Month: October 2008

Wednesday Round Up #32

This week I am introducing a new feature, Top of the List, which highlights some of my favorites for the week. After that, I’ve got a fun one, Sarah Palin and Language, followed by sports, anthropology, the brain, and medicine and health care.

Top of the List

Greg Downey, Turning a Blind Eye
Our own Greg gets his chance to shine in Seed Magazine! Here he covers the media reaction to a supposedly “undiscovered” tribe in Brazil that reached global proportions back in May. He writes, “In truth, our reactions to and perceptions of these people reveal far more about us than about them.”

Jonah Lehrer, The Future of Science… Is Art?
Art, the practical constraints of present science, and future creativity and inspiration

Zane Andrews and Tamas Horvath, Why Calories Taste Delicious: Eating and the Brain
Scientific American piece on our desire to eat beyond homeostatic regulation

Daniel Zwerdling, A Meal Fit For A Candidate: Barack Obama
Chef Rick Bayless talks real Mexican food as he cooks up grilled skirt steak tacos. The real surprise, Bayless was a PhD student in anthropology at Michigan before choosing food over academics. I say he’s reached more people that way!

Sarah Palin and Language

Maureen Dowd, Sarah’s Pompom Palaver
NY Times op-ed with delicious humor: from speaking in tongues in Wasilla to channeling Clueless

Language Log has featured a series of posts on the Governor from Alaska
Also Outside
Affective Demonstratives
Palin’s Accent

Daniel Libit, Palin’s Accent Takes Center Stage
Politico dissects the politics and sociolinguistics of the Palin accent

Mr. Verb, Palin’s Accent and Syntax
One big verbal trainwreck?

The Neurocritic, Maverick Maverick Maverick Maverick Maverick Maverick
A mavericky transcript… Includes a bonus, The Sarah Palin Show!

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #32”

Carolyn Nordstrom: Fighting for a Healthy Global Economy

This video features my colleague Carolyn Nordstrom, and is part of the series “What Would You Fight For” that highlights Notre Dame professors in television commercials played during Notre Dame football games.

Carolyn is the author of numerous books that examine globalization, war, illegal economies, and the men, women and children caught up in those endeavors. Her most recent book is Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. One of her best known is A Different Kind of War Story, where she writes, “This is a book about war, and about the remarkable creativity average people bring to the fore in surviving violence and rebuilding humane worlds.”

Carolyn has inspired me through her commitment to ethnography and the insight it provides into people’s lives. This type of ethnography is crucial to neuroanthropology. Here’s a blurb from a grant I once wrote:

This book is about how I imagine ethnography. We can see more in people’s words and actions that we do at present. I think of Oliver Sacks, the neurobiologist, who uses case studies to reveal a different perspective on how life plays itself out. Just like Giovanni challenged me with his words, I want to challenge other anthropologists to ask, Why? Why have we ceded so much ground to biologists and psychologists?

Good ethnographers time and again raise the everyday aspects of life, as Nordstrom (2004) does in presenting a child soldier’s answer to her question of why he was fighting: “I forgot,” he replied. As she notes, particular life histories, personalities and local sociocultural traditions shape the actions of ground soldiers. Forgetting, like wanting, does too. So how are we to understand that?

My answer is through ethnography that draws on both traditional and novel ways to examine how people act and interact with the world.

Neuroprospecting: Mining cultures for neuro-behavioural data

Bioprospecting: pursuit of plant-derived chemicals for pharmaceuticals: the process of searching for and extracting potential pharmaceutical compounds from plants.

Neuroprospecting: pursuit of culture-specific behaviours for neuroscience: the process of searching and extracting potential neuro-behavioural data from cultures.


Group Sari Bunuan Macan Andaleh play Gendang Tambuah in a procession
Photo: Paul Mason

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Ethos: Cultural Politics of Mental Health in Native North America

I thought this would interest some of you.  Here’s the link to the online version. And for more info on Ethos, including the links to an entire issue on Jerome Bruner, just click here. Or check out the editorial office.

To view an online version of this email, click here.
Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology

Ethos presents a special collection:

Cultural Politics of Mental Health in
Native North America

Guest Editor: Joseph P. Gone
The September issue of Ethos includes a remarkable collection of articles on the contradictions and conflicts that arise in mental health counseling involving majority culture counselors and Native Americans. Articles featured in this collection include:

Introduction: Mental Health Discourse as Western Cultural Proselytization
Joseph P. Gone

Discourses of Stress, Social Inequities, and the Everyday Worlds of First Nations Women in a Remote Northern Canadian Community
Naomi Adelson

Clinical Paradigm Clashes: Ethnocentric and Political Barriers to Native American Efforts at Self-Healing
Joseph D. Calabrese

Sobriety and Its Cultural Politics: An Ethnographer’s Perspective on Culturally Appropriate Addiction Services in Native North America
Erica Prussing

Commentary: The Problem of Mental Health in Native North America: Liberalism, Multiculturalism, and the (Non)Efficacy of Tears
Audra Simpson

Commentary: No Itinerant Researchers Tolerated: Principled and Ethical Perspectives and Research with North American Indian Communities
Joseph E. Trimble  

About Ethos
http://www.wiley.com
  
Ethos is an interdisciplinary and international journal devoted to publishing scholarly articles exploring interrelationships between the individual and the sociocultural milieu, between the psychological disciplines and the social disciplines.

Printing four times a year, Ethos is the journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and is published in partnership with the American Anthropological Association. The journal is one of more than 20 publications featured in AnthroSource, a service of the American Anthropological Association.

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Wednesday Round Up #31

This week we have more from John Hawks’ students, food, psychology, evolution, the brain, and anthropology.

Biology of Mind

I love encouraging students, and find that blogging raises the bar for them. Suddenly it’s not just the professor who’s reading a paper, but their fellow classmates and in the case of this new blog, Biology of Mind, the whole world! So here are students’ reflections and critiques on papers they have found fascinating:

Effects of Meditation Seen through Long-Term Buddhist Practitioners
Brain Damage from Stress
Looking Further into Semiotics…
The Anatomy of Humor
Is There Something about How We Live Today That Is Bad for Our Mental Health?
Behavioral Evidence for Theory of Mind in Monkeys
Culture Codes
Which Came First : Large Brains or Complex Social Groups?

Food

Eric Nagourney, Nutrition: Soda Ban in Schools Has Little Impact
Banning soda? “Only about 4 percent fewer children from the no-soda schools said they did not drink it.”

Elisabeth Rosenthal, Fast Food Hits Mediterranean; a Diet Succumbs
Fast food invades Greece, and childhood obesity and diabetes become problems. Plus this tidbit, “Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an ‘intangible piece of cultural heritage’.”

Tara Parker-Pope, Instead of Eating to Diet, They’re Eating to Enjoy
Is this the better way to be healthy and to avoid the yo-yo effect?

Associated Press, Mexico Pushes National Campaign to Lose Weight
Increasing disease burden due to obesity leads to a new government initiative

Psychology

Eric Schwitzgebel, Six Ways to Know Your Mind
Getting to know yourself – a good guide to how to think about subjectivity and research focused on our experience (or phenomenology). A good follow up is Eric’s End of (Philosophical) Innocence, about how to effectively deal with the intuitions and assumptions at the core of our ideas and our research

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #31”