Author: gregdowney

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.

Brainy muscles

A recent story in The New York Times by Gina Kolata, one of my favorite science writers, highlights one reason why I think neuroanthropology has to be broader than ‘cognitive anthropology’ was in the 1980s and 1990s (and why ‘cognitive science’ itself has really expanded with the more recent wave of thinking about embodied cognition). In an article on whether or not weight training is really good for athletes, titled Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?, I think Kolata does a much better job presenting the case for the efficacy of weight training than the arguments against it. Even several of the physiologists and trainers who Kolata suggests are less than rapt with weight training make comments that are more specifically about weight training done badly than against the practice as a whole; they criticize poor form, badly designed programs, and even not working hard enough, hardly criticisms of the overall efficacy of weight training.

Most of the athletes and other experts seem to me to be pretty strongly in favor of weight training, and I have no doubt that there’s good reason. Most athletic training has been radically transformed with the advent of weight training, and approaches that have come out of weight training (such as targeting specific muscle groups and working different parts of the body to failure) are also applied even in non-weight training exercises, such as selective sprinting, whole body exercises, and the like. Some of my research on capoeira, no-holds-barred fighting (or MMA), and other forms of wresting training suggest that actually training with ‘weights’ — barbells, dumbbells, and the like — can be less than ideal, but most of the modifications that this research suggests are consistent with the theory and practice of weight training, even if they expand the activities involved (body weight exercises, whole body dynamic lifting, jumping, etc.).

But one of the few critics says something that I found extremely interesting, and it resonated with some of the stuff I’ve been writing in my sports-related manuscript (hopefully a book soon) about how neural plasticity affects athletic performance. Specifically, Dr. Patrick O’Connor, a University of Georgia exercise scientist, says that ‘a sport like rowing, swimming or running requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns that may best be developed by actually doing the sport.’ A sport like ‘rowing, swimming or running’ that ‘requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns…’ hmmmm? So that would be like, what, every sport?

Continue reading “Brainy muscles”

Real life methods conference

Jovan at Culture Matters (and, not coincidentally, with me at Macquarie’s anthro department) pointed out to me a conference in Manchester. Titled, Vital Signs: Researching Real Life, the conference is an interdisciplinary meeting to think about how to do research on the kinds of complex tangles that we seem to gravitate towards at Neuroanthropology. The meeting will 9-11 September 2008 at Manchester University. The website describes how:

We are using the concept of ‘real lives’ in an open way to stimulate debate about how research methodologies and methods in the social sciences and beyond can rise to the challenge of producing knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities.

The call for abstracts is online and outlines the following areas for discussion:

  • Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
  • Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
  • Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life; for example, combining ‘social science’, ‘science’, ‘art’, ‘literature’, ‘history’ and ‘journalism’
  • Mixing methods in real life research. Eg How do we, how can we, combine ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ approaches? Can we transcend that divide?
  • Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
  • Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
  • Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
  • Communicating and disseminating real life research (in a vital way?)
  • Challenges in analysing real life data
  • Real life research in policy and politics
  • Participatory real life research
  • Real life research ethics and moralities
  • What is real life? Theorising real life

Keynote speakers are Les Back, Tim Ingold and Carolyn Steedman (more info on them here).

Overall, might be worth an inquiry if you’re going to be anyway near Manchester in September.

What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?

Some cultural anthropologists are afraid of the brain sciences; they fear that neuroscientists want to dissolve culture into the study of the brain, discounting the necessity of studying culture, social interaction, systems of meaning, symbolism, everyday life, and all the things that cultural anthropologists have argued are important for shaping human life. Emily Martin, for example, one of the most interesting anthropologists working on the way that cultural assumptions shape medicine, medical education, and the like, writes in an article on the ‘mind-body’ problem of the dangers of ‘neuro-reductionist’ thought.

Martin’s fear is that, ultimately, although some in the brain sciences explicitly claim to have an interest in cultural differences, they do not grant the social the same degree of ‘reality’ as the cellular and organic. As Martin writes, although they sometimes discuss social and cultural differences; ‘… the levels in neuron man, a figure frequently reproduced in neuroscience texts, begin with molecules, but go no farther than the central nervous system’ (2000:574). I’m sure that Martin is right for a lot of neuroscience texts; but I would argue that cultural anthropology texts, in the main, probably demonstrate the same degree of partiality.

She sees ‘the neuroreductive cognitive sciences as the most dangerous kind of vortex—one close by and one whose power has the potential to suck in disciplines like anthropology, severely weakening them in the process’ (ibid.). Martin encourages anthropologists to unite ‘in opposition to a position in which the dyke between nature and culture has been breached, and all of what anthropologists call culture has drained through the hole and dissolved in the realm of neural networks’ (ibid.: 576).

Normally, I would argue that Martin is over-reacting, worried about a possibility that is too remote. But then, every once in a while, I read something that helps me to realize that Martin’s fear, however exaggerated, are grounded in concrete experiences. Rather than a ‘dyke between nature and culture,’ I find that the real issue is the slipperiness of the notion of culture that some in the brain sciences use. That is, if we look carefully at what they are using as the ‘cultural’ in their own attempts to grapple with cross-cultural differences in the brain, cognition, and development, we find that however well meaning, given the wrong tool, one is likely to wind up with a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, although I like the majority of what they write, I fear that this is the situation with a recent piece I stumbled across by reading Encephalon’s recent posting, Briefing the Next US President on 24 Neuroscience and Psychology Issues.
Continue reading “What’s the ‘culture’ in neuroanthropology?”

