Author: dlende

Around the Web at Savage Minds

Jay Sosa over at the cultural anthropology blog Savage Minds puts together a weekly round up entitled Around the Web. This week’s edition is a real stand-out.

We have an interview at the Telegraph with Nigel Barley, the anthropologist and novelist, best known for his funny The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. Here’s one great quote: “I’m not saying anthropology isn’t fiction,” [Barley] replied, “but fiction’s more fun. It lets you look inside people’s heads in a way you wouldn’t dare to do if you stuck to anthropology.”

Tim Parks at the Guardian writes Everything Is Connected on the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Bateson’s collected essays Steps to an Ecology of Mind should be required reading for every aspiring neuroanthropologist. Parks provides us a biography of Bateson, and speaks directly to how Bateson’s research, life experience and writings apply to art in today’s changing and challenged world:

Dreams, religious experience, art, love – these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind. Of these four, art enjoyed the special role of fusing different “levels of mind” together: there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely schematic and transparent.

Over at Somatosphere, the medical anthropology blog, Ann Kelly writes of Mosquito Huts, Wundercabinets and Cultural Models, a wide-ranging reflection on her work in Gambia and Tanzania as part of a mosquito and malaria control project. How does anthropology intersect with public health and local architecture in a living space intermediary between a home and a laboratory? Go find out through combined entomological and ethnographic analysis…

And those are just the three pieces from Around the Web that really caught my attention. If you’re looking for culture in the suburbs, the lost tapes of Osama bin Laden, and what evangelicals really say about gays, then go find out!

Savage Minds Bonus: Kerim writes an entertaining review of Donna Haraway’s book When Species Meet. Or rather Kerim’s dog Juno (cute photo!) pens this review. Here’s one early excerpt:

I also like Haraway. She seems to engage ideas in the same way a dog might play with a dead animal: sniffing it, placing it our mouth, playing with it, rolling on it, barking at it, offering it to our master only to run away with it again. But I could tell my owner was as frustrated by this kind of play as he is when I do it. He likes to play boring, repetitive, games like fetch. He seems to prefer the easy popular style of Patricia McConnell to Haraway’s challenging prose.

Richard Thaler Speaks at RSA

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Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago, co-wrote the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness with the legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Here Thaler presents his views about decision making, policy and goverment before an audience at the RSA – often called the Royal Society of Arts.

For those of you looking to read something shorter, Thalen and Sunstein give an overview of their book in this LA Times article Designing Better Choices. They also have a scholarly article Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron. And for the truly devoted, you can check out their website Nudges.

Thalen is a behavioral economist, and thus sees the notion of perfect rationality and idealized cost/benefit decision making as irrational. We are human, flawed and imperfect; more importantly, our “choice architectures” are significantly shaped by features of the environment, such as what captures our attention or simply following the default option like the rest of the herd. Hence the nudge, those small features in the environment that we can shape in specific directions while still letting people make their own decisions.

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Meet the Family: Human Evolution

Here’s a video I found this week and used in my lecture on human evolution on Thursday. It’s well put together, and provides a good visualization of some major moments/species over the past six million years. A few ideas that are still being debated in the field might get slipped in, and this video represents a “splitter” view (seeing more species in the fossil record than the “lumpers”, including the Neanderthals as separate). But overall I liked it.

David Brooks and the Social Animal

In his NY Times op-ed The Social Animal, David Brooks writes that the “individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.”

He goes on to say that the Republican party hasn’t kept up with science: “Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.”

Brook then declares this worldview the main impediment to modernization of the Republican party: “These problems straining the social fabric aren’t directly addressed by maximizing individual freedom. And yet locked in the old framework, the Republican Party’s knee-jerk response to many problems is: ‘Throw a voucher at it’.”

Brooks misses two crucial points in his op-ed, as he does in most of his recent op-eds covering similar “human nature” issues. He does not get “culture” and he does not get “power and inequality.”

We are not just social animals, we are cultural animals! But the Republican party does not get this fundamental fact of human nature. For the Republicans, there is one set of values that matter, and we can impose those values on others. It’s not just an ideology of individualism, it’s an ideology of culture.

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Wednesday Round Up #28

This week it’s anthropology, the brain, HIV/AIDS, and some integrative interactions. Enjoy!

Anthropology

Paul Mason, Passion for Research and Music Combined
Our own Paul writes in the Macquarie Globe about his interdisciplinary interests. Includes this photo if you want to get a look at the man!

The Evolving Mind, Gaps in the Brain and Jack of Many Trades
Plasticity meets the Swiss army knife metaphor: ‘Any blade currently manifest, endowed in us by “nature,” is one nurture has extended.” For more, see a follow-up post on the creative confines of nature.

Mark Liberman, David Brooks, Social Psychologist
Language Log takes down Brooks’ facile “collectivist mentality” op-ed

Mark Liberman, One Question, Two Answers, Three Interpretations
Language Log turns from Brooks to David Nisbett’s research on US/East Asian differences, as well as James Flynn’s work on the social rise in IQ test scores

Science Daily, New Evidence Debunks ‘Stupid’ Neanderthal Myth
Recreating stone tools—were Neanderthal tools simpler to make? Not to modern hands at least

NPR, The Science of Getting a ‘Yes’
Social psychology and persuasion

Wray Herbert, Brrr, It’s Lonely Out There
Metaphor, meaning and basic perceptions

Clive Thompson, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
NY Times Magazine on social networking and our changing forms of intimacy. Mind Hacks discusses the article here.

Brains

Neuronism, Dendritic Plasticity and ‘Input Feature Storage’
Synaptic plasticity meets computational neuroscience

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #28”