Earlier today, I wrote a post on Bruce Wexler’s book where I suggested that ideology and ‘culture shock’ were not necessarily the best case studies to work with when discussing the integration of social theory with neurosciences. My reasons for this are many, but they boil down to a fear that, if we choose our case studies poorly, we will not offer compelling integrated accounts that bring together biological studies of the brain and humanistic studies of society and culture. It may have seemed that I was not overly generous to Wexler, however, even though I quite like his work, so I thought I’d balance this out by giving some examples of ways that anthropologists have similarly chosen examples that make it especially difficult to present coherent accounts across different scales and perspectives on a subject.
One of the best/worst examples of attempting to prematurely bridge the gap between culture and brain science is the concept of ‘memes.’ First proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (in The Selfish Gene), a ‘meme’ is defined by Dawkins as the smallest unit of cultural information, which spreads from one person to the next through diffusion, sort of like an infection. Dawkins and other ‘memeticists’ (is that a word… or a meme?) are at pains to argue that culture propogates itself, like a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head or a fashion you must have that you then make your friends crazy to imitate, because of the effectiveness of the meme, not because it is useful to the bearers. Proponents also argue that, although there are significant differences with genes, evolutionary theory can also be applied to memes to understand how cultural ideas spread, develop, change, or become extinct.
So what’s the problem with memes?
Continue reading “Brain-culture, memes, and choosing examples”
Neuroanthropology 