Day: February 20, 2008

Poverty & Programs

This article, A Home Remedy for Juvenile Offenders, strikes me as relevant to our earlier discussion on poverty and the brain.  While I think the emphasis on “therapy” places too much weight on psychology and the individual, nonetheless I admire the overall idea, as related here:

The basic idea is to reach and help borderline youths at a moment of crisis, and turn them away from a more serious criminal path. By treating them in the context of their families and environments rather than in isolation, officials found that recidivism was usually less than half that of residential correction programs. The city says that it hopes its program will be as successful, but that it will take many years before it can be sure. Still, at roughly $17,000 per child, such in-home therapy programs cost a fraction of the annual expense of keeping a child in secure detention, which can be $140,000 to $200,000. 

My hope is that anthropology can and will add to this sort of work.  Still, I am not sure anthropology has developed enough as an applied science where it can point to clear and specific ways to make a difference in these social and material environments (please comment if you do have some specific ideas or programs).  So the recognition of individual differences (including moments of crisis), the importance of life pathways, and the focus on social context strike me as quite a good start. 

What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?

Some cultural anthropologists are afraid of the brain sciences; they fear that neuroscientists want to dissolve culture into the study of the brain, discounting the necessity of studying culture, social interaction, systems of meaning, symbolism, everyday life, and all the things that cultural anthropologists have argued are important for shaping human life. Emily Martin, for example, one of the most interesting anthropologists working on the way that cultural assumptions shape medicine, medical education, and the like, writes in an article on the ‘mind-body’ problem of the dangers of ‘neuro-reductionist’ thought.

Martin’s fear is that, ultimately, although some in the brain sciences explicitly claim to have an interest in cultural differences, they do not grant the social the same degree of ‘reality’ as the cellular and organic. As Martin writes, although they sometimes discuss social and cultural differences; ‘… the levels in neuron man, a figure frequently reproduced in neuroscience texts, begin with molecules, but go no farther than the central nervous system’ (2000:574). I’m sure that Martin is right for a lot of neuroscience texts; but I would argue that cultural anthropology texts, in the main, probably demonstrate the same degree of partiality.

She sees ‘the neuroreductive cognitive sciences as the most dangerous kind of vortex—one close by and one whose power has the potential to suck in disciplines like anthropology, severely weakening them in the process’ (ibid.). Martin encourages anthropologists to unite ‘in opposition to a position in which the dyke between nature and culture has been breached, and all of what anthropologists call culture has drained through the hole and dissolved in the realm of neural networks’ (ibid.: 576).

Normally, I would argue that Martin is over-reacting, worried about a possibility that is too remote. But then, every once in a while, I read something that helps me to realize that Martin’s fear, however exaggerated, are grounded in concrete experiences. Rather than a ‘dyke between nature and culture,’ I find that the real issue is the slipperiness of the notion of culture that some in the brain sciences use. That is, if we look carefully at what they are using as the ‘cultural’ in their own attempts to grapple with cross-cultural differences in the brain, cognition, and development, we find that however well meaning, given the wrong tool, one is likely to wind up with a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, although I like the majority of what they write, I fear that this is the situation with a recent piece I stumbled across by reading Encephalon’s recent posting, Briefing the Next US President on 24 Neuroscience and Psychology Issues.
Continue reading “What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?”