Peter Stromberg, a professor of anthropoology at the University of Tulsa, is also part of our Encultured Brain session. His paper is entitled Cultural Neuroscience and the Idea of Addiction: Thoughts from the Early Phase Routines of Tobacco Use. Here is the abstract:

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that aspects of social context shape the experience of drug use. This paper extends our understanding of this relationship by exploring the cognitive and emotional effects of routines of self-administration of tobacco among one group of beginning smokers. This information is derived from a one-year qualitative study of 55 first-year college students on two campuses. Analysis of interviews done in the project has revealed that low level smokers on these campuses use tobacco almost exclusively at collective gatherings. Thus interactive processes such as social entrainment, imitation, and absorption (an attentive state) are heavily implicated in early-phase routines of self-administration. As one student says, “…when you see someone else light a cigarette, you get this urge to do the same.” I look briefly at the neurobiology of these mental processes, pointing out that these are all very important mechanisms that function to regulate social interaction among some species of monkeys and non-human primates. Thus these mental processes have a long evolutionary history, and much research now suggests that there are aspects of these processes that are not under voluntary control. As such, beginning smokers who become entrained with other smokers, for example, may experience their activity as being influenced by something beyond their familiar ability to control their own action. Such experiences may contribute to the cultural idea of tobacco as a substance with the capacity to override the will of the user and foster dependency.

Peter has published previously on early stage smoking in the paper Taking Play Seriously. Here are some relevant lines: “Cigarettes have been socially engineered to become potent symbols. Therefore, they need to be understood as cultural products invested with cognitive and emotional salience as well as nicotine delivery devices engineered to create a population of dependent users. In this paper, we look at the symbolism of cigarettes, but unlike many researchers examining this topic, we attend as much to what tobacco users do with cigarettes as to what smoking means to them cognitively. Based on interviews with low-level smokers conducted on two college campuses, we suggest that students use tobacco in order to accomplish interactional goals and to structure social time and space that would otherwise be ambiguously defined.”

Peter got his start at Stanford, graduating with his PhD in cultural anthropology in 1981. He subsequently published the 1993 book Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Over his career his main interests have been the anthropology of mental health and the religious and secular meaning systems in contemporary Western societies. Of late, he has turned his attention to the rhetoric of self-transformation in contemporary society and is planning to extend that work by looking at self-transformation in dynamic psychotherapy.

Peter has a forthcoming book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You. Stanford University Press gives us this blurb:

Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about.

To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption.

If you are interested in knowing more, you can contact Peter at peter-stromberg at utulsa.edu.

As for onsite, you might check out what I just wrote about craving and compulsion, but the pieces on Grand Theft Auto and on Running and Dissociation are also relevant. Plus I wrote a whole series on play back in February.

At the Encultured Brain session Rachel Brezis will give a talk on Autism and Religious Development: A Case for Neuroanthropology. Here is the abstract:

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that disrupts the juncture between self and culture, affecting an individual’s abilities to interpret and perform in social contexts. As such, it provides an intriguing case for the examination of anthropological theories of acculturation and self-construction. Moreover, person-centered ethnographies of the cultural practices of persons with autism can shed light on the neuropsychological bases of the disorder.

The author’s ethnographic study of the religious development of persons with High-Functioning Autism in Israel demonstrates the ways in which such cultural-level research contradicts some theories of autism derived mostly from experimental research. Instead, ethnographic research corroborates emerging neuropsychological studies to point to an alternative paradigm of autism. Rather than focusing on the deficit in understanding others (Theory of Mind), which predicts shallow, impersonal views of the universe among persons with autism, these studies suggest that the primary deficit in autism lies in weak self-coherence and the related functions of episodic memory and executive planning. These deficits lead individuals to become overly reliant on received cultural scripts, which are then coarsely woven into their personal narratives. Such integrative, interdisciplinary research is beneficial not only to the respective fields of anthropology and neuropsychology, but ultimately enhances our understanding of autism, providing the individuals behind the label with greater insight into their condition and support in their struggle for inclusion.

A graduate of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Rachel is now a PhD student in Comparative Human Development and Clinical Psychology at the University of Chicago. For her masters’ thesis in the Department of Comparative Human Development, she wrote on the religious understandings of children with autism as part of a larger project exploring the psychological bases of religious beliefs. At Chicago she has also helped run the Clinical Ethnography workshop.

Rachel is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Culture, Brain and Development and CART Center for Autism Research and Treatment at UCLA, where she is training in clinical and research methods in autism. Within her broad focus on the intersection of mental health and culture, she plans to pursue the study of autism as a window onto the intricate process of acculturation.

If you want to get in touch with Rachel, her email is brezisrs at uchicago.edu

For more on autism, we have one relevant post about autism and understanding others, discussing the case of Amanda Baggs and her YouTube video.

Rebecca Seligman is a psychological and medical anthropologist at Northwestern University. I have known Rebecca since we interviewed together at Emory for graduate school, and I am very pleased that she will be part of our Encultured Brain session. She once showed me some remarkable video of trance states among Candomble practitioners in Brazil; I still think about that footage today.

