Mental disorders such as depression and autism are generally viewed in one of two lights, either as something neurological or something psychological. Cultural anthropology obviously has greater affiliation with the psychological side, and biological anthropology with the neurological. The same split is true in psychiatry, ably demonstrated by Tanya Luhrmann’s Of Two Minds, which, to radically simplify, describes the fight between talk-therapists and pharmaceutical-dispensers. (Still, at least this anthropologist wishes Luhrmann had gone beyond ethnographic description of fields to tackle the same problem that both anthropology and psychiatry embody—bridging the nature/nurture or biology/culture split.)
But is this way of dividing things, an enculturated mind versus an epigenetic brain, an accurate description? Recent research suggests no.
