Time at Its Margins: Cattle Smuggling across the India-Bangladesh Border

This article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. Borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. Dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. I show how India’s prohibitions on live cattle exports and Bangladesh’s demand for beef compel acts that effectively legalize animal smuggling, which, nonetheless, remains a risky business. Across the riverine islands of the India-Bangladesh borderlands, small-scale traders and transporters operate according to the distinct logics of militarized infrastructures and legal regimes that generate moments of “signal clear,” marking the temporary opening of border passages and opportunities for sustenance, as well as “armed” times, more sustained periods of heightened national security, and imminent violence. By subjecting the border’s productive and coercive temporal energies to close ethnographic scrutiny, I suggest that cattle’s sacrality reinforces the material world of capital and strife, ruptures kinship ties, and subjects Muslim cattle workers and their families to prolonged periods of scarcity and hunger. This article shows how people’s experiences of the borderland as a space are vitally shaped by fractured, shifting, and contingent rhythms of time.

The biometric imaginary: (Dis)trust in a policy vacuum

The decision in Europe to implement biometric passports, visas and residence permits was made at the highest levels without much consultation, checks and balances. Council regulation came into force relatively unnoticed in January 2005, as part of wider securitization policies urging systems interoperability and data sharing across borders. This article examines the biometric imaginary that characterizes this European Union decision, dictated by executive powers in the policy vacuum after 9/11 – a depiction of mobility governance, technological necessity and whom/what to trust or distrust, calling upon phantom publics to justify decisions rather than test their grounding. We consult an online blog we operated in 2010 to unravel this imaginary years on. Drawing on Dewey’s problem of the public, we discuss this temporary opening of a public space in which the imaginary could be reframed and contested, and how such activities may shape, if at all, relations between politics, publics, policy intervention and societal development.

Balloon -catheter usage in maxillary sinus surgery: Case report

Introduction: The postoperative drainage and the postoperative bleeding from maxillary sinus cavity have been controlled after functional sinus surgery. It has usually been done using the band of iodize gauze squeezed through the temporary opening in the vestibular mucosa or through the inferior meatal antrostomy. The aim of this study was to present the use of balloon-catheter in maxillary sinus surgery intendend for control of postoperative drainage and bleeding. Case report: Balloon-catheter was used in one female who was treated for anemia after chemotherapy and with allergy to iodine. It was inserted into the sinus cavity through the temporary inferior meatal antrostomy and removed five days after surgery without any postoperative discomforts and complications especially in this risk group of patients. Conclusion: The balloon-catheter surgery method used in risk group of patients improved the quality of postoperative period without significant complications.