Japanese culture is often invoked as an exemplary case by those concerned with the anthropology of the emotions, for we can observe in that culture one striking instance of the different forms that feelings take in different language systems and how certain feelings are brought to life when they are named as such. The argument is that people in places that are so distant and different from ‘us’ display and experience a range of emotions that will seem to Westerners very strange, far from what we assume to be normal. Far from pathologising another culture, though, an attention to the particularity of these feelings may also serve as a moral lesson to us about the limits of our own language.

Psychoanalysis itself would then have to take on a quite different character as a ‘talking cure’ if the talking is about feelings that presuppose a quite different relationship between child and parent and then, by implication, between patient and analyst. The Japanese word ‘amae’, for example, names a kind of emotion that the English term ‘dependence’ only imperfectly captures, for it cannot be pinned down so neatly by us in our language. Many studies of amae evoke aspects of a comforting nestling in the care of others in early life and the way a degree of indulgent helplessness would be anticipated, enjoyed and resisted later on when someone may go into analysis.

In conversation as in filmmaking, Allan Dwan (1886–1981) is a master storyteller. He savors details, builds suspense, sketches characters broadly yet deftly, and never allows the pace to flag. A genuine affection for people–tempered by a mischievous sense of humor–illuminates every yarn. In a career spanning five decades starting in 1911, Dwan's attitude toward morally ambiguous characters remained sympathetic. Gamblers, loose women, outlaws and outcasts are presented with understanding. We're encouraged to enjoy the extravagant nastiness of the villains and to view simple folk without condescension. Although Dwan retained the pictorialism and the melodramatic plot devices of the silent screen, his generous stance defies time. He continued to grow during the sound era, enjoying a large measure of creative freedom making color westerns, adventures, and melodramas for producer Benedict Bogeaus. Even the slightest of the series (Pearl of the South Pacific and Escape to Burma [both 1955]) are graced by ravishing images and smoothly flowing narratives. Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) has almost nonstop action against magnificent locations. Even better is Passion (1954), a moving story of romance and revenge. Silver Lode (1954), Tennessee's Partner (1955) and Slightly Scarlet (1956) are masterpieces; human stories handled with total formal control.

Refugee Watch came into the world in 1998 – exactly a decade ago – for the task of documenting the flows of forced migration in South Asia. It was probably the first such initiative in this region followed by an imaginative publication from Dhaka, and then other publications and initiatives. Refugee Watch while being a proud member of the human rights community of the region, which is aware of its responsibility towards victims of forced migration, continues to be a unique publication. From its inception, the initiative marked its regional coverage in its structure, authorship, news and style. It gradually brought before the readers the news of other regions, the relevant analyses, informed comments, and commentaries on campaigns and events relating to forced migration. It also aimed to be distinct, and readers will realize that this remains the case till now, on two counts. First, it did not want to be a scholastic publication. It brought out creative writings, narratives, critical legal opinions, experiences of the refugees themselves along with commentaries on partition refugees in a comparative light, and above all fresh perspectives infused with a sense of history. In this sense it aimed at not only being inter-disciplinary, but also at crossing the divide of academic publication and commitment bound writings and presentations. Second, in Refugee Watch the refugee appeared not only as a particular category of the displaced, but also as a figure of all kinds of displacement and forced migration.

The idea of contagion, i.e., the transfer of disease from one who is afflicted to one who is not, though seemingly obvious to most contemporary readers, has had a complicated and chequered history within the medical traditions of the world. In the premodern era, as in the modern era—and some have suggested even in postmodern contexts—the idea of contagion has been a powerful and polysemic idea. The only extant studies of the idea in South Asia, however, pertain to premodern societies. The discussion of the idea in the history of medicine in colonial India remains merely incidental to concerns about epidemic diseases. This has led to a rather simplistic understanding of the concept with regard to its usage by colonial Indian doctors. In stark contrast to this, studies based in other colonial contexts, such as Australia, have suggested that the relationship between contagion and colonial modernity was anything but simple and straightforward. Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker have suggested that the ‘geographies, policies and identities’ that emerged under colonial modernity through the entanglement of ‘metaphor and public policy … intertwin[ing] personal conduct with the management of populations, nations and economies’ within the idea of contagion, were rich, polyvalent and had even an almost fantastic dreamlike character to them.

