Month: February 2008

Real life methods conference

Jovan at Culture Matters (and, not coincidentally, with me at Macquarie’s anthro department) pointed out to me a conference in Manchester. Titled, Vital Signs: Researching Real Life, the conference is an interdisciplinary meeting to think about how to do research on the kinds of complex tangles that we seem to gravitate towards at Neuroanthropology. The meeting will 9-11 September 2008 at Manchester University. The website describes how:

We are using the concept of ‘real lives’ in an open way to stimulate debate about how research methodologies and methods in the social sciences and beyond can rise to the challenge of producing knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities.

The call for abstracts is online and outlines the following areas for discussion:

  • Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
  • Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
  • Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life; for example, combining ‘social science’, ‘science’, ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘history’ and ‘journalism’
  • Mixing methods in real life research. Eg How do we, how can we, combine ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ approaches? Can we transcend that divide?
  • Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
  • Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
  • Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
  • Communicating and disseminating real life research (in a vital way?)
  • Challenges in analysing real life data
  • Real life research in policy and politics
  • Participatory real life research
  • Real life research ethics and moralities
  • What is real life? Theorising real life

Keynote speakers are Les Back, Tim Ingold and Carolyn Steedman (more info on them here).

Overall, might be worth an inquiry if you’re going to be anyway near Manchester in September.

Play and Culture

Two earlier posts on The Neurobiology of Play and Taking Play Seriously examined play as the neurobiological and behavioral levels.  Together, they present an argument for play as one primary way that animals with large brains achieve neurological integration through play’s role in skilled behavioral engagement and the building of social relationships. The last post ended by discussing the role of play in joint coordination and reciprocal fair play, and the first post by saying that play helps combine sensory information, emotional states, cognitive framing, bodily movement, and decision making. 

Today I want to argue that together, these processes help promote the production of culture.  Without the integration of basic neurological processing and social relationships into culture, culture is, in effect, an empty shell of forms and roles and symbols.  Play connects us into cultural forms, helps recreate them anew for developing individuals and even create new forms.  In other words, I see play as part of how we get cultural creole, which I discussed in an early post, Avatars and Cultural Creole, on the challenge persistent on-line communities present to anthropology’s theory of culture. 

But first a mini-ethnographic moment.  I went sledding with my kids the other day.  My eldest son’s best friend joined us, along with his older sister.  At first I was sledding with my little daughter as the boys zipped and at times tumbled down the hill on their own.  They started to create a game out of it, imagining they were space ships in battle.  Arguments began to break out over who beat whom and what type of ship each one could be.  A new game quickly evolved as I started to race down on my sled after them—suddenly I became the enemy, trying to torpedo them, hands outstretched as they tried to squirm away.  (To note, the combined rough-and-tumble/Space Wars held no interest for the older sister and was a bit too dangerous for my daughter, so they started hanging out and doing things together.  Play and gender…)  Then the game evolved more, as I went up the other side of the run-off pond where we sled.  First I was a dangerous battleship attacking them.  Tiring more quickly than they did, I finally simply lay there on the flat bottom of the pond and became a battlestar which they could ram with fierce joy. 
Continue reading “Play and Culture”

Pacified, high-performance zombies?

Judith Warner writes today about The Med Scare, of the over-medication of certain groups of children within a broader pattern of lack of medications for many children with mental health problems.  She is particularly concerned with “the narrative of the disastrously overmedicated American.” 

The whole article is worth a read, but I was particularly struck by her cultural analysis near the end:  

Why, then, the exaggerated belief that we’re raising a nation of pacified, high-performance zombies? I think it’s because we have real worries about the state of children – and childhood itself – in our time. We know that our current lifestyle of 24/7 work, constant competition, chronic stress and compensatory consumerism is toxic. But we also know – or feel – that there’s not much we can do about it. We feel guilty about the world we’ve created for our kids, one of lots of work and not much free play. But we’re also wedded to that world, invested in it, utterly complicit with its values and demands.

And so we shift the focus of our fears away from big forces we feel we can’t do anything about (globalization, an increasingly merciless marketplace, a growing gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, the general indignities of life in the beleaguered middle class). Instead, we focus on decisions we can control (whether or not we will “drug” our kids). Our minds shift away from the myriad ways we collude in making life toxic for our children, and we obsess instead on condemning other people for allegedly poisoning their children’s bodies.

Cracks in Our Rose-Tinted Glasses?

In the last week, several media outlets have addressed research that presents an alternative view on the happy emphasis on positive psychology and self-help that has swept through America in the past few years.  I’ll just excerpt some pieces from each, not a lot of commentary this time. 

First, three pieces from Sharon Begley’s article “Happiness: Enough Already” in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/107569 

Excerpt #1: While careful not to extol depression—which is marked not only by chronic sadness but also by apathy, lethargy and an increased risk of suicide—[Diener] praises melancholia for generating “a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.” This is not romantic claptrap. Studies show that when you are in a negative mood, says Diener, “you become more analytical, more critical and more innovative. You need negative emotions, including sadness, to direct your thinking” 
Continue reading “Cracks in Our Rose-Tinted Glasses?”

Brain Reading for $299

I was at a talk yesterday on anthropology and genetics, where the presenter argued persuasively that molecular anthropology really took off when the methods of accessing genetic information became easy and cheap enough to use for anthropology–the ability to collect data in the field, the ability to process the genetic sequences quickly and cheaply, and so forth.  Even though brain imaging has gotten a lot more inexpensive, it’s still brain imaging–sticking people in a big tube.  Not the most natural of situations.

I just ran across this article, Brain-reading headset to sell for $299.  Here’s one relevant excerpt about the NeuroHeadset: “The headset’s sensors are designed to detect conscious thoughts and expressions as well as “non-conscious emotions” by reading electrical signals around the brain… The company, which unveiled a prototype last year, says the headset can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects.”

The headset has been developed by Emotiv Systems primarily for gaming.  So it’s not quite research-ready.  But the price and the portability might soon open the collecting of real-time functional brain data in the near future, permitting us neuroanthropologists to get some important data in the field.

Anger and Healing

“Anger slows healing process after injury: study” is one of today’s headlines.  Here’s the main point:

Researchers at the University of Ohio inflicted minor burns on the forearms of 98 volunteers who were then monitored over eight days to see how quickly the skin repaired itself… The results were startlingly clear: individuals who had trouble controlling expressions of anger were four times likelier to need more than four days for their wounds to heal, compared with counterparts who could master their anger.

 Anger, not surprisingly, is more nuanced than an on/off state.  “Subjects described as showing ‘anger out’ (regular outbursts of aggression or hostility) or ‘anger in’ (repressed rage) healed almost as quickly as individuals who ranked low on all anger scales.”  

Indeed only one group had significantly slower healing:

Only those who tried but failed to hold in their feelings of upset and distemper took longer to heal. This same group also showed a higher secretion of the stress hormone cortisol, which could at least partly explain the difference in healing time, the study noted… High levels of cortisol appears to decrease the production at the point of injury of two cytokines crucial to the repair process, suggests the study. Cytokines are proteins released by immune-system cells. They act as signallers to generate a wider immune response.

 So, it is not so much “anger” that matters, but anger management.  Trying and failing is the key variable, not so much anger itself.  That appears to be what is stressful, the lack of control and the uncertainty, rather than experiencing anger itself. 

Here’s the abstract of the original article.