Author: dlende

Supersized Sweet Secular Search Engine

The latest economic downturn is giving us plenty of business losers, as well as a few winners. It’s the winners that have been catching my eye recently. McDonalds is doing well. Hersheys too. Netflix and Nintendo. Hamburgers, chocolate, movies, and video games. Things we consume, that we experience – not manufactured goods, not services, but activities that mix goods and services together in ways that promote demand, a desire to return and do or have or experience it again.

Let’s take a more mixed example. Mattel the toy company. Its popular 99 cent Hot Wheel toy cars weren’t so popular last year. But American Girl, dolls built around an experience and an identity, is doing well. John Sherry, the anthropologist who heads up Notre Dame’s Marketing department, recently wrote, “The staging ground for the brand’s performance and enactment, American Girl Place, has become a commercial Mecca, a secular pilgrimage site to which female believers throng.”

In my recent piece on what one day at Kotaku the gaming site shows us about our modern world, I wrote:

On this particular day, January 12th, a range of pieces captured why the video game phenomenon has so much to tell us about our modern obsessions, from sex to shopping, drugs to drinking. These eight stories show us the powerful convergence of people looking for fun and industries looking for profit. From pleasure to despair, this convergence is the story of our post-modern lives. It’s not commodities anymore, it’s activities.

We are seeing the emergence of a new type of economy amidst a new type of globalization, and it’s going to produce its own winners and losers, both on the economic side and on the people side.

Want to know how the world is changing? Just look at this Coke avatar ad from the Super Bowl, where the online world meets the iconic brand. It gives us a walk through a modern urban life and ends with romantic tension. Coke is right there in the middle of our enjoyments and our desires, and its enhanced sweetness and pitch-perfect iconic value part-and-parcel of how we live now.

Last April in Cellphones Save the World, I wrote the following:

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Wednesday Round Up #49

No brains and no anthropology this week! Categories, that is. Not even a top-of-the-list. Just a data dump on Our Digital Age, then a plethora of psychiatry. Followed by fuzzy animals and furry hobbits.

Our Digital Age

The Op-Ed Project
“an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate emphasis on enlarging the pool of women experts who are accessing (and accessible to) our nation’s key print and online forums”

Antropologi, Dissertation: Why Kids Embrace Facebook and MySpace
New research on just why kids get so involved in social networking

Douglas Quenqua, Friends, Until I Delete You
Are you only worth a tenth of a hamburger on Facebook?

Daniel Solove, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
Gossip and the changing shape of privacy online

Pamthropologist, Another Semester Begins and There is Work to Do
These students don’t need a virtual life – they need to get engaged with some basics

Daniel Smith, What Is Art For?
A profile of Lewis Hyde, from Thoreau to our digital “cultural commons”

Jonah Lehrer, The iPhone Mind
The extended mind meets social networking

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #49”

The Foundation for Applied Psychiatric Anthropology

fapaThe Foundation for Applied Psychiatric Anthropology (FAPA) is a new organization founded by the anthropologist and social worker Rebecca Lester and the psychiatrist Davinder Hayreh.

The Foundation “promotes the use of ethnographic research and mixed-methods approaches to improve understandings and treatments of mental illness, broadly defined. FAPA facilitates collaboration among scholars and practitioners who wish to integrate clinical work with ethnographic research and advocacy initiatives related to culture and mental health.”

FAPA also offers reduced-fee psychotherapy services to residents in the Saint Louis, Missouri area. To find out more, check out FAPA’s description of its clinical services and approach.

Rebecca Lester is a professor of anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis. You can read about her treatment philosophy. For researchers, Rebecca has put together a great list of books in psychiatric anthropology.

And here’s Davinder Hayreh’s LinkedIn profile. He is presently nearing the finish of his residency in psychiatry at Barnes-Jewish Hosptial in Saint Louis.

For more information, you can contact them at office @ psychanthro.org [remove spaces].

Alvaro Fernandez and Brain Plasticity

It’s not the best quality video ever, but it’s great to see Alvaro Fernandez – of SharpBrains fame – in action in this clip Amazing Findings in Neuroplasticity. Quite a good overview in five minutes.

Greg has covered neuroplasticity before, as well as the research on cab drivers.

Over at SharpBrains you can check out Brain Plasticity: How Learning Changes the Brain and The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains.

SharpBrains has its own YouTube Sharpbrains channel, with nine other videos for your viewing pleasure.

Grand Stone

grandson_menhirTwo carnivals are out.

Grand Rounds brings together the best medical blogging of the past week, and this time it’s at Chronic Babe where it goes totally babelicious.

From tampons to breast exams it’s got it all. But you can even find Sharp Brains’ argument that brain training is heading for a productive tipping point.

Four Stone Hearth rounds up anthropology, and A Very Remote Period Indeed brings us the New Hope edition.

One piece I enjoyed was a summary of arguments about the Out of Africa hypothesis over at Remote Central. But there’s plenty other stones to explore!

Wednesday Round Up #48

Last week we did a special theme – Obama is a neuroanthropologist – but this week it’s back to normal. I’ll cover some things that might already be two weeks old (gasp!), but it’s all for a good cause – your own reading pleasure.

So this time we have some favorites, then PTSD, some anthropology, some brain stuff, decision making, and fighting inequality. Yes, lots of categories – I’m catching up… Enjoy!

Top of the List

Dennis Overbye, Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy
I liked this essay, for its examination of science as both a search for truth and a pragmatic endeavor that also happens to teach values

Jane Brody, Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You
Getting down and dirty for a better immunological system. I was just talking about this in my med anthro class, contrasting the science with people who are obsessed with cleanliness.

Jennifer Ruark, In the Thrall of Neuroscience
Chronicle of Higher Education piece from December – finally found a complete online version. All about the new interdisciplinary interest and collaboration with neuroscientists. I even get a quote!

Ed Yong, Pre-emptive Blood Flow Raises Big Questions about fMRI
Cool study about blood going to parts of the brain in anticipation of activation

PTSD

After reading my students’ great post on veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder, I came across some PTSD readings to share.

Anxiety Insights, Mind-Body Skills Reduce PTSD in War-Traumatized Children
“biofeedback, meditation, guided imagery and self-expression (in words, drawings, and movement) produce lasting changes in levels of stress, flashbacks, nightmares and symptoms of withdrawal and numbing in adolescents living in a region of conflict.”

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #48”