An siRNA-based functional genomics screen for the identification of regulators of ciliogenesis and ciliopathy genes

Defects in primary cilium biogenesis underlie the ciliopathies, a growing group of genetic disorders. We describe a whole-genome siRNA-based reverse genetics screen for defects in biogenesis and/or maintenance of the primary cilium, obtaining a global resource. We identify 112 candidate ciliogenesis and ciliopathy genes, including 44 components of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, 12 G-protein-coupled receptors, and 3 pre-mRNA processing factors (PRPF6, PRPF8 and PRPF31) mutated in autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa. The PRPFs localize to the connecting cilium, and PRPF8- and PRPF31-mutated cells have ciliary defects. Combining the screen with exome sequencing data identified recessive mutations in PIBF1, also known as CEP90, and C21orf2, also known as LRRC76, as causes of the ciliopathies Joubert and Jeune syndromes. Biochemical approaches place C21orf2 within key ciliopathy-associated protein modules, offering an explanation for the skeletal and retinal involvement observed in individuals with C21orf2 variants. Our global, unbiased approaches provide insights into ciliogenesis complexity and identify roles for unanticipated pathways in human genetic disease.

Objects of Transcendence: Scots Protestantism and an Anthropology of Things

This anthropological essay takes as its ethnographic point of departure two apparently contrasting deployments of the Bible within contemporary Scotland, one as observed among Brethren and Presbyterian fisher-families in Gamrie, coastal Aberdeenshire, and the other as observed among the Orange Order, a Protestant marching fraternity, in Airdrie and Glasgow. By examining how and with what effects the Bible and other objects (plastic crowns, ‘Sunday clothes’, Orange regalia) enter into and extend beyond the everyday practices of fishermen and Orangemen, my aim is to sketch different aspects of the material life of Scottish Protestantism. By offering a critique of Bruno Latour’s early writing on ‘quasi-objects’ via Alfred Gell’s notion of ‘distributed personhood’, I seek to undermine the sociological assumption that modernity and enchantment are mutually exclusive.

Approaches through Materiality

Religion is a funny thing, because it always seems to be riding two horses at once. One could describe these horses in a number of different ways, using all sorts of familiar dichotomies; practice and belief, body and soul, earthly and heavenly, here and hereafter. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses”. Here, food and forgiveness, or, perhaps more accurately, ingestion and salvation, are claimed, simultaneously – even seamlessly – by religion. This list could (and does) go on, being inclusive of, for example, immanence and transcendence – but more on this below. Yet these binary pairs can clearly be observed bleeding into one another. Ingesting pork, for example, often appears to be religiously more troublesome than does ingesting bread. This is because matter matters. We may ask, then, is religion really riding two horses, or are these ‘familiar dichotomies’ so familiar because they are false? Rephrasing the question in terms that partially echo the title and subtitle of Morgan’s (2010) landmark edited volume Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, is, I think, helpfully clarifying. What, then, is the matter with religion? The answer presented below is that, very often, the matter with religion is the matter of religion. Put more simply still, the problem with religion is its materiality. This chapter examines the whys and wherefores of this problem for the anthropology of religion – its ethnographic puzzles and methodological opportunities, as well as its conceptual impasses and theoretical insights.

Dual Classification Revisited: Rodney Needham and Vertical Asymmetry aboard Scottish Trawlers

Drawing on ethnographic data collected while working as a deckhand on two Scottish trawlers, this article analyses the spatialisation of social, religious and economic inequalities that marked relations between crew members while they hunted for prawns in the North Sea. Moreover, it explores these inequalities as a wider feature of life in Gamrie, Aberdeenshire, a Brethren and Presbyterian fishing village riven by disparities in wealth and religion. Inequalities identified by fishermen at sea mirrored those identified by residents onshore, resulting in fishing boats being experienced as small 'floating villages'. Drawing on the work of Rodney Needham, this article suggests that these asymmetries can be traced along a vertical axis, with greater to lesser wealth and religiosity moving from top/above to bottom/below. The article seeks to understand the presence and persistence of these hierarchies at sea and on land, by revisiting dual classification within anthropological theory.

