Summary

23:T4aa,

Based on fieldwork among Ghanaian labor migrants in Italy, this article explores the experiential reality of migrant underworlds in contrast to Baudrillard's still topical, but ultimately flawed, notion of hyperreality. To West African migrants, reality is not disintegrating and being substituted with codes and simulation, as Baudrillard would have it. Rather, these migrants are shackled by an excess of relentless reality. Consumed by the demands of this moment and the next, migrants increasingly inhabit hyporeal worlds where distances grow, obstacles become insurmountable, and the waiting becomes endless. Yet, these migrant underworlds are intimately linked to the privileged and hyperreal world of play and consumption through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the gadgets we use. The pervasiveness of precarious migrant work situations and the normalization of suffering is not an accident or an aberration but the logical underside of the globalized market economy. Living and working in hyporeality, a widespread and mundane experience, this article argues, has certain implications for migrants’ sense of time, space, and agency.

24:T54a,Summary

Fifty-two leukocyte cultures obtained from 28 healthy, normal individuals studied on 35 separate occasions produced a wide range of interferon titers (IF) in response to infection with Newcastle disease virus (NDV) in vitro (< 0.7 to 2654 IU; median 406 IU). This variability could not be correlated with the proportion of mononuclear cells in the culture nor was any correlation noted between the IF titer and simultaneously determined phytohemagglutinin (PHA) blastic transformation. Technical factors could not explain these findings as a similar variability was noted when 10 individuals were studied concurrently. Repeated studies of 2 individuals over 18 months showed marked differences in the IF produced by their leukocytes on these separate occasions. Several subjects were encountered whose leukocytes produced no IF on one occasion, but were responsive to NDV on follow-up study. Spontaneous production of IF by control leukocyte cultures without virus by these individuals, and the group as a whole, was not found. The biological significance of such periods of transient leukocyte hypore-sponsiveness to in vitro virus infection is unknown.

The authors thank Mrs. Alice Cole for her excellent technical assistance in performing these studies.

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Distressed: Migrant underworlds and travels in hyporeality

Human Leukocyte Interferon: The Variation in Normals and Correlation with PHA Transformation 1