Complete this quote:
“Musik dan tari dibuat oleh otak, dipengaruhi oleh kebudayaan dan tergantung kepada…”
“Music and dance are produced by the brain, influenced by culture and depend upon…”
AAA Session on Impulsivity: Call for Submissions
Hal Odden and I are putting together a session on impulsivity at this year’s American Anthropological Association meeting being held in New Orleans. If you are interested in being a participant, please email me at dlende@nd.edu and Hal at oddenh@ipfw.edu as soon as possible. Please indicate your potential topic and/or paper title when you email us.
We want to examine impulsivity broadly, so we are looking for people working on a range of issues related to impulsivity, risk taking behaviors and sensation seeking. Hal plans to look at impulsive suicide in Samoa, and I will look at impulsivity and substance use among adolescents.
We encourage submissions from people working on risk-taking in different sociocultural contexts; maladaptive behaviors associated with impulsivity, including binge eating and bulimia, violence, and unsafe sexual practices; and broader theoretical issues that could be informed by a reconsideration of impulsivity, including embodiment, motivation, and agency.
The session will be broadly oriented by neuroanthropology, using ideas drawn from both psychological anthropology (examining individual-environment interactions) and biocultural anthropology (mixing theory and methods between two disciplines). This session will bring a theoretical and ethnographic sensibility to the role of impulsivity in people’s lives today. This person-centered approach, bridging biology and culture, encourages the circulation of ideas from critical and evolutionary perspectives.
Proposed papers could potentially look at:
-How the neurobiological processes underlying impulsivity develop within specific social and cultural contexts
-How impulsive behaviors are informed by local conceptions of personhood, motivation, and agency
-How ideas on sensation seeking and risk taking in psychology and public health can be fruitfully adopted in psychological and medical anthropology
-How we can build more experience-near and culturally sophisticated accounts of human desire, temptation, and compulsion
-How ideas about impulsivity can inform practice theory, embodiment and other related areas of sociocultural theory.
Please email us your proposed topic and/or title as soon as possible at dlende@nd.edu and oddenh@ipfw.edu. Depending on how many people respond, we might have to limit participation – we’d rather not, of course, but just a warning up front. A single session can have a maximum of seven people.
The AAA meeting will be held from November 17th to 21st, 2010, in New Orleans, and has the meeting theme of “Circulation.” More information can be found at the AAA conference website. We are planning to submit this volunteered session for consideration by the Society for Psychological Anthropology.
Wednesday Round Up #105
A day late – yesterday I was busy wrapping up that long post on how anthropologists can build a broader audience! So got my favs, and then a topical fav, skull modification! Then onto modern attempts at modification, neuromarketing. After that it’s anthropology and the mind, finishing it off with video games.
Top of the List
Jonah Lehrer, Depression’s Upside
Evolutionary approaches to depression, including an examination of Darwin’s life and how his melancholy might actually have accelerated the pace of his research. Mind Hacks provides some good commentary, including one potential problem.
Greg Boustead, The Age of Impossible Numbers
Make sure you follow the zoom in! “Running the Numbers, photographer Chris Jordan attempts to convey the vastness of modern consumption by breaking down annual statistics into more graspable quantities depicted by clever visualizations made of individual objects or groups of objects that he photographs.”
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Survival of the Fittest Theory: Darwinism’s Limits
How uncritical neo-Darwinian research is.
Ned Block and Phillip Kitcher, Misunderstanding Darwin
How the above critics got it wrong.
Maurice Bloch, Reconciling Social Science and Cognitive Science Views of the Self, the Person, the Individual etc…
The esteemed anthropologist in a great video lecture that is part of the special series of lectures ‘The Study of Cognition and Culture Today’.
Dirk Hanson, Speaking in Tongues – A Neural Snapshot
Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, has fascinated thinkers. Tongue speakers typically claim that the outbursts are non-voluntary, but others can sometimes produce instances of glossolalia on demand. If you want to see glossolalia in action, you can also go to our extensive round up on trance in video!
Cranial Modification – or Culture Does Skulls
Carl Feagans, Artificial Cranial Modification: Head Shaping
Skull shaping reviewed at A Hot Cup of Joe, which looks at examples from around the world.
On Reaching a Broader Public: Five Ideas for Anthropologists
By Daniel Lende
How can anthropologists reach a wider audience? Good debate on that question has sprung up in recent weeks at Savage Minds, Culture Matters, and Ethnografix. We’ve also written about this question here. Now it’s time for a synthesis.
Five Ideas for Reaching a Wider Audience
-Write about something specific
-Make our work relevant to readers
-Build appeal
-Move beyond critique
-Provide alternatives and how-to ideas
Write About Something Specific
Sometimes our love of anthropology as a field gets in the way. Most people are interested in specific topics, not the latest theoretical debate. They get engaged by stories and want to learn something concrete or new.
