Greg Downey is a lecturer in anthropology at Macquarie University. As part of the Encultured Brain session, he will give the presentation A Comparative Neuroanthropology of Equilibrium in Sports and Dance. His abstract goes:

Retaining one’s balance, especially given bipedalism, is a complex sensorimotor challenge. Some theorists, such as philosopher Jerry Fodor, have suggested that the extraordinary speed and facility of human equilibrium suggest it is a mental “module,” a domain specific, automatic, encapsulated neural tool. This presentation examines the claim that equilibrium is a mental module in light of comparative ethnographic and psychological data, and proposes a more complex “nodular” neural system of equilibrium that is subject to enculturation. This nodular system model is more consistent with neurological imaging and other research, including successful efforts to compensate for damaged vestibular systems using prostheses to the sense of touch.

In fact, balance is not so much “a sense” as a shifting synthesis of motor responses and multiple sensory streams — including the vestibular system, vision, and certain key proprioceptive regions. The system typically operates without conscious awareness, but training in physical disciplines such as sports can lead individuals to develop new ways of achieving equilibrium in demanding situations, such as while spinning and leaping, grappling, colliding with others, or even standing on one’s hands.

Ethnographic research on the acrobatic Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira, and the presenter’s practical experience as a dance instructor and athlete, suggest how variations in training can affect an individual’s “senses” of balance, practically, phenomenologically and neurologically. For example, because vision can compensate when the vestibular system is unable to function normally (for example, when spinning, inverted, or moving violently), so strategies of looking can directly impact how people successfully balance.

Greg’s book Learning Capoiera: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art discusses his long-term ethnographic work with capoiera masters in Brazil. Here is the Amazon blurb:

Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey’s extensive research about capoeira and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players’ perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the “ring” where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives. He brings together an experience-centered, phenomenological analysis of the art with recent discoveries in psychology and the neurosciences about the effects of physical education on perception. The text is enhanced by more than twenty photos of capoeira sessions, many taken by veteran teacher, Mestre Cobra Mansa.

Greg is presently writing another book tentatively titled “The Athletic Animal: Sports, Evolution, and the Human Body’s Potential.” As he writes on his website, “This book uses elite athletes to demonstrate how humans modify their own bodies, nervous systems, and senses. Far from being the “brainy geeks” of the animal kingdom, I argue, humans are among the most physically versatile because of the plasticity of our nervous system and our ability to guide the development of our own (and each other’s) bodies. Ironically, the subject has led me to a type of holistic anthropology I was not trained to do, one that brings social and cultural research and theory together with attention to psychology, the brain sciences, physiology, and ecology.”

Why do sports matter? Here is one answer from Greg. “I’m working on a new project on rugby across three different ethnographic sites, looking into how different training techniques generate different types of skills, even in the same positions and sports, in Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. I think it has profound implications for things like national differences in sporting ability, the sort of thing that people point to frequently to demonstrate that differences between ‘races’ are obvious. It’s an interesting flipside to the medical anthropology work, which studies cultural impacts on dysfunction, because I’m really looking at heightened functioning.”

Greg has published the articles Producing Pain: Techniques and Technologies in No-Holds-Barred Fighting; Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education; and most recently Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art. You can also read his piece on the neuroanthropology of balance and equilibrium here on-site.

If you would like to get in touch with Greg, his email is gdowney at mq.edu.au

Harold Odden is another presenter at our Encultured Brain session. His paper is on Ethnopsychologies and Children’s Theory of Mind: Finding Common Ground between Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience. So the abstract:

Developmental psychologists have argued that successful negotiation of everyday social interactions rests on having a “theory of mind,” an understanding of how others’ behaviors can be understood in terms of internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Substantial research efforts over the past 30 years have been directed at understanding the trajectory and psychological impact of the development of a theory of mind in young children. A consistent thread in this work has been questions regarding the relative role of contextual features in the ontogeny of theory of mind. Recent research has pointed to ways by which different aspects of the child’s developmental milieu, such as social ecology and the use of mental-state language, may indeed have an appreciable impact. This attempt to situate this developmental process in a social and cultural context should be met with enthusiasm by psychological anthropologists, who have long held an interest in local models of self, emotion, and psychology across cultures. Further impetus for a renewed interdisciplinary conversation has been generated by recent discoveries and methodological advancements in neuroscience. In particular, work on mirror neuron systems suggests them to be possible neural mechanisms underpinning theory of mind and other key social cognitive processes such as imitative learning. This paper will discuss some of the possible linkages to be drawn in these three fields of research, and argue that there are great opportunities for developing a more robust understanding of theory of mind and ethnopsychologies through an interdisciplinary approach.

