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.

Proceedings from ASCS 09 Conference online

The Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, held in Sydney last year, are now online for anyone to access. Thanks to the editors, Wayne Christensen, Elizabeth Schier, and John Sutton, for pulling the whole collection together!

I didn’t get to stay for the whole conference because I was running around doing preparation things for the Australian Anthropological Society Conference that we held in December. Nevertheless, I saw some really good papers, and some of the others are especially interesting for those of us interested in neuroanthropology. Please peruse the whole list, but for a discussion of cultural variation in cognition, of special interest might be: Nian Liu’s Tuesday, Threesday, Foursday: Chinese names for the days of the week facilitate Chinese children’s temporal reasoning, Zhengdao Ye’s Eating and drinking in Mandarin and Shanghainese: A lexical-conceptual analysis, Collaborative remembering: When can remembering with others be beneficial? by Celia B. Harris, Paul G. Keil, John Sutton and Amanda J. Barnier, and Expanding expertise: Investigating a musician’s experience of music performance by Andrew Geeves, Doris McIlwain, and John Sutton.

I also like the look of Evaluation of a model of expert decision making in air traffic control, by Stefan Lehmann and colleagues, but I haven’t had the time to really read it (and won’t get time for a few days). Ben Jeffares’ paper was excellent in presentation, but I haven’t yet checked out the written version yet: The evolution of technical competence: strategic and economic thinking.

My paper from the conference, Cultural variation in elite athletes: Does elite cognitive-perceptual skill always converge?, is available as a pdf. I have to admit, it’s a shallower paper than I usually like to present, but I had to cover a LOT of turf, and it’s primarily a proposal for a research program, reviewing the neurological and behavioural places where I expect we might find the clearest evidence of cultural difference in neural dynamics. I’ll take the liberty of reposting the abstract:

Anthropologists have not participated extensively in the cognitive science synthesis for a host of reasons, including internal conflicts in the discipline and profound reservations about the ways that cultural differences have been modeled in psychology, neuroscience, and other contributors to cognitive science. This paper proposes a skills-based model for culture that overcomes some of the problems inherent in the treatment of culture as shared information. Athletes offer excellent cases studies for how skill acquisition, like enculturation, affects the human nervous system. In addition, cultural differences in playing styles of the same sport, such as distinctive ways of playing rugby, demonstrate how varying solution strategies to similar athletic problems produce distinctive skill profiles.

I’d love to hear any responses to the piece. I don’t usually present in cognitive science, as I’m more comfortable in my home discipline of anthropology, working from a pretty solid base of anthropology into the border of brain-culture research, so I’d be interested to learn what scholars situated more confidently in cognitive science think of the piece.

Videos from The Encultured Brain – NOW AVAILABLE!

Dear Loyal Readers (and Passers By) —

It gives me great pleasure to announce that you can apparently now access streaming .wmv files of the four long-format talks that were given at The Encultured Brain Conference at the University of Notre Dame in October 2009. No, you do not have to rush out to your video store, nor do you need to send me a stamped self-addressed envelope as well as a surprisingly large fee for ‘postage and handling.’ Yes, it has taken a while, so file this in the ‘much better late than never’ box, and enjoy.

At the moment, we do not yet have them posted on YouTube, but we are working on that, so there will likely be a second message very soon (maybe more) with the videos. I’d like to write some commentary on each as well, but I want to watch them again before I do so. The reason I say ‘apparently’ the videos are accessible is because I am a bit of a slow adapter, and between my computer and my current from-home Internet connection, I cannot watch them, but I’m certain our readers are more technologically sophisticated and media savvy than I am.

The talks can be linked to through:

Daniel Lende, Opening Address: “Neuroscience and the Real World”
Patricia Greenfield, Keynote Address 1: “Mirror Neurons and the Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Cultural Processes.”
Harvey Whitehouse, Keynote Address 2: “Explaining Religion.”
Greg Downey, Closing Address: “A Brain-Shaped Culture: Ambitions, Acknowledgments and Opportunities.”

If you want to read more before committing your computer to a streaming video, the abstracts for the talks are below the fold.
Continue reading “Videos from The Encultured Brain – NOW AVAILABLE!”

Charlie Rose is back on the brain


Heidi Tan from the Charlie Rose show sent me an announcement about a recent broadcast because we had previously posted on discussions of the brain on Rose’s show (Find part one of that series here on YouTube or, better yet, go to the Charlie Rose website for the whole series of [currently] four episodes). Last night’s episode, ‘The Social Brain,’ included discussion with panelists Cornelia Bargmann of Rockefeller University, Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma (Italy), Gerald Fischbach of the Simons Foundation, Kevin Pelphrey of Yale University and co-host Eric Kandel of Columbia University. The group discusses social interaction, mirror neurons, autism, aggression, learning and the need for greater research on the ‘social brain.’

“Although many aspects of social behavior are learned, one of the striking things we’re going to hear about is that some aspects of social behavior are determined by individual genes that have profound effects on how we act, whether we bond together as individuals, degrees of aggression, and other things.” (Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate, Columbia University)

If you missed last night’s episode catch it again tonight on Bloomberg Television® at 8PM and 10PM ET, or listen to the interview simulcast on Bloomberg Radio. Bloomberg Radio is broadcast on 1130AM in the New York Metropolitan area and is available on XM and Sirius. There’s also a version online, but because my Internet connection is so slow right now, I can’t really watch it: go to http://www.charlierose.com/ if you want to check it out.