So rather than writing jargon-laden versions of “OMG anthropology is the best ever,” we should write about the topics and stories that capture people’s attention. Once we have their attention, we can also communicate why anthropology matters. We have great material, we just need to use it better.
As Ryan Anderson at Ethnografix writes:
Nobody–or very few people–are going to read books that are ABOUT the discipline of anthropology itself. And it seems to me that many of [our] general audience books are more about anthropology and its UNIQUE perspective and less about an actual subject, event, or issue…
As an analogy, this is like the difference between publishing a book that is ABOUT photography versus publishing a book that is a photographic essay. Huge difference. One will appeal mostly to photographers, and the other might have the possibility to appeal to a much different audience, depending on what it’s about.
To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson:
“Photography is nothing – it’s life that interests me.”
So what does that mean for anthropology? Maybe it means that we need less books about anthropology and more books by anthropologists about the ideas, subjects, events, issues, debates, stories, and experiences they know best.
Anthropologists share that passion with Cartier-Bresson – it is life that interest us. That is our strength. More than any other field, we embrace human life. Rather than foreground our reflexivity or the importance of this theoretical model or that, we should focus on what captures our own attention. Other people outside of anthropology also care about people’s lives, and they want to learn more – focusing on that will build a broader audience.
The proof is in the pudding, the saying goes. And here on Neuroanthropology.net, our most popular posts fit this “about something” model. Co-sleeping, barefoot running, and post-traumatic stress disorder all focus on a specific topic.
Make Our Work Relevant To Readers
Some of the recent online debate has centered on what anthropology can learn from journalism. This is an important topic, particularly for learning how to best communicate with a broad audience. But the simple fact remains – we are not journalists, we are anthropologists.
Continue reading “On Reaching a Broader Public: Five Ideas for Anthropologists”
Videos from The Encultured Brain – NOW AVAILABLE!
Dear Loyal Readers (and Passers By) —
It gives me great pleasure to announce that you can apparently now access streaming .wmv files of the four long-format talks that were given at The Encultured Brain Conference at the University of Notre Dame in October 2009. No, you do not have to rush out to your video store, nor do you need to send me a stamped self-addressed envelope as well as a surprisingly large fee for ‘postage and handling.’ Yes, it has taken a while, so file this in the ‘much better late than never’ box, and enjoy.
At the moment, we do not yet have them posted on YouTube, but we are working on that, so there will likely be a second message very soon (maybe more) with the videos. I’d like to write some commentary on each as well, but I want to watch them again before I do so. The reason I say ‘apparently’ the videos are accessible is because I am a bit of a slow adapter, and between my computer and my current from-home Internet connection, I cannot watch them, but I’m certain our readers are more technologically sophisticated and media savvy than I am.
The talks can be linked to through:
Daniel Lende, Opening Address: “Neuroscience and the Real World”
Patricia Greenfield, Keynote Address 1: “Mirror Neurons and the Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Cultural Processes.”
Harvey Whitehouse, Keynote Address 2: “Explaining Religion.”
Greg Downey, Closing Address: “A Brain-Shaped Culture: Ambitions, Acknowledgments and Opportunities.”
If you want to read more before committing your computer to a streaming video, the abstracts for the talks are below the fold.
Continue reading “Videos from The Encultured Brain – NOW AVAILABLE!”
Great Expectations: Conference on Brain Plasticity
Back in February, the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University in Copenhagen hosted a fantastic looking conference, “Great Expectations: The Plasticity of the Brain and Neurosciences at the Threshold: Nature and Nurture – And Beyond…” The conference was organized by GNOSIS Research Centre – Mind and Thinking Initiative.
It had a great line-up: Steven Rose, Douglas Hofstader, Maxine Sheet-Johnson, Timothy Ingold, and a host of Danish scholars whose work we can now all expore. The three days of the conference each addressed a different theme: Brain Plasticity, Awareness and Intentionality, and Beyond Dualisms.
You can read the Introductory Statement on the conference. Here’s one paragraph from the end:
Neuroscience seems to have learned from its critics. Reductive and neurocentric positions have to give way to the ideas that the plastic brain is capable of learning for life, and that both bodily movement as well as social activity leaves clearly formed traces in the development of the brain. Whenever we pray, learn to ride a bicycle, or read a book, the brain changes. The brain is not destiny. Are there no limits, human and neurobiological, to how much we can learn and to the extent that upbringing might effect changes in the brain?
The best thing is that you can get the videos from all the talks. So here is Steven Rose on The Future of the Brain – Promises and Perils of the Neurosciences (preceed by an intro to the conference), Jesper Morgensen on Any Limits to Neuroplasticity?, and Tim Ingold on The Social Brain.
You can access the entire program and all the videos at the Great Expectations conference website.
Neuroanthropology 