You can now find us at PLoS Neuroanthropology. Please update your subscriptions, come over and comment (or complain), and let us know what you think.

We are tremendously excited about this opportunity for many more reasons than we have space to articulate. Here we’ll touch on some of the main ones.

The Network

We are thrilled to be part of an initiative that combines serious scholars and serious writers together. That first. As a group, we share interests in science and medicine, in the public uses and misuses of knowledge, and in promoting awareness of ideas and research in a broad fashion.

This amazing new network of people includes writers we’ve followed, others we’ve admired from afar, and some new names with impressive track records. A Pulitzer Prize winner, the former editor-in-chief of Scientific American, professors at Duke and North Carolina Central University, a range of award-wining science journalists, and some top-quality science bloggers with rigorous science backgrounds – that is a great group of people. We are particularly excited to learn from the writers how to better practice this craft, and to engage with people with such an array of interests.

Anthropology within the Public Library of Science

One of the things that has us most excited, that really clinched our decision to make the move to PLoS, is that we hope we might act as a voice for anthropology in a scholarly and public forum built around science and medicine. Anthropology offers powerful insights from cross-cultural research and sophisticated integrative theory that deserve a much wider audience, one we hope to help grow here at PLoS Blogs.

As research becomes increasingly international and interdisciplinary, researchers in all fields need to confront the complexities of worldwide variation and of cultural biases, including our own. Anthropology has done this work for over a century now, and is in a wonderful position to offer the fruits of these intellectual efforts, including hard won wisdom from our own field’s mistakes, to the work of science and medicine represented at PLoS.

PLoS and Blogs

As a non-profit, ad-free adventure, PLoS Blogs also suits what we’ve done long-term at Neuroanthropology. We’ve debated that topic several times, whether to go for ad revenue, whether to join a network that might pay us. We’ve always decided no. We didn’t start doing this for money, we haven’t kept at it for money. We do it because we enjoy writing and we like sharing our ideas with a broad public.

PLoS itself has taken bloggers seriously for quite some time. It offers bloggers access to preprint versions of articles on the same terms as journalists and organizations. The PLoS team has used its own weblogs – PLoS.org, everyONE and Speaking of Medicine – to highlight scholarly content in an accessible format. As Brian Mossup, PLoS Community Manager (and many thanks for the thrill of that initial call!), says, PLoS Blogs will open up “the discussion, and debate, on science and medicine.”

Although online discussions are no longer new to academia, many of us are searching for ways to better integrate online discussion with serious scholarship to increase the quality of the former and the vitality of the latter. We want PLoS blogs, and Neuroanthropology in particular, to be a place where readers can reliably turn to find a broad engagement with new research at the intersection of brain and culture.

The Principles behind PLoS

PLoS’s Core Principles - Open Access, Excellence, Integrity, Breadth, Cooperation, Community Engagement, Internationalism, and Science as a Public Resource – resonate deeply with us.

The Principles capture how we want science to be: open, international, and public. These values resonate with the ethics of anthropology, where integrity, breadth, and community engagement are core guiding principles for our research with people around the world. These values also correspond well with our home institutions, University of South Florida and Macquarie University, where top-notch science, interdisciplinary cooperation, public education, and community contribution are all fundamental to how these universities strive to conduct themselves.

What PLoS Does

There are also some selfish reasons to be part of PLoS. The Public Library of Science is a serious and powerful voice for open-access scholarship and education. We want Neuroanthropology to be a part of that.

PLoS One, the flagship interdisciplinary journal of PLoS, is soon to become the world’s largest journal, given how it is doubling in size every year.

The PLoS family extends to 1200 academic editors. In 2010 PLoS will publish roughly 8,000 articles, providing about 10% of new articles added to PubMedCentral and 1% of new articles added to PubMed.

At a time when scholars are widely discussing the potential of open access, PLoS is leading the charge to make new research accessible to scholars everywhere. To paraphrase a well-worn hacker’s aphorism: science wants to be free. We’d like to be part of letting it loose.

2.3 million page views per month. That’s what the PLoS sites average as a whole. If that’s not enough, PLoS emails Table of Content alerts to 100,000 readers on different weekly and monthly intervals. Its Twitter stream has 4300 followers; its Facebook group, 7000 fans. We’re both thrilled and humbled to be able to join such a vibrant community and will do everything in our power to return the trust.

Even though PLoS has been an innovator in the creation of the new Article Level Metrics Program, we know deans like their traditional journal impact factors right now. And here PLoS is strong. PLoS Biology has the highest impact factor in Biology, according to the Journal Citation Reports. PLoS Medicine is ranked sixth in Medicine, just after the major medical journals in the United States and Britain like the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.

Those are serious numbers in the impact game. The point is not simply that PLoS is successful, but that it’s changing the rules of that game. They’ve created this success using the power of online and open access and creating networks of scholars to ensure high quality.

PLoS Blogs and the Future

PLoS has revolutionized open-access, peer-reviewed scientific publishing since its founding in 2003. It opened up the world of academic publishing, making new research widely accessible regardless of whether a reader had access to a leading research library. We hope, and even believe, that blogs can go through a corresponding transformation, albeit in a different direction. Science blogging has different challenges and potentials for success.

Blogs have become an important channel for the popularization of science, often at an intermediate depth, between the level of the expert specialist and the most unfamiliar public or general readership. Because science blogs are so nimble, writers can respond quickly, posing questions, offering critiques, seeking connection and writing in open-ended fashion. We can comment as science stories unfold, responding both to the research and to popular versions, helping to highlight why findings are particularly interesting or exposing when someone’s over-reaching from the results.

