No abstract

The present investigation provides evidence that gastric banding remains effective after more than 10 years in less than 50 % of initially operated patients. Older (>50 years) and male patients seemed to maintain the banding as long-time carriers with good results, and these patients subjectively profited from this method. Good results can be achieved if patients are followed thoroughly, and alternative surgical options for patients who fail may be offered with longstanding success.

Introduction: Neurologic deficits are still a major complication of aortic arch surgery. We therefore compared cerebral protection by deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA), antegrade (ACP) and retrograde (RCP) cerebral perfusion.Patients and Method: 64 consecutive patients who underwent replacement of the aortic arch for aneurysms or dissections from January 1999 through August 2001 were analysed retrospectively for clinical and neurologic outcome. For DHCA core temperature was lowered to 18~ and was kept between 18 and 24~ in the perfused groups. Selective antegrade cerebral perfusion (ACP) was achieved either via the subclavian artery or the brachiocephalic trunc. Retrograde cerebral perfusion (RCP) was performed via the superior vena cava.

This article investigates the bureaucratisation of Islam in Brunei and its interlinkages with socio-cultural changes. It elucidates how realisations of state-enforced Islamic orthodoxy and purification produce locally unique meanings, while simultaneously reflecting much broader characteristics of the contemporary global condition. The article first introduces a theoretical perspective on the bureaucratisation of Islam as a social phenomenon that is intimately intertwined with the state's exercise of classificatory power and related popular processes of co-producing, and sometimes appropriating symbolic state power. Second, it outlines the historical trajectory of empowering Brunei's national ideology, Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB). It then explores social imaginaries and bureaucratic representations of “deviant”-declared practices, before illustrating how these practices become reinvented within the parameters of state power as “Sharia-compliant” services to the nation state. Simultaneously, national-religious protectionism is paradoxically expressed in thoroughly globalised terms and shaped by forces the state cannot (entirely) control. Newly established Sharia-serving practices become culturally re-embedded, while also flexibly drawing upon multiple transnational cultural registers. In the main ethnographic example, bureaucratised exorcism, Japanese water-crystal photography and scientisation fuse behind the “firewall” of MIB. These hybrid pathways to orthodoxy complicate the narratives through which they are commonly framed.

No abstract