Controversy Over Tongue-Tie: Divisions in the Community of Healthcare Professionals.

While recent decades have seen a rapid rise in cases of infant tongue-tie and in surgery to correct it, a controversy is now raging over the condition. Opinion is especially divided over so-called posterior tongue-tie, a variant which is detected based on the "feel" of the sub-lingual space. Drawing on ethnographic research with clinicians in England, we clarify the professional and personal commitments involved in the controversy.

Water access transformations: Metrics, infrastructure, and inequities.

Scholarship on water insecurity has carried over an important insight from studies of food insecurity: Insecurity often occurs in the midst of plenty, and water insecurity is therefore better characterized by inaccessibility than by scarcity. Access to clean, adequate, and reliable water is, however, more challenging to systematize than access to food. Water is fluid and protean, and only when it is safely stored can people pretend to own it.

Perinatal mental distress in a rural Ethiopian community: a critical examination of psychiatric labels.

Background: Perinatal mental distress poses a heavy burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study investigated perceptions and experiences of perinatal mental distress among women in a rural Ethiopian community, in an effort to advance understanding of cross-cultural experiences of perinatal mental distress.

Methods: We employed a sequential explanatory study design.

Social-ecological change in the Omo-Turkana basin: A synthesis of current developments.

This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-scale commercial farming in the Omo-Turkana Basin, based on an expert elicitation coupled with a scoping review and the collective knowledge of an multidisciplinary network of researchers with active data-collection programs in the Basin. We use social-ecological systems and political ecology frameworks to assess the impacts of these interventions on hydrology and ecosystem services in the Basin, and cascading effects on livelihoods, patterns of migration, and conflict dynamics for the people of the region. A landscape-scale transformation is occurring in which commodities, rather than staple foods for local consumption, are becoming the main output of the region.

Competition for Cooperation: variability, benefits and heritability of relational wealth in hunter-gatherers.

Many defining human characteristics including theory of mind, culture and language relate to our sociality, and facilitate the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. Therefore, deciphering the context in which our sociality evolved is invaluable in understanding what makes us unique as a species. Much work has emphasised group-level competition, such as warfare, in moulding human cooperation and sociality.

Distribution and Numbers of Pygmies in Central African Forests.

Pygmy populations occupy a vast territory extending west-to-east along the central African belt from the Congo Basin to Lake Victoria. However, their numbers and actual distribution is not known precisely. Here, we undertake this task by using locational data and population sizes for an unprecedented number of known Pygmy camps and settlements (n = 654) in five of the nine countries where currently distributed.

Rapidly rising food prices and the experience of food insecurity in urban Ethiopia: impacts on health and well-being.

The rise in food prices since 2007 is widely recognized as signaling a crisis of food insecurity among the world's poor. Scholars sought to chart the impacts of the crisis on food insecurity by conducting simulation studies, assessing anthropometric outcomes, and evaluating shifts in experience-based measures of food security. Few studies, however, have investigated the broader impacts on those most vulnerable and how rapid rises in food prices play out in the everyday lives of those most impacted.

Water insecurity in 3 dimensions: an anthropological perspective on water and women's psychosocial distress in Ethiopia.

Water insecurity is a primary underlying determinant of global health disparities. While public health research on water insecurity has focused mainly on two dimensions, water access and adequacy, an anthropological perspective highlights the cultural or lifestyle dimension of water insecurity, and its implications for access/adequacy and for the phenomenology of water insecurity. Recent work in Bolivia has shown that scores on a water insecurity scale derived from ethnographic observations are associated with emotional distress.