Paul mentioned this intriguing review, Mind, Brain, Law and Culture, at the end of his post on Norman Doidge. Welcome back from the field, Paul!

Written by Andrew Scull, a sociologist at UC San Diego and an expert in the history of psychiatry, this review appeared in the journal Brain in 2007. In it, Scull took on the books Law and the Brain, edited by Semir Zeki and Oliver Goodenough, and Brain and Culture by Bruce Wexler. I’ll deal as briefly with Brain and Culture as Scull does, before getting to the meat of Scull’s critique.

Scull reviews Wexler’s book favorably, as did Greg back in February, praising it for an integrative approach: “Rather than positing a rigid separation between the biological and the social, Wexler insists that the two interact and mutually influence each other in powerful ways. It makes no sense, in his view, to regard the brain as an asocial or a presocial organ, because in important respects, its very structure and functioning is a product of the social environment.”

Like Greg, Scull likes the first two-thirds of the book, but is less sanguine about the last third, where Wexler moves away from plasticity to speaking of difference. These chapters are more speculative and vulnerable to criticism, evoking generalizations based on selective snippets of anthropological and historical evidence.

Continue reading “Andrew Scull Takes the Law (and the Brain) Into His Own Hands”

For those who speak indonesian, this is a follow-up of Paul Mason on Neuroanthropology defined Posted by gregdowney on December 27, 2007 and  Paul Mason: Slides on Neuroanthropology Posted by gregdowney on January 12, 2008.

The article was published in Gema Seni and I have scanned a copy which can now be accessed here, (I apologise for the poor scanning, most of page 117 is indeed missing):

Mason, P.H. (2007) Alam, Otak dan Kebudayaan: Perkembangan Baru Tentang Pengetahuan Musik dan Tari. gema-seni: Jurnal Komunikasi, Informasi, dan Dokumentasi Seni, Vol 2, no. 4, pp. 108-119.

While passing through Jakarta in early May, I picked up a copy of the Sunday Jakarta Post. I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoy reading The Jakarta Post. It is full of cynical, pessimistic and diplomatic stabs at every shortcoming of the country where it is printed. The front page of the May 11th issue (2008 ) had a particularly funny, yet in reality frustrating, article about pedestrian strips (or the lack thereof) in Jakarta. The article is called, Unnatural Selection in the Concrete Jungle. It’s a very witty piece! The author, Rhiannon Zepol, even manages to take the mickey out of her host-country’s love of acronyms by referring to the ABDPPCDYB (Anak Buah Dari Pohon Pak Charles Darwin Yang Besar = Operation Charles Darwin Citizen Selection Program). 

Zepol’s piece appealed to me because it speaks of some daily frustrations that seem to have been solved in so many other cities of the world. The article alludes to a political ignorance that is reflected in Indonesian lifestyle. The best example I could give is a TV commercial created by the Health Department for people to put a cup of Dettol (a brand of anti-bacterial disinfectant) into their Mandi. A Mandi is basically a large tub/upright-bath from where people scoop water for washing and flushing the toilet (aka hole-in-the-ground). One would think that putting dettol in this water is a good idea. However, the shower-using politicians and council workers have probably neglected the fact that most Indonesians use Mandi water for cooking as well. Dettol tasting rice is not exactly what I would like on my menu.

Continue reading “ABDPPCDYB”

Apologies in advance, but ignore this post if you’re not interested in anthropology. I just had a paper come out in an online conference proceedings, and I don’t think it’s going to get too much notice unless I do a bit of self promotion. So, at the risk of being accused of narcism (or worse), I’ll just post a brief notice and link to the paper:

Continue reading “On-line coaching paper available: shameless self-promo”

The new anthro Four Stone Hearth carnival is up over at PaddyK’s Swedish Extravaganza. It’s a great collection, held together by Paddy’s, um, unique sense of humor (check out his popular posts, such as How to measure my d— and How to understand women).

Some of my carnival favorites? Terry at Remote Central gives us a history of humanity in generational time! Well done.

And Alexandre at Linguistic Anthropology asks a great question, Does the French language belong to the French? I know what my Belgian friends would say…

Biocultural Synergies

Harriet Alexander, Social Sciences Robbed of Usefulness
Publish or perish, or the perils of interdisciplinary work over acceptable field-specific crap

What Sorts of People, The Biocultures Manifesto
Co-construction of science and interpretation—but just in a walled garden

Anne Holden, Of Stress and Periods
Peter Ellison and his work on fertility and psychological and physiological stress

Sandra Kiume, Book Club: The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine
Rips the essentialist pop sci book apart

Ariel David, Mind Reading May Reveal Mother Tongue
Pretty pictures, experimental tasks and language switching

Gualtiero Piccinini, Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic
Review of the same titled book co-authored by a philosopher and a psychologist—learning from research that captures slices of subjective experience

Jeffrey Kluger, The Art of Simplexity
The complexity of simplicity—or the great efforts that go into making things easy

Pierpaolo Andriani, Gaussianitis: A Subtle and (Nearly) Universal Disease
What both biology and culture often forget: real variation, not a cultural or biological norm, or the “compulsive use” of “representative averages” gets us away from “the complexity and ambiguity of life” where humans are artisan pieces, not “standardised mass manufactured items”

Dave Snowdon, Understanding HOW Does Not Mean We Comprehend WHAT or WHY
The perils of eliminative materialism, and why evolution and culture matter

Thomas McDade and Carol Worthman, The Weanling’s Dilemma Reconsidered: A Biocultural Analysis of Breastfeeding Ecology
Pdf describing how to build a nested biocultural analysis of lactation

Psychiatry

The Last Psychiatrist, What’s Wrong with Research in Psychiatry?
Six poignant points on why it’s business as usual

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #16”