Month: April 2009

Escaping Orientalism in cultural psychology

eastwest1In a recent article in American Psychologist, Adam Cohen (2009) suggests that a number of fields in psychology have taken up the study of culture, but the results, although interesting, have been limited by what sorts of ‘culture’ have been investigated. As Cohen (2009:194) writes:

A person reading these literatures could be excused for concluding that there is a very small number of cultural identities (North American vs. East or Southeast Asian), that vary principally on the dimensions of individualism–collectivism or independent–interdependent self-construal—whether people are seen as inherently independent from others or whether social roles are most important in defining the self.

In this post, I want to provide a bit of a bibliography of some of the literature fast emerging on cultural difference in psychology, neuroimaging, and related fields, but also focus a bit on the consequences of this limited imagination in considering cultural difference, the almost exclusive focus on East-West contrasts. Just because I love a bit of controversy with my breakfast, I’ll suggest it’s a form of what Edward Said has called ‘Orientalism.’

Although Cohen brings up the issue and offers a few suggestions for how the problem might be addressed, I think his prescriptions would herald more of the same sickness, although perhaps spreading the infection to more hosts. That is, Cohen puts his finger on a serious problem in the psychological study of culture, but the prognosis won’t improve much unless we actually understand the root of the problem: it’s not studying Europeans (and European-Americans) and Asians (and Asian-Americans) that’s causing the whole problem. Part of it is misunderstanding what is being studied in the first place when cultural difference is under the lens.

This post is based on part of a talk I gave on Tuesday to the Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) here at Macquarie. When I got into the subject, I realized it was far more than I could possibly share in a 50-minute presentation, so I thought I’d post it here.

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Wednesday Round Up #61

So after the favs, it’s some evolution (hobbits and phalluses, anyone?), then anthro and neuro, onto education and finishing off with some stuff on Colombia. Enjoy!

Top of the List
fibroblast-and-nanowires
Courtney Humphries, Untangling the Brain: From Neuron to Mind
Feature article from Harvard Magazine which addresses the question, “how do individual neurons link to one another in networks that somehow result in complex brain functions?”
The striking picture at right leads off the article, and shows a human fibroblast on a bed of nanowires. They also have some good online videos about simple creatures and how they navigate the world.

Roberto Casati, Book Review: The Art Instinct by Dennis Dutton
Culture & Cognition takes on the claims of art by evolution while preserving sympathy for the overall evolutionary effort. For the fun version, see Colbert’s interview with Dutton – art for propagation!

Heather Tompkins, Derek Albeck
Street Art! Skulls meets urban portraiture! Hat-tip to Sue!

The Neurocritic, Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion and Envy and Schadenfreude
Both critical and informative on the blow-up of novel research and media sensationalism

Declan Butler, Web Usage Data Outline Map of Knowledge
Pdf of a recent Nature News piece – here’s what impressed me about this take on the PLoS paper, “A striking difference in the usage maps is that journals in the humanities and social sciences figure much more prominently than in citation-based maps. Along with journals in some other fields, such as psychology and the environment, they also emerge as gateways between clusters that are otherwise poorly connected, and so act as key bridges between disciplines.”

Evolution

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #61”

Anthropology on Cambridge DSpace

dspace-anthropology
One of our readers, Laurence (thanks!), pointed out a great resource yesterday, Cambridge DSpace (Digital Space), the university’s “institutional repository… to facilitate the deposit of digital content of a scholarly or heritage nature.”

Laurence sent us the link for all the video lectures and other materials under “Department of Social Anthropology” at Cambribge. These resources include interviews with a wide range of scholars, from Paul Rabinow to Colin Renfrew and Simon Schaeffer and many others. This section shows 471 results, so plenty to explore.

There is a whole range of intellectual communities on Cambridge DSpace, from horse paleopathology (only 1 item, but still I had to mention it!) to the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre. The Department of Economics has their collection of working papers up, including this 2004 one on bounded rationality and neural networks. But it really seems that the Department of Social Anthropology has taken the greatest advantage of DSpace, so go explore.

What Is Social Anthropology? by Alan Macfarlane

I found the following video quite good – rather like getting to sit down in a tutorial and listen to a master speak. Your tutor is Alan Macfarlane, professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

If you’re interested in comparing the master class to the group document, here’s the Wikipedia entry on social anthropology.

Macfarlane’s most recent book is Letters to Lily: On How the World Works, where he brings together his work as historian and anthropologist to answer his granddaughter’s questions, What is love? Why are families so difficult? How do we get justice? How well does democracy work? Who is God? What makes us individuals? And why are we here in the first place?

You can get the full list of questions and some background and a taste of how he answers the questions at Macfarlane’s website.

Macfarlane has written many books, including The Glass Bathyscape: How Glass Changed the World (publishing in the US as Glass: A World History), written with Gerry Martin. The two published a synopsis of the book in Science, Beyond the Ivory Tower: The World of Glass. Macfarlance has also provided us a set of video clips on glass, its making and uses, which highlight the conclusion to the Science piece:

“The different applications of glass are all interconnected–windows improved working conditions, spectacles lengthened working life, stained glass added to the fascination and mystery of light and, hence, a desire to study optics. The rich set of interconnections of this largely invisible substance have made glass both fascinating and powerful, a molten liquid that has shaped our world.”

Also, with a hat-tip to Kerim at Savage Minds, Macfarlane has interviewed an extraordinary range of social scientists in his “Ancestors” page, from Frederick Barth to Roy Wagner, with full audiovisual files available.