Dobu Island

Dobu Island is an island, part of D'Entrecasteaux Islands in Papua New Guinea. It is located south of Fergusson Island and north of Normanby Island.

The people of Dobu were the subject of a seminal anthropological study by Reo Fortune. He described the Dobuan character as "paranoid", obsessed with black magic, and as having extremely unusual attitudes toward sex and violence.

Fortune's account was reiterated by Ruth Benedict in her popular work Patterns of Culture. However, many later anthropologists expressed skepticism.

Fortune's analysis was significantly challenged by Susanne Kuehling in her 2005 title Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea. In particular, Kuehling's interest lies at the intersection of ethics and personal conduct.

References

Sources

Dobu (film)

Dobu (どぶ) is a 1954 Japanese film written and directed by Kaneto Shindo and starring Nobuko Otowa.

Plot

Toku, a factory worker (Taiji Tonoyama) gives food to a starving woman, Tsuru (Nobuko Otowa), who then follows him home. He shares a shack in a shanty village in Kawasaki with his friend Pin-chan (Jūkichi Uno). The two men try to get rid of her but then let her stay when she gives them money. Tsuru tells the people of the village that she lost her job due to a strike, then was robbed of her severance pay, then sold to a brothel in Tsuchiura. She ran away with a friend from Kawasaki. Toku and Pin-chan sell her to a geisha house and spend the money. She is thrown out. The owner demands his money back. Tsuru earns the money to pay their debt by working as a prostitute outside the station. The other prostitutes beat her. She fends them off with a policeman's revolver and is then shot dead by the police.

Cast

Reception

Japanese film scholar Alexander Jacoby describes Dobu as "a searing account of urban poverty".

2,5-Dimethoxy-4-butylamphetamine

2,5-Dimethoxy-4-butylamphetamine (DOBU) is a lesser-known psychedelic drug and a substituted Amphetamine. DOBU was first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. In his book PiHKAL (Phenethylamines i Have Known And Loved), only low dosages of 2-3mg were tested, with the duration simply listed as "very long". DOBU produces paresthesia and difficulty sleeping, but with few other effects. Compared to shorter chain homologues such as DOM, DOET and DOPR which are all potent hallucinogens, DOBU has an even stronger 5-HT₂binding affinity but fails to substitute for hallucinogens in animals or produce hallucinogenic effects in humans, suggesting it has low efficacy and is thus an antagonist or weak partial agonist at the 5-HT_2A receptor.

Isomers

Alternative isomers of DOBU can also be produced, where the 4-(n-butyl) group of DOBU is replaced with any of the three other butyl isomers, the iso-butyl, sec-butyl and tert-butyl compounds being called DOIB, DOSB and DOTB respectively. All are significantly less potent than DOBU, with DOIB being active at around 10-15mg, and DOSB at 25-30mg, and both being primarily stimulant in action with little or no psychedelic effects. The most highly branched isomer DOTB was completely inactive in both animal and human trials.