Neuroanthropology

For a greater understanding of the encultured brain and body…

Archive for the ‘Applied Anthropology’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Expanding the Top Ten Ways for Anthropologists to Make a Difference

Posted by dlende on August 18, 2009

Last month’s The Top Ten Ways for Anthropologists to Make a Difference outlined how people’s work can have real-world impact. The idea was to get people’s attention and provide them with ideas about what to do. It worked. The Top Ten Ways became a popular post and provoked good discussion.

Now it is time to take the next step – not just what to do, but how to do it. Over the coming weeks the series Ten Ways To Make A Difference will provide examples and references for each type of engaged anthropology. The examples will come from both biological and cultural anthropology, and cover how each option applies to anthropology itself.

The post serves as the master list for Ten Ways To Make A Difference. As each part of the series comes online, the corresponding description will become a live link to that post.

TOP TEN WAYS FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

(1) Critique. Our default position, but sometimes it does work. (Just not as well or as often as we hope.)
(2) Develop basic knowledge of problems. Rather than keeping to analysis, embrace our role as being able to speak directly about the causes and consequences of significant problems.
(3) Investigation. Take critique and go after something that matters to the public, whether that’s a community or the effects of a misguided policy.
(4) Advocacy. Use our understanding and our position as scholars to help advocate for change, to both represent the local point of view and to speak from our status as an expert. (Yes, expert – that research you did and the degree you have help grant that in the eyes of others.)
(5) Involve the community in your research. Besides making for better research and applied outcomes, involving the community in your work yields direct and indirect benefits, through salaries, skill development, idea exchange and more.
(6) Develop concrete community or applied outcomes. Start by having these outcomes as a goal from the beginning, along with more traditional outcomes like peer-reviewed articles. Then do community-based research to make sure your applied outcome is relevant.
(7) Focus on developing or changing policy. Yes you can. As anthropologists we know plenty about unintended consequences, we also know a lot about what works locally. Put that to use.
(8) Get the word out. Communicate your work in an effective and popular way. Write an op-ed or a blog post or, gasp, a popular book. Remember that communication can also be informal. As anthropologists we can act as conduits, communicating among different constituencies in the field, different parties at the negotiating or policy table, or even different fields’ perspectives on a problem.
(9) Help develop organizations. Organizations do make a difference. They can bring people together in common cause and provide a framework through which to work. Indeed, organizations can take all the points made here and ramp them up to the next level.
(10) Create interventions or programs. Have a good idea? What about your community partners? Then try it out to see if it might work. Other fields do it. We can too. Do some investigation, get community involvement, and also check on what other fields recommend. And then see if our anthropology ideas make a difference. Remember, it’s always good to evaluate how effective your program is!

Posted in Applied Anthropology | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Public Anthropology by Biological Anthropologists

Posted by dlende on July 25, 2009

Skin A Natural History“Public anthropology” is often presented as primarily an effort of cultural anthropology. For example, the University of California Press Series in Public Anthropology focuses on ethnographies. Yet a broader public anthropology is inherent in its own description:

The California Series in Public Anthropology draws anthropologists to address major issues of our time in ways that readers beyond the discipline, find valuable. Many anthropologists write on narrow subjects in self-contained styles that only coteries of colleagues appreciate. The Series strives, instead, to analyze important public concerns in ways that help non-academic audiences to understand and address them.

Rob Borofsky echoes this broad conception when he writes, “Public anthropology seeks to address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to the re-framing and easing–if not necessarily always resolving–of present-day dilemmas.”

Biological anthropologists do public anthropology. They write for broad audiences and address social problems and public concerns. Their books move from the very body we live in to the importance of human variation, the origins of violence to assumptions about human nature and reproduction. Biological anthropologists have provided advice and information on caring for your child, looked at how our present-day environment can shape human health and behavior, and shown how to engage in primate conservation.

Here are those books, the ones that show public anthropology in action. The title links to the Amazon book listing. These books are recent, accessible, competitively priced, and compelling – all useful for increasing their public reach.

Public Anthropology Books by Biological Anthropologists

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2000), Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species. Ballantine Books.
Hrdy “unblinkingly examines and illuminates such difficult subjects as control of reproductive rights, infanticide, ‘mother love,’ and maternal ambition with its ever-contested companions: child care and the limits of maternal responsibility.”
98% Chimp
Nina Jablonski (2008), Skin: A Natural History. University of California Press.
“This amply illustrated rhapsody to the body’s largest and most visible organ showcases skin’s versatility, importance in human biology and uniqueness… Penn State’s anthropology chair, Jablonski nimbly interprets scientific data for a lay audience, and her geeky love for her discipline is often infectious.”