For anthropologists, and for those interested in brain-culture relations, blogs are especially important because they provide a forum for synthetic work, a place where theorists and scientific analysts can try to draw conclusions from diverse sources and types of data. Although it may sound dry, the informal format can allow us to speculate and float ideas that might not yet be substantial enough to support a more traditional academic paper or book.

Finally, science blogs are fun, hopefully for the reader as much as the writer, as the rules for academic writing are relaxed and we can exercise our (sometimes warped) senses of humor. At Neuroanthropology, we like to think that anthropologists are particularly well suited for the role of online entertainment: nothing is quite as entertaining as the range of human oddity, including our own.

Recent controversies in the realm of for-profit science blogs and concerns about the business models for online publication suggest that, as with open-access publishing, a not-for-profit organization, founded on principles of community responsibility and accessibility, might offer the best way to bring together diverse talents.

We hope that PLoS can do for science blogging what it has done for academic journals, encouraging innovation and cooperation, offering an alternative model for supporting science, by people who are passionate about research.

That’s right – we’ve moved over to PLoS Blogs! Well, for the most part. Greg and I will be doing our main blogging over there now. More in just a bit about the move.

Here’s the link to our main Neuroanthropology page there. Please update your subscriptions. We really look forward to having you over there. This is a very exciting move for all of us.

Prof. Deutscher is an accomplished linguist, who has written a number of general works as well as specialist works, including research on Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon and Assyria. Deutscher is honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester, and the article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, to be published by Metropolitan Books.

Deutscher lays out a number of different areas of research that suggest language affects thought, especially in the areas of gender, spatial perception, time, and colour perception, and suggests some areas where profound linguistic differences offer tantalizing possibilities for studying the subtle ways that linguistic practice can influence cognition.

Although I feel Deutscher is unreasonably harsh on Whorf, in part because some contemporary understandings of Benjamin Whorf paint him as a more radical linguistic determinist than I find him to be, the research Deutscher discusses is well worth considering, and it’s a nifty piece to share with our regular readers.

Was Whorf ever the ‘loony fringe’?

The one thing that turns me off to Duetscher’s writings is his pretty harsh bashing of Benjamin Whorf, who, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting anthropological linguists. The tendency to blame a theorist for all of the excesses committed in his (or her) name helps to give academic writing some of its vitriolic, bi-polar character, in which theorists go from being excessively praised (not every good idea can be linked to your favourite theorist) to inordinately vilified (if our intellectual ancestors were truly as dumb and unbalanced as we sometimes make them sound in straw arguments, they would have been running into walls or getting irremediably lost trying to get for work to their homes).

For example, Duetscher suggests that Whorf argued:

Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). …

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.

Both of those last two statements seem to me to be overly extreme; linguistic determinism never really went away in anthropology, although there have been different variants, some of the a lot stronger and more emphatic than others. I know that Wikipedia says that Berlin and Kay’s work on colour terminology left the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ‘completely discredited,’ and it seems to be a dominant motif in some corners of linguistics to say that Whorf was theoretically dead and buried, but I think that this, too, is a pretty pronounced over-statement as the idea of linguistic determinism seems to have shifted and adapted even if one of its primary proponents work fell into some disrepute.

(In fact, Berlin and Kay’s research has also come in for a fair amount of criticism since it was originally published, although it still stands as one of the great cross-cultural research projects ever carried out. You know you’re an academic when you don’t care who wins the argument because you just enjoy the research on both sides.)

The idea that language is essential to understanding a group’s worldview, that there were concepts in some languages inexpressible in others, hardly vanished for decades, as Duetscher and others suggest. An interest in cultural patterns of categorization has been long standing in cognitive anthropology, and most cultural anthropologists assumed that ethnographic understanding demanded some knowledge of local languages.

In fact, one could argue that the semiotic and hermeneutical moves in anthropology and a number of other social sciences assumed the existentially shaping power of symbolic systems, an enlargement but extension of linguistic determinism. Even though Whorf may have fallen out of favour, other versions of linguistic determinism-like thinking still stood their ground (ideological determinism, hegemonic determinism, symbolic determinism, if you will).

One of the reasons that Whorf gets dumped on, in my opinion, is that Steven Pinker really seemed to have it in for him, writing that linguistic relativism is ‘is wrong, all wrong’ in The Language Instinct, going on to say that believing thought and language are the same thing was a ‘conventional absurdity’ (1994: 57). Daniel Casanato (2008: 64-65) suggests that Pinker collapses the difference between Whorf’s argument – language affects thought – and the argument that language is thought, leading to a persistent confusion in Pinker’s critique.

Strong versions of linguistic determinism are really hard to defend and notoriously tricky to demonstrate, especially because causation is difficult to determine; it’s hard to answer the question, ‘Does language cause cognitive differences?’ because it’s very hard to create conditions where other factors can be controlled (see, for example, Casanato’s critique of the work of Peter Gordon and Gordon’s response in Science, 18 March 2005).

I don’t want to get too bogged down in this though because I want to briefly describe the research that Deutscher is referring to when he discusses how language can influence thought.

Re-examining language and thought

Fortunately, Deutscher gets beyond the critique of Whorf, and his New York Times article discusses a number of different pockets of research where Whorfian-like thought has again become convincing to scholars. New research is showing that language can influence perception subtly in a number of ways.

One example is the gendering of nouns, something which English does not do, but other languages do so extensively. Languages with gendered nouns or without gender neutral ways of saying things – Deutscher offers the example of being able to say that you had dinner with ‘a neighbour’ and leave the person’s sex ambiguous – oblige people to communicate information that can be omitted in English. In contrast, English does oblige speakers to definitively establish when an event happened due to verb tenses; Chinese does not. As Deutscher explains:

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

As an example, Deutscher briefly discusses how gendered nouns bias the way that people think about various nouns. Psychological experiments have shown that, when asked to assign adjectives to various inanimate objects or even give voices to animated versions of everyday objects, people who speak languages that gender these objects demonstrate biases in their associations. If the same object is feminine in one language and masculine in another (like ‘bridge’ in German and Spanish respectively), speakers will be influenced in the way that they think about these objects.

