‘Not always logical’: binational/biracial marriages in Britain, 1900–1940

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the intersection of race, religion, and nationality in marriage by concentrating on unions between Britons and ‘Arabs’ (those from North Africa and the Middle East) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on this area, most of which was not in the British Empire, allows an analysis of the intersection between the empire and the larger world. Marriage was a nexus in the intertwined prejudices of race, empire, class, and religion. Though the British primarily blamed polygamy for any marital problems, their own gendered law of nationality was equally at fault. Indeed, the centrality of gender was clearest in three circumstances. First, many women refused to be ‘white women in peril,’ instead exercising agency in their relationships. Second, British men who moved to the Middle East, converted to Islam, and married Muslim women, became legal hybrids who struggled to pass on British nationality to their wives and children. Third, British-born women married to Middle Eastern Christians faced similar problems, despite marrying other monogamists. In the 1930s, the British government formed a committee to address these issues, but the committee failed to find solutions, in part because the members, like the British state, supported racial/national coverture for women and thus refused to consider granting women equal rights in nationality. As a result, women married to men of different races and nations remained vulnerable to desertion and divorce in the interwar period. Such issues both confirmed the importance of an imperial frame of mind, but also the fact that the dilemmas went well beyond the formal empire.     

Investigation of morphine and morphine glucuronide levels and cytochrome P450 isoenzyme 2D6 genotype in codeine-related deaths

Compared to morphine and morphine-6-glucuronide (M6G), codeine and its other major metabolites codeine-6-glucuronide and norcodeine have weak affinity to opioid μ-receptors. Analgesic effects of codeine are thus largely dependent on metabolic conversion to morphine by the polymorphic cytochrome P450 isoenzyme 2D6 (CYP2D6). How this relates to toxicity and post-mortem whole blood levels is not known. This paper presents a case series of codeine-related deaths where concentrations of morphine, M6G and morphine-3-glucuronide (M3G), as well as CYP2D6 genotype, are taken into account. Post-mortem toxicological specimens from a total of 1444 consecutive forensic autopsy cases in Central Norway were analyzed. Among these, 111 cases with detectable amounts of codeine in femoral blood were identified, of which 34 had femoral blood concentrations exceeding the TIAFT toxicity threshold of 0.3mg/L. Autopsy records of these 34 cases were retrieved and reviewed. In the 34 reviewed cases, there was a large variability in individual morphine to codeine concentration ratios (M/C ratios), and morphine levels could not be predicted from codeine concentrations, even when CYP2D6 genotype was known. 13 cases had codeine concentrations exceeding the TIAFT threshold for possibly lethal serum concentrations (1.6 mg/L). Among these, 8 individuals had morphine concentrations below the toxic threshold according to TIAFT (0.15 mg/L). In one case, morphine as well as M6G and M3G concentrations were below the limit of detection. A comprehensive investigation of codeine-related fatalities should, in addition to a detailed case history, include quantification of morphine and morphine metabolites. CYP2D6 genotyping may be of interest in cases with unexpectedly high or low M/C ratios.     

Migrants, Civil Society and Sovereign States: Investigating an Ethical Hierarchy

Many actors in global politics profess both a commitment to basic human rights and to a system of sovereign democratic states. There are clear tensions between these commitments which become apparent when seeking ethical answers to the increasingly urgent problem of migrants who cross state boundaries in pursuit of better life chances elsewhere. Is it possible to achieve a coherence between a commitment to individual human rights and to sovereign democratic states? It is argued that a neo-Hegelian constitutive theory of individuality provides a useful guide to our thinking about this matter.     

Interrelationships among Native Peoples, Genetic Research, and the Landscape: Need for Further Research into Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues

To understand the impacts of development on native peoples requires an understanding of how their genetic make-up is implicated in their relationship with their landscapes. This is an area ripe for more research. The ASLME project on DNA Fingerprinting and Civil Liberties proposed improvements to the ethical and legal safeguards for the collection and storage of DNA-derived genetic information. Native peoples have proposed a similar examination of the ethical and legal issues related to the collection and storage of their genetic information obtained via family histories and genealogies.     

Teleportation,Cyborgs and the Posthuman Ideology

This paper is concerned with a set of phenomena that lies at the intersection of popular culture, genetics, cybertechnology, nanotechnology, biotechnology and other advanced technologies, bio-ethics, science speculation, science fiction, mythology, the New Age Movement, cults, commerce and globalization. At the centre is a radical technophilia that finds representative expression in posthumanism, an Internet-based social movement driven by an extreme scientific utopianism. This set of phenomena constitutes an articulated cultural response to a number of underlying economic, technological and social dynamics that are together transforming the world, and particularly developed societies as they are incorporated into a global system of 'digital capitalism'. This paper first describes posthumanism and transhumanism. It then explores two key notions, teleportation and cyborgs, that receive extensive attention in mainstream media and serve as exemplars of this scientistic ideology, locating them both in cultural history and contemporary popular culture. The paper argues that posthumanism and associated phenomena are best seen as an ideological interpellation of humanity into an increasingly dominant scientific and technological order based on the cultural and scientific ascendancy of the 'Informational Paradigm' identified by Katherine Hayles in her inquiry into 'How we became posthuman'.