Christina Toren is a professor of anthropology at the University of Saint Andrews. In the Encultured Brain session, she will give a talk on Inter-subjectivity and the Development of Neural Processes. The abstract goes like this:

How might inter-subjectivity be understood to inform the development over time of each one of us considered as an autopoietic (self-creating, self-organizing) system? This paper argues that the development of the neural processes that characterize human conceptual development is an emergent aspect of the functioning of an embodied nervous system for which inter-subjectivity is a necessary condition. The genuine multiplicity of human beings as organisms characterised by historicity is not explained, indeed usually not even fully acknowledged, by current neuroscience models of infant and child development.

This paper proposes a dynamic systems approach to the anthropology of human development which shows why cognitive science on the one hand and, on the other, cultural construction, cannot explain the multiplicity of human being – that is, how it comes to be the case that what differentiates us is a function of what we have in common.

In her paper Christina draws on the founders of the idea of autopoiesis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who co-authored the book Autopoiesis and Cognition. She also discusses the recent book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind by Evan Thompson. Varela and Thompson, along with Eleanor Rosch, co-wrote the classic The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.

Christina approaches the problem of the embodied mind, our development, and our ways of understanding each others’ ideas and experiences as an ethnographer first. Insisting on the importance of ethnography has been a consistent theme in her work. In her chapter Ethnography: Theoretical Background in the volume Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences, she argues for an ethnography “that is open, phenomenologically oriented, reflexive and free of predetermined hypotheses.” More recently, she wrote in How Do We Know What Is True? in Questions in Anthropology, “The explanatory power of our ethnographies must be made to reside in rendering our informants’ categories analytical,” by which she means amenable to historical and social analysis. “The meaning of a category cannot properly be taken for granted… it requires, always, an ethnographic investigation to establish how it is used and what its implications may be.”

Christina does a lot of her ethnographic work in Fiji in the South Pacific. Recently she published the article Sunday Lunch in Fiji: Continuity and Transformation in Ideas of the Household, which examines how the ritualization of eating, the intensification of commodity exchange, and children’s development help us understand both cultural continuity and change over time in the concept of what we might call home (even though household means something rather different there). Her earlier book Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography has the following Amazon description:

Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography is the outcome of over a decade’s research into how Fijians live their lives and constitute their knowledge of the world. Through this exploration, the author aims to derive a new theory of embodied mind that works as well for explaining ourselves as it does for explaining others. Investigating the processes by which humans interact with the material world of objects and with other people, the book addresses the issue of how we form our identities in connection with, and in contrast to, the identities of those around us. Mind, Materiality and History demonstrates that the human mind is the fundamental historical phenomenon.

Fiji. Some anthropologists get the best field sites… But that’s not why we do it! As Christina writes in her profile, “As an anthropologist, I am fascinated by the extraordinary variety and complexity of human beings. What interests me is how we become who we are – each one of us uniquely ourselves – and how the history of our relations with others informs this process of becoming ourselves.”

If you want to get in touch with Christina, her email is christina.toren at st-andrews.ac.uk

The next Critical Neuroscience conference will be held January 30, 2009 at UCLA. The theme this time is “Challenging Reductionism in Psychiatry and Social Neuroscience.” It will be held at the Semel Institute Auditorium and there is free admission as long as you register. To register, send an email to criticalneuro at gmail.com. For more details, you can also contact Suparna Choudhury, one of the main organizers (and a promising young scholar in her own right!), at schoudhury at mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

The presenters include Joseph Dumit, whose book Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity is a must-read in this area.

Shaun Gallagher is another heavy-hitter, and author of the recent book How The Body Shapes The Mind.

Steven Rose recently penned Lifelines: Beyond the Gene and The Future of the Brain: The Promises and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience.

Evan Thompson just came out with Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

(Reminder to self: start writing heavy books with big titles… instill awe in other bloggers as they copy Amazon links.)

Cornelius Borck and Laurence Kirmayer are also coming, two people who presented at the last Critical Neuroscience workshop in July in Montreal.

