Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, I have gone on to do fieldwork in Brazil and the United States. I have written one book, Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art (Oxford, 2005). I have also co-authored and co-edited several, including, with Dr. Daniel Lende, The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (MIT, 2012), and with Dr. Melissa Fisher, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke, 2006).
My research interests include neuroanthropology, psychological anthropology, sport, dance, human rights, neuroscience, phenomenology, economic anthropology, and just about anything else that catches my attention.
I just received this announcement through the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and it looks like something that our readers might find interesting although we’re pretty far out in front of the meeting date (note: 2010):
We are pleased to announce the 4th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind (LCM 4), to be held in Turku, Finland, at Åbo Akademi University, 21-23 June 2010.
Currently confirmed plenary speakers are:
Bradd Shore, Emory University
Dan Zahavi, Centre for Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen
Cornelia Müller, Berlin Gesture Centre and Europa Universität Viadrina
Peggy Miller, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
The LCM conferences are interdisciplinary fora, targeted primarily at researchers in the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology who consider that they have something both to impart to, and to learn from, each other in the study of language as a social, cultural, cognitive and biological phenomenon. More information can be found at:
Walter Goldschmidt, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles got in touch with us here at Neuroanthropology.net to give us a bit of a (friendly) hard time about unfortunate neologisms (touché) and to ask if we were familiar with his work. With my repeated posts on evolutionary psychology, he thought it might be of interest, especially his discussion of affect hunger.
What Prof. Goldschmidt did not realize is that I have an autographed copy of his book, Bridge to Humanity: How Affect Hunger Trumps the Selfish Gene (Oxford U Press listing, Amazon), and I’ve long thought it was both an excellent counter-argument to the ‘selfish gene’ hypothesis as well as a much more persuasive account of the possible evolutionary origins of altruism than the typical explanation: kin selection.
So, as a bit of a ‘thank you’ to Prof. Goldschmidt for providing such a compelling work, I’m going to post a bit of a book discussion here, focusing especially on Prof. Goldschmidt’s account of ‘affect hunger,’ which I find a much more neuroanthropologically plausible account of altruism than the usual account provided by evolutionary psychology discussions of ‘kin selection.’ Continue reading “Evolution of altruism: kin selection or affect hunger?”
For all our Australian readers, the 9th conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science will be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, from Wednesday 30 September to Friday 2 October 2009. The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science is hosting the event, and my colleague, John Sutton, will be convening the event. The announcement can be found here.
Lots of interesting speakers are already confirmed, including Thomas Metzinger of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität and Barbara Tversky from Stanford.
If you’re in Australia, and you’re interested in neuroanthropology or cognition and culture more broadly, drop me a line because we may try to put something together around the conference to meet up and talk over future directions in the field.
In January, The Wall Street Journal carried a short excerpt from science writer
Sharon Begley’s excellent, but unfortunately titled book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. The article, How Thinking Can Change the Brain, is excellent, as is the book, which I’d highly recommend, but both engage in a couple of pervasive rhetorics for talking about brain function that I believe make it harder to really theorize about issues like neuroplasticity.
That is, although I like Begley’s work, some of the ways that she writes about the brain puts her readers, if they’re not already neuroscience savvy, two steps backwards before moving toward greater understanding. It’s sad because I think her book is one of the best works for a general readership on recent research, and the brain imaging projects with Tibetan monks which forms the central narrative of the book are fascinating on so many levels. Begley has a brilliant eye for turning research into story-telling and with the meditation research, she’s picked an ideal subject on which to exercise her skills.
If only she would stop carrying on about ‘Mind’ and ‘Brain’ like they were the two primary characters…
The Guardian (UK) brings us a recent example of technophobia based on comments by neuroscientist Lady Susan Adele Greenfield, this time about the latest prime suspects for ‘rotting the brains of our youth’: Facebook and social networking sites. Patrick Wintour offers us Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind, suggesting that social networking websites might be responsible for ‘short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.’