Rebecca will deliver a paper entitled, funny enough, “The Cultural Neuroscience of Dissociation.” Here’s the abstract:

Approaches to trance and possession in anthropology have tended to treat dissociative phenomena as primarily social and rhetorical practices, used to create social space or positioning for the performance and articulation of certain types of self-experiences, in particular cultural settings. Most anthropological studies of dissociation do not consider the relationships among such social processes and the emotional context and biological mechanisms of dissociative experiences. Within psychology and psychiatry, on the other hand, the experience of dissociation is assumed to be the direct product of an underlying neurological mechanism, which operates functionally. More specifically, current research in psychiatry is focused almost exclusively on establishing the link between dissociation and trauma, which is viewed as the trigger for a neurologically mediated dissociative response that functions as a defense mechanism. In this paper, I outline an approach to dissociative phenomena that integrates the neuropsychological notions of underlying mechanism with anthropological understandings of its social-discursive uses, demonstrating how an understanding of such mechanisms further illuminates the role of dissociation as a metaphor for certain types of self-related experience. This integrative model, informed by cultural neuroscience, can advance ethnographic studies of dissociative phenomena, including trance, possession and spiritual healing practices, by considering the central role of embodied processes in the phenomenology of dissociation.

Rebecca has already published on this research in a Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry article, “Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism.”

Rebecca is also working on a paper with Ryan Brown (yes, he’s presenting too!) that will provide an anthropological take on the emerging field of cultural neuroscience in a special issue on that topic. The whole collection will hopefully appear later this year in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and is being edited by Joan Chiao. If you don’t want to wait that long, you might check out some previous posts on cultural neuroscience and the cultural brain here.

Rebecca was also part of an Ethos special issue on Building Biocultural Anthropology that I co-edited with Dan Hruschka back in 2005. Her article dealt with a similar topic, “Distress, Dissociation, and Embodied Experience: Reconsidering the Pathways to Mediumship and Mental Health.” Here is the abstract to that piece:

This article explores the biocultural bases of spirit possession mediumship in the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé. After a brief review of the literature, the article moves beyond the biomedical and social-structural explanations that have dominated the theoretical landscape, by attempting to construct an etiology of mediumship that is traced through the interface of individual characteristics with the cultural belief system that forms their context. Data were collected from a total of 71 individuals over the course of a year-long field study in Salvador, Brazil. Analyses of social ethnography, life history and semistructured interviews along with results from psychological inventories, suggest that altered states of consciousness should not be considered the central and defining element of mediumship. An alternative model is proposed, in which the combination of social conditions and somatic susceptibilities causes certain individuals to identify with the mediumship role, and predisposes them to dissociate. However in the context of Candomblé, dissociation is not a pathological experience, but rather a therapeutic mechanism, learned through religious participation, that benefits individuals with a strong tendency to somatize.

If you want to contact Rebecca, please email her at r-seligman at northwestern.edu.

Our AAA conference panel in San Francisco “The Encultured Brain: Neuroanthropology and Interdisciplinary Engagement” is only ten days away. In that time I will feature our individual presenters so that people can get a sense of who is going to present and what their work is about.

First up is Ryan Brown, assistant professor in Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University. His talk is entitled: The Brain in Culture: Emotional Responses to Social Threat. Here is the abstract:

Recent technological developments allow us to peer into the mechanics and dynamics of our brain and nervous system with increasing ease and depth. Scientific and public perceptions of impending miraculous solutions (or, alternatively, the end of humankind as we know it) have rippled forth from these new technologies and associated research projects. A holistic anthropological view provides a cooling tonic to these heated misperceptions. Specifically, a radical developmental systems view that refuses to assign a priori causal primacy to genes, neurons, social interactions, or institutions shows the brain to be not only enculturated (affected in structure and function by culture) but also always “in culture”; at once a product of, participant in, and creator of sociocultural systems. Evolution has endowed the human nervous system with redundant and parallel pathways that enable both stability and plasticity during development. Similarly, sociocultural systems are highly evolved and self-stabilizing, with multiple ways of enabling or limiting individual behavior that have co-evolved with the human brain. As a result, technologies of neuro-observation promise new opportunities for understanding (not to mention intervention) only insofar as they operate at the intersection of sociocultural systems and human behavior. For example, intersections of psychophysiology and social psychology have thrown new light on how the brain and nervous system function during threatening or unpleasant social interactions. I describe how an anthropological and social theoretical approach can: (1) push such knowledge “up” to the population level, and (2) push such knowledge “down” into lived experiential worlds.

Ryan’s broad interests focus on risk-taking, psychophysiology, violence, emotions and health, culture and acculturation, and evolutionary and biological approaches to health and behavior. You can download his CV here.

Ryan is also the director of the newly founded Cultural Psychophysiology Laboratory (CPL) at Northwestern University, which uses portable psychophysiology equipment to conduct field experiments. Current work at CPL focuses on how race-ethnicity, SES, and cultural context affects physiological and behavioral responses to potentially threatening social situations.

If you want to contact Ryan about his work in cultural psychophysiology, his AAA presentation, or anything else, his email is: ryan-a-brown at northwestern.edu