Jonathan Marks (2005), What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes. University of California Press.
“So why should one venture through the 307 remaining pages of this book, if the main message is obvious from the start? I can see two good reasons. First of all, because it is fun… The second reason is that the subject of this book is extraordinarily important. Many scientists and physicians deal daily, in one way or another, with human variation and its consequences. However, only seldom do we have the time to reflect on the assumptions underlying many concepts, even apparently simple ones, in this area.”

James J. McKenna (2007), Sleeping with Your Baby: A Parent’s Guide to Cosleeping. Platypus Media.
“Cosleeping is one of the most delicious experiences in parenting, and Dr. McKenna’s carefully researched and thoughtful advice separates the myths from the marvelous reality.”

Dale Peterson & Richard Wrangham (1997), Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Mariner Books.
“Contradicting the common belief that chimpanzees in the wild are gentle creatures… they suggest that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human warfare.”

Meredith Small (1999). Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent. Anchor.
“How we raise our children differs greatly from society to society, with many cultures responding differently to such questions as how a parent should respond to a crying child, how often a baby should be nursed, and at what age a child should learn to sleep alone… [This book] will be especially meaningful to those swept up in the wild adventure of parenting.”

E.O. Smith (2002). When Culture and Biology Collide: Why We Are Stressed, Depressed and Self-Obsessed. Rutgers University Press.
“This book will be completely accessible to laypersons, and yet equally thought provoking for scientists.”

Karen Strier (1999), Faces in the Forest: The Endangered Muriqui Monkeys of Brazil. Harvard University Press.
This book “outlines the fight against extinction of the wooly spider monkey. Muriquies remain one of the most endangered primates, but the detailed profile drawn up by the author and her fellow researchers has provided crucial information in their fight for survival. In all areas Strier has carried out impressively thorough and precise research, outlined here in a very readable form, accessible to specialist and laymen alike.”

Other Recent Popular Books by Biological Anthropologists

Why limit ourselves to just eight? After all biological anthropologists have written many popular books. Here is a wider listing, ones that might not hew to a strict definition of “major issues” and “critical concerns” that comes with public anthropology. But these are certainly books that interest a broad public.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Applied Anthropology, Evolution, Human variation | 5 Comments »

Engaging & Dispatching Memetics

Posted by dlende on July 24, 2009

Engaging Anthropology
I am reading the book Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence by the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen. Quite enjoying it – definitely recommended.

I’ve just finished his section on Memetics and the Anthropologists. He systematically dismantles meme theory from an anthropological point of view, just like Greg did in his post, We Hate Memes, Pass It On. (Greg’s version is snarkier…) Eriksen also ties in the popular success of meme theory to a consideration of how anthropology can gain public relevance. This description resonates with much that we do here on this site.

Memetics may be beyond salvation as a theoretical project. However, it raises a few questions which are just right for anthropology seen as an endeavour of public relevance. It sees human culture as part of nature yet rejects the simplifications of human sociobiology, and it asks highly pertinent questions about cultural transmission, cultural diffusion and cultural change. The notion of contagion is useful and has not been properly explored in cultural studies, including anthropology.

But – I repeat- without an understanding of the human subject, no advance will be made, and of course, context is everything. Curiously, in attempts at applying memetics, the biology itself seems to suffer. In Ingold’s words, the genotype exists ‘in the mind of the biologist’ (Ingolg 2000: 382). The ambition of offering a simple and straightforward analytic account of the human mind has led to an untenable abstraction (62-63).

Eriksen pushes us to make generalizations and to take cross-cultural analysis seriously, to examine these big questions of cultural change and diffusion. But he ties that into a grounded understanding of the person, the human subject. Those subjects, or people, are always found in specific contexts, and these local environments help shape culture and subjectivity (beyond the generalizations of, say, contagion). Biology comes in as a crucial mediator here, from helping to understand the contours of cultural change to being a crucial player in the relations of subject and environment. At least that is how I read it. Memetics fails because it is not anthropological, neither grappling with the rich tradition of research on cultural change and meaning nor with the actual realities of people and their lives.

Eriksen then relates his analysis of memetics and anthropology to a larger public project.

The lesson from the experiment of memetics is that we have to do better: those of us who feel that memetics is insufficient have to come up with a better alternative than merely stating that things are more complicated than this. Saying ‘things are more complicated’ is like having endless meetings to avoid making a controversial decision.

