This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.

In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.

Understanding the distribution and extent of suitable habitats is critical for the conservation of endangered and endemic taxa. Such knowledge is limited for many Central African species, including the rare and globally threatened Grey-necked Picathartes Picathartes oreas, one of only two species in the family Picathartidae endemic to the forests of Central Africa. Despite growing concerns about land-use change resulting in fragmentation and loss of forest cover in the region, neither the extent of suitable habitat nor the potential species’ distribution is well known. We combine 339 (new and historical) occurrence records of Grey-necked Picathartes with environmental variables to model the potential global distribution. We used a Maximum Entropy modelling approach that accounted for sampling bias. Our model suggests that Grey-necked Picathartes distribution is strongly associated with steeper slopes and high levels of forest cover, while bioclimatic, vegetation health, and habitat condition variables were all excluded from the final model. We predicted 17,327 km2 of suitable habitat for the species, of which only 2,490 km2 (14.4%) are within protected areas where conservation designations are strictly enforced. These findings show a smaller global distribution of predicted suitable habitat forthe Grey-necked Picathartes than previously thought. This work provides evidence to inform a revision of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List status, and may warrant upgrading the status of the species from “Near Threatened” to “Vulnerable”.

Following the two earthquakes that occurred in Turkey on February 6, 2023 with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.5, causing over 50,000 deaths and 100,000 injuries, France proposed to deploy, via the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism (EUCPM), the French Civil Protection Field Hospital (ESCRIM [Élément de Sécurité Civile Rapide d’Intervention Médicale]): the French World Health Organization (WHO)-classified Emergency Medical Team (EMT) Level 2 (EMT2).

After the acceptance from Turkey on February 8, a disaster assessment team (DAT) was sent on February 10, 2023. It was decided, with local health authorities (LHA), to set up the field hospital in Gölbaşi, Adiyaman Province where the State Hospital was closed due to a structural risk.

Arriving in Gölbaşi on February 13 at 2:00am in -12°C (10°F) temperatures, the detachment had no choice but to begin setting up the base of operation (BoO). At dawn, the cold was so intense that one doctor suffered from frostbite. Once the BoO was installed, the team set up the hospital tents. From 11:00am, the sun melted the snow and the ground became very muddy. The objective being to open the hospital as soon as possible, installation of the hospital continued, and it opened on February 14 at 12:00pm/noon, less than 36 hours after on-site arrival.

This article describes the mechanics of setting up an EMT-2 in a cold climate, the many problems encountered, and the solutions imagined and proposed.

This article casts a spotlight on Khashabi Theatre, one of several independent Palestinian venues in Haifa. It explores Khashabi's dramaturgical–performative discourse with ghosts, and thereby examines how it produces a ‘dual presence’ of Palestinian urbanism: the ghostly presence of victims of history who were uprooted from the city, and the presence of the contemporary community that, by converging at the theatre, plays a key part in the revival of urban leisure culture. The article discusses the particular location of the theatre in the city and the dramaturgical characteristics of the two plays staged in the first season. It also examines the objects and the actors’ bodies as elements that evoke and conjure up ghosts, and shows how artistic practice, which allows alternative places to be established, plays a key role in the struggle for the ‘right to the city’, which is also the struggle for the ‘right of return’.

Analyzing 48 foreign exchange (FX) rates and 1.2 million FX-related news articles over a 35-year period, using digital textual analysis, we find that a currency reversal investment strategy that buys (sells) currencies with low (high) media sentiment offers strong positive and statistically significant returns and Sharpe ratios. The results are robust and the strategy adds value over other currency premia determinants. Analysts’ forecasts systematically mispredict the reversal strategy. This is the first article to show that price reversals based on media sentiment are a well-defined feature of the FX market.

The type species of Squamarina has two varieties, S. gypsacea var. gypsacea and S. gypsacea var. subcetrarioides. In this study, a phylogenetic and taxonomic analysis of these two varieties shows that S. var. subcetrarioides merits treatment as a species separate from S. gypsacea. Therefore, we raise this variety to species level as S. subcetrarioides (Zahlbr.) Y. Y. Zhang. Squamarina subcetrarioides is phylogenetically not closely related to S. gypsacea and differs from that species in the thallus forming rosettes when young, later becoming cracked and irregular in outline, and consisting of numerous small squamules.

Pakistan has suffered heavy losses due to the torrential monsoon rains of 2022. With obliterated infrastructure and rising disease burden, the nation is still reeling from the dismal aftermath. It is critical to understand that such catastrophes are not a 1-time calamity but are likely to become more frequent with growing severity of the climate crisis. These losses point to a more systemic problem that is a lack of preparedness, and without sustainable long-term measures in place, the nation remains just as vulnerable to the next ‘unpredictable’ weather contingency. Prior planning and effective allocation of resources can help develop a proactive response to future disasters of this magnitude.

Mechanical thrombectomy is generally used in adult patients with pulmonary embolism or extensive venous thromboembolism, but it is starting to become more prevalent in the children. We present a unique case of a 3-year-old female with very early-onset inflammatory bowel disease with extensive venous thromboembolism who underwent successful mechanical thrombectomy.

Colombian theatre-makers have been searching for aesthetic languages to speak about the national conflict for decades. By analysing two of the most prominent theatrical productions from the 2010s, I explore the mechanisms they employ for the inscription of testimonies on audiences. I argue that the use of ghosts onstage to make the disappeared present transforms these plays into both ritual spaces and testimonial encounters at the same time. I do this by engaging with Derrida's works on spectres, along with the work of Latin American scholars who have explored the ethical and aesthetic challenges of making art in times of war.

We prove quantitative bounds for the inverse theorem for Gowers uniformity norms $\mathsf {U}^5$ and $\mathsf {U}^6$ in $\mathbb {F}_2^n$. The proof starts from an earlier partial result of Gowers and the author which reduces the inverse problem to a study of algebraic properties of certain multilinear forms. The bulk of the work in this paper is a study of the relationship between the natural actions of $\operatorname {Sym}_4$ and $\operatorname {Sym}_5$ on the space of multilinear forms and the partition rank, using an algebraic version of regularity method. Along the way, we give a positive answer to a conjecture of Tidor about approximately symmetric multilinear forms in five variables, which is known to be false in the case of four variables. Finally, we discuss the possible generalization of the argument for $\mathsf {U}^k$ norms.

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2 English make use of categorical and gradient probabilistic selectional information of ditransitive verbs to predict whether the verbs would be followed by prepositional-object or double-object dative constructions. L1 German learners used both categorical (“pay/*donate the woman the money”) and gradient (“pay/#send the woman the money”) constraints for prediction in a target-like manner. In contrast, L1 Turkish learners were delayed in recruiting categorical verb information and were only selectively sensitive to gradient verb information. We argue that target-like predictive processing across categorical and gradient verb information is attainable for L2 learners, but differences in L1-L2 word order may curtail the utility of prediction by verb subcategorization information in L2 processing.