A Yoruba ritual – the Oodua ritual festival in Ile-Ife – has been sustained over a long period, but has been adjusted under the pressure of modernity. Its relevance as a cultural practice is being asserted in multiple ways in today’s Nigeria. Ethno-nationalism is a key factor in the ritual in contemporary Ile-Ife in the sense that the Olokun Festival Foundation (OFF) is the agency through which the ethno-nationalism of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) is inscribed on the ritual. Although it professes to be a culture-promoting affiliate of the OPC, the OFF’s involvement in the ritual facilitates the presence of the OPC – a popular Yoruba ethno-nationalist movement – and thereby results in significant modifications to the ritual. Hence, the ritual has become an embodiment of new significations through which understandings of the contemporary face of Yoruba ethno-nationalism in Nigeria can be expanded. In sum, a combination of symbolic anthropological and sociological approaches reveal that the ritual in its modified form is culturally restrictive and socially integrative.

After publishing a new Qatabanic inscription that mentions the term kʿbt for the first time, this paper provides a South Arabian etymology for the pre-Islamic Meccan sanctuary of the Kaʿbah, which is derived traditionally from the Arabic word kaʿb “cube”. The paper suggests that the name of the Meccan Kaʿbah, and the Kaʿbah of Najrān, both derived from the ancient South Arabian term kʿbt, supposedly as a variant of the term kʾbt, which designates a high structure, probably with a protective function against water, a term which was later assigned to a sanctuary name for the deity dhu-Samāwī in Najrān; and not derived from Arabic kaʿb “cube”. The paper argues that the Arabic word “kaʿb” meaning “cube” was borrowed from Greek κύβος at a later time after the Meccan Kaʿbah had already established the cubic form that we know today.

The increasing economic value of Majang forest land that accompanied the establishment of large, state-run coffee plantations and timber production has led to growing tensions between Majang people and ‘incoming’, resettled ‘highlanders’ or ‘migrants’ from the Ethiopian highlands (known in the local vernacular as Gaaleer), which often circulate around dynamic land transactions. In the early 2010s, the Ethiopian government introduced a new policy of land registration to settle these tensions by regulating uncontrolled land sales. This article explores how past land deals generated contests and grievances and how the formalization of land titling resulted in aggravating these tensions, even triggering violent conflict in 2014–15, rather than resolving them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gambella’s Majang zone, this article examines how contests and grievances attached to different interpretations of past land transactions between Majang people and ‘highlanders’, and their political implications, heightened when the government attempted to formalize land tenure in the early 2010s. The article makes an important contribution to our understandings of African land tenure and land-related conflict.

I have defined “Saharanism” as a racializing and extractive imaginary that operates across deserts.1 Saharanism “entails a universalizing idea of deserts as empty and lifeless spaces, providing the conceptual justification for brutal, conscienceless, and life-threatening actions in desert environments.”2 Saharanism is informed by an ideology that creates, sustains, and weaponizes the ubiquitous perception of deserts as abnormal environments that are there to accommodate actions and undertakings that would not otherwise be undertaken in places that are considered ordinary. Given its extensive history and trans-desertic nature, Saharanism encompasses a wide array of disciplinary and policy thinking about deserts, which has had dire effects on deserts and arid lands globally.3

Let $k \geqslant 2$ and $b \geqslant 3$ be integers, and suppose that $d_1, d_2 \in \{0,1,\dots , b - 1\}$ are distinct and coprime. Let $\mathcal {S}$ be the set of non-negative integers, all of whose digits in base $b$ are either $d_1$ or $d_2$. Then every sufficiently large integer is a sum of at most $b^{160 k^2}$ numbers of the form $x^k$, $x \in \mathcal {S}$.