The anthropologist’s account of human nature has to be holist – it must include the recipe, the ingredients, the oven and the cook – and it must supersede the conventional culture/nature divide. Looking in the direction of biology, it is likely to find more by way of inspiration in ecology than genetics. It must also take human experience seriously as an area of enquiry. These general delineations notwithstanding, several paths are possible and might shed light on the human condition. The field is open: with a handful of exceptions, there have been few attempts since the Second World War to develop a theory of human nature which draws on biological knowledge without succumbing to the temptations of easy fixes (63).”

Just to be clear, by recipe, ingredients, oven and cook, Eriksen means DNA, development, the environment, and subjectivity (or an actor). So I would certainly agree with a holistic approach that supersedes the conventional culture/nature divide. In biology, I actually hope that both ecology and genetics play a role. But I would point out that neuroscience is actually the closest to many of the areas that interest him as an anthropologist – experience and behavior, interactions with the environment, possible biological dynamics that help shape culture, and so forth. In other words, neuroanthropology.

To be honest, neuroanthropology probably has a branding problem, rather like cognition and culture. The term doesn’t shout out “public relevance.” But as a site to explore the proper combination of recipes, ingredients and cooks, and to gain an online presence, well, it’s a good start. Next stop, a theory of human nature. Right?

In any case, here’s the Google Book link to Engaging Anthropology. The “Memetics and the Anthropologists” section starts on page 57. Just do a search for memetics; it looks like you can read the entire section online to get Eriksen’s excellent analysis of the weaknesses of memetics.

And for more on Thomas Hylland Eriksen, he is a professor at the University of Oslo. He also runs a rich website called Engaging with the World, where you can see how he’s put his words into practice.

Posted in Applied Anthropology, Cultural theory | 6 Comments »

Top Ten Ways for Anthropologists to Make A Difference

Posted by dlende on July 17, 2009

(1) Critique. Our default position, but sometimes it does work. (Just not as well or as often as we hope.)

(2) Develop basic knowledge of problems. Rather than keeping to analysis, embrace our role as being able to speak directly about the causes and consequences of significant problems.

(3) Investigation. Take critique and go after something that matters to the public, whether that’s a community or the effects of a misguided policy.

(4) Advocacy. Use our understanding and our position as scholars to help advocate for change, to both represent the local point of view and to speak from our status as an expert. (Yes, expert – that research you did and the degree you have help grant that in the eyes of others.)

(5) Involve the community in your research. Besides making for better research and applied outcomes, including the community in your work yields direct and indirect benefits, through salaries, skill development, idea exchange and more.

(6) Have concrete community or applied outcomes. Start by making these outcomes a goal from the beginning, along with more traditional outcomes like peer-reviewed articles. Then do community-based research to make sure your applied outcome is relevant.

(7) Focus on developing or changing policy. Yes you can. As anthropologists we know plenty about unintended consequences, we also know a lot about what works locally. Put that to use.

(8) Get the word out. Communicate your work in an effective and popular way. Write an op-ed or a blog post or, gasp, a popular book. Remember that communication can also be informal. As anthropologists we can act as conduits, communicating among different constituencies in the field, different parties at the negotiating or policy table, and even different fields’ perspectives on a problem.

(9) Help develop organizations. Organizations do make a difference. They can bring people together in common cause and provide a framework through which to work. Indeed, organizations can take all the points made here and ramp them up to the next level.

(10) Create interventions or programs. Have a good idea? What about your community partners? Then try it out to see if it might work. Other fields do it. We can too. Do some investigation, get community involvement, and also check on what other fields recommend. And then see if our anthropology ideas make a difference. Remember, it’s always good to evaluate how effective your program is!

Posted in Applied Anthropology | 10 Comments »

Paul Farmer: This I Believe

Posted by dlende on July 9, 2009

Paul Farmer is a doctor and an anthropologist, and spoke as part of NPR’s series This I Believe. Farmer co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care for the poor around the world. He helped develop DOTS (directly observed therapy), a way to provide care for HIV/AIDS that works in resource-poor settings, as well as community-based approaches to treating multi-drug resistant TB in developing countries.

As an anthropologist he has emphasized the importance of structural violence, the negative impact that systems of power can have on people through racism, gender inequality and political violence, with significant articles in both Current Anthropology and PLoS Medicine.

His most recent book is Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. You can also read about his lifework in Tracy Kidder’s biography, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.

Hat-tip (and thanks) to Ryan Anderson over at Ethnografix and his anthropological list of inspiring people and work.

Link to full text of Paul Farmer’s This I Believe NPR recording.