Deutscher wonders in his article whether these demonstrable lower level biases might wind up having higher order effects. Does gender associations with objects affect the way that they are designed, for example? ‘Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned?’ It’s a good question (or set of questions), but as Daniel Casanato points out, it would be hard to determine whether it was really the linguistic property that was affecting the taste, fashion, habit or preference, or whether some other causal mechanism or relation might be discerned.

Deutscher argues that the most powerful evidence for language influencing perception comes from the study of egocentric and geographic orientations in different groups of people. Whenever we use directions like ‘left’ and ‘right,’ ‘forward’ and ‘backward,’ we are using egocentric spatial reference or deixis. The speaker or person listening can be used as the point of reference, and space extrapolated from the position and direction of the point of reference. What is ‘left’ will change as we move because ‘left’ stays with us, not with the space itself.

In contrast, a language might not have egocentric directions, like the Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland (yet another reason not to be blasé about language extinction). In Guugu Yimithirr, people can only speak with reference to cardinal directions – north, south, east, west are the English versions – as they cannot say ‘left’ or ‘right.’ Languages that primarily depend upon geographic space encourage people to develop a sense of direction that a person from a more egocentric language-speaking community might find extraordinary.

Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

Here, Deutscher’s explanation is not simply the language, but the habit of being constantly aware of cardinal direction demanding by the language: ‘studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious.’

Deutscher’s discussion of how this permanent awareness of geographical directions affects a range of skills, including how people learn movements, recall events, and even make gestural references is excellent, and worth the effort of reading the article in and of itself. Deutscher goes on to discuss recent findings that language affects thought and perception in other areas, as well, including colour perception, particularly ironic in light of the role of colour perception research in ‘discrediting’ Whorf in the first place.

For example, Daniel Casanato of Stanford, in a 2008 article in Language Learning, returned to the classic Whorf case study of how languages shaped different experiences of time, a topic that I discussed in a recent post, ‘Life without language.’ The irony is that Whorf’s treatment of time perception was one of the things he was most vilified for, treated as though it was not possible that time perception could be anything other than universal.

Deutscher’s piece is great – engaging and information – but I still can’t get comfortable with the ceremonial attacks on the intellectual ancestors. I’ll attach a few links below where you can find more discussion of the issues, but please feel free to suggest some more in the comments section, especially if you’ve posted on the subject.

Previous posts on Whorf and linguistic relativism:

A softer ‘neo-Whorfianism’
Two languages, one brain and theory of mind
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

For more on Guy Deutscher:

Guy Deutscher, ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Clichés’ a New York Times Op-Ed piece from 2005.

The Google Books site for Prof. Deutscher’s book, The Unfolding of Language.

The American Scientist has an interview with Guy Deutscher by Amos Esty.

For more on linguistic relativism

How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think? [6.12.09] By Lera Boroditsky on Edge.

On Guugu Yimithirr and spatial perception, the work of Stephen C. Levinson is crucial. His homepage at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is here. (Papers available for download here, too.)
Levinson at Scientific Commons is here.

One, two, many — or ‘small size’, ‘large size’, ’cause to come together’?
Mark Lieberman’s comments on the Pirahã research of Peter Gordon at Language Log (going back to 2004)

Languagehat discusses work on the Pirahã in PIRAHA AND WHORF.

You can find many of Daniel Casanato’s papers on his website.

References:

Casasanto, Daniel. (2005). Crying “Whorf” Science, 307 (5716), 1721-1722 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5716.1721

Casasanto, D. (2008). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought Language Learning, 58, 63-79 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00462.x

Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: Harper.

Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by J. B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

One note – the stats are based on on-site visits as registered by WordPress.  The syndicated views are a different story, but WordPress doesn’t make it easy to tabulate those.  But the #1 post based on both onsite and syndicated views looks to be Greg’s recent “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?”

Yes, it has indeed been the most shocking tale of neuroanthropological carnage ever seen!

All I can say is that Greg and I certainly didn’t anticipate this when we started this site in December 2007. It’s been a great ride.

Some stats for that time. According to WordPress, we’ve managed 858,400 onsite visits since then.

On top of that, we have over 1500 Google Reader subscriptions for neuroanthropology.net and another 380 through our old feed of neuroanthropology.wordpress.com. Throw in the people at Bloglines, and we have more than 2000 subscribers.

Alexa, the Web Information Company, ranks us as #599,463 in worldwide traffic. Sounds impressive, when there has to be millions and millions of sites out there.

But then you dig into the statistics. “Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful.” So, being number 600,000 just isn’t meaningful. Was it supposed to be?

Let us go to Technorati, a popular tracker of internet usage. They give us an authority of 587 right now. That sounds very authorative. Until you see that Huffington Post has the most authority. Uh oh.

So how about URL Fan, i.e., how popular is your site? They have us at #30294 out of 3,783,534 websites. We were just beat out by jcpenneycouponsfreeshipping.com for spot #30293. Darn.

How about our own analysis of success? Sorry, I’m busy! But go check out our old post, Neuroanthropology @ 500,000. I went into details there on our top posts, search terms, and more and Greg and I both reflected on what has made the site popular.

Just one last thing to do. Create a post for our top 100 posts. Go see what we’ve done!

I did cut out all the grading and policy details.  If you’re really interested in that, drop me an email.