‘Giant sleep machines’ and the brain

I stumbled across this article in the Discover website, entitled How To Sleep Like a Hunter-Gatherer. Quite a bit of the piece is clearly based on a discussion with anthropologist Carol Worthman, director of the Laboratory for Comparative Human Biology at Emory University. The article basically considers some of the variation in human sleep patterns, pointing out how rare and extreme American sleeping behaviors are, especially the extreme quiet, isolation, and uninterrupted, single-shot way that we get out eight hours.

I’m struck by this for a number of reasons; Worthman points out how sleep patterns would be different for people living communally, for foraging groups living in less isolation from the environment, and for folks living in very loud cities (she draws on Cairo, where people also sleep twice during the day and often share sleeping space with other people). The implications are intriguing, as my former colleague Jim McKenna has pointed out in his discussions of co-sleeping.

But I’m also struck by the possibility that the ‘American’ pattern she describes (which is likely also restricted — for example, what about those working night shifts…), might fundamentally affect patterns of alertness, body metabolism, memory, ability to maintain attention, and a host of other factors.

Moving to the country has made me more aware of this because I sleep much less than my wife, and I tend not to be ready to go to sleep when she’s nodding off on the couch after dinner. At night, when everyone else is asleep and I’m working, doing dishes, or writing blog posts, the noise is extraordinary. Between crickets and frogs, the noise level is constantly equivalent to a party on the neighbors’ farm. It’s taken some getting used to. I haven’t yet noticed a change in my sleep patterns, but I suspect that the variation Worthman describes likely has significant affects on the human brain. It’s one of those mechanisms that I’m interested in: it’s ‘cultural’ in the sense that it’s socially-based variation, but it’s largely not conscious, non-semantic, and behavioral, something that most current theories of culture don’t handle very well. Anyway, I don’t have much intelligent to say about the piece — maybe I will after I get some sleep. (I know, that was cheap, but I do want to go to bed, and it’s all I’ve got.)

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’ve been away from Neuroanthropology for a few days, typing my fingers numb working on a grant application for the Australian Research Council. I won’t go into it too much here (maybe later), but I will say that I have NEVER seen a more complicated, bureacratized, byzantine system than the ARC grant competition. I felt semi-conscious when I finished the ‘interactive’ budgeting section alone (I put ‘interactive’ in quotes only because the system would have to give the applicant something back to call it ‘interaction’). Many thanks, especially to Daniel, for covering my absence while I was ‘away,’ or at least pulling out clumps of hair trying to figure out what the instructions on the application were asking me to do.

But I’ve been wanting to post a number of things, including a recent article by Ashley Newton and Jill de Villiers that appeared in Psychological Science. Special thanks to Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily whose posting about this article drew it to my attention. (And Prof. Munger is also responsible for creating the ‘Blogging about refereed research’ system that we’re trying to work with on Neuroanthropology.)

Newton and de Villiers ran experiments in which subjects were asked to solve ‘false-belief’ problems, questions about how individuals would act when it was likely that they had developed false beliefs; for example, if the subject see Max watch Sam put food in one place, then Max leaves the room, only to have Same move the food to a new location. Will Max believe the food is in the first place, or in its actual location, when he returns to the room? These problems test the subject’s ability to reason about another person’s beliefs, even when they are false. Young children tend to get these problems wrong, saying that Max will look for the food in the new location because the child knows the food is there. Very young children do not recognize that Max will have a ‘false belief.’ (Alright, so ‘false belief’ problems aren’t that hard, but the researchers made the tasks a bit more difficult…)

Continue reading “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?”

Podcast on the evolution of language

Friend of Neuroanthropology, Dr. Ginger Campbell, has a new podcast up on the evolution of language. It’s free to download (audio mp3 or through iTunes).

Dr. Campbell’s stuff is great. I tend to load the podcasts onto my little iPod shuffle and listen to them while I’m riding around on the tractor (got a new 4-wheel-drive tractor this week!) and while running the ‘whipper snipper’ (what Yanks call a ‘weed whacker’ or, less prosaically, a ‘line trimmer’). We have a 4 cylinder whipper snipper, and it gets to be a rough ride, so I always enjoy listening to a good lecture while I’m I’m tearing through the unruly grass around the farm. Ira Bashkow, my former writing group mate from Chicago, now on the faculty at University of Virginia (and author of the 2007 Victor Turner Award winning, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World), turned me on to the podcast-lecture-listening-while-doing-physical-work when he told me that he works out in the gym to them. I’ve put a bit of a farm-related wrinkle on the whole process. But I digress…

The bottom line is that the Brain Science Podcasts are a great resource for anyone interested in Neuroanthropology. In her interviews, Dr. Campbell reminds me a lot of Anne Fausto-Sterling, one of my intellectual heroes (just her enthusiasm, willingness to learn, and humility in spite of knowledge). As soon as I get the slasher (Yanks: mower) on the back of the new tractor and the pastures dry out a bit, I’ll no doubt have stack of the podcasts I haven’t yet had a chance to listen to loaded on the iPod.