Neuroscience in Context, the European group, is again sponsoring this conference. It fits well, as NIC is all about “critical perspectives, neuroethics, and anthropology.” McGill’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry is sponsoring the conference once more as well.

The new sponsor is The Foundation for Psychocultural Research. Founded by Robert Lemelson, the Foundation’s mission is “to support and advance interdisciplinary research projects and scholarship at the intersection of psychology, culture, neuroscience and psychiatry, with an emphasis on Psychocultural factors as central, not peripheral.”

The workshop in July produced a string of popular posts here at Neuroanthropology, as I was lucky enough to attend that conference. Here are some fan favorites: The Three Aspects of Critical Neuroscience; Neurotosh, Neurodosh, and Neurodash; Pop Goes the Media; Psychopharma-parenting (very funny!); and The Cultural Brain in Five Flavors.

Primates and neuroanthropology? Most definitely! Katherine MacKinnon and Agustín Fuentes will deliver a talk at our Encultured Brain session on “Primate Social Cognition, Human Evolution, and Niche Construction: A Core Context for Neuroanthropology.” Here is the abstract:

Primates exhibit a strong proclivity towards sociality and social group living. Some argue for a specific pattern of social cognition as a core adaptation for the primates. Modern monkeys, apes and humans all live in some form of social networks or communities, suggesting that our last common ancestors also lived as such. Sociality is a crucial part, possibly defining part, of our adaptive strategies. This paper will explore the evolutionary implications for primate cognitive ability as a mechanism for niche construction and human evolutionary success. In humans enhanced cognitive capabilities, extra-somatic manipulations of the environment, and enhanced communicative abilities has enabled our genus to successfully exploit myriad social and structural environments across space and time. Additionally, our extended period of infant development (cognitive, motor, social) necessitated increasing support from group members throughout our evolutionary history. The interactions between our central nervous system and our social and physical environments have demanded increased complexity and connectivity in our social networks, relative to other primates species, in which information about the habitat, food, predator detection, and infant care are disseminated. Here we discuss how the intersections of environment, culture and biology have deep tangled roots in our lineage and how comparative phylogenic and behavioral data from other primates can illuminate the complex interweaving of the social outcomes of our cognitive abilities. Examples from our phylogenic history, as well as from the living nonhuman primates effectively expand on reductionist explanations of variable patterns of social and cognitive complexity.

I’ll profile Katie here, with Agustin in this post. First off the great shot of Katie comes from Costa Rica, where she works with capuchin monkeys. I had the pleasure of watching capuchins in the Colombian Amazon – if I had to pick a species to study, this could be the one! They were magical as they jumped through the trees and chattered among themselves.

Katie is a biological anthropologist at Saint Louis University, and has focused on primate social behavior since she started fieldwork in Central and South America in 1992. Her current work focuses on the social behavior and development of wild infant and juvenile capuchin monkeys – those cute baby monkeys that get lots of awww… But she is also deeply concerned with conservation efforts, in particular how primate communities interact with local human communities. Katie has done much of her recent work in Suriname, where in addition to her capuchin interests, she is also concerned with the responsibilities (such as giving back, helping local economies, and educational efforts about the forests) that field primatologists, usually non-local, have to the local human communities in which they work.

Thus, besides primate behavior in itself, work with capuchins reflects in two ways on people – insights into ourselves as primates and pressing issues of how we relate to our environment, including the wonderful creatures that share their lives with us.

Specifically with neuroanthropology, if we now see the brain as more plastic and accept arguments like Andy Clark’s about the extended mind, then we need to understand how our brains and the functions therein (thereout?) evolved. We are social creatures, and primates place our claims of cognition in context.

Katie just co-edited the great compilation Primates in Perspective, which won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2007. Why? Because it provides a comprehensive overview of primatology from the best researchers in the field.

Katie also helped establish the Midwest Primate Interest Group (MPIG), along with colleagues (including Agustin) at Washington University-St. Louis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and University of Notre Dame.

