The nurse-to-nurse handover is not taught formally during training, yet it is one of the most important rituals of the nursing shift. This article focuses on the structure and function of change-of-shift reports and lists the events that occur within them, describing the locations of the handover process and the mode of communication involved. The problems that can occur during handover are dis...

Horses are often kept in individual stables, rather than in outdoor groups, despite such housing system fulfilling many of their welfare needs, such as the access to social partners. Keeping domestic stallions in outdoor groups would mimic bachelor bands that are found in the wild. Unfortunately, the high level of aggression that unfamiliar stallions display when they first encounter each other...

Over the years, research in ethno-linguistics contributed to gather corpora in a wide range of languages, cultures and topics. In the present work, we are investigating ritual speech in Yucatec Maya. The ritual discourse tends to have a cyclic structure with repetitive patterns and various types of parallelisms between speech sections. Previous studies have revealed an intricate connexion betwe...

Turner's suggestive analysis of African ritual symbolism (1) enhances one's appreciation of the complexity of expressive phenomena. There are, however, methodological and theoretical cautions to be raised. First, the approach he advocates attacks the problem of representations at the most difficult point of analysis. Symbols of the kind singled out by this method are repositories of many, highl...

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role in imagining and bringing about political shifts...