Posted in Applied Anthropology, Medical anthropology, Video | 2 Comments »

Community-Based Work and the Importance of Being Integrative – The Ganey Award and Video

Posted by dlende on June 29, 2009

In April I had the honor of receiving the Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award. Given by the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, the Ganey Award goes to a Notre Dame faculty who has done collaborative work in the local community. For those interested in the details of that work, here is the press release – Daniel Lende Wins 2009 Ganey Award.

Neuroanthropology.net has played a central role in the community-based research I have done with my students. These include posts on using humor in recovery from breast cancer, a support group for women with HIV/AIDS, research to help redesign a local hospital waiting room, and the stories that US war veterans wanted to share about their everyday battles with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Two peer-reviewed articles have come out of the community-based research with my students: Embodiment and Breast Cancer among African American Women, and Community Approaches to Preventing Mother-to-Child HIV Transmission: Perspectives from Rural Lesotho. A great community guide, Underneath It All: Humor in Breast Cancer, was put together by the students, community members and myself, and is now used in a local hospital.

One of the best things about the award was that the Center for Social Concerns made this wonderful video with my community partners and my students. Here’s the YouTube link, but I also present it below as it captures why I do this sort of work.

I also want to share a written version of what I said at the CSC award dinner. No, no, not all the thank yous (there were plenty and all richly deserved), but a reflection on my own approach to my work.

I want to close by speaking to why the work I have done has meshed so well with the Center for Social Concerns.

At its core my work is integrative. Notre Dame had encouraged that integrative spirit. These five factors make that spirit a reality.

First is listening, listening to the person across the table. That is the start to doing community-based work and the start to understanding other ideas.

Second is the synthesis of intellectual and social problems. These are human problems, where compassion and involvement can matter as much as intellectual analysis or abstract policy.

Third is a push to make our research international and interdisciplinary, and not just local and field specific. Integration only happens by crossing boundaries.

Fourth is the combination of traditional publishing with other forms of scholarship, such as a community guidebook and electronic publishing. These forms of scholarship can reach many, many more people than a typical peer-reviewed article.

Fifth, being community-oriented, with an insistence that what we do is relevant to more than just the university. Some of the most challenging questions and even our best answers and outcomes can come from those people across the table, the people with whom we are lucky enough to work.

These five factors – listening to others, the synthesis of intellectual and social problems, making our work interdisciplinary, combining traditional publishing with other forms of scholarship, and having a community orientation – all matter. Together they make a tremendous difference in our lives as academics, students, and community partners.

Posted in Applied Anthropology, Medical anthropology, Video | 8 Comments »

Varieties of Public Anthropology

Posted by dlende on June 27, 2009

So I wrote an overview of Rob Borofsky’s efforts in Public Anthropology the other day. But there are plenty of other varieties of public anthropology.

So here’s a quick guide to some that I’ve found in the form of blogs, associations and communities, some literature that you can access online, and graduate programs with a public anthro emphasis. It’s a US emphasis, as that is what I am most familiar with – though I really wish it could be more international. Feel free to comment to add more!

Blogs

Society for Applied Anthropology – Podcasts
See in particular the podcast from this session, Public Anthropology, Applied Anthropology and Ethically Engaged Ethnographic Writing.

Culture Matters focuses on all sorts of applied anthro, but you can see all the posts with “public anthropology” here

Open Anthropology – looking for a critical take on the world? Max Forte’s blog is a great place to start and to return.
Here are posts that specifically mention “public anthropology.”

Savage Minds, the leading cultural anthropology blog, has a whole “public anthropology” category, which contains all their relevant posts.

Digital Ethnography – Michael Wesch does public anthropology on YouTube and more.

Antropologi.Info helps spread the word. You can specifically find “public anthropology” mentions here.

On the Human – While more than just anthropology, this project engages the question of what it means to be human, with a particular focus on the issue of “human singularity.” Offers posts, resources and more.

I could go on as I consider most blogs as an explicit form of public anthropology. But I’ll stop here and direct you to two ways to explore more. First, our Best of Anthro 2008 Initiative gives you public anthropology on the internet – a collection of the best and most popular anthropology writing and blogging of 2008.

Second, you can check out this “Public Anthropology” Google Blog Search.

Associations & Communities

Society for Applied Anthropology. The society also has its own Ning online community, which is getting close to 800 members strong.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Applied Anthropology | Leave a Comment »

Public Anthropology

Posted by dlende on June 22, 2009

Yanomami Girl by Victor Englebert

Yanomami Girl by Victor Englebert

Public anthropology happens when anthropologists engage with public issues and problems rather than just pursuing discipline-specific endeavors.

