Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.
We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
If you would like more information, please contact Greg Downey at Macquarie University greg.downey (at) mq.edu.au (remove spaces).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the true giants of anthropology, passed away this past week on 30 October, just shy of 101 years old.
As Maurice Bloch writes, Lévi-Strauss was ‘the last survivor of these great beasts such as Sartre, Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,’ the theorists who have given contemporary anthropology, and social theory around the world, a French accent and Gallic cadence.
I’m not going to retread the substance of these obituaries, nor will I repeat what was better (and more quickly) written by other commentators online such as Rex at Savage Minds, Marshall Sahlins at the AAA website (for the 100th birthday), Richard Price, a student of Lévi-Strauss, and Robert Mackey at the NYTimes website, The influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss (a piece that links to a number of video clips in English and French, including interviews with other scholars). Instead, I’m going to write briefly about the relation of Lévi-Strauss to the study of brain and culture from my perspective.
I’ve been wanting to write a post on Lévi-Strauss for a while, and even started it once, because I’ve been grappling with the question about how neuroanthropology aspires to produce theoretical and empirical projects that are distinct from what is typically called ‘cognitive anthropology.’ Lévi-Strauss’ work is crucial to the foundation of cognitive anthropology, as a range of authors have argued (see Sperber 2008, for example), so he’s a critical point of departure for neuroanthropology.
Although I admire Lévi-Strauss, and I’m perfectly content to be considered close classificatory kin to cognitive anthropology, there are some characteristics of Lévi-Strauss’s thought, structuralism (the theoretical school Lévi-Strauss dominated, but which did not encompass all of his work [see Doja 2008]), and contemporary cognitive anthropology with which I fundamentally disagree. So although this post is written in respect, it has elements of opposition, perhaps even the false binarism that arises whenever one is trying to highlight distinctiveness in the midst of significant overlap. Beware the theoretical belligerence of small difference! Read the rest of this entry »
Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology carnival bringing together all things four-field, is now up in its 79th edition over at Anthropology.net. Thanks, Tim, for putting this one together on short notice!
Some really intriguing data and ideas about female choice and sexual strategies among chimps, which are rightly highlighted right at the top.
Good stuff on Ardipithecus, Bluestonehenge, and plenty more.
Applications are now being accepted for the 2010 Neuroscience Boot Camp at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information, head on over to the Boot Camp website.
Kezia Kamentz dropped me an email and shared that last year’s Boot Camp went really well: “great teachers, a small but very diverse group of students, and a varied set of teaching methods.” Kezia said that they would love to have some anthropologists on board, and I know that there’s a few of you out there. Kezia writes:
Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, Boot Camp participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function. Like last year’s faculty, the 2010 Boot Camp faculty consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists.
A busy week – but now you can peruse some economics, war, NY Times mind, anthro, and blogging mind.
Top of the List
Sandra Kiume, Social Neuroscience
Channel N gives us a great video with John Cacioppo speaking on “Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community.” Sometimes Channel N didn’t load right for me, so you can also go straight to the RSA page with the Cacioppo video.
The Uncultured Project is about fighting global poverty, about one man’s decision to try and make the world a better place. It’s a story told through a website and promoted on YouTube.
Imagine leaving behind your friends, family, possessions, and a full scholarship to a good university – all to go halfway around the world to a third world country just to help the poor.
Charlie Rose 12- part Brain Series started off last night apparently (I’m in Australia, as most of you know — I miss a few things). Heidi Tan dropped us a line to let us know it was happening. The series is also supported by the Simons Foundation.
Last night’s introductory topic was ‘The Great Mysteries of the Human Brain’: consciousness, free will, perception, cognition, emotion and memory with a roundtable of brain researchers.
Charlie’s co-host and guests included Eric Kandel from Columbia University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Cornelia Bargmann from Rockefeller University, Tony Movshon from New York University, John Searle from University of California Berkeley and Gerald Fischbach of the Simons Foundation.
If you missed last night’s episode, according to Heidi, you can catch it again tonight on Bloomberg Television at 8PM and 10PM ET, or listen to the interview simulcast on Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio is broadcast on 11:30AM in the New York Metropolitan area and is available on XM and Sirius.
For information about the series, you can visit: http://www.charlierose.com/. When I did, it automatically loaded the first episode of the series.
A great conference coming up on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2009 in Sydney, Australia: Mind and Its Potential. The Dalai Lama, Paul Ekman and Martin Seligman are the really big names, and then people like Susan Greenfield, Marc Hauser, Natasha Mitchell and many more fill a long list of “extraordinary speakers.”
The conference is premised on this theme:
Science is only just beginning to understand the extraordinary capacity of the brain to change and develop. The implications for how we learn, work and care for one another are profound. Here is your opportunity to hear the world’s top scientists, psychologists and philosophers explain how to apply the new science of the brain in education, medicine, business and your life.
The conference really emphasizes the following: “Practical applications of the new science of the brain: How do we learn? How do we teach? How do we overcome adversity and disability? How should we live our lives? Find out the implications for education, health care, business and your life!”
The first day of the conference really emphasizes plasticity and learning as fundamental to both understanding neural function and how we deal with issues like education, parenting, and exercise. The second day features the Dalai Lama and Martin Seligman discussing human flourishing and spirituality, ethics and morality in the morning, and then emotions and more in the afternoon. You can access the overall prorgam here.
Dave Munger, In Which I Resist Writing The Obvious Headline
Finding a genetic basis for anger using fMRI research with genetic analysis. Oh the juicy, misleading titles that could have been.
Joe Brewer and George Lakoff, Why Voters Aren’t Motivated By A Laundry List Of Positions On Issues
An overture to cognitive policy – the principles, frames, and point of views that make sense of political development.
For more, here’s Cognitive Policy Works: Politics For Real People basic statement on Cognitive Policy: “Cognitive policy is about the values and ideas that both motivate the policy goals and that have to be uppermost in the minds of the public and the media in order for the policy to seem so much a matter of common sense that it will be readily accepted.”
Alex Hutchinson, Global Impositioning Systems
The evils of GPS, or why not figuring how to get places reduces our sense of direction (it’s a skill after all)
Marco Roth, The Rise of the Neuronovel
An in-depth and critical essay on writers’ turn to writing not about the mind but about the brain. Most recommended.