A transcript of the discussion can be found here.

Continue reading “Charlie Rose is back on the brain”

Four Stone Hearth #84 is Gelada-ful

image from the BBC

The new, Four Stone Hearth #84! (Gratuitous Gelada Edition), is up at A Primate of Modern Aspect, and it’s especially Geladicious! If you don’t get it, you’re just going to have to go check it out, this itinerant web carnival of all things anthropological. (And, no, it’s not a reference to a delicious frozen dessert…)

I especially liked Eric Michael Johnson’s post, Bonobos and the Emergence of Culture, on Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s TED lecture, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes. It’s not a long comment, but check out the discussion as well. It’s really intriguing to watch the commenters struggle to dichotomize biology and culture when the bonobos are making a mangle of them. I do think Savage-Rumbaugh is over-invested in the argument that bonobos are specifically human-like (Comparison with Tasmanians? Ouch. But the bonobos are very cute when roasting marshmallows and learning to drive a golf cart). The fact that bonobos are ‘culture susceptible,’ shall we say, is sufficient to make a mess of biology v. culture and to highlight the way that the ‘extended mind’ concept can help us think about brain enculturation to build basic cognitive capacities. Johnson writes:

I challenge you to watch Kanzi build a fire and perform activities that require precise hand-eye coordination (including the making of stone tools) and conclude that this is a difference of kind rather than merely a difference of degree.

Also interesting is Zinjanthropus’s own post, So… Did knuckle walking evolve twice?, about a case of convergent evolution. Krystal D’Costa does a really nice ethnography of gold in the South Asian community, based in NYC: Sometimes All That Glitters Is Indeed Gold (JH3). And Beast Ape has a short but well cited piece on baboon fathers sorting out paternity of their female friends’ kids, Friendship, fatherhood, and MHC in baboons; it suggests baboon daddies are likely not able to sniff out their own offspring.

More on Americans exporting mental illness

My previous post, Exporting American mental illness, on Ethan Watters’ New York Times Magazine article, came together pretty quickly, in a few-hours’ rush of thinking, writing, and mistyping. Nevertheless, I’m glad I posted it because I really liked Watters’ original article, even though I took issues with attributing too much causal power to specialists’ knowledge about mental illness. I didn’t consider my original piece to be a ‘critique’ as I fully suspect many of my issues might have been addressed in the book-length version.

cartoon by Gary Larson

Over at Somatosophere, Eugene Raikhel has a great post on the original article. He’s very generous to my hurried effort but goes on to add in some really good discussion of multi-causal models in psychological anthropology and how difficult it actually is to think about complexity. He agrees with my brief piece (with one caveat that I would concede), but really goes on to take the discussion to a more sophisticated consideration of the question:

“How should anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists deal with this kind of complexity?” Is it enough to gesture toward complexity, calling it a “flow” or an “assemblage” and listing its various elements (as I’ve done above), or should we try to understand the various specific mechanisms through which what we often call macro-processes (like “globalization” or “industrialization”) shape the ways individuals experience and articulate their distress?

Raikhel goes on to discuss three different conceptual and concrete ways to try to link up these scattered forces into local explanations, drawing on Ian Hacking, Laurence Kirmayer and Norman Sartorius, and Tanya Luhrmann. All three are excellent examples of researchers doing the hard yards of making these links between macroscopic and psychological processes, between biology and culture on different levels. I won’t rewrite in less extensive form Raikhel’s excellent piece; just go to the original.

But I also want to point out the Raikhel, like me, really praises Watters’ original effort. Raikhel has a couple of key points of disagreement in the assumptions about modernity and stress and about the psychiatric ‘gray out’ that’s occurring with globalization, but he keeps these in perspective. I’m happy to criticize science journalists when they write stupid dreck, but the discussion of the Americanization of mental illness is quite thorough even though it’s reaching out to an audience that might not have run into this sort of anthropological analysis of psychiatry before; it’s a great piece to alert the public to the subtleties of human brain-culture-belief interactions (which we tend to call ‘neuroanthropology’ around here).

Exporting American mental illness

The New York Times Magazine has a great discussion of the effects of the exportation of American ideas about mental illness, titled appropriately, The Americanization of Mental Illness by Ethan Watters, based on his forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, coming out this month from Free Press. The article is quite good, offering some intriguing cases, such as the rise of virulent, American-style anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong, the effect of possession beliefs on communities’ reactions to schizophrenia, and how the narrative of mental illness as ‘brain disease’ might actually lead to great stigma as it spreads and replaces local understandings. The article is well worth a read, and I’m looking forward to the book.

graphic by Alex Trochut, NYTimes

The ethnographic record is full of conditions that didn’t make it into the most recent edition of the DSM — amok, nervios, koro, zar — you can check out Wikipedia or some other source on ‘culture bound syndromes,’ such as Introduction to Culture-Bound Syndromes in Psychiatric Times, to get a fuller discussion of some of these conditions. The Psychiatric Times piece suggests that there are at least 200 culture-bound syndromes.

One thing I really liked about the New York Times Magazine article, however (and by extension, Watters’ book, I suspect), is that the discussion of ‘culture-bound syndromes’ usually tends to treat other people’s syndromes as ‘culture-bound,’ Western psychological illnesses as not ‘culture-bound.’ Watters’ work points out that Western mental illness is both itself culture-bound and that persuading people to believe in Western-style mental illness can affect the way that psychic disorders manifest.

Continue reading “Exporting American mental illness”