Anthropology 5937: Biocultural Medical Anthropology

Prof. Daniel Lende, Fall 2010, University of South Florida

Content:

This course provides a comprehensive grounding in biocultural medical anthropology, which emphasizes understanding how health and healing are shaped by both biological and cultural processes.  This class will examine disease, illness, human biology, embodiment, public health, methods, and belief systems.  From the biology of stress to the biopolitics of medicine, students will engage in substantive discussion and read central pieces of the scientific and anthropological literature.  While the class is focused on biocultural dynamics, students will also cover the biological mechanisms of disease and applied biocultural practice.

Required Texts:

Wiley, Andrea & Allen, John. 2009. Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Nichter, Mark. 2008. Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Knapp, Caroline. 1997. Drinking: A Love Story. New York: Dial.

Schedule of Classes and Readings

Week One

Aug 24: Introduction to Class

Book: None    

Aug 26: Biocultural Perspectives on Health & Disease

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 1-2

Reading:

- R. Hahn & M. Inhorn. 2009. Introduction. In: Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition. Pp. 1-31.

Recommended

- G. Armelagos et al. 2005. Evolutionary, historical and political economic perspectives on health and disease. Social Science and Medicine 61(4):755-765.

-A. McElvoy & P. Townsend. 2009. Interdisciplinary research in health problems. In: Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective, 5^th Edition. Pp. 33-80.

-P. Farmer et al. 2006. Structural violence and clinical medicine. PLoS Medicine 3(10): e449.

-A. Kleinman. 2010. The art of medicine: Four social theories for global health.  Lancet 375:1518-19.

-S. McGarvey. 2007. Population health. Annals of Human Biology 34(4):393-396.

-R. Nesse. 2008. Evolution: Medicine’s most basic science. The Lancet 372: S21-S27.

Week Two

Aug 31: Diet & Nutrition

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 4

Reading:

-D. Himmelgreen & N. Romero Daza. In press. Nutrition. In M. Singer & PI Anderson, eds., Companion to Medical Anthropology.

-T. Leatherman. 2005. A space of vulnerability in poverty and health: Political-ecology and biocultural analysis. Ethos 33(1): 46-70.

Recommended

- C. Victora et al. 2008. Maternal and child undernutrition: Consequences for adult health and human capital. Lancet 371(9609): 340-357.

- B. Turner et al. 2007. Human evolution, diet, and nutrition: When the body meets the buffet. In: Evolutionary Medicine and Health. Pp. 55-71.

Sep 2: Growth & Development

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 5

Reading:

- C. Worthman. 1999. The epidemiology of human development. In: C. Panter Brick and C.M. Worthman, eds. Hormones, Health, and Behavior. Pp. 47-104.  

- N. Krieger & G. Davey Smith. 2004. “Bodies count,” and body counts: social epidemiology and embodying inequality. Epidemiologic Reviews 26: 92-103.

Recommended

-S. Stinson. 2000. Growth variation: Biological and cultural factors. In: Human Biology: An Evolutionary and Biocultural Perspective. Pp. 425-463.

- J. Hoddinot et al. 2008. Effect of a nutrition intervention during early childhood on economic productivity in Guatemalan adults. Lancet 371: 411-416.

- K. Hampshire et al. 2009. Saving lives, preserving livelihoods: Understanding risk, decision-making and child health in a food crisis. Social Science & Medicine 68(4):758-765.

Week Three

Sep 7: Inequality

Book: None

Reading:

- R. Wilkinson. 2006. The impact of inequality. Social Research 73(2): 711-732.

- M. Marmot M. 2007. Achieving health equity: From root causes to fair outcomes. Lancet 370: 1153-63.

- C. Hertzman & T. Boyce. 2010. How experience gets under the skin to create gradients in developmental health. Annual Review of Public Health 31: 329-347.

Recommended

- N. Adler & J. Stewart. 2010. Health disparities across the lifespan: Meanings, methods and mechanisms. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1186:5-23.

- C. Kuzawa & E. Quinn. 2009. Developmental origins of adult function and health: Evolutionary hypotheses. Annual Review of Anthropology 38:131-147.

Sep 9: Reproductive Health

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 6

Reading:

- M. Lock & V. Nguyen. 2010. Local biologies and human difference. In: An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Pp. 83-110.

- K. Oths. 1999 Debilidad: A biocultural assessment of an embodied Andean illness.  Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13(3):286-315.

Recommended

- M. Tapias. 2006. Emotions and the intergenerational embodiment of social suffering in rural Bolivia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 20(3): 399-415.

- D. Lende & A. Lachiondo. 2009. Embodiment and breast cancer among African-American women. Qualitative Health Research 19: 216-228.

- B. Piperata. 2008. Forty days and forty nights: A biocultural perspective on postpartum practices in the Amazon. Social Science & Medicine 67: 1094–1103.

Week Four

Sep 14: Aging

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 7

Reading:

- C. Ikels. 1998. The experience of dementia in China. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 22(3): 257-283.

- P. Kontos. 2006. Embodied selfhood: An ethnographic exploration of Alzheimer’s disease. In: Thinking about Dementia, Leibing and Cohen eds. Pp. 195-217.

Due: Revision of Wiki Entry

Recommended

-D. Crews & B. Bogin. 2010. Development, senescence and aging. In Clark Spencer Larsen, ed., A Companion to Biological Anthropology. Pp. 124-153.

 - P. Kontos & G. Naglie. 2009. Tacit knowledge of caring and embodied selfhood. Sociology of Health and Illness 31(5): 688-704.

Sep 16: Infectious Disease: Pathogens & Immunity

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 8

Reading:

- T. McDade. 2005.  The ecologies of human immune function. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 495-521.

- P. Brown, M. Inhorn & D. Smith. 1996. Disease, ecology, and human behavior. In: Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method, Revised Edition. Pp. 183-218.

