Medicine has played a complicit role in European imperial expansion since the very beginnings of colonial ventures around the globe (see Comaroff and ComarorY ). Such complicity, termed a "medical conquest" by Kay (1987), is historically present in Latin America. There is evidence in even the earliest Spanish efforts aimed at facilitating the containment, control, and conversion of native populations of the New World through royal ordinances demanding the creation of nucleated "orderly" townships, termed reducciones, in the colonies.' As with cathedrals, hospitals were centrally located, physically and socially constructed monuments integral to establishing a sense of Spanish colonial order and facilitating the subjugation of native populations. In the modern era, the existence of Western-style, biomedically based health centers and services that are often overly specialized for what "developing" countries are permitted to afford in the global economy points to the influence Western societies hold: it is, concomitantly, political, economic, cultural, and medical. the shaman's needle 635other forms of health care are outside the medical system and they are usually ignored. When they are not ignored they are derogated as curiosities, or as fringe medicine, quackery and superstition. (1980:191 ] This epistemological shift sanctions a new kind of anthropological analytic. Viewed from this new ground, medical systems are always and everywhere complexes of knowledge and practice which are media for ideological and symbolic expression (Comaroff 1982) and as such are inseparable from socioideological interests (Young 1981), as well as from the transformational processes of cultural change (Comaroff 1981).Thus the reconceptualization of "primitive medicine" facilitated a dismantling of the ideology implicit in biomedicine-that peculiarly Western mystification that reifies sickness and medicine as components of an exclusively technical and thus nonsocial and noncultural ("natural") process (Taussig 1980). As Young insists, "the proper study of African medicine is simultaneously the study of our knowledge about medicine. To forget this is to accept what is perhaps the most influential ideological belief of our time, that is, that scientific inquiry gives access to ideology-free knowledge" (1981:386).Within this shift from "primitive medicine" to ethnomedicine are the necessary roots of a concept that logically followed and then quickly became (and remains) a central analytical trope in medical anthropology, virtually all discourses of medical development, and cross-cultural research of healing systems: medical pluralism. 4 Biomedicine was no longer conceived as the only viable medical system. The legitimation of ethnomedicine helped pave the way for new waves of research aimed at determining the nature of this medically plural context and exploring possibilities for employing ethnomedicines as alternative health care resources-what would be termed the "integration" or "collaboration" of ethnomedicine and biomedicine (Ake...

In the present investigation we examined the role of ATP-sensitive potassium (K ATP ) channel activity in modulating carotid baroreflex (CBR)-induced vasoconstriction in the vasculature of the leg. The CBR control of mean arterial pressure (MAP) and leg vascular conductance (LVC) was determined in seven subjects (25 ± 1 years, mean ± S.E.M.) using the variable-pressure neck collar technique at rest and during one-legged knee extension exercise. The oral ingestion of glyburide (5 mg) did not change mean arterial pressure (MAP) at rest (86 versus 89 mmHg, P > 0.05), but did appear to increase MAP during exercise (87 versus 92 mmHg, P = 0.053). However, the CBR-MAP function curves were similar at rest before and after glyburide ingestion. The CBR-mediated decrease in LVC observed at rest (∼39%) was attenuated during exercise in the exercising leg (∼15%, P < 0.05). Oral glyburide ingestion partially restored CBR-mediated vasoconstriction in the exercising leg (∼40% restoration, P < 0.05) compared to control exercise. These findings indicate that K ATP channel activity modulates sympathetic vasoconstriction in humans and may prove to be an important mechanism by which functional sympatholysis operates in humans during exercise.

This article examines how President Alejandro Toledo's self-professed Andean identity and efforts to establish a state-led indigenous rights framework conflicted with a growing eco-ethno alliance of Andean and Amazonian representatives in Peru. Existing scholarly accounts declare the indigenous movement to be unimportant or, indeed, entirely absent in Peru. Yet, they do so by emphasising the centrality of the historical dynamic between the Andean region, where until recently local peoples have desisted from making explicit indigenous claims, and the urbanised coastal region, where the elite's power is most clearly concentrated. This obscures the Amazon as a site of historical events and eco-ethno-politics of national and global scope. The recent emergence of a debate on indigenous issues shows that the Amazonians' longer engagement in the global sphere of indigenous and environmental politics now places them in the position of exemplifying indigeneity for the Andeans and Peruvians at large. This shift challenges in fundamental ways the historical image of Peru the nation as inextricably implicated in the post-colonial fantasies of what I term the ‘Inca slot’.

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