Hal is at the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (or IPFW). We started grad school at Emory together, where Hal did his doctoral research on children’s learning in Samoa. Here is the abstract to his thesis (which you can download in all its glory here).

This doctoral dissertation examines the processes of cultural learning by which Samoan children (0-12 years of age) come to understand local concepts of hierarchy, social rank, and respectful behavior. This is a particularly important domain of cultural knowledge in contemporary Samoa as titular chiefs exercise wide-ranging social, political and economic powers in their families and villages, and concerns with relative rank organize social interactions between all members of society. Consequently being able to understand local models of hierarchy is an essential component of children’s developing social and cultural competence.

This dissertation documents how children are socialized to use observational, imitative, and participatory learning as primary modes of social learning, as they adapt to familial demands and practices, prevailing ethnotheories of child development, and other aspects of their developmental niche. The ways in which social learning is structured in this context are compared with predictions from Vygotskian “cultural-historical” activity theory to demonstrate the analytic necessity of attending far more to the socio-cultural context in which children develop to more adequately understand the nature and full range of variation in developmental processes.

Hal’s new research in Samoa combines his interest in children’s socialization and development with a concern for their well-being, with a particular focus on mental and behavioral health. He plans to examine how variations in biological, psychological and sociocultural processes (e.g. children’s temperament, attachment relationships, household organization and dynamics, and social rank) interact at the level of the individual to generate diversity in developmental trajectories and outcomes.

Hal is co-author with Tara Callaghan and Phillippe Rochat of the paper Synchrony in the Onset of Mental-State Reasoning: Evidence From Five Cultures (pdf), which examines mental-state reasoning as a universal milestone in child development (see this press release). He also has a paper in Educational and Child Psychology that argues that observational learning is an important and culturally promoted form of social learning in Samoa.

If you want to get in touch with Hal, his email is oddenh at ipfw.edu

Another presenter at our Encultured Brain session is M. Cameron Hay-Rollins, a professor of anthropology at Miami University in Ohio. Her talk is The Relevance of Neurology to an Indonesian Healing Tradition, based on her work with the Sasak people on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. Here is the abstract:

Jampi are central to healing among the Sasak of Indonesia. When someone is ill, people respond with jampi — secret, oral formulae that are memorized verbatim. The ethnographic processes through which Sasaks memorize and later treat illness with jampi rely and elaborate upon neurological processes. In this paper, I explore the co-emergence of the social and neurological processes that facilitate verbatim oral memory and enable people to respond to illness constructively. Specifically I examine how Sasaks remember jampi, noting that the social contexts surrounding illness promote remembering in ways that fit the neurological evidence on successful effortful recall of episodic memories. Because research suggests that moderately stressful events promote memory accuracy, the Sasak practice of gathering around an ill person and urgently discussing the illness likely promotes jampi recall. In analyzing the Sasak reliance on jampi as a unique way of culturally elaborating neurological processes, I show the central importance of anxiety in facilitating memory and motivating agency in a world of compelling concerns. By integrating neurology into my analysis of Sasak healing practices, I conclude that methodologically examining anxiety in ethnographic contexts may contribute significantly to our understanding of social action.

Overall, Cameron integrates neurobiological insights into memory with anthropological research on social memory through a focus on ritual, language and enculturation through development. These concretes processes are what can get biological and cultural ideas together, and are a core focus of neuroanthropological research. She describes this research more in the forthcoming article “Anxiety, Remembering and Agency: Biocultural Insights for Understanding Illness” which will appear next year in Ethos. You can see all her publications at her website. But I’ll be happy to provide some highlights myself.

Her book Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia comes with this Amazon description:

Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country’s worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care.

Cameron recently published on her new work examining clinical interactions and medical information in the US in the paper Reading Sensations: Understanding the Process of Distinguishing `Fine’ from `Sick. Here’s a relevant part of the abstract where she is using a biocultural approach to understand how we move from our own experience to an illness category: “Perceptional and interpretive decisions regarding what sensations need to be attended to as potential symptoms may be the result of personal awareness of cultural ideas about vulnerability, sensation duration, and interference with activities. The interpretation of sensations is always tentative, conditional on further cultural information regarding whether the sensation should be constructed into a symptom.”

If you want to get in touch with Cameron, her email is hayrolmc at muohio.edu