Author: dlende

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.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #105”

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”

Wednesday Round Up #104

So the favs, then a bunch of book reviews, and onto anthropology and the mind. Then some health, art and philosophy, and after you spend all day reading this stuff, why not finish it off with some alcohol and sex?

Top of the List

Sharon Begley, West Brain, East Brain
“What a difference culture makes.” Newsweek has a story on cultural neuroscience!

Chris Clark, Zooming in with Prezi
Prezi, a cool new presentation tool – an online version of Powerpoint that lets you zoom in and out and also embed YouTube and Flash animations. Looks both cool and useful!

Sarah, Would You Like to Kula?
Funny anthropology pick up lines.

BigThink, Oliver Sacks on Humans and Myth-Making
“Humans naturally create stories and narratives,” says Oliver Sacks in this video lecture.

Leslie Heywood, Gender Specs
An informed feminist takes on the evolutionary psychology approach to gender. So, what do women look for in a man? And what do men look for in a woman?

Joe Brewer, Belief and Worldview in Politics
Over at Cognitive Policy Works, an argument that what someone believes to be true is more important than what is actually true. How do our minds work? How do we view reality? These are the sort of questions addressed here, using an applied approach informed by cognitive science. Another interesting piece is Story Reversal: The Power of Frame Breaking, which includes a video.

Harvey Whitehouse, Four Recipes for Religion
Our Encultured Brain keynote presenter gives a nice summary of different types of organized religion. Discussion continues over at Cognition & Culture in the post, Religion Science: If you pay the piper, do you call the tune?

Book Reviews

Emily Bazelon, The Tiny Differences in the Littlest Brains
A review of the new book by Lise Eliot, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps — and What We Can Do About It. Looks like a very good neuroanthropology read on gender and the brain.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #104”

EvoS: Evolution, Addiction and the Encultured Brain


Two weeks ago I had a wonderful visit to EvoS, the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University. Leslie Heywood, a gifted writer and a true interdisciplinary scholar, invited me to Binghamton. She really enjoyed herself at our Encultured Brain conference, and wanted me to share my work with the EvoS program.

It was a very stimulating visit, and given their technology gurus there, I can share with you two key parts of it.

First there is the video of my lecture on Evolution, Behavior and the Encultured Brain. You don’t actually get to see me, however – you see my Powerpoint slides and hear my accompanying lecture. In the talk I cover a lot of my work on evolutionary theory and addiction, and then discuss how that work has lead me to neuroanthropology and how neuroanthropology works as a good complement to evolutionary biology.

I also took part in a podcast, where I got involved in a great discussion with students at Binghamton about my research on substance use and abuse in Colombia. So in the podcast I range more widely over my work, in particularly discussing some of the cultural anthropology work I have done. So you can also get the Daniel Lende podcast.

They also had a page providing a brief introduction to my talk, and there you can access the pdf of my Evolutionary Medicine and Health chapter “Evolution and Modern Behavioral Problems: The Case of Addiciton.”

Two by Four Stone Hearth


We’ve been a little lax about posting links to the great anthropology carnival Four Stone Hearth. So we’re going to take a swing at updating you about the last two editions.

A Very Remote Period Indeed hosted Four Stone Hearth #85: Cold Wind Edition. Amidst the January cold came archaeological delights like ancient pants and prehistoric footwear to keep you warm, as well as Melville Herskovits in the history of anthropology, the place of linguistic anthropology at the hearth, and much, much more.

Over at Testimony of the Spade we have Four Stone Hearth #86: Amazing Stories Edition. It’s worth a visit for the great covers from fantastical fiction. But you can also find musings on the paleolithic diet, a bronze age halberd, dance and trance, and once again, much, much more!

Link to Four Stone Hearth #85: Cold Wind Edition

Link to Four Stone Hearth #86: Amazing Stories Edition