Lutte nationale ou fondation étatique ?. Les intellectuels palestiniens, d’Oslo I à Intifada II
Is today’s recentering of the Palestinian “intellectual field” around NGO-activism and at the expense of a (muted) marxist rearguard imputable to political as well as social islamist militancy ? Why has the hegemonic presence of “Islam” in the Palestinian “public sphere”, not generated “new Muslim intellectuals”, whose exegetic commitment on the global scene does not preclude national and secular commitments ? Is it because the Palestinian “civil society” has been hindered, since the breakout of the second Intifada, by the disintegration of those infrastructures and institutions granted by the Oslo process and forced into emergency-driven actions—making it difficult for more autonomous discourses, of whatever tendency, to emerge ? This paper approaches these questions by deconstructing, in the Palestinian case, the prerequisits of an intellectual sphere; by delineating the structural constraints under which these actors labour; last, by illustrating their polarisation in the debate over suicide operations.
Sociologues et sociologies en Cisjordanie occupée: engagements et hétéronomies
L'etude des pratiques, representations et institutions des sociologues et politologues palestiniens enseignant et/ou effectuant des recherches dans le nord de la Cisjordanie occupee permet de cerner les contours d'un espace academique eclate mais selon plusieurs lignes de fracture. La cesure entre dynamique universitaire et dynamique de recherche semble constituer la variable structurante du paysage academique palestinien avec laquelle se conjugue une logique de polarisation spatiale des capitaux academiques permettant de mieux comprendre l'enclavement des sociologues observes, et d'expliquer les differents regimes d'engagement des acteurs interviewes a partir de leurs trajectoires.
The Vascular Theory of Migraine‐Resuscitated or More Moribund?
Your decision to publish an important paper on cerebral blood flow (CBF) in migraine1 as the first in Headache for 1989 is to be applauded. But does it clarify or cloud the issue? After 20 years of CBF studies in migraine the results show 1) a reduction of at least 25 30% in classical migraine1, 2) an average increase of 31% in common and classical migraine2, 3) or no change in common migraine3. Now we learn that the measurements need modifying by 40% to allow for scattering of radiation the Compton scatter effect which has led to "an unbalanced interpretation of the data"1 So the results are as contradictory as they can be, the measurements require adjustment, and the interpretation is therefore doubly doubtful. From the clinical point of view the neurological aura, the enlarging scotoma, the scintillations, the migration of the paraesthesiae up the arm or visual disturbances across the visual field, have not been seen in cerebrovascular disease.4 The headache is throbbing in only 47% of 750 patients questioned during a migraine5; but even when the pain is pulsatlie, it throbs for only a portion of the time at the maximum of the headache (Blau unpublished observations). The evidence for a neurological aetiology has been examined6: the most potent argument against a vascular cause is that the common triggers stress, light and hunger go direct to the nervous system, not via blood vessels. No one denies that vascular changes occur in migraine but are they primary or secondary to a neurological disturbance? Sokoloff7 concluded that the stimulated rat and monkey cortex showed increased glucose uptake, and that the increased local blood flow occurred "in response (my italics) to changes in local functional activity". The evidence, therefore, points to an underlying neurological basis with secondary vascular responses. The vascular theory may need resuscitation but who is going to give it the kiss of life?