The study of the history of contagion amongst Indian doctors in the late nineteenth century raises some interesting methodological as well as conceptual problems.

THE BEGINNING

In the space of a few months during the partition of India in 1947, 20 million people were displaced, 1 million died, 75,000 women were said to have been abducted, raped and families were divided, properties lost, homes destroyed and countries (India and Pakistan) exchanged.1 Excluding the internally displaced, today South Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world. Going back to the 1940s, partition's refugees/migrants during the last five decades have had a long and complex history in the course of reaching respective homelands, some of them more than once (in the 1940s–1960s and then from the 1970s onwards) and some of them found themselves disowned by it in 1971 when Bangladesh came into being. […]

By December 1951, 6,597,000 refugees had moved from India to West Pakistan, and 7,94,127 refugees moved to what was then East Pakistan. Of the Indian Muslims headed for Pakistan during 1947–8, 95.9 per cent of the migrants from Assam, West Bengal and Bihar moved to East Pakistan and 3.2 per cent to Karachi. According to the 1951 census, 66.69 per cent of the migrants in East Pakistan came from West Bengal, 14.50 per cent from Bihar, 11.84 per cent from Assam and 6.97 per cent from other places in India. A passport and visa scheme was introduced only on 15 October 1952. But travel documents were not even required until 1953–4, several years after India and Pakistan became two separate countries.

Since the early 1980s nations in Latin America have been implementing a cluster of deep reforms to their economies. Referred to in the United States as the Washington Consensus and in Latin America as “neoliberalism,” the reforms include a package of economic policies intended to promote economic development by opening national economies to global market forces. Over the last twenty-five years, governments throughout Latin America have reduced tariffs and other protectionist measures, eliminated barriers to foreign investment, restored “fiscal discipline” by reducing government spending and promoted the export sector of the economy (Williamson 1990).

Now, after 25 years of free-market reforms, many citizens in the hemisphere—and some governments—are questioning the wisdom of the Washington Consensus. Indeed, between October 2005 and December 2006, sixteen Latin American nations held either presidential or congressional elections. Nearly all of these contests have been referred to as referendum on the reforms. In many of the region's most significant economies—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela, candidates critical of the Washington Consensus prevailed. In other nations the outcome of the vote was so close that right-leaning governments at the very least have no mandate to deepen existing reforms.

This sea change in Latin American democracy has been portrayed in the Western press as an irrational resurgence by protectionists. However, a closer look at the record of the Washington Consensus shows that the concerns of citizens and governments can be justified.

In Latin America, there is disappointment with the current democratization project because of its limited definition, and the appropriation of the concept of citizenship by dominant sectors. Democracy is understood to be a partial and very specific form of government that functions under the most basic concept of representation based on one person, one vote. This approach focusses almost exclusively on political parties alternating in office and leaving aside questions of real participation and ways to reduce social inequalities.1 The democratization project has been reduced, therefore, to ‘formal democracy’ that guarantees electoral processes in particular fair and competitive elections to renew political representatives at each election. This democracy project has enormously benefited the political elite, especially political parties, which have monopolized the political process and have resisted changing the status quo.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called ‘third wave of democratization’ brought to the region a new citizenship regime which emphasized individual liberties and universal suffrage. Hence, democratic regimes have extended political and civil rights while social and economic rights have been under attack (or dismissed) as governments prioritize fiscal balance over social policy.

Consequently in Latin America, there have been some institutional reforms and more ‘transparency’ in its public affairs. However, the fundamental structures of inequality and the vertical controls over society remain untouched, making a viable democracy unlikely for ordinary people. Moreover, there is a disconnection between voting and the conditions of peoples’ lives.

