By Daniel Lende
The other night, my two year old daughter complained with a sleepy vehemence, then turned to my wife for comfort (yes, we are co-sleepers!). She had been sick, unable to sleep well, and she sought out her mother for comfort and soothing. It wasn’t that my daughter was physically stressed, but that her little mind seemed to get ahead of herself. The terrible things bothering her? Suddenly they are all right because of Mamá.
What does this have to do with the fight-or-flight reaction? Very little. But anyone who’s tried to deal with a screaming baby knows that such a thing is very stressful for everyone involved. And that’s the point. Stress does not sit so easily into the category we imagine for it. When my daughter screams, I feel my blood pressure rise and a lack of control if I am unable to soothe her. Alternatively, calming her calms me. These sorts of experiences do not fit easily into the stressor/stress reaction dichotomy covered in yesterday’s post on Robert Sapolsky. But I had not really thought about it that way until I recently read the work of Michael Blakey, professor of anthropology at William & Mary.
In his chapter “Beyond European Enlightenment,” Blakey opens with a discussion of how naturalism leads into ecological and evolutionary “explanations” that lie explicitly outside the social realm as well as to sexual, racial and genetic determinism (“natural” causes or differences, hence we just have to accept the present state of affairs). Blakey is not against the documenting of human variation that good ecological or human biology research can highlight, say between a certain type of environment and a certain body type. However, he is against this approach becoming the core focus of a discipline (say, biological anthropology) and quite aware of the dangers that the projection of biological explanations into the social realm plays in the communications and politics of a public anthropology.
As he writes, “Naturalism as it informs empirical methods shows the human element in data analysis as contaminating, deviating from ultimate truth. Culture, therefore, becomes a thing to be purged (or denied) in apprehension of legitimate truth (382).” He sees the logical extension of such a view as: “The proper order of human life according to this view is to be found outside human society. Whether the method is belief in gospel or systematic evidence, religion and natural science obtain an allure of being able to reveal knowledge from beyond human agency (382).”
Neuroanthropology 