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Community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) was recognized in Europe and worldwide in the late 1990s. Within a decade, several genetically and geographically distinct CA-MRSA lineages carrying the small SCCmec type IV and V genetic elements and the Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL) emerged around the world. In Europe, the predominant CA-MRSA strain belongs to clonal complex 80 (CC80) and is resistant to kanamycin/amikacin and fusidic acid. CC80 was first reported in 1993 but was relatively rare until the late 1990s. It has since been identified throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, with recent sporadic reports in sub-Saharan Africa. While strongly associated with skin and soft tissue infections, it is rarely found among asymptomatic carriers. Methicillin-sensitive S. aureus (MSSA) CC80 strains are extremely rare except in sub-Saharan Africa. In the current study, we applied whole-genome sequencing to a global collection of both MSSA and MRSA CC80 isolates. Phylogenetic analyses strongly suggest that the European epidemic CA-MRSA lineage is derived from a PVL-positive MSSA ancestor from sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, the tree topology suggests a single acquisition of both the SCCmec element and a plasmid encoding the fusidic acid resistance determinant. Four canonical SNPs distinguish the derived CA-MRSA lineage and include a nonsynonymous mutation in accessory gene regulator C (agrC). These changes were associated with a star-like expansion into Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in the early 1990s, including multiple cases of cross-continent imports likely driven by human migrations.

This article takes a critical look at 'the ontological turn'. Illuminating 'the turn's' theoretical point of departure, and clarifying its anthropological implications, the article argues that two key problems arise if the theory is to be taken at face value. It points, first of all, to the difficulty in studying 'radical alterity', in the manner proposed by the new understanding of ontology within anthropology. If anthropology is, as the ontological turn advocates, not a study of multiple 'world-views' but of essentially different 'worlds' altogether, how, we ask, does one approach this methodologically? Put in other words, if we really believe in radically essential, fundamental ontological difference with what registers can we, then, conceive and describe ontological others in ways that do them ethnographic justice? Secondly, the article ponders the issues of radical essentialism and immanence advocated by the ontological turn, and shows how an anthropological endeavour that advocates incommensurable difference, as an analytical point of departure, may be problematic in relation to the impact that anthropology has outside academia. As history has so vividly shown us, anthropological constructions of radical alterity and ontological difference offer themselves, in social terms, all too easily to political constructions of Otherness.

Serving as a metaphor for practice, the concept of navigation has become increasingly popular in anthropological theory. The concept seems to have almost sneaked its way into our analytical vocabulary; it is used when referring to how people act in difficult or uncertain circumstances and in describing how they disentangle themselves from confining structures, plot their escape and move towards better positions. Yet, despite its increasing popularity, the concept is most often used in an unspecified or misunderstood manner — it is generally not well defined! Building on prolonged fieldwork in Bissau, West Africa, and with West African migrants in Lisbon, Portugal, I take a second look at the concept of social navigation, clarifying the notion as an analytical optic, discarding the most unfortunate misconceptualizations of the term and elucidating the contribution that the concept can make to our understanding of the way people act in their social worlds.

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