Recommended

- J. Eisenberg et al. 2006. Environmental change and infectious disease: How new roads affect the transmission of diarrheal pathogens in rural Ecuador. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(51): 19460-19465.

- K. Smith & N. Christakis. 2008. Social networks and health. Annual Review of Sociology 34: 405-429.

Week Five

Sep 21: Infectious Disease: Globalization

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 9

Reading:

-R. Barrett et al. 1998. Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases: The third epidemiological transition. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:247-271.

- Farmer, P. 1999.  Rethinking “emerging infectious diseases” (ch.2) and Immodest claims of causality (ch. 10) In Infections and Inequalities. Pp. 37-58 and 228-261.

Due: Draft of Wiki Entry

Recommended

-L. Manderson et al. 2009. Social research on neglected diseases of poverty: Continuing and emerging themes. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 3(2): e332.

- E. Anderson-Fye. 2004. A “Coca-Cola” shape: Cultural change, body image, and eating disorders in San Andrés, Belize. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 28(4): 561-595.

Sept 23: Emerging Diseases: Malaria & HIV

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 10

Reading:

-H. Williams & C. Jones. 2004. A critical review of behavioral issues related to malaria control in sub-Saharan Africa: What contributions have social scientists made? Social Science and Medicine 59(3): 501-523.

-P. Farmer et al. 2001. Community-based approaches to HIV treatment in resource poor settings. Lancet 358: 404-409.

Recommended

- V. Kamat. 2008. Dying under the bird’s shadow: Narrative representations of degedege and child survival among the Zaramo of Tanzania. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(1): 67-93.

Week Six

Sep 28: Stress & Social Inequality

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 11

Reading:

-R. Sapolsky. 2005. The influence of social hierarchy on primate health. Science 308(5722):648-652.

-T. McDade. 2008. Beyond the gradient: An integrative anthropological perspective on social stratification, stress, and health. In C. Panter-Brick & A. Fuentes, eds., Health, Risk and Adversity. Pp. 209-235.

Recommended

-N. Schoenberg et al. 2009. Situating stress: Lessons from lay discourses on diabetes. In: Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition. Pp. 94-113.

-E. Mendenhall et al. 2010. Speaking through diabetes: Rethinking the significance of lay discourses on diabetes. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(2): 220-239.

- M. Nichter. 1981. Idioms of distress: Alternatives in the expression of psychosocial distress: A case study from South India. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, 5(4), 379-408.

-R. Sapolsky. 2004. Immunity, stress and disease. In: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Pp. 144-185.

- W. Dressler. 2004. Culture and the risk of disease. British Medical Bulletin 69: 21-31.

- M. Flinn. 2007. Why words can hurt us: Social relationships, stress, and health. In: Evolutionary Medicine and Health. Pp. 242-258.

Sep 30: The Impact of Race – Genetics or Experience?

Book: None

Reading:

- A. Goodman. 2000. Why genes don’t count (for racial differences in health). American Journal of Public Health 90(11):1669-1702.

-C. Gravlee et al. 2009. Genetic ancestry, social classification, and racial inequalities in blood pressure in southeastern Puerto Rico. PLoS One 4(9): e6821.

Due: New Wiki Entry

Recommended

-C. Gravlee. 2009. How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139(1): 47-57.

-N. Krieger. 2010. The science and epidemiology of racism and health: Racial/ethnic categories, biological expressions of race, and the embodiment of inequality – an ecosocial perspective. In: What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Pp. 225-256.

- A. Kleinman. 2000. The violence of everyday life: The multiple forms and dynamics of social violence. In Violence and Subjectivity. Veena Das et al., eds. Pp. 226-241.

Week Seven

Oct 5: Mental Health

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 12

Reading:

-W. Dressler et al. 2007. Cultural consonance and psychological distress: Examining the associations in multiple cultural domains. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 31(2): 195-224.

-R. Seligman & L. Kirmayer. 2008. Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: Narrative, metaphor and mechanism. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64.

Recommended

- L. Weaver & C. Hadley. 2009. Moving beyond hunger and nutrition: A systematic review of the evidence linking food insecurity and mental health in developing countries. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 48(4): 263-284.

- M. Eggerman & C. Panter-Brick. 2010.  Suffering, hope, and entrapment: Resilience and cultural values in Afghanistan.  Social Science & Medicine 71:71-83.

- B. Pescosolido, C. Brooks Gardner & K. Lubell. 1998. How people get into mental health services: Stories of choice, coercion and muddling through from first-timers. Social Science and Medicine 46 (2): 275-286.

Oct 7: Neuroanthropology

Book: None

Reading:

-G. Downey & D. Lende. 2009. The encultured brain: Why neuroanthropology? Why now? http://neuroanthropology.net/2009/10/08/the-encultured-brain-why-neuroanthropology-why-now/

-M. Cameron Hay. 2009. Anxiety, remembering, and agency: Biocultural insights for understanding Sasaks’ responses to illness. Ethos 37(1): 1-31.

-G. Downey. 2010. ‘Practice without theory’: a neuroanthropological perspective on embodied learning. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: S22-S40.

Recommended

- J. Dumit. 2003. Is it me or my brain? Journal of Medical Humanities 24:35-47.

-S. Choudhury et al. 2009. Critical neuroscience: Linking neuroscience and society through critical practice. BioSocieties 4: 61-77.

-B. Kohrt. 2005. “Somatization” and “comorbidity”: A study of Jhum-Jhum and depression in rural Nepal. Ethos 33(1): 125-147.

-C. Worthman. 2009. Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion. American Journal of Human Biology 21(6): 772-781.

