Who would you describe as a major benefactor of humanity? charles Darwin or albert Einstein? Louis pasteur or alexander Fleming? William Shakespeare or Wolfgang amadeus Mozart? i made my choice when i lay on an operating table and watched, on a screen over my head, the surgical procedure taking place. i felt no pain; the lower half of my body was desensitized by spinal anaesthesia. after the op...

In response to the call for a new Science of Stigma, this anthropological study investigates the moral experience of patients diagnosed with severe multibacillary leprosy. From 2003 to 2006, fieldwork was conducted in the so-called “United-States-of-Sobral”, in Ceará State, Northeast Brazil. Sobral is highly endemic for leprosy, despite intensified eradication efforts and a 30% increase in prim...

A packet of soft brown sugar informs us that ‘Since 1878 our passionate team have been making and packing high quality on the banks River Thames.’ There is an inadvertent touch grotesque comedy to this: Tate Lyle's employees seem be Dickensian monomaniacs, kept alive by their inexhaustible enthusiasm for sentimental attachment Thames. How does this bizarre sentence come distributed around super...

This article examines Evangelical carnaval in Brazil to argue that anthropological writing on syncretization expresses a theoretical gap or shortcoming. In several large Brazilian cities, Evangelicals are currently organizing parades and performing samba music with percussion instruments. Many adherents regard as spiritually hazardous because the genre is perceived hold Afro-Brazilian religious...

Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that problematic relationship with the law began 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges Bainbridge, New York. According to pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged claimed have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad used seer stones see lost, stolen, hidden things seek t...

Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature person of extreme cruelty. No matter flexibility use, is mostly meant be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that dangerous and horrible human imagination” (1). However, may argued sometimes perf...

In this paper we want to explore the epistemological relevance and value of reputation understood as evaluative social information. Using reputation to classify and assess an agent or an item can be epistemologically useful in the absence or as is especially relevant today overabundance of information. However, in order to be and remain epistemically useful and ethically just it has to be open ...

Acting virtuously can subsequently free people to act less-than-virtuously. We review recent insights into this moral self-licensing effect: (a) It is reliable, though modestly-sized, and occurs in both real-world and laboratory contexts; (b) Planning to do good, reflecting on foregone bad deeds, or observing ingroup members’ good deeds is sufficient to license less virtuous behavior; (c) When ...

Since the pioneering work by Kripke and Montague, the term possible world has appeared in most theories of formal semantics for modal logics, natural languages, and knowledge-based systems. Yet that term obscures many questions about the relationships between the real world, various models of the world, and descriptions of those models in either formal languages or natural languages. Each step ...

Humans have historically spent immense communal effort and creativity on religious structures. In this study, we examine two famous and complex monuments: one the 9th-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur and the other the cathedral church of Chartres. We argue that metaphor, metonymy, and other blends are literally “built in” to the architecture and art to structure the experience of people i...