If you ever have the time, I would like to pick your brain about the field of study you are pursing. My undergraduate major is Oceanography, but I am intensely interested in Cultural Anthropology, Neuroscience, Neuroimaging, and Psychology. How did you decide to go in the direction you did?

For a while now I have been doing something completely different for a living (professional pilot), and I often feel frustrated by lack of intellectual challenge. For some time have been considering going back to pursue studies in things I find fascinating.

Since I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about this stuff anyway, sometimes I think… well why not?

Any advice or thoughts to share would be appreciated!

Chris

2 years, a Masters degree, and a job with the European Neuroscience and Society Network later, I’m pleased to report there is a LOT more work going on in this area than I realized, but most of it is out of the states. Check out the BIOS group at the London School of Economics (where I’m seated) as an example: a fairly varied group of social scientists using a variety of approaches and methodologies (historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists) to tackle current bio issues, neuroscience included. This is a great Centre and there are others out there. Do consider stepping outside the States.

1. Door-knocking worked for me. And sometimes one has to resolve to back out of academic relationships if they are not productive. For example, I dropped my departments only Brazilianist from my dissertation committee because he was so psycho-phobic. I had to look elsewhere. Worst thing, I think, is being stuck in a relationship you don’t want to be in (that includes girlfriends, boyfriends too obviously!). But still as important as congruence on research interests is that you actually like each other and can communicate.

As you point out, the tedium of perpetual epistemological defense can be frustrating. You might try to come armed with simple, pre-conceived responses to anticipated dissenters. My sense is that we can pretty much forecast criticisms from different camps, (e.g, what the po-mo proponent is going to say). It’s sort of like give a conference talk and anticipating what the Q&A will entail and already having powerpoint slides prepared to deal with it. Politicking is just part of the process

You topic sounds interesting/timely. Maybe you know the work of Scott Atran. He is a good example of someone with clout doing cross-disciplinary work. He core figure in the cognitive science of religion (see In Gods We Trust), but more recently has been working on affiliation in jihadism and political negotiation. I think that demonstrating to faculty mentors that there is already solid work out there that backgrounds your interests (e.g., Atran) would help you make your case.

Another piece of advice is more pragmatic. If you find too many barriers and too much risk for alienation, don’t sweat it. Just do a solid field study that will be acceptable to your committee as good ethnography, and then move onto the next step, and find an opportunity that will build on you skills/knowledge and develop new areas of research.
In may case, I am sussing out post-doctoral opportunities where I can bring my background as a cultural/medical anthropologist to bear on issues in behavioral health and social neuroscience.

2. This point relates to what is likely the most anxiety-provoking issue for graduate student fieldworkers. And it is a huge topic for discussion. I will just say here that if you want to use quantitative or mixed methods for field work (as I did) do some or all of the following:
-read ethnographies/research articles that DO this, so you know how it can be done
-study methods handbooks such as H. Russell Bernard’s books on qual. and quant. approaches in anthropology. I think as important as knowing what methods to use is knowing what methods NOT to use for the particular questions/problems you are addressing.
-if not offered in your anthro department (and very likely they are not) take a course in statistics and/or quantitiative analysis in another department (viz., sociology, psychology, public health, economics)
-Look for funding sources that require you to employ more empirical approaches in fieldwork. For example, here in the U.S. the National Science Foundation (NSF) has a directorate in social/behavioral sciences that includes cultural anthropology. However, proposals need to specify hypotheses to be tested and a well-articulated methods section and plan for analysis. This is quite different than other foundations for anthro research.
By the way, the NSF is a great funding source for ‘interdisciplinary research’ that truly does cut across disciplines.
Another option is to get funding for a project that emphasizes qualitative methods in the proposal and then use quantitative methods anyway, assuming there is a good reason/fit.

Hope this helps

1. As a prospective masters student at my own institution, University of Bergen (Norway), I am in somewhat distress about how I should proceed when writing my thesis proposal (on socio-cognitive approaches to youth culture and “jihadism” in the Middle-East). Any reference to cognition or psychology (psychoanalysis not included) tends to make most of the faculty frown. There is a lot of good and sound scientific research being done at my institution, but mostly on ecology and ethnicity. But “everybody” knows that getting the right advisor is important. So how does one go about when as Ashwin points out, there is a lot of “disciplinary boundaries/stigmas/epistemological insecurities” that needs to be dealt with first? Constantly defending ones own epistemological commitments in discussions, papers etc. can be quite tiresome, especially against handy straw men such as “biological determinism” and “reductionism”. In my case it boils down to whether one should prioritize ethnographic knowledge at the cost of shared theoretical commitments or vica versa. Did you people just knock on/in office doors when looking for advisors?

2. My other main concern is how, as a student, to go about when integrating the heavy emphasis on fieldwork (6 months, participant observation) with a sound scientific methodology from cognitive science and psychology. As funding is critical, it can be a problem when applying for grants if ones field of interest falls flat between two departments. For example, my department lacks good facilities for quantitative inquiry (data analysis etc.). It’s even worse if one of these departments has great epistemological and disciplinary barriers such socio-cultural anthropology departments tend to. How did you folks go about? What are your experiences?

I would love to see a discussion on this!