First and foremost, I hope that this blog provides a space where anthropologists interested in neurosciences can share their thoughts, get in touch, and find out about each other’s research.  We’re in the vast minority out there, and I felt like it would be good to start up some conversations.

So, in keeping with that ‘mission,’ I am looking forward to signing up other participants as contributors.  For those of you who have not done it, blog posting is a great way to share thoughts, point out interesting news items, or get in touch without the extremely formal demands of normal academic publishing.  Unlike simply creating a mailing list, however, this blog will have a public face, so that we might be discovered by like-minded souls, wherever they are.

In the long run, I think that I’d like to work toward some collected volumes, conferences, panels at the American Anthropological Association or Australian Anthropological Society meetings, contacts between grad students and outside advisors, and that sort of long-running, loose collaboration.  I’ll be posting calls for papers or even first drafts of conference proposals for people to read, and I think the opportunity to share and discuss them with fellow travelers will be great.

In addition, like a normal blog, I will be trying to post links to and commentary upon news items or new papers that might be of special interest to those of us interested in neuroanthropology.  We’ll try to find a way for us to post unpublished papers (if anyone would like to), create a collective annotated bibliography of particularly important sources, make a contacts list, and a host of other similar academico-social activities.

Finally, I’m just hoping to see what people are doing out there, and I thought that making myself publicly present (well, in a virtual sense), might be a great way to do that.  So if you’re interested, let’s get you signed up as a contributor.  If you don’t mind too much, a great first post would simply be a short discussion of your research interests and why you’re ‘here’ (again, in a virtual sense).

As the blog moderator, I reserve the right to edit things.  I’ll use that privilege very sparingly, probably only in an effort to keep things collegial.  I feel like one of the great problems in this area is that some of the ‘leading lights’ working on these theoretical issues have a tendency to attack anyone who is not completely on board with their own models, terminology, or programs.  I don’t want to spend my time attacking each other, so I may curb excessive ‘flaming’ if it becomes an issue.  I doubt it will.