INTERNAL RESETTLEMENT IN LAOS

In this response to an article by Holly High, “The Implications of Aspirations: Reconsidering Resettlement in Laos,” published in Critical Asian Studies in December 2008 (vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 531–50), the authors do not dispute the notion that many people in Laos have aspirations for modernity and development. However, they are at odds with High in two key ways. First, she only presents a selective reading of authors who have written critically about highland to lowland resettlement in Laos, thus misrepresenting some of their ideas. Second, the empirical evidence High provides is insufficient or inappropriate to support her argument that people who are being resettled from the uplands to the lowlands in Laos are supportive of these state-sponsored schemes because they fit with their aspirations for modernity. The authors are concerned that High's article may inadvertently serve to justify the views of those who advocate and fund centrally planned resettlement of ethnic minorities in Laos and who believe that non-participatory and top-down resettlement is acceptable if increased funding is available and better planning is conducted, even when those targeted for relocation would rather not move.     

K2 Toxicity: Fatal Case of Psychiatric Complications Following AM2201 Exposure

Limited forensic and clinical experience and the lack of confirmatory testing strategies for synthetic cannabinoids (SC) prevent adequate characterization of SC toxicity and the potential impact on public health. A statewide surveillance system identified a fatality involving a 23‐year‐old man found with a large stab wound to the neck following use of a SC product suspected of containing AM2201. Analytical testing for common SCs, SC metabolites, routine drugs of abuse, and over‐the‐counter medications was performed on heart blood obtained at autopsy. Additionally, assays were performed on the SC raw material and drug paraphernalia found on the decedent. High concentrations of AM2201 were detected in all samples. AM2201 metabolites were detected in postmortem blood. Other than a trace amount of JWH‐073 found in smoke residue, no other substances were detected. Psychiatric complications including self‐induced, lethal trauma can occur after the use of SC products.     

Remarks on the theoretical significance of Marx's Grundrisse

In recent years much play has been made with the significance of the Grundrisse for the reinterpretation of Marx's thought. The text has been represented as a vindication of those who have treated Marx's work as a relatively direct development from the early writings of 1843 and 1844, and a rebuttal of those who have sought to establish that Marx's later works constitute a radically distinct project from that of his youth, the two projects being separated by an epistemological break. This paper examines the theoretical structure of the Grundrisse, the kind of concepts that it contains and the objects constructed by these concepts. I argue that the result of such an examination demonstrates that the latter of the two positions outlined here is the correct one. The Grundrisse is shown to be an incoherent, transitional work, and its ambiguities an index of the presence of a number of theoretical obstacles.     

On the production and structuring of scientific knowledges

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has contained within it a series of discrepancies, which combine to render impossible the actual theorising of changes in scientific knowledges, and their foundation in a break with a previous theoretical ideology. This paper is a close textual investigation which shows the precise nature of these discrepancies, how they mutually support each other in a discourse founded in a positivist epistemology continually undermined by attempts to theorise discontinuity in knowledges. The outcome of this is that changes in scientific knowledges appear irrational, for Kuhn presents no means with which such shifts can be thought.     

Economic property and the theorisation of ground rent

The theory of capitalist ground rent that Marx develops in CapitalVol. III is customarily regarded as either unproblematic, or susceptible to technical improvements. This paper argues that there are profound difficulties in Marx's theorization of ground rent and the relation of landed property to capitalist production in agriculture, and draws attention to the concepts of 'property' and 'commodity' that Marx deploys. The persistence of a philosophical anthropology in the later works of Marx emerges clearly in the deficiencies of these concepts when used in the analysis of capitalist agricultural production.