As indicated by the title of this chapter, some conditions may display features evocative of hematological malignancies and have to be recognized as not being tumoral. Here, these situations have been grouped as increased leucocyte types (leucocytosis) or as decreased cell counts (cytopenias), segregated in disease types. A third part considers abnormal immunophenotypes of lymphocytes and myeloid cells. Finally, the recurrent question of haemodilution of bone marrow aspirates, which decreases the otherwise helpful ability of flow cytometry to count large numbers of cells and thus perform accurate differentials, is discussed.

The Linguaphile Activist

The celebrated Hindi poet Mahadevi Verma claimed that a monk does not need to be a scholar or an author. However, should the three qualities of spiritual practice, scholarship and literary craft blend, such a synthesis is sublime and sacred (M. Verma 1987, p. 32). For Verma, Camille, her dear younger brother, embodied this rare confluence. This chapter explores his progression from a young engineering student into Father Bulcke, the worldrenowned scholar on the Ramkatha, Hindi literature and Indology. Rama's story in the Ramcharitmanas, written by the celebrated Indian poet from the Bhakti era, Tulsidas, is considered a literary masterpiece and one of the most popular versions of the Ramayana in India. Tulsidas believed that the narration of Rama's story (in Awadhi, a north Indian vernacular language), undertaken purely for his own personal happiness, would ultimately bring him moksha, the highest spiritual goal in the teachings of Hinduism. Camille always referred to Tulsidas as his idol; propitiously, one may argue that by working on the genesis and the development of the Rama story, much like what Tulsidas wished for himself, Camille also strove for his intellectual moksha.

He was proud of his linguistic heritage; he loved his native Flemish language, while the society around him considered embracing French as the mark of upward mobility. His deep emotional bond with his mother tongue inspired him to become one of the leading activists in the political movement to adopt Flemish as a medium of academic, institutional and official language. As a protagonist of the Flemish language, he was greatly inspired by the Flemish writer Guido Gezelle; in fact, Gezelle was one of the first serious intellectual and theological influences on Camille's life. As a linguaphile, Camille was not against the French language per se; his opposition was directed against the imposition of a language as part of a colonial project to erase the local language and culture. His early brush with the French cultural and linguistic hegemony and his belief that language is the custodian of the cultural essence of any society eventually shaped the future course of his life, and his scholarship and activism in India.

This chapter addresses some of the classic problems of historical analysis, focusing on the ways in which the intellectual options that the complex history of the discipline can help historians address the challenges those problems pose. It presents a discussion of the problems of objectivity, bias, and judgment in history. It focuses on historians’ necessarily paradoxical yet coherent conception of their own relationship to history – of which they are, according to the logic of the discipline itself, both students and products. It suggests that postmodern theory about the nature of historical knowledge both recapitulates and deepens this fundamental historicist position. It discusses the standards of evidentiary support and of logical argumentation that historians use to evaluate the plausibility and productivity of historical interpretations. Finally, this chapter explores once again the unique pedagogical usefulness of History as a discipline that is irreducibly and necessarily perspectival, interpretive, and focused on standards of inquiry rather than on the production of actionable outcomes.

Iron Age archaeologists working with material from ancient Israel have long noticed dramatic changes in pottery styles during the transition from the Iron I to the Iron II. The Aegean-inspired Philistine pottery that dominated the southern coastal plain during the Iron I completely disappeared in the tenth century BCE, as did the once pervasive collared rim jar of the highlands. Slip and burnish, rare in the Iron I, became extremely popular, and the limited ceramic repertoire that characterized the Iron I highland settlements grew significantly. Finally, in the Negev Highlands sites, a simple form of handmade pottery became dominant. The chapter reviews these dramatic changes, all taking place at approximately the same time, and shows that they were all a result of the growing complexity in the region, and the emergence of larger polities.

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.

Toward the end of the Iron I, the vast majority of the many rural villages excavated in the highlands were abandoned. At the same time, a handful of settlements began to grow into fortified towns. Why did these dramatic changes take place at this time, and what is the relationship between these two phenomena? The chapter reviews the evidence and evaluates the various possible explanations for such widespread abandonments, including climate change, nomadization, incentives to move to other regions, forced resettlement, death, and security (external threats), and concludes that the first phase of this abandonment could have only been a result of an external threat (the second phase of the abandonment will be discussed in subsequent chapters, and especially Excursus 12.1). The chapter then identifies the threat with the Philistines, analyzes the nature of Philistine–Israelite interaction, and assesses the impact of the Philistine pressure on social complexity in the highlands and the emergence of leaders there. This is also the phase in which the first Iron Age fortifications appear in the highlands. Taken together, these changes signify the emergence of the Israelite monarchy toward the end of the Iron Age I and the transition into the Iron II.

Onam, the harvest festival of the Malayalis, marked the moment of departure in August 2001, when the Adivasis of Kerala planted ‘refugee huts’, the kutilkettysamaram, in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in protest against mass starvation deaths in their communities. The protest was historic and innovative; no other protest of this nature has ever been attempted anywhere else in India. What they sought was their right to livelihood resources – land for the landless. While there were several land struggles and movements by Adivasis in Kerala, the immediate provocation for them marching to the state capital was the report of 32 starvation deaths among Adivasis in and around Attappady and Wayanad, the tribal district in the state. They demanded a settlement outside the controversial Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999, passed by the state legislative assembly, which repealed the original Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. The Adivasi Dalit Samara Samithi (ADSS) argued that of the 75,000 Adivasi families in the state, 45,000 were landless, and the granting of 5 acres to each of those families would require the distribution of 2.25 lakh acres of land. The Adivasis, led by C.K. Janu – an Adiya woman who spearheaded the struggle – conducted their protest in an unprecedented manner. The struggle was considered successful by the ADSS, claiming that their demands for lands were met, at least partly, by the government. When no action was taken by the government to make the promised measures, and instead followed procrastination politics, the tribal alliance renewed their protest, now in the form of Occupy Muthanga. The indigenous people of Wayanad, under the banner of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) – nearly 800 families – entered the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (MWWS) in January 2003 and declared the area their own, a new republic. However, in two months’ time, on 19 February, they were forcefully evacuated with armed police: one Adivasi and a police officer lost their lives; several Adivasis were hurt or injured in the process.