The Baroness Greenfield has written a stack of books, including a best-seller on the brain, earned a peerage for her outstanding career, and has so many titles and honours that I’m not even sure what to call her (Prof? Lady?). Browsing her homepage and publications list, there’s a range of interesting stuff on consciousness, analgesia, dopamine, and a fair number of subjects upon which I don’t have even the expertise to comment. The only problem is that her fears, closely examined, reveal that she doesn’t know what to be afraid of, adopting a ‘one-paranoia-fits-all’ approach to technological change.
The Guardian article seems a bit over-wrought, and I don’t have the transcript of Greenfield’s presentation to the House of Lords, so I’m hesitant to attribute too much of the phobia to the original speech (for a critique of Greenfield’s habit of alarmism, however, see Ben Goldacre’s weblog). As we’ve seen repeatedly, the transition from scientist presenting to science writer submitting the story to editor reworking to press printing can be really rough, transforming subtle and measured analysis into formulaic, exaggerated soundbites. However, there are some extensive quotes, so in this piece, I’ll do my best to analyze what we have. In another post, I want to move beyond the fear of Facebook, using Lady Greenfield’s comments to think about how we might actually do research on the effects of technological change among developmental influences, but I won’t get to that in this post, as it’s already too long.
I’m not blasé about the developmental consequences of heavy exposure to screen technology, but I think that a legitimate interest in the possible effects of significant technological change in our daily lives can inadvertently dovetail seamlessly into a ‘kids these days’ curmudgeonly sense of generational degeneration, which is hardly new. That is, we have to be careful when we look at the research as it’s easy to annex our popular understandings of generational dynamics, even frustrations with our own children, students, and other young people, into a snowballing sense that everything’s going to hell.
Is new technology affecting our brain development and how? Is the recent change in the developmental environment much greater than previous changes in childhood ecology? And what specifically can we say about social networking sites as a factor in cognitive development? Obviously, these are huge questions, and it’s not my area of research specialty exactly, so I’m not going to bring fresh unpublished data to the table. But I do have some thoughts on the subject nonetheless, as our regular readers might imagine… but here’s the first part, where I deal with the concerns voiced by Greenfield and others.
There’s a fascinating piece at the science reporters’ blog at Nature, In the Field: ‘AAAS: Science journalism in crisis?’ The story has a mix of sad news leavened with just a bit of optimism. The bottom line is that, with newspapers suffering badly from the economic crisis, many are cutting budgets for their science reporting.
A panel at the AAAS meeting was inspired when CNN announced last December ‘to axe its entire space, science and environment unit.’ Christine Russell, a former science reporter for the Washington Post, now president of the US Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, reported that ‘the number of dedicated science pages in US newspapers has fallen from a peak of 95 in 1989 to 34 in 2005, and is still dropping–with a big shift toward consumer and health reporting in those remaining.’ The piece at In the Field discusses the shrinking space for science news at the Boston Globe and the accompanying shrinkage of the science reporting staff.
I’ve leveled a fair bit of criticism at science writing on this blog, but the unfortunate thing is that as the field becomes less professional, less practiced, it’s only going to get worse. So many of the science issues facing the public — genetics, neuroscience, climate science, stem cells, energy policy, ecosystem change, nuclear proliferation, developmental biology — are complex and require a pretty sophisticated set of analytical lenses to sort the significant discoveries from the dross. They aren’t the sort of science stories that your business reporter is going to be able to write astutely about (unless your business reporter was previously downsized when the science page was dissolved).
Walter Goldschmidt, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology from the University of California Los Angeles got in touch with us here at Neuroanthropology.net to give us a bit of a (friendly) hard time about unfortunate neologisms (touché) and to ask if we were familiar with his work. With my repeated posts on evolutionary psychology, he thought it might be of interest, especially his discussion of affect hunger.
Neuroanthropology 