Author: dlende

Chains of Difference

Chains of Difference: A Community Clinical Anthropology Project is an effort to use anthropology to bridge our differences. Two of its key efforts are combining education and anthropology to help us deal better with the problems that can arise from our very diversity, and the idea that amateur anthropology – learning about and practicing anthropology outside formal settings – can be crucial to this process of negotiating our differences.

Here are three aims from their Welcome post:

-The discussion of contemporary dilemmas that stop us from learning more about each other across difference (religious, class difference, cultural, generational, etc): what can we actually ask each other about diversity and how to do it?

-The ideia that making anthropology a practise accessible to all can enhance inter-cultural relations and promote cooperation across difference

-The aim of passing direct knowledge of the practise of amateur anthropology across generations rather than relying on indirect educational means (e.g. internet). Adults trained in amateur anthropology can ideally pass the knowledge onto children and encourage them to pursue knowledge on questions of difference across diversity from a very early stage.

Chains of Differences is a project initiated by Pedro Oliveira, a Portuguese clinical psychologist
with a PhD in social anthropology recently completed at Brunel University.

Alongside Chains of Difference, Oliveira is starting a post-doctoral project focused on bring together clinical psychology and anthropology through “running multi-family groups and researching them simultaneously through an action-research ethnographic methodology.” He would love to get feedback on this project, so you can find the complete description of his proposed work here.

Link to Chains of Difference Facebook Group.

Link to Chains of Difference blog.

Four Stone Hearth #95

Afarensis has put together an outstanding addition of anthropology’s blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. The Four Stones refer to anthropology’s four fields – archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology – and the hearth to how they come together to create a holistic approach to understanding humans in varying times and spaces.

Michael Tomasello and cultural diversity, chimpanzee culture, neuroarchaeology!, and much more. Plenty for the readers of Neuroanthropology to enjoy.

Link to Four Stone Hearth #95.

Impulse and Cupidity


So I’m now down in Tampa, getting set up at the University of South Florida after some good years at Notre Dame. Tampa looks great – an exciting city. And USF looks like it will definitely support interdisciplinary efforts like neuroanthropology. So it’s all good.

Here’s a quote that caught my eye on Sunday:

For in the anything-goes atmosphere of our recent past, it wasn’t just external controls that went awry; inwardly, people lost constraint and common sense, too. Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.

In the late 1970s, the historian Christopher Lasch famously described America as a culture of narcissism. Today we might well be called a nation of dysregulation. The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere.

It came from the NY Times article Dysregulation Now by Judith Warner. She featured the work of Peter Whybrow in the second half of the piece. Whybrow directs the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

Whybrow is the author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. It definitely looks like a neuroanthropology-friendly work, with the Amazon description reading: “The indictment of American society offered here—that America’s supercharged free-market capitalism shackles us to a treadmill of overwork and overconsumption, frays family and community ties and leaves us anxious, alienated and overweight—is familiar. What’s more idiosyncratic and compelling is the author’s grounding his treatise in political economy (citing everyone from Adam Smith to Thorstein Veblen) as well as in neuropsychiatry, primatology and genetics.”

Building on Whybrow’s work, Warner writes near the end of her piece:

The larger structural problems that create our widespread envy, greed, overconsumption and debt — gross income inequality, for starters — will be much more difficult, politically, to address… [T]he pressures that drive the dysregulated American haven’t abated any since the fall of 2008. Wall Street is resurgent, and unemployment is still high. For too many people, the cycle of craving and debt that drives our treadmill existence simply can’t be broken.

It’s the “modern misfits” story, where human nature no longer matches the human culture we’ve created. That too is familiar. But at least there is an appreciation of causation at different levels, from human psychology to structural problems, and that’s good. And I do happen to think that issues surrounding consumption and self-regulation are rather important, and not sufficiently recognized as problems that need more than simple answers like a Drug War or a pill to break the cycle of craving…

Dysregulation Nation article link.

Peter Whybrow’s website.

Student Websites and the Classroom: Anthropology Online

Over the past year, Eric Lindland has guided his students in creating websites as part of their anthropology coursework. Using Weebly, an easy-to-use platform, these Notre Dame students have shown off their learning online.

In Lindland’s Fall 2009 class, Cultural Difference and Social Change, students who had returned from a significant international experience over the summer came together to process what they had learned. The websites proved central in that process, and also let students show what they had done and what it meant to other students and their families and friends.