Part of the reason that Bengali vernacular forms of ‘western’ medicine-more appropriately called daktari medicine—have largely remained absent from the historian's account of nineteenth century South Asian medical history is because the daktars for whom it had meaning as a distinct form of medical practice have themselves remained out of sight. Histories mainly reliant upon English language archives—both governmental and nongovernmental—have mostly tended to see this numerous group of physicians as anonymous statistics, sometimes as half-trained quacks exploiting the lacunae of medical legislation and occasionally—it must be admitted—as prominent representatives of ‘native’ opinion, such as Dr Madhusudhan Gupta, Dr G. C. Roy, Sir Nil Ratan Sircar or even the Congress leader Dr B. C. Roy. Little detailed account, however, has been available of the actual lives and of the numerous and varied Bengalis who came to practice ‘western’ medicine at various levels of the colonial establishment, ranging from the lowly hospital assistants to the grand Edinburgh- or London-trained MDs. It is through their agency and through contact with their lifeworlds that daktari acquired its unique identity. Any history of daktari medicine will therefore remain incomplete without an account of the histories of these daktars.

The study of individual lifeworlds, i.e., lives in context, has been popularized since the 1970s by the increasing intellectual prominence of microhistory. As one of its pioneers, Carlo Ginzburg, has clarified, for a long time microhistory was only a vague quest for a more intimate view of the past in smaller scale.

Introduction

The world is witnessing a scenario of rapidly changing demographic conditions, predominantly in developing countries. The resulting slowdown in the growth of the number of children per couple along with the steady increase in the number of elderly persons has a direct bearing on both intergenerational and intragenerational equity and solidarity, which constitute the basic foundations of human society. Population ageing results mainly from reduction of fertility, a phenomenon that has become virtually universal. Since 1950, the proportion of old persons in the total population has been rising steadily, from 8 per cent in 1950 to 11 per cent in 2007, and it is estimated to reach 22 per cent in 2050 (United Nations (UN), 2007). Ageing will also have an impact on economic growth, via savings, investment, consumption, labour market behaviour, pensions, taxation and intergenerational transfers. In the social sphere, this phenomenon influences family composition and living arrangements, demand for housing and migration, and the need for health care services. On the political front, population ageing may shape voting patterns and political representation (UN, 2007). The recent emphasis on studies on elderly persons in the developing world is attributed to their increasing numbers and deteriorating living conditions in the later years of life. While increasing numbers are attributed to demographic transition, deteriorating social and economic conditions are a result of the fast eroding traditional family system in the wake of rapid modernization, internal and international migration and urbanization.

The term daktar used as a designation to particularly and solely describe practitioners of a separate system of medicine had not caught on in printed Bengali texts till the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, there is no doubt that a significant number of Bengalis had come into contact with ‘western’ medicine well before that. The eighteenth-century ‘Black Doctors’ and ‘Compounders’, and later, in the nineteenth century, the many physicians employed temporarily during the cholera epidemic of the 1820s, all had a chance to practice some form of ‘western’ medicine or other. The lack of detailed archival evidence, however, makes it, as yet, difficult to reconstruct what sort of medicine these early pioneers practised or how significant their role was within the extant economy of healing.

A relatively more detailed picture of the actual practice of early Bengali practice of ‘western’ medicine emerges from the 1840s. This picture presents a highly diverse and heterogeneous world. The men involved came from a wide range of backgrounds and had a wide variety of skills. They also occupied very different positions within the world of daktari medicine. The historiographic recovery of this plurality, however, is often confounded by an uneven archival record and the codes through which texts preserve biographical information.

Up to 150,000 people in northern Afghanistan are said to be fleeing from advancing Taliban forces and making their way to the Tajikistan border. European aid workers in the area say the refugees are in a desperate situation – without food, shelter or medicines. The refugees are sheltering in the Pamir Mountains, a remote and inaccessible area near the international border, which has been closed by the Tajikistan government. […] ‘These people have nowhere to go. There is no food, no shelter, no equipment or medicine’, Afghan affairs expert, Ahmed Rashid, told BBC World Service radio from Lahore, Pakistan. […]

Aid workers say they are unable to reach the refugees because of the remoteness of the area. UN officials are now in Kabul trying to persuade the Taliban to allow aid convoys through before snow blocks roads and leaves the refugees stranded. The winter in the Pamir Mountains is only six weeks away and there is an urgent need to get food stocks to the refugees to last them through the winter months. The Taliban, which captured power in 1996, control 90 per cent of the country with just a small bit of territory in the north holding out. They have made several attempts to capture the remaining 10 per cent and extend their rule to the entire country.