Praying for Salvation: A Map of Relatedness

This article attempts to push Mauss’ work on the sociality of prayer (1909) to its fullest conclusion by arguing that prayer can be viewed anthropologically as providing a map for social and emotional relatedness. Based on fieldwork among deep-sea fisher families living in Gamrie, North-East Scotland (home to 700 people and six Protestant churches), the author takes as his primary ethnographic departure the ritual of the ‘mid-week prayer meeting’. Among the self-proclaimed ‘fundamentalists’ of Gamrie’s Brethren and Presbyterian churches, attending the prayer meeting means praying for salvation. Yet, contrary to the stereotype of Protestant soteriology as highly individualist, in the context of Gamrie, salvation is not principally focused upon the self, but is instead sought on behalf of the ‘unconverted’ other. Locally, this ‘other’ is made sense of with reference to three different categories of relatedness: the family, the village and the nation. The author’s argument is that each category of relatedness carries with it a different affective quality: anguish for one’s family, resentment toward one’s village, and resignation towards one’s nation. As such, prayers for salvation establish and maintain not only vertical – human-divine – relatedness, but also horizontal relatedness between persons, while also giving them their emotional tenor. In ‘fundamentalist’ Gamrie, these human relationships, and crucially their affective asymmetries, may be mapped, therefore, by treating prayers as social phenomena that seek to engage with a world dichotomised into vice and virtue, rebellion and submission, and, ultimately, damnation and salvation.

Whose sins do the Brethren confess? The problem of sin as the problem of expiation

Among Brethren fisher families in Gamrie, northeast Scotland, professional clergy and written liturgy are held to be blasphemous denials of the true workings of the Holy Spirit. God, I was told, chooses to speak through all born-again (male) persons, unrestricted by the vain repetitions of lettered clerics and their prayer books. In this context, confession of one’s own sin is a private and pointedly interior affair. In Gamrie, not only did every man seek to be his own skipper, but also his own priest. Yet, much of Brethren worship is given over to ritualised acts of confession. So whose sins do the Brethren confess, and to what end? This article argues that among the Brethren of Gamrie, such acts involve confessing not one’s own sin, but the sins of a ‘sick’ and ‘fallen’ world. More than this, by attending to the sociological (as opposed to theological) processes of confessing the sins of another, we see a collapse in the distinction between confiteor and credo that has so dogged anthropological studies of Christianity. In Brethren prayer and bible study, as well as in everyday gossip, the “I confess” of the confiteor and the “I believe” of credo co-constitute one another in and through evidences of the ‘lostness’ of ‘this present age’. But how, if at all, does this solve ‘the problem of sin’? This article suggests that, with the ritual gaze of confession turned radically outward, Brethren announcements of global wickedness enact (in a deliberate tautology) both a totalising call for repentance from sin, and a millenarian creed of the imminent apocalypse. Here, the problem of ritual can be understood as the problem of (partially failed) expiation.

Establishing the ‘Truth’ of the Matter: Confessional Reflexivity as Introspection and Avowal

The conceptualisation of reflexivity commonly found in social anthropology deploys the term as if it were both a ‘virtuous’ mechanism of self‐reflection and an ethical technique of truth telling, with reflexivity frequently deployed as an moral practice of introspection and avowal. Further, because reflexivity is used as a methodology for constructing the authority of ethnographic accounts, reflexivity in anthropology has come to closely resemble Foucault’s descriptions of confession. By discussing Lynch’s (2000) critical analysis of reflexivity as an ‘academic virtue’, I consider his argument through the lens of my own concept of ‘confessional reflexivity’. While supporting Lynch’s diagnosis of the ‘problem of reflexivity’, I attempt to critique his ethnomethodological cure as essentialist, I conclude that a way forward might be found by blending Foucault’s (1976, 1993) theory of confession with Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of ‘epistemic reflexivity’.

The Exclusive Brethren ‘Doctrine of Separation’: An Anthropology of Theology

Why do the Exclusive Brethren attend church ten times a week? Why do they shun excommunicated members, including immediate family? Why do they refuse to eat with outsiders? Why will they employ outsiders in their businesses, but never be employed by them? Why do they reject modern media as “pipelines of filth”? Why do they refuse to vote, while simultaneously campaigning for Conservative Party candidates? Why do they only live in detached houses, and build churches entirely without windows? How, in other words, do the Exclusive Brethren try to live good lives? And what can we learn anthropologically from these models of ‘the good’, and from the objections they provoke? Drawing inspiration from Keane’s (2014) suggestion that ‘we shouldn’t decide in advance what ethics will look like’, this paper seeks to critically contribute to new scholarship within the anthropology of morality and detachment by constructing, in a very literal sense, an anthropology of theology via an analysis of the Exclusive Brethren ‘doctrine of separation’.