How migrants navigate their sense of home between the place left behind and the new place of destination is a crucial question. The social scientific perspective has increasingly come to emphasize the multiplicity of home and appreciates that home provides a bridge between “here” and “there.” In this article we explore how notions of home compare between migrants who arrived in the US throughout the 19th and 20th century. We can draw on a uniquely rich comparative set of letters written by people who left German-speaking Europe or Ireland. Our analysis of more than 12,000 letters uses methods of linguistic analysis to navigate between a macro-perspective, focused on term frequencies, a meso-perspective focused on the contextual meaning of the terms home and Heimat, and a micro-perspective providing in-depth details of two sets of letter collections. We find that the emotional words used to express an affective link with home reveal a deeper process of socio-cultural integration among the two groups. Indeed, we find that home is being talked about a lot more frequently in the Irish compared to the German letters, pointing to a profound divergence in the integration process. In the German letters, America quickly became home, which occurred at a much slower rate among the Irish. Moreover, the Irish maintained a desire to return home to Ireland for longer, an idea that the German writers contemplated only rarely.

Projects seeking to indigenize STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) for the public have recently emerged in digital spaces in Africa. These ‘STEM-for-the-public’ projects are conceptualized within the framework of ‘indigenization’ that cuts across the STEM and social science fields. I identify two paradigms in the indigenization literature: the language (L) paradigm and the methodology–conclusion dyad (MCD) paradigm. Although STEM-for-the-public projects fall within the L paradigm, they sometimes exhibit the MCD paradigm by drawing on oral culture and other forms of indigenous knowledge. These projects constitute an attempt at a cultural solution to what I describe as ‘the problem of unequal access and relevance’ (Problem-UAR), which plagues a particular kind of society that I describe as ‘wholesale-origin societies’ (such as those of Africa, south of the Sahara). Based on a digital ethnography, I show that, although they have had some recognizable impacts, operating in different modes, using a variety of linguistic approaches, covering various STEM topics, and adopting different modality frames, STEM-for-the-public projects, in their current forms, are not the ultimate solution to Problem-UAR because: (1) they generally do not address the classroom side of Problem-UAR; (2) they largely exclude offline publics; and (3) they have reached only a significantly small portion of their target online populations.

To understand the requirements of animals their calls can be analysed. This potentially enables specific and more precise individual care under different emotional and physiological conditions. This study was conducted to identify three different conditions (oestrus, delayed milking and isolation) of buffaloes based on vocalization patterns. A total of 600 acoustic samples of buffaloes for each condition were collected under different conditions consisting of 300 records for confirming and 300 for non-confirming of a particular condition. Important acoustic features like amplitude (P), total energy (P2s), pitch (Hz), intensity (dB), formants (Hz), number of pulses, number of periods, mean period (sec) and unvoiced frames (%) were extracted using the MFCC (mel frequency cepstrum coefficients) technique. Algorithms (model) were trained by partitioning the acoustic data into training and validation sets to develop predictive models. Three different ratios were assessed: 60%-40%, 70%-30% and 80%-20%. Decision tree models were optimized based on decision and average square error (probability) options and other parameters were set to default values of the software package to deveop the best model. The performance of algorithms was evaluated on the parameter accuracy rate. Decision tree models predicted the physiological conditions oestrus, isolation and delayed milking with an accuracy of 66.1, 84.3 and 71.3%, respectively, while the logistic regression model predicted with an accuracy rate of 59.5, 71.1 and 65.7%, respectively, and the artificial neural network (ANN) model predicted these three conditions with 77.7, 85.2 and 79.4% accuracy, respectively. The ANN model was found to be best on the basis of minimum misclassification rate (on 80%-20% portioning). However, decision tree algorithms also provided the additional information that intensity (maximum), amplitude (minimum) and formant (F1) are the most important features of vocal signals to identify physiological conditions like oestrus, isolation and delayed milking respectively in dairy buffalo.

This experiment assessed the effects of adding hemp (seeds or hay) and stevia by-products to dairy cow diets on milk yield and on the fatty acid profile and oxidative stability of the milk. Additional analyses included composition, total phenolic content and total antioxidant capacity of milk samples as well as blood serum parameters. Thirty-five Holstein dairy cows were involved for 60 days, divided into five groups: control, hemp seed, hemp hay, stevia and a combination of hemp seeds and stevia leaves. No significant changes were observed in milk yield or composition. While monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) content did not differ significantly between control and experimental diets, milk from cows fed hemp seeds had higher MUFA compared to those fed hemp hay. Further research is recommended to determine the optimal proportion of these by-products in cow diets.