Abstract— Photolysis at 254 nm of alkyl benzohydroxamates [C, H, CONHOR: R = CH3 H2CH3 CH(CH3)2, CH2C6H5 CH(CH3)C2H5 CH(CH3)‐n‐C6H13] in acetonitrile or hydrocarbon solvents gives benzamide. These reactions can be sensitized by benzophenone (at ca. 350 nm) and are quenched by cis‐piperylene. Racemization occurred when 2‐octyl (+)‐benzohydroxamate was irradiated in cyclohexane. These results are consistent with a mechanism involving a triplet biradical. Photolysis of phenyl benzohydroxamate [C6H5CONHOC6H5] and benzyl N‐methylbenzohydroxamate [C6H5CON‐(CH3)OCH2Q6H5] cannot be quenched with ris‐piperylene and appear to be singlet reactions.

Among the Tuareg people in the Air Mountain region of Niger, women are sometimes possessed by spirits called 'the people of solitude'. The evening curing rituals of the possessed, featuring drumming and song, take place before an audience of young men and women, who joke and flirt as the ritual unfolds. In her analysis of this tolerated but unofficial cult, Susan Rasmussen analyses symbolism and aesthetic values, provides case studies of possessed women, and reviews what local people think about the meaning of possession.

Influenza, pneumococcal disease, and shingles (herpes zoster) are more prevalent in older people. These illnesses are preventable via vaccination, but uptake is low and decreasing. Little research has focused on understanding the psychosocial reasons behind older adults’ hesitancy towards different vaccines. A cross-sectional survey with 372 UK-based adults aged 65-92 years (M = 70.5) assessed awareness and uptake of the influenza, pneumococcal, and shingles vaccines. Participants provided health and socio-demographic data and completed two scales measuring the psychosocial factors associated with vaccination behaviour. Self-reported daily functioning, cognitive difficulties, and social support were also assessed. Participants were additionally given the opportunity to provide free text responses outlining up to three main reasons for their vaccination decisions. We found that considerably more participants had received the influenza vaccine in the last 12 months (83.6%), relative to having ever received the pneumococcal (60.2%) and shingles vaccines (58.9%). Participants were more aware of their eligibility for the influenza vaccine, and were more likely to have been offered it. Multivariate logistic regression analyses showed that a lower sense of collective responsibility independently predicted lack of uptake of all three vaccines. Greater calculation of disease and vaccination risk, and preference for natural immunity, also predicted not getting the influenza vaccine. For both the pneumococcal and shingles vaccines, concerns about profiteering further predicted lack of uptake. Analysis of the qualitative responses highlighted that participants vaccinated to protect their own health and that of others. Our findings suggest that interventions targeted towards older adults would benefit from being vaccine-specific and that they should emphasise disease risks and vaccine benefits for the individual, as well as the benefits of vaccination for the wider community. These findings can help inform intervention development aimed at increasing vaccination uptake in future.

No abstract

No abstract

This commentary offers a socio-cultural anthropological critical overview of studies of covering, popularly called “veiling” and “the veil” as practiced predominantly (though not exclusively) by some (though not all) Muslim women. The goal is to review studies that enhance understanding of this practice by detaching it from ethnocentric and culture-bound images of gender and religion—especially women and Islam—pervasive in some media portrayals and implied in some political policies in the West, for example, France. Drawing on these works, this commentary will also discuss the essay on this topic by Wagner, Sen, Permanadeli, and Howarth, outlining the contributions, issues raised, and areas of further inquiry suggested by these authors’ and others’ research on the veil in relation to Muslim women’s identity in contexts of religion and symbolism, aesthetics, political pressures and resistance to stereotyping.

Menstrual taboos, I argue, can be understood only in relation to other ritual restrictions, ones observed by men as well as women, and have significant implications for our understanding of female ritual roles. Gender imagery in Tuareg menstrual ritual and cosmology is used as a metaphor for relations between participants in wider socioeconomic contexts, and it forms a symbolic medium of conflict and ambiguity for Tuareg men and women. In this article, ritual restrictions are seen as an idiom through which struggles and paradoxes are presented and individual responses to predicaments are encoded. They constitute efforts to control descent and to protect the statuses of both men and women; they represent a reflection on the subject of the differentiation of noble and nomadic values from other, competing values in Tuareg society. The bases of this differentiation do not fall into rigid polarities between male and female, “official” and “unofficial” religion. Ritual restrictions on women serve not to protect Islam or Tuareg men but to preserve the identity and lifestyle of the traditional Tuareg nobility. [gender, religion and systems of thought, Africa]

This article examines how social, economic, and political upheavals in the Sahara have stimulated re-thinking about loneliness in relation to trauma from mobility, dispersion, and return home in communities of Tamajaq-speaking, Muslim, and semi-nomadic Tuareg in northern Niger and Mali. How do Tuareg, sometimes called Kel Tamajaq after their language, draw on and re-formulate longstanding and new ways of coping with loneliness in regional droughts and wars, which have driven many to alternately disperse from their communities and return to homes that are no longer the same? What is the connection between changing modes of travel, concepts of loneliness, and ways of coping with this experience? In these communities, loneliness is a recurrent theme in personal life histories—in particular, in narratives of both geographic travel and spiritual travel in medico-ritual healing—and is alluded to in poetry, song, and everyday conversation. This article explores the meanings of loneliness and ways of coping with it in this society through analysis of this emotion in symbol, subjective perception, and social experience. The focus is upon representations of loneliness in narratives by travelers who have confronted this emotion, and upon relevant Tamajaq terms often used to express loneliness: namely, essuf (the wild, solitude, and nostalgia); tamazai (approximately, a depression); and tarama (unrequited love), illustrating with cases and examples. More broadly, the article is guided by and builds on insights in psychological anthropology into emotion and affect as well as suffering and subjectivity.