Introduction

Sri Lanka is among the societies which are ageing the fastest in the developing world. During the intercensal period, 1981–2001, the proportion of the population in the age group over 60 years has increased from 6.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent. According to the available standard projection, the elderly will account for approximately 20 per cent of the total population in 2026. This process of ageing, which is being witnessed in Sri Lanka is the outcome of policies and programmes which rapidly reduced mortality over a period of 50 years and increased the average lifespan from 46 years in 1946 to 74 years in 2001. Fertility reached the replacement level in the mid 1990s and has continued to decline further below this level, resulting in a corresponding decline in the share of the population under 15 years of age from 35 per cent in 1981 to 26 per cent in 2001.

Sri Lanka has undergone the demographic transition at a relatively early stage of economic development and at a low level of per capita income. The rapid changes that have taken place are imposing severe constraints on the capacity of the country's economy as well as its social institutions to provide the standards of economic and social security that should accompany the demographic changes and the process of ageing. While these problems affect the ageing population as a whole they become more acute in the case of elderly females.

In this article, I will argue that the changing international order has hyperbolized international borders where profiling of the world's people takes place. Knowledge about contemporary border practices is inadequate. The aim of this study shows how the drama of processing of people at the border is related to wider political imageries in the US and in Europe. […]

INTRODUCTION

The widely socially shared and often personally lived experiences at the border greatly influenced the way in which the citizens have been educated about the nation state, but they also affect how people are conditioned into contemporary world order. Moreover, it can be claimed that the border related experiences provide an increasingly important loci for political pedagogy. Airports, border crossings and seaports supply not only the physical but also the mental templates into acknowledging the logic and method of separating people into various entities: e.g. into states, communities, nations, ethnicities, cultures and civilizations because a sovereign state's power can be said to be at its most definitive and explicit at the international borders, the recent change towards hierarchical world order has wide ramifications. […]

During the twentieth century, the spread of the universalistic idea of citizenship replaced the particularistic and elitist notions of the past. The border practices in the West were, at least nominally, based on a system of random checks, whereby most, if not all people were inspected for travel documents and for security.

What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at Crunchem Hall in the film Matilda displays a sign warning ‘If you are having fun you are not learning’. In contrast, one of the slogans of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is ‘Share and enjoy’. Does that mean we've got something to look forward to? Or is the place of enjoyment becoming more complex as our subjective experience of pleasure at learning is drawn into the equation as a necessary function of what it is to attain knowledge? Perhaps we are being recruited into a kind of psychoanalytically structured regime of truth in which we are subject to a senseless superegoic imperative to enjoy. I enjoy learning, but I wonder if I am now obeying a command to learn and then feeling increasingly anxious that my students should enjoy their work.

Education is changing fast, and it sometimes seems as if the transformation in our relation to knowledge under capitalism is speeding up. This transformation is twofold. First, there is a bureaucratization of education institutions. This is proceeding apace in secondary education under ‘New Labour’ in Britain with the enforcement of Standard Attainment Tests (SATs). Not only does this bureaucratization mean that as much energy is put into assessment and recordkeeping as into instruction, with an increased administrative load on teachers, but the competition between schools that SATs-based league tables produces is also reflected in the strategies that individual schools and school students adopt.

What is psychoanalytic myth, today? The answer to this question is not simple, for in speaking of psychoanalysis we are necessarily drawn into a series of representations that concern us, each of us. And psychoanalytic myth structures and reproduces itself through a variety of media in such a way as to pull us into it even when we do not speak about it explicitly, or, we might say, ‘consciously’. We first need to draw into the open the thought that psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice.

Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice

Of course, it is a type of speech, but this representational practice operates through the symbolic forms that make our speech possible so as to induct us also, at the very same moment we speak, into the position of a reader. We become, as we speak within psychoanalytic myth, a reader not only of the unconscious lives of others, but of our own speech as it seems to reveal to us something of the secrets that inhabit our own inner lives. This mode of reading, including reading what lies in our own speech, is, at one level, conscious, a consciousness encouraged and facilitated by a psychoanalytic vocabulary that has circulated throughout the world at an incredible rate in the last century.