As Rob Borofsky writes in Public Anthropology – A Personal Perspective, this approach to anthropology addresses:

important social concerns in an engaging, non-academic manner. Public, in this sense, contrasted with traditional academic styles of presentation and definition of problems… The only way to be taken seriously by the broader public, I am suggesting, is to ask the questions readers beyond the academic pale ask, to answer the questions these readers long to know, to share experiences that add insight and meaning.

Rob Borofsky has been one of the leaders in public anthropology, having founded the Center for a Public Anthropology and serving as editor for the series in Public Anthropology at the University of California Press.

Many prominent books have come out of the UC Press series. Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor is the best-known. Carolyn Nordstrom recently published Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (for a taste, see this video of Nordstrom “Fighting for a Healthy Global Economy”). Rob Borofsky himself put together Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From It. The latest is Righteous Dope Fiend by Phillippe Bourgois.

Public Anthropology and the University of California Press host an annual competition for new manuscripts in public anthropology [this is actually the 2009 call here], one aimed at graduate students and the other for scholars more broadly. Here’s Cat Bolton, the latest graduate winner and an incoming faculty here at Notre Dame, encouraging you to submit:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Applied Anthropology | 3 Comments »

Tobacco Worse Than Cocaine?

Posted by dlende on May 27, 2009

Gas Deal
By Mariana Cuervo, Elizabeth Montana, Brian Smith, and Sadie Pitzenberger

Is your local gas station attendant a drug dealer? Most people would say no, yet he readily deals all day long with customers looking for their next nicotine fix. Nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco, keeps its users hooked.

Even though most people do not consider tobacco to be a drug, this post will show that it is exactly that. Tobacco delivers similar neurobiological effects as illegal substances like cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana, all more commonly associated with the word “drug.” With tobacco, however, advertising and the law contribute to the common perception that tobacco is not a drug.

Tobacco Products

Just like on the street corner, where you might be able to buy crack, marijuana or meth, a gas station offers different types of drugs. Tobacco itself comes in many forms: dip, snuff, cigars and, of course cigarettes.

Chewing tobacco or “dip” is a smokeless form of tobacco, which when packed into the lip allows nicotine to flow into the bloodstream via the gum line. Snuff, a finer form of tobacco, is snorted while cigarettes are smoked. Both provide an alternative way to get a nicotine high.

The ways in which these tobacco products are consumed mirror the techniques of cocaine consumption – coca leaves are chewed, cocaine is snorted, and crack is smoked. So how is tobacco different?
Cigarette Poisons
And just like marijuana tobacco is grown in the ground, picked and dried, and then rolled into cigars and cigarettes. Tobacco has nicotine while marijuana has tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Both are responsible for getting the user high.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Addiction, Applied Anthropology, Medical anthropology | 12 Comments »

Calories Not Diets

Posted by dlende on March 3, 2009

Have a favorite way to lose weight, one that has worked for you? As long as it involves cutting calories over the long term, then it will probably be effective. That’s the basic lesson from the latest research.
frank-sacks
Last week Frank Sacks, a Harvard professor of nutrition, and his colleagues published a major study in the New England Journal of Medicine, Comparison of Weight-Loss Diets with Different Compositions of Fat, Protein and Carbohydrates (full text). A total of 811 participants from Boston and Baton Rouge were divvied up into four diets with different emphases on protein and fat. The participants were then followed over two years. The conclusions, as summarized by Journal Watch, were:

Changes in weight and waist circumference at 6, 12, 18, and 24 months were indistinguishable among groups: At 2 years, only about 15% of each group had lost at least 10% of body weight. Attendance at group counseling sessions strongly predicted successful weight loss.

So there’s the catch! The weight loss was modest. As the Journal Watch title puts it, “Four low-calorie diets yield the same mediocre results. Dieters ate different amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrate — but, after 2 years, most were still obese.” Still, many people would accept an average loss of 9 pounds and 2 inches less of waistline.

The main implication of this study is that calories matter, not diets. As Frank Sacks emphasized in a great interview on Science Friday, most research on diets has focused on the short-term. But weight loss is a long-term problem – and there calorie restriction is what really adds up. How to achieve that is a major issue, which I considered at length in a previous post on successful weight loss.

In the Science Friday interview Sacks himself ends up advocating a “very common sense approach – to have portion control, to cut out the highest calorie stuff you are eating, and getting some exercise. It’s all an integrated whole.” To that end, Sacks says that individuals should experiment with different diets to see what works for him or her.

On the research side, Sacks bluntly states that “we should move on from trying to figure out which diet is best.” Rather, we should examine why individuals vary so much in their response to weight loss programs. “The difference in individual response just overwhelms any possible dietary difference.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Applied Anthropology, Food & Eating | 6 Comments »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 135 other followers