Week Eight

Oct 12: The Relevance of Medical Anthropology

Book: Wiley & Allen, Epilogue

Reading:

-C. Worthman & B. Kohrt. 2005. Receding horizons of health: Biocultural approaches to public health paradoxes. Social Science and Medicine 61(4): 861-878.

-C. Hemmings. 2005. Rethinking medical anthropology: How anthropology is failing medicine. Anthropology and Medicine 12(2): 91-103.

Due: All Wiki Revisions

Recommended

- D. Napolitano & C. Jones. 2006. Who needs ‘pukka’ anthropologists’? A study of the perceptions of the use of anthropology in tropical public health research. Tropical Medicine and International Health 11(8): 1264-1275.

 - A. Wiley. 2004. Toward relevant research: Adaptation and policy perspectives on maternal-infant health in Ladakh. In: An Ecology of High-Altitude Infancy: A Biocultural Perspective. Pp. 178-203.

Oct 14: Methods in Biocultural Anthropology

Book: None

Reading:

- C. Worthman & E. Costello. 2009. Tracking biocultural pathways to health disparities: The value of biomarkers. Annals of Human Biology 36(3): 281-297.

-D. Hruschka. 2009. Culture as an explanation in population health. Annals of Human Biology 36(3): 235-247.

-C. Hadley & A. Wutich. 2009. Experience-based measures of food and water security: Biocultural approaches to grounded measures of insecurity. Human Organization 68(4): 451-460.

Recommended

-C. Gravlee et al. 2009. Methods for collecting panel data: What can cultural anthropology learn from other disciplines? Journal of Anthropological Research 65(3): 453-483.

- J. Limon. 1989. Carne, carnales, and the carnivalesque: Bakhtinian batos, disorder, and narrative discourses. American Ethnologist 16(3): 471-486.

Week Nine

Oct 19: Healing

Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 3

Reading:

-T. Csordas & A. Kleinman. 1996. The therapeutic process. In Handbook of Medical Anthropology. Pp. 3-20.

-J. Frank & J. Frank. 1986. Therapeutic components shared by all psychotherapies. In: Cognition and Psychotherapy, A. Freeman et al., eds. Pp. 45-78.

Due: Initial Draft of PLoS Post

Recommended

- K. Finkler. 1994.  Sacred healing and biomedicine compared. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8(2):178-197

- M. Nichter & C. Nordstrom.  1989.  A question of medicine answering: Health commodification and the social relations of healing in Sri Lanka. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 13: 367-390.

Oct 21: Ethnophysiology & Embodiment

Book: Nichter, Intro, Ch 1

Reading:

-C. Helman. 2007. The body: Cultural definitions of anatomy and physiology. In: Culture, Health and Illness, Fifth Edition.

- G. Shepard. 2004. A sensory ecology of medicinal plant therapy in two Amazonian societies. American Anthropologist 106(2): 252-266.

Recommended

- M. Lock & N. Scheper-Hughes. 1996. A critical-interpretive approach in medical anthropology: Rituals and routines of discipline and dissent. In: Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method, Revised Edition.

- N. Krieger. 2005. Embodiment: a conceptual glossary for epidemiology. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59(5): 350-355.

-L. Kirmayer. 1992. The body’s insistence on meaning: Metaphor as presentation and representation in illness experience. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6(4): 323-346.

Week Ten

Oct 26: Illness Causality & Categories

Book: Nichter, Ch 2-3

Reading:

- L. Rebhun. 1994. Swallowing frogs: Anger and illness in Northeast Brazil. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 8(4): 360-382.

- P. Farmer. 1999. Sending sickness: Sorcery, politics, and changing concepts of AIDS in rural Haiti. In: Infections and Inequalities. Pp. 158-183.

Recommended

- R. Baer, L. Clark, & C. Peterson. 1998. Folk illnesses. In: Louie S, ed. Handbook of Immigrant Health.  Pp. 183-202.

- L. Garro. 2000. Cultural meaning, explanations of illness, and the development of comparative frameworks. Ethnology 39(4):305-334.

- L. Chavez et al. 2001. Beliefs matter: cultural beliefs and the use of cervical cancer-screening tests. American Anthropologist 103(4), 1114-1129.

Oct 28: Pharmaceuticals & Placebos

Book: Nichter, Ch 4

Reading:

-D. Moerman & W. Jonas. 2002. Deconstructing the placebo effect and finding the meaning response. Annals of Internal Medicine 136: 471-476.

-S. Reynolds White et al. 2002. Mothers and children: The efficacies of drugs. In: Social Lives of Medicines. Pp. 23-36.

Recommended

- J. Thompson et al. 2009. Reconsidering the placebo response from a broad anthropological perspective. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 33(1): 112-152.

- S. Van der Geest & S. Reynolds Whyte. 1989. The charm of medicine: Metaphors and metonyms. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 3(4): 325-344.

Week Eleven

Nov 2: Health Policy & Biomedicine Reconsidered

Book: Nichter, Ch 5-6

Reading:

-A. Castro & P. Farmer. 2005. Understanding and addressing AIDS-related stigma: From anthropological theory to clinical practice. American Journal of Public Health 95(1): 53-59.

-M. Rotherham-Borus et al. 2009. Common factors in effective HIV prevention programs. AIDS and Behavior 13: 399-408.

Recommended

- M. Nichter. 2002. The social relations of therapy management.  New Horizons in Medical Anthropology, M. Nichter and M. Lock, eds. Pp. 81-110.

- B. Good. 1994.  Medical anthropology and the problem of belief.  In: Medicine, Rationality and Experience. Pp. 1-24.

- L. Hunt. 2000. Strategic suffering: Illness narratives as social empowerment among Mexican cancer patients. In: Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Garro and Mattingly eds. Pp. 88-107.

