ought to respond to such diseases? As many readers will know, a characteristically African ethic prescribes weighty duties to aid on the part of those (...) in a position to do so, and it therefore entails that there should have been much more contribution from the Western, ‘developed’ world. However, what else does it prescribe, say, on the part of sub-Saharan governments and the African Union, and are they in fact doing it? I particularly seek to answer these questions here, by using the 2013-16 Ebola crisis in West Africa to illustrate what should have happened but what by and large did not. (shrink)

Scholars and environmentalists in the industrialized nations have repeatedly deplored the destruction of tropical forests as a byproduct of economic development. Their position is based upon scientific, economic, and ethical arguments. Proponents of economic development from the tropical nations recognize that its immediate benefits are enjoyed by their own relatively poor populations while the benefits of habitat preservation are enjoyed by the world as a whole. So far, few institutional mechanisms have been developed that can reconcile the competing perspectives. In (...) addition to reviewing the arguments in favor of and against habitat preservation, this paper proposes some innovative institutions that can both satisfy developmental aspirations and account for the global benefits of habitat preservation. (shrink)

Scholars and environmentalists in the industrialized nations have repeatedly deplored the destruction of tropical forests as a byproduct of economic development. Their position is based upon scientific, economic, and ethical arguments. Proponents of economic development from the tropical nations recognize that its immediate benefits are enjoyed by their own relatively poor populations while the benefits of habitat preservation are enjoyed by the world as a whole. So far, few institutional mechanisms have been developed that can reconcile the competing perspectives. In (...) addition to reviewing the arguments in favor of and against habitat preservation, this paper proposes some innovative institutions that can both satisfy developmental aspirations and account for the global benefits of habitat preservation. (shrink)

Prolonged investigations of past and present use of wetland margins in various lowlands within Latin America have yielded a wealth of detail. It has become necessary to search out regularities in the natural environmental context and the human adaptations, all of which can be done advantageously in the context of the concept of landscape. Such a move in the direction of theory is attempted here by means of a heuristic model and an exploration of variations in its expression. The discussion (...) of seasonal as well as longer termed change in the natural environment and human adaptation is easily accomodated. The essay includes a brief consideration of some of the recent directions in the investigation of the tropical wetland landscape. (shrink)

This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect (...) white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Christina Landman is a professor of Theology at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa. As an East African serving under her as a research fellow at the Research Institute of Theology and Religion since 2014, and as somebody whose articles have been published in the two journals where she has been the editor, I can only honour her by contributing to her festschrift and in basing my reflections on my understanding of theological education in tropical (...) Africa, where she plays a critical role – despite my bias towards East Africa, and Kenya in particular. In other words, the goal of this article is to focus on the future of theological education in Africa, with special reference to Eastern Africa, and Kenya in particular. How has Africa journeyed with theological education since its inception in the 19th and 20th century? How is it reflected in the academic institutions of higher learning, in ministerial training, in general academic contexts and in local congregations? Is it Africanity without ethics? Does it have a future? In addressing these concerns, the article employs historic-analytical design in its endeavour to assess the efficacy of theological education as an agent of social transformation in 21st-century Africa. Considering that Africa cannot be identified as a single geocultural context and/or as a monolithic entity, the article builds its case by mainly referring to the Kenyan context. Its methodology includes an extensive literature review of some materials that are connected to theological education, participant observation and personal reflections as an educationist in an African context. The methodology will also include the Protestant divinity school that was established in Frere Town, Mombasa, and later shifted to Limuru, Central Kenya, in 1929. It is set on the premise that the future of theological education in Africa is guaranteed by the growing interest in theological education among the youth, especially in the 21st century. (shrink)

(2014). Explosive Population Growth in Tropical Africa: Crucial Omission in Development Forecasts—Emerging Risks and Way Out. World Futures: Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 120-139.

Tropical grasses are fast growing and often used for phytoremediation. Three different types of tropical grasses: Vetiver (V. zizanoides), Imperata (I. cylindrical) and Pennisetum (P. purpureum) tested in different growth media of spiked heavy metal contents under the glasshouse environment of RimbaIlmu for 60-day. The growth performance, metals tolerance and phyto-assessment of cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu) in shoots and roots were assessed using flame atomic absorption spectrometry (FAAS).Tolerance index (TI), translocation factor (TF), biological accumulation coefficient (...) (BAC), biological concentration factor (BCF), and uptake efficacy was applied to evaluate the metal translocation ability among all three grasses. All three grasses showed significantly higher (p<0.05) accumulation of the total heavy metals in the spiked metal treatment compared with other tested treatments. Vetiver accumulated remarkably higher total concentration of Cd (93.08 ± 3.81 mg/kg) and Zn (1284.00 ± 234.83 mg/kg) than both Imperata and Pennisetum. The overall trend of heavy metals accumulation for all three grasses followed the order of Zn>Pb>Cd>Cu. The results of study suggested that both Imperata and Pennisetum are commendable and potential phytoextractors for Zn as well as phytostabilizers for Cd, Pb and Cu, respectively. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that the values of concrete objects and persons are reducible to the final values of tropes. This reductive account has recently been discussed and rejected by Rabinowicz and R0nnow‐Rasmussen (2003). I begin by explaining why the reduction is appealing in the first place. In my rejoinder to Rabinowicz and R0nnow‐Rasmussen I defend trope‐value reductionism against three challenges. 1 focus mainly on their central objection, that holds that the reduction is untenable since different evaluative (...) attitudes have, ontologically speaking, different objects. I grant that this may well be so, but argue that the objection is based on an unwarranted, loose reading of the notion ‘value for its own sake’. On the more reasonable strict reading, it is plausible to maintain that tropes are the sole ontological category that can properly be ascribed final value. (shrink)