Here is the MacKinnon Short CV if you want to see more of what Katie has done. And to get in contact with her, her email is mackinn at slu.edu

Along with Katherine MacKinnon, Agustin Fuentes is giving the Primate Social Cognition, Human Evolution, and Niche Construction paper at our Encultured Brain session. Here’s the abstract:

In humans enhanced cognitive capabilities, extra-somatic manipulations of the environment, and enhanced communicative abilities have enabled our genus to successfully exploit myriad social and structural environments across space and time. Additionally, our extended period of infant development (cognitive, motor, social) necessitated increasing support from group members throughout our evolutionary history. The interactions between our central nervous system and our social and physical environments have demanded increased complexity and connectivity in our social networks, relative to other primates species, in which information about the habitat, food, predator detection, and infant care are disseminated. Here we discuss how the intersections of environment, culture and biology have deep tangled roots in our lineage and how comparative phylogenic and behavioral data from other primates can illuminate the complex interweaving of the social outcomes of our cognitive abilities. Examples from our phylogenic history, as well as from the living nonhuman primates effectively expand on reductionist explanations of variable patterns of social and cognitive complexity.

Based on his work with macaques, human evolution, and primate-human interactions, Agustin has increasingly advocated for an integrative approach to understand human behavior and cognition. He has a new book out, The Evolution of Human Behavior. The Amazon blurb goes like this:

This unique volume reviews a wide array of approaches–including human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, memetics, and gene-culture co-evolution–on how and why humans evolved behaviorally… Fuentes incorporates recent innovations in evolutionary theory with emerging perspectives from genomic approaches, the current fossil record, and ethnographic studies. He examines basic assumptions about why humans behave as they do, the facts of human evolution, patterns of evolutionary change in a global environmental-temporal context, and the interconnected roles of cooperation and conflict in human history. The net result is a text that moves toward a more holistic understanding of the patterns of human evolution and a more integrated perspective on the evolution of human behavior.

With co-authors James Loudon and Michaela Howells, Agustin wrote the article The Importance of Integrative Anthropology (pdf) where they examined interactions between humans and macaques in Bali using both ethnographic and primatological methods. The result? Better methods bring better understanding.

In his 2004 American Anthropologist article It’s Not All Sex and Violence: Integrated Anthropology and the Role of Cooperation and Social Complexity in Human Evolution, Fuentes issues a direct challenge to the Hobbesian view of our “primitive” past – Leviathan’s “life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Agustin advocates niche construction as a way to bring evolutionary thought to bear on arguments about brain-environment interactions, the impact of social relations, and the understanding of embodiment and our extended minds. John Odling-Smee and Kevin Leland have a 2003 book Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution as well as a 2001 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change. This 2007 article by Laland and colleagues The Niche Construction Perspective: Implications for Evolution and Human Behaviour (pdf) gives us the latest update. Here’s the abstract:

The vibrancy of the field of evolution and human behaviour belies the fact that the majority of social scientists are deeply unhappy with evolutionary accounts of human behaviour. In part, this reflects a problem within evolutionary biology: neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, “niche construction”, by which organisms modify environmental states, and consequently selection pressures, thereby acting as co-directors of their own, and other species’, evolution. Social scientists are rarely content to describe human behaviour as fully determined by naturally-selected genes, and view humans as active, constructive agents rather than passive recipients of selection. To be aligned with this viewpoint, evolutionary biology must explicitly recognize the changes that humans bring about in their world to be drivers of evolutionary events. Learning and culture have played important evolutionary roles, by shaping the pattern and strength of selection acting on our ancestors. The incorporation of niche construction as both a cause and a product of evolution enhances the explanatory power of evolutionary theory and provides what ultimately will prove to be a more satisfactory evolutionary framework for understanding human behaviour. Here we spell out some of the important implications of the niche-construction perspective for the field of evolution and human behaviour.

If you want to know more about the work of Agustin, you can contact him at afuentes at nd.edu