- C. Briggs. 2003. Why nation-states and journalists can’t teach people to be healthy: power and pragmatic miscalculation in public discourses on health. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(3): 287-321.

Nov 4: NGOs to Policy

Book: Nichter, Ch 7-8

Reading:

- M. Lock & V. Nguyen. 2010. Biomedical technologies in practice. In: An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Pp. 17-31.

- V. Smith-Oka. 2009. Unintended consequences: Exploring the tensions between development programs and indigenous women in Mexico in the context of reproductive health. Social Science & Medicine 68(11): 2069-2077.

Due: Proposal for Poster/Final Paper Project

Recommended

- D. Mosse. 2004. Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice. Development and Change 35(4): 639-671.

- L. Schell et al. 2007. Advancing biocultural models by working with communities: A partnership approach. American Journal of Human Biology 19(4): 511-524.

- S. McGarvey. 2009. Interdisciplinary translational research in anthropology, nutrition, and public health. Annual Review of Anthropology 38(1): 233-249.

Week Twelve

Nov 9: Biopolitics and Biopower

Book: None

Reading:

- M. Lock & V. Nguyen. 2010. Who owns the body? In: An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Pp. 205-228.

- J. Biehl. 2010. Human pharmakon: Symptoms, technologies, subjectivities. In: A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities. Pp. 213-231.

Recommended

-N. Rose. 2007. Beyond medicalisation. Lancet 369: 700-702.

-D. Fassin. 2008. The embodied past: From paranoid style to politics of memory in South Africa. Social Anthropology 16(3): 312-328.

- A. Petryna. 2009. Biological citizenship after Chernobyl. In: Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition.

- I. Hacking. 2000. Madness: Biological or constructed? In: The Social Construction of What? Pp. 100-124.

Nov 11: Veteran’s Day – No Class

Week Thirteen

Nov 16: Drinking – Falling in Love

Book: Knapp, Prologue, Ch 1-5

Reading:

-D. Lende. 2005. Wanting and drug use: A biocultural analysis of addiction.  Ethos 33(1): 100-124.

-N. Dow Schull. 2005. Digital gambling: The coincidence of desire and design. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597(1): 65-81.

Recommended

-H. Kincaid & J. Sullivan. 2010. Medical models of addiction. In: What Is Addiction? Pp. 353-376.

Nov 18: Film: Dope Sick Love

Week Fourteen

Nov 23: Drinking – Complications

Book: Knapp, Ch 6 – 10

Reading:

- A. Garcia. 2008. The elegiac addict. Cultural Anthropology 23(4): 718-746.

Recommended

- D. Lende. 2007. Evolution and modern behavioral problems. In: Evolutionary Medicine and Health: New Perspectives, W. Trevathan, E.O. Smith & J. McKenna, eds. Pp. 277-290.

Nov 25: Thanksgiving – No Class

Week Fifteen

Nov 30: Drinking – Addiction and Recovery

Book: Knapp 11-16

Reading:

- D. Lende. In prep. Addiction and the brain: Turning neuroscience into neuroanthropology.

Due: Final Revision of PLoS Post (absolute deadline – if possible, complete earlier)

Recommended

- NIDA Principles of Drug Treatment. Pp. v – 60

- H. Castañeda et al. 2008. Enabling and sustaining the activities of lay health influencers: Lessons from a community-based tobacco cessation intervention study. Health Promotion Practice 11(4): 483-492.

Dec 2: Poster Session

Week Sixteen

Dec 9: Final Paper due by 5:00PM

This lecture was part of The Evolution Institute’s Risky Adolescent Behavior Workshop. You can see all the videos from the workshop at The Evolution Institute’s Viddler Page.

The first is The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology. Here is the abstract, part of a whole special issue in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology on the work of the husband-wife team John Whiting and Beatrice Whiting:

The Whiting model aimed to provide a blueprint for psychocultural research by generating testable hypotheses about the dynamic relationships of a culture with the psychology and behavior of its members. This analysis identifies reasons why the model was so effective at generating hypotheses borne out in empirical research, including its foundational insight that integrated nature and nurture, its reconceptualization of the significance of early environments, and its attention to biopsychocultural dynamics active in those environments.

Implications and the evolution of the ecological paradigm are tracked through presentations of three current models (developmental niche, ecocultural theory, bioecocultural microniche) and discussion of their related empirical literatures. Findings from these literatures converge to demonstrate the power of a developmental, cultural, ecological framework for explaining within- and between-population variation in cultural psychology.

The figure above is from this paper, and represents Carol’s own model for understanding human development. But the real point that Carol wants to make in emphasizing these three models goes as follows:

All of these models share a concern for how the cultural ecology of affect and affect regulation drive psychobehavioral development, competence, and well-being or health. Whoever has looked has found linkages among cultural practices, stress physiology, and emotion regulation. Note that each of these models foregrounds the development of emotion and emotion regulation and de-emphasizes classic knowledge acquisition. Although there are important reasons for this emphasis (Damasio, 2005), a reconsideration of what constitutes “knowledge” and more systematic investigation of the linkages between emotion and knowledge might prove valuable (588).

The second article is Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion. This article was part of a special issue on Advances in Evolutionary Endocrinology in the American Journal of Human Biology. Here is Carol’s abstract:

The centrality of emotion in cognition and social intelligence as well as its impact on health has intensified investigation into the causes and consequences of individual variation in emotion regulation. Central processing of experience directly informs regulation of endocrine axes, essentially forming a neuro-endocrine continuum integrating information intake, processing, and physiological and behavioral response. Two major elements of life history—resource allocation and niche partitioning—are served by linking cognitive-affective with physiologic and behavioral processes. Scarce cognitive resources (attention, memory, and time) are allocated under guidance from affective co-processing. Affective-cognitive processing, in turn, regulates physiologic activity through neuro-endocrine outflow and thereby orchestrates energetic resource allocation and trade-offs, both acutely and through time. Reciprocally, peripheral activity (e.g., immunologic, metabolic, or energetic markers) influences affective-cognitive processing.