This paper reassesses Robert Koch’s work on tropical infections of humans and cattle as being inspired by an underlying interest in epidemiology. Such an interest was developed from the early 1890s when it became clear that an exclusive focus on pathogens was insufficient as an approach to explain the genesis and dynamics of epidemics. Koch, who had failed to do so before, now highlighted differences between infection and disease and described the role of various sub-clinical states of disease in the (...) propagation and—consequently—in the control of epidemics. Studying pathologies of men and cattle in tropical countries eventually facilitated the application of such measures in Europe through the screening of healthy carriers of typhoid, which was carried out in 1902. The concept of the carrier state can be understood as a spin-off from tropical medicine into the study and control of infectious disease in Europe. With it travelled assumptions that were typical for colonial and veterinary medicine where the health of indigenous individuals or cattle would be a secondary objective compared to the control of diseases in populations. (shrink)

The tropical rain-forest regions in Borneo Island have in place various tough environmental policies to manage the economic use of natural resources sustainably. Nevertheless, their biological landscapes are struggling against unprecedented ecological assault amid rapid industrial transformations which have involved massive and irreversible exploitation of land resources. The main reason behind this mismatch of sustainable resource management vis-à-vis unsustainable resource use is the failure on the part of the policy makers to act under the guidance of certain ethical virtues when (...) attempting to translate environmental rhetoric in print to concrete actions in reality. Ethical engagement with nature is pivotal in helping to stimulate genuine efforts in environmental conservation. Field research in the Borneo tropical rain-forest state of Sarawak, Malaysia is able to identify and evaluate the distinctive environmental attitudes, values, and practices of the indigenous communities, and their implications on Sarawak’s sustainable land-resource use and to reinforce the importance of ethical leadership in addressing a myriad of today’s environmental challenges. (shrink)

The article addresses the role of scarcity in negotiating the relationship between intellectual property, particularly from a legal-economic perspective, and property rights, as understood by transaction cost economics, to shed light on the deadlock faced by those suffering from neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The consistency of the law and economics fundamentals that support the trade on knowledge goods, namely patents on essential medicines, is put under check by Scott Veitch’s scholarship on legal irresponsibility. The damages that emerge from the operations (...) of the intellectual property system are registered in the novel concept of negative public domain, and are due mainly to the lack of access to treatments that end up being unaffordable, or to innovation that leads to new drugs that is not sufficiently incentivised though price signals. The accountability for such damages is taken into consideration by arguing that the disavowal of responsibility is made possible by the negative public domain, which is balanced by the construction of a positive response through the language of rights. As such, responsibility per se is preserved, evading one instantiation of Teubner’s legal paradoxes, but rendered ineffective by design. In other words, even if the harms endured by those affected by the NTDs can be traced back to the operations of the intellectual property system, there is no one to hold accountable. The main goal pursued through the article is to make such an arrangement explicit, by giving centrality to the notion of scarcity and its interplay between legal and economic theory, alongside the novel concept of negative public domain as a site where the actual consequences of irresponsibility lie, to hopefully inform further critique in subsequent works. (shrink)

En este artículo, mediante un abordaje archifilológico, nos proponemos acentuar el devenir de la asociación crítica de Araripe Júnior entre la hiperestesia y los efectos de lectura de los folletines desde sus primeros abordajes de la recepción del naturalismo por parte de escritores jóvenes, en el momento en el que se multiplican exponencialmente las publicaciones periódicas y se constituye un público lector. Reparamos, a su vez, en una asociación recurrente entre una literatura folletinesca considerada descartable y un lector caracterizado como (...) desecho social. El sondeo de su singular concepción de la hiperestesia literaria resulta productivo para trazar nuevos abordajes de su influyente teoría del estilo tropical y de la obnubilación brasílica, proyectada como supervivencia en el canon literario y en los folletines de sus contemporáneos. A su vez, hacemos hincapié en el sentido prescriptivo de los ensayos de Araripe Júnior, dirigidos a los jóvenes escritores de folletines, para conjurar el potencial revulsivo de la literatura hiperestésica naturalista sobre el público masivo y para reconducir su lirismo inervador hacia la constitución de una psicologia do tumulto, que contribuya a una renovación estética y cultural. También en torno a la hiperestesia, la intervención prescriptiva de sus ensayos procura regular la influencia de un Zola monstruoso, en su capacidad de mostrar y hacer sentir la realidad de la vida precaria moderna. Finalmente, observamos su abordaje de la literatura como toxina, en el que resuena una clave farmacológica de la literatura moderna latinoamericana. (shrink)

This article examines the changing status of tropical biology by considering the origins and early development of the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory. Today the laboratory is part of a large diversified tropical research center operated by the Smithsonian Institution. However, for most of its history the laboratory led a tenuous existence. Both the early problems and eventual success of the institution can only be explained by considering the interaction of various intellectual, institutional, and broader social factors.

This paper deals with the question of how to price drugs for tropical diseases. The thesis defended in the paper is: (i) there should be no legal constraints on the profits pharmaceutical companies can make on their products for tropical diseases. In essence, (i) expresses the idea that drugs for tropical diseases should be treated as any other product on the free market and that the producers of these drugs should be allowed to sell their products at whatever price the (...) market can bear. The main argument in favour of (i) is first outlined. Five common arguments against (i) are thereafter discussed, and it is argued that all of these fail in their intended purpose. (shrink)