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I'm going to have to remember to refer to my RSS reader as ThOR.
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If you visited Governor’s Island in New York last summer you most certainly saw the billowing, cloud-like structure that sits in the middle of the lawn. And if you’re anything like my kids you probably dashed up to it to see exactly what thing was. But it’s not until you get up close that you realize it’s made from many, many plastic bottles stringed together. “53,780 used plastic bottles,” says designer Jason Klimoski, “the number thrown away in NYC in just 1 hour.” Klimoski and his team at STUDIO KCA collected the bottles – a combination of milk jugs and water bottles – and lashed them together to create “Head in the Clouds,” a pavilion people can walk into, sit inside, and contemplate just how much plastic is thrown away every day.
The structure, however, was temporary and the team is now looking for its next home. If you’re interested in having this in your back yard get in touch with the designers.
In 2012, David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby, wrote a column for USA Today in which he explains his company’s decision to file a lawsuit. He writes,
A new government health care mandate says that our family business must provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don’t pay for drugs that might cause abortions. Which means that we don’t cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs.
The Supreme Court’s opinion (PDF), issued a week ago, bears this out (p. 2):
The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients. If the owners comply with the [Health and Human Services] mandate, they believe they will be facilitating abortions. . .
If the wording in Alito’s opinion doesn’t distinguish between their religious beliefs and the federal government (i.e. Health and Human Services), a footnote on page nine drives home the point:
The owners of the companies involved in these cases and other who believe life begins at conception regard these four methods [Plan B, ella, Mirena, and ParaGuard] as causing abortions, but federal regulations, which define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, see, e.g. 62 Fed. Reg. 8611 (1997); 45 CFR §46.202(f) (2013), do not so classify them.
Ethnophysiology (or ethno-a&p, as I verbalize it) is the way in which the human body and its functions are understood in a cultural context. Clearly, Christianity’s understanding of reproductive physiology – that life begins at conception, and therefore preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg is tantamount to abortion – is ethnophysiology. Following this, it’s no wonder that so many science bloggers and memes have targeted the Court and Hobby Lobby (Mother Jones, for example) for “disregarding the science.” As Jay Michaelson wrote, responding to the Court’s statement (above) concerning abortifacients, “That should be a statement of fact, not faith. Either these pills cause abortions, or they don’t. Yet Justice Alito—himself a devout Catholic—says that this fact may be determined based on ‘religious beliefs.’” Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN, goes one step further, resisting the urge to dismiss the plaintiffs beliefs out-of-hand, as she illustrates that the four contraceptives in question don’t even cause abortions by Christian definitions.
Well, not exactly. Ethnophysiology, like most things culturally constructed, is malleable and often times, you don’t get to decide to what extent. In fact, as many postcolonial STS scholars argue (see Harding 2011), neither the monolithic body of knowledge that we call “science,” nor the process of knowledge production by the same name, are the authority of human knowledge. The reproductive physiology which we refer to as “science” is, itself, an ethnophysiology (and by extension, “facts” are ethnophilosophy). The flaw is in adding the ethno- prefix to something in order to Other it. This isn’t to say that the Court’s ruling is tolerable – women’s health and its direct effects on the nation’s social and economic well-being should trump all – but there are much better arguments to be had. Call David Green, five-ninths of the Supreme Court, and the Christian understanding of human reproduction misogynistic if you want, but to say that they eschew intelligence, logic, and reason because they use the word “abortion” differently is just ethnocentric.
(Bonus Question: Is corporate personhood a form of animism?)
Harding, Sandra G. 2011. The postcolonial science and technology studies reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Further Reading:
Brewis, Alexandra. 1993. Reproductive ethnophysiology and contraceptive use in a rural Micronesian population. Providence, R.I.: Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University.
De Bessa, Gina Hunter. 2006. “Ethnophysiology and contraceptive use among low-income women in urban Brazil”. Health Care for Women International. 26 (6): 428-452.
Rashid, S. 2001. “Indigenous Understanding of the Workings of the Body and Contraceptive Use amongst Rural Women in Bangladesh”. South Asian Anthropologist. 1: 57-70.
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In this week’s photo selection, let’s take a journey to South Africa’s well-known safari zone to the Galapagos Islands to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado …
Black-naped fruit dove, Rotterdam Zoo, South Holland, Netherlands.
To join this series, tweet @flickr with your favorite wildlife photos, and include the hashtag #WildlifeWednesday. And if you’d rather not tweet, simply include the same hashtag in your Flickr photo title, or tag it with WildlifeWednesday.
We look forward to seeing your contributions and featuring a new selection of your photo submissions every Wednesday here on our blog.
Keep laughing at Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery video if you want to (cough, Netflix), but the company is moving forward as though it's serious. Bloomberg points to a letter filed today with the FAA asking for permission to take its unmanned...
I've had my on-track exploits overlaid with race telemetry to be viewed after the session, but Jaguar Land Rover is looking to project that info on the windshield while you make laps or cruise the highways. The Virtual Windscreen concept beams...
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Love or hate them, it's hard to argue that Apple's retail stores aren't highly distinctive. That's what the EU's highest court thought when it overruled a German verdict and said that Apple's store design could be registered as a trademark in Europe....
Of all the tragic things that come with Alzheimer's disease, its tendency to sneak up on people is one of the toughest to deal with. That's because by the time the condition is even detectable, there's a good chance it's already too late to turn back...
It's been a while since we've seen any new curved or flexible displays following LG's G Flex and Samsung's Galaxy Round smartphones. LG Display is thinking bigger now. It's announced that it's been able to create an 18-inch OLED panel that has enough...
Up until now, you can only navigate Google Glass by touching or talking to it, but London-based firm This Place just made it possible to control the device using something else: your brainwaves. The company just released an open source application...
Lyft, the Uber alternative with a penchant for pink mustaches, will launch service in New York City at the end of the week. Initially, the ride-on-demand app will focus on boroughs beyond Manhattan, explaining that "Brooklyn and Queens are vastly...
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