By guiding attention, memory, and behavior, affective-cognitive processing also informs individual stances toward, patterns of activity in, and relationships with the world. As such, it mediates processes of niche partitioning that adaptively exploit social and material resources. Developmental behavioral neurobiology has identified multiple factors that influence the ontogeny of emotion regulation to form affective and behavioral styles. Evidence is reviewed documenting roles for genetic, epigenetic, and experiential factors in the development of emotion regulation, social cognition, and behavior with important implications for understanding mechanisms that underlie life history construction and the sources of differential health. Overall, this dynamic arena for research promises to link the biological bases of life history theory with the psychobehavioral phenomena that figure so centrally in quotidian experience and adaptation, particularly, for humans.

In this second article, Carol is tying her work back into evolutionary theory. If the first took up more the cultural/psychological side, then here we are grounded in the mechanisms and ideas of biological anthropology. She writes here:

Given the evidence of gene-environment interactions and developmental effects discussed above, combinations of history and circumstance will condition the phenotypes generated from the genetic structure, and thus influence the impact of that structure on corresponding experience, welfare, behavior, and the balance of selective pressures upon genetic diversity. Such gene-environment interactions and their consequences for function and welfare deserve investigation across a wide range of human cultures and conditions. Such study bears exciting possibility for unlocking dynamics among culture, social conditions, the nature and distribution of social niches, and selection pressures operating on allelic variants (779).

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology.

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion.

Update: You can see Carol lecture on Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion regulation here.

He uses his 2002 article in City Pulse, Can Glory Days Return to Lake Lansing?, to discuss how he crafted a very effective piece of reporting that was also a very effective piece of public anthropology.

You just have to love how he uses a great hook at the beginning, and then seamlessly transitions to the broader “this is what this piece is about” while still maintaining relevance. Some great writing:

Lake Lansing just wants to be left alone. In the Prohibition Era, bootleggers raised hell in a house on stilts that sat in the belly of the lake – site of a men’s social club – while a lookout warned of an impending sheriff’s raid. By the time the police boat reached the moated fortress, all alcohol had been hurriedly dispatched into the lake through a trap door.

Over the years, the lake has imbibed more than its share of bad whiskey. Septage, arsenic, fertilizer, dog poop, gull dung, mercury and just about everything that people throw on the ground for miles around the 450-acre waterworld winds up in the lake. “If you spit on the sidewalk,” says Pat Lindemann, the Ingham County drain commissioner, “it goes into the lake.”

But what I really want to highlight in McKenna’s SFAA piece is how he demostrates how to connect core anthropological analysis with journalistic writing. He calls it using “The Anthropological Dozen.”

In every journalistic article I write I try to incorporate what I call “The Anthropological Dozen.” These questions help insure a muckracking result.

Very briefly, here they are: 1) holism (how do disparate phenomenon connect?); 2) fieldwork (from lab tests to participant observations); 3) What’s taken for granted (Did the Ojibwa help create this lake?); 4) culture (how is capital behind what’s behind); 5) cross-cultural justaposition (how did Indians and colonialists use the lake?); 6) Getting the native’s point(s) of view (Who are the natives? What are the ways in which the “native points of view” are ignored, omitted, or supressed?); 7) Contradictions and ideologies (Do people say one thing and do another? Are there dialectical tensions in the terrain of inquiry?); 8.) Origins and history (human origins, the origin of the state, the origin of a nation, the origin of a given institution, the origin of a name, the origin of a place. How have things transformed since the origin?); 9) epistemological critique (Begin with a “reification of names” in your analysis. Do names – like “Lake Lansing” in this instance – accurately capture the idea/object represented?); 10) conformity/resistance (what are the modes of resistance that the less powerful play?); 11) privilege the most powerless; and 12) analyze social change.

McKenna goes on in his essay to provide examples of these various techniques in action, and also to describe how he got the necessary information as journalist/anthropologist through interviews, library research, and the like. And all on a four day deadline!

Here is just one example, focusing on the writing part:

The colonialists originally called it Pine Lake for the stand of beautiful white pine trees on the east side of the lake – the largest stand in Ingham County. But the white pines were soon destroyed for their wood resources in the second half of the 19th century. According to Raphael, the biggest logging operation was conducted by a John Saltmarsh, whose name ironically revealed his intent. He “assaulted the ‘marsh’” in the winter one year, sending the logs over the lake ice on sled runners. They were stockpiled for export behind the new train depot. Saltmarsh also owned a picket mill, to make the fences that would set the enclosures around the new form of land division around Lansing: private property.

Notice how I translated academic parlance into civic voice. This is journalism as a public anthropology, a syncretism (McKenna 2010b). Think of it as converting ethnography into a good story. There are villains, dramatic tensions, metaphors and ample use of quotation to enliven the narrative.

Link to the City Pulse article, Can glory days return to Lake Lansing?

Link to the Society for Applied Anthropology August Newsletter

It’s just about the food: It’s not about the place, the price, the surroundings, the crowd or the nutritional value — it’s just about good food and where to find it.

Good food can be found anywhere: We built Foodspotting to work in any city, small town or country from the start. It encourages exploration — trying new things vs. following the crowd.

So here I can find out what dishes people are recommending in Colombia. That mazorca in the photo here is one of my favorite street foods in Colombia – this one came from the Usaquen district in Bogota.

Belgium is there, a place I really enjoy traveling.

Or in my new home city of Tampa.

So go explore food over at Foodspotting