Day: March 4, 2008

Neuroanthropology Session at the AAA Conference

Greg and I are organizing a session for the annual American Anthropological Association meeting, held this year in San Francisco from November 19 to November 23rd.  The session is called, “The Encultured Brain: Neuroanthropology and Interdisciplinary Engagement.” 

We still have one or two spots that might be open for people interested in presenting on neuroanthropology at the AAAs.  So please contact either me (dlende@nd.edu) or Greg (greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au) as soon as possible, as we need complete abstracts before March 10th.  Please let us know what you’d like to present on! 

Here’s our session abstract: 

As a collaborative endeavor, neuroanthropology aims to better integrate anthropology, social theory, and the brain sciences.  In this panel, we explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behavior. Neuroanthropology can help to revitalize psychological anthropology, promote links between biological and cultural anthropology, and strengthen work in medical and linguistic anthropology.  However, recent anthropology has not engaged neuroscience to produce the sort of synthesis that began when Franz Boas built cultural anthropology from psychophysics. 

Neuroscience has increasingly produced basic research and theoretical models that are surprisingly amenable to anthropology.  Rather than “neuro-reductionist” or determinist approaches, research has increasingly emphasized the role of environment, body, experience, evolution, and behavior in shaping, even driving organic brain development and function.  At the same time, the complexity of the brain makes a mockery of attempts to pry apart “nature” from “nurture,” or to apportion credit for specific traits.   Research on gene expression, endocrine variability, mirror neurons, and neural plasticity all beg for comparative data from across the range of human variation — biological and cultural. 

Neuroscientists and other social scientists are already actively working on these sorts of integrated models; books like Wexler’s Brain and Culture and Quartz and Sejnowski’s Liars, Lovers and Heroes actively incorporate anthropological materials.  In the social sciences, books like Turner’s Brains/Practices/Relativism aim to bring neuroscience into social theory, often with critical intent. 

However, these works often leave out the best of anthropology.  Although our research is being borrowed, we are being left out of the conversation precisely at a time when we should speak with authority.  In the present round of integration, simplistic understandings of culture dominate, and, at times, outside authors read our research through unsettling ideological lenses.  And, given the emphasis on experience, behavior, context and development, the absence of ethnographic research and insight into precisely those domains that impact our neural function is startling. 

Anthropology has much to offer to and much to learn from engagement with neuroscience.  An apt model is just how important genetics has become in anthropology, cutting across the entire discipline.  A similar revolution is waiting with neurobiology, if we can draw on our strengths and build neuroanthropology on inclusion, collaboration and engagement, both within and outside anthropology.  To this end, this session explores areas of anthropological research related to the brain where heredity, environment, culture and biology are in complex relations, with human variation emerging from their nexus rather than being determined by a single variable.  Participants explore addiction, motor skill, XXXX, XXXX — brain-related phenomena that can only be explained by dynamic models including both “bottom-up” (biological, neural, and psychological levels) and “top-down” (cultural, social, and ideological) factors.  Participants highlight that no single model of the biological-cultural interface holds for all cases.  The papers in this panel also suggest ways in which anthropologists might intervene in public discussions of crucial human characteristics and make our concerns more persuasive for other academic disciplines exploring the complexity of the human brain.

Free Lunch and Iraq

Two very different articles highlight just how little cost-benefit analysis matters sometimes, whether at the highest policy levels or in the most mundane of circumstances.  Humans evolved in a world of threats and status, and oftentimes that runs counter to any sort of logic.  And so we face many opportunities lost and much damage done. 

Bob Herbert writes today about “The $2 Trillion Dollar Nightmare,” the on-going estimate of the total cost of the Iraq war.  He notes the lack of public discussion of the “consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.”  Then he discusses the testimony of a Nobel-prizing winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Hormats: “Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. ‘For a fraction of the cost of this war,’ said Mr. Stiglitz, ‘we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more’.” 

Carol Pogash wrote recently about “Free Lunch Isn’t Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry.”  Many students who qualify for federally-subsidized lunches go without:  “Lunchtime ‘is the best time to impress your peers,’ said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student body president. Being seen with a subsidized meal, he said, lowers your status’.” 

Pogash writes later, “Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the public schools in Berkeley, Calif., said that attention to school cafeterias had traditionally focused on nutrition, but that the separation of students who pay and those who receive free meals was an important ‘social justice issue’.”

Beyond threats and status, cultural distinctions matter in these sorts of decisions.  The war on terror was framed, from the very first moment, as a war of civilization against barbarians—our very way of life seems to be under threat.  And students know what eating a subsidized meal signifies, that all that effort in having “spiky hair and sunglasses” goes to waste in that moment of being seen on the wrong side of the American Dream. 

In the end the costs do matter, particularly in opportunities lost, as our own biological and cultural heritages conspire together.  That’s more than the market, more than being predictably irrational, it’s the tragic acting out of our own selves at the smallest and largest of scales.  But they are dramas we ourselves write, and so can change. 

But it won’t be easy.  Write what you know best, one writer’s rule goes.  In everyday life it’s what we do all the time.  Breaking free from that, from lamenting what might have been to seizing what could be, will take courage and vision and work.