Each student designed and built a website devoted to sharing stories, photos, links, and other features of their international experience. Each website also represents each student’s perspective on the privileges and challenges of doing intercultural work, and about the strategies of cooperation and service between Western and non-Western peoples that can improve qualities of life for all involved.

Explore these websites to learn more about the practical, on-the-ground aspects of living and working abroad as a student, and about the larger structural factors that condition the lives of those who share their food, shelter, culture, and hopes with those who choose to become intercultural sojourners.

Brianna Muller’s site Paz, Amor y Justicia covers her work at Familias de Esperanza in Guatemala. Shannon Coyne created Opportunity and Inequality about her time in the village of Putubiw in central Ghana, and drew in comparative experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Lindland’s class Ritual, Sport and Play also created their own websites. Each site “explored some example or facet of these three interrelated genres of human behavior.” The in-depth exploration, which included original research and analysis by the student, ranged from Little League to Party Culture to Soccer and even Yoga.

A great example here is Justin Perez and his site Masculinities at Play: Pickup Basketball at Notre Dame.

In Introduction to Anthropology, the student websites “sought to address a question of anthropological interest that is conducive to both biological and sociocultural inquiry, and present a range of informed responses to that question from the perspective of anthropologists and other theorists of human behavior.”

Topics included Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Travel (not Columbus!), Malaria: Perpetuating the Cycle of Poverty, We Make Faces (on facial expressions cross-culturally), and many more.

Link to student websites for Cultural Difference and Social Change

Link to student websites for Ritual, Sport and Play

Link to student websites for Introduction to Anthropology

Community Based Work – Student Posts 2009-2010

I wanted to provide a handy list of the posts that my Notre Dame students wrote based on their community-based research last fall. Much of this work has built on previous efforts, and you can read about my approach to community-based research (including a fun video!) and find links to published articles and earlier student work in the post Community Based Work and the Importance of Being Integrative.

The Posts

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Getting Help Early to Feeling Welcomed

Finding a Voice: Establishing a Support Network for HIV+ Women

“We Pregame Harder Than You Party”

Obesity Meets Family Medicine

I also want to include Brandon Sparks’ post on his ethnographic/CBR research in Africa. This piece drew on his senior thesis, which he finished in 2009.

Funerals and Food Coping in Rural Lesotho

Sin & Sex: Student Posts on Compulsion Spring 2010

My freshmen students in ANTH 13181 “Compulsion” have now wrapped up their nine posts that range over sin and sex. Here’s the full list of what they wrote. Down below I talk more about the class itself.

Augustine’s Original Sin

Be Afraid, America. Be Very Afraid: The Effect of Negative Media

Stealing Pears: We All Want To, But Why?

The Pitfalls and Pratfalls of Criminals

Psychopathy: Is It In You?

Nature vs. Nurture and Sex: Why the Fight?

Inside the Mind of a Pedophile

Love Is A Process

Attraction

There are all nine. For those of you interested in how to integrate blogging into a class, please see my detailed explanation of how I approach this sort of assignment in last year’s post Culture and Compulsion: Student Posts 2009.

All right, onto ANTH 13181 “Compulsion.” This class was one of Notre Dame’s University Seminars. The university seminars are small classes, capped at 18, for freshmen to gain broad exposure to a certain field through focusing on a specific topic of interest (compulsion, in my case). These classes aim to ground freshmen in university-level writing, critical reading, and discussion. I also had two basic goals for the class, to show how anthropology uses a holistic approach to examine human behavior and to read some great works of literature as anthropologists.

The first half of the class focused on sin. We read Alan Jacobs’ Original Sin: A Cultural History, followed by Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. During the second half we switched to sexuality. We opened with sections from Edward Shorter’s Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire and Anna Clark’s Desire: A History of European Sexuality. Then we read two novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I have attached the Lende Seminar Syllabus 2010 for anyone who is interested.

I had eighteen great students, all freshmen, from a wide variety of backgrounds and intellectual interests. Besides everything they learned, I am proud that we created a space of open discussion together. Believe me, it’s not necessarily easy for 18 and 19 year olds to discuss crime and sex in a classroom setting! But we did it, and did so in an honest and intellectually sophisticated manner. Well, most of the time. Sometimes we just had to laugh at the foibles of human nature, including our own.

I really enjoyed this class, and want to finish up by thanking the students. It was a great class!