I have not yet read Earl Count’s (1973) Being and Becoming Human, but my friend and colleague Juan Dominguez also once recommended it to me. As soon as I return from fieldwork, it will be added to my ever-growing reading list. I have just finished reading Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s (1980) Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind). For an Indonesian historian who was jailed though not trialled for 14years, Pramoedya certainly has a beautiful literary style with a gift for portraying the way different cultural mindsets interact… Next on the list will be a PhD thesis I recently acquired from the Universitas Negeri Padang – wow the amount of bureaucracy I had to get through to finally obtain but a few photocopied chapters! Incredible! It reminds one, that fieldwork in Indonesia is always facilitated if one travels are accompanied by several packets of Cigarettes filling one’s pockets…

Best,
~j

Dlende, you might laugh: My Honours research was in Psychophysics. I then side-stepped and did post-grad studies in Anthropology.

Meanwhile that list of references will keep me going a while! While I have a copy of Brad Shore’s book which I referred to frequently earlier in my PhD, I was unaware of his article. Thanks for posting those references. I must apologise, but unfortunately, my references are in a filing cabinet in Australia which I probably won’t see for another five months. I will post the references as soon as I return to Oz!

That said, I want to make an argument for a much older involvement within anthropology with the meaning and import of the brain. I hadn’t known that about Paul Broca, so that’s a definite starting point. But on the American side, I see Franz Boas as a definite founder of “neuroanthropology,” as he is in most things anthropological in the United States. Boas’ initial interest was in “psychophysics,” particularly “the relationship between subjective experience and the objective world.” That led him to Baffin Island, where he quickly realized the need for the larger scope of a study on the Inuit there—hence cultural anthropology. So, psychophysics led him to cultural anthropology, and I think today we are at a point to go back again.

Boas also was a “neuroanthropologist” because he took on the main use of the brain in his day, the biological determinism packed around views of “unchanging” brain size as reflecting permanent differences among “races.” His demonstration of the environmental variation of cranial form, particularly that “cranial form changed in response to environmental influences within a single generation of European immigrants to the United States,” remains a landmark in American anthropology.

And, of course, Boas laid out the four fields and anthropology’s holistic approach, and I believe that we need this sort of integrative approach to be able to understand how we are ourselves, including how our brains work.

Alfred Kroeber, Boas’ student, is also a father figure in anthropology, and his 1923 textbook Anthropology is striking because of how integrative it is, making a case for direct connections between anthropology and other fields. For me, I see that textbook as one of our most direct precursors to the work we are trying to do today.

Neuroanthropology, though not called that, has a definite history through American anthropology though the rest of the twentieth century. On the biological side, we have the work of Ralph Holloway and his at-the-time controversial argument that brain re-organization happened before the emergence of the Homo line. On the cultural side, I could point to the latter work of Victor Turner (a Scot, I know, but his professional career was spent as a professor in the US). Turner’s 1983 essay “Brain, Body and Culture” is certainly another precursor to today’s neuroanthropology.

Alongside the history of interest in the brain in anthropology, there has also been a justified wariness of how brain and psychological science are used in the social arena. And brain research has passed through several historical epochs, and to my mind, finally appears at a point where its understanding of the brain offers us exciting opportunities for cross-fertilization. Earlier views, from the symbol and meaning free behaviorism to the excessively innate cognitive revolution, did not provide for a lot of theoretical overlap with anthropology. But the increasing importance of Hebb’s theory on synaptic plasticity (e.g., his 1949 book on The Organization of Behavior), the emergence of new methods like brain imaging, the increasingly detailed knowledge about specific brain systems, and the theoretical and popular work of authors like Chagneux or Damasio have placed neuroscience in a much more complementary position to anthropology.

So, here’s my statement on how anthropology has unique strengths that match up well with the emerging brain size. These strengths make neuroanthropology a distinct enterprise from many of the other “neuron” sister disciplines, and offer us a bright future if we but seize it.

So my list:
- the critical evaluation of biological determinism
- the use of a holistic approach (which matches well with the complexity of the brain)
- the recognition of at least a moderate relativism (e.g, the moderate version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), which matches with the understanding of how brains wire together based on patterns of use and input (i.e., through interaction with the local environment, largely structured through historical processes)
-the focus on human evolution, including the evolution of our brains, as crucial to understanding our “cultural biology”
-the importance of ethnography as a method to understand people’s behavior, experience and relations

Links:
Bradd Shore article:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294(199103)2%3A93%3A1%3C9%3ATOCMCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

Warren TenHouten webpage
http://www.soc.ucla.edu/faculty.php?lid=170&display_one=1

Early!! Anthro Article on Broca:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1356-0123(187007)1%3A1%3C1%3ATAASOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

Clarence Gravlee on Boas cranial form research:
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.125

NY Times article on Ralph Holloway
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/science/27prof.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

Victor Turner’s “Brain, Body and Culture” article
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9744.1983.tb00512.x

Nice Overview of Antonio Damasio’s work:
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/damasioreview.html

A Consideration of the moderate version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html