Neuroanthropology

This week we’ve got medical anthropology (including Paul Farmer!), Iraq (in particular the new book The Forever War), the brain, society, evolution, and drug hacks.

Medical Anthropology

60 Minutes, Dr. Farmer’s Remedy
Paul Farmer, doctor and anthropologist, solves health problems linked to poverty and inequality

The Economist, Global Health: The Price of Being Well
Social forces impact health. A major statement by a new WHO group, highlighting the need for social justice alongside the provision of adequate care

Nicholas Wade, A Dissenting Voice as the Genome Is Sifted to Fight Disease
A young professor argues that the evidence on personalized medicine based on genetics doesn’t match the hype

Eugene Raikhel, Moving beyond Race in Pharmacogenomics?
Great discussion, with good links, over at Somatosphere

The Banana Peel Project, Communication, Criticism and Medicine
Foucault, commentary and the role of informed critique

Randal Archibold, Indians’ Water Rights Give Hope for Better Health
See social justice in action. Water rights to farming to having a sense of involvement, rather than the Pima being the case study for genetic vulnerability to diabetes (due to changed social circumstances)

Michael Conlon, Stressed Mothers May Raise Fat Children: Study
Stress from mother transformed into comfort food for kids

Lindsey Tanner, Got a Fat Gene? Get Active for 3-4 Hours a Day
Which is exactly what the modern world dictates, isn’t it?

Alan Feuer, Thousands Later, He Sees Lottery’s Cruelty Close Up
Being poor and chasing the wins—an in-depth look

Jennifer Gibson, Laughter Is the Best – and Possibly Oldest – Medicine
Brain Blogger on the power of laughter in healing

Iraq

Lee Hamilton, Outside the Green Zone, the Human Dimension
“The near-complete American failure to understand Iraq is still evident five and a half years into the war.” NY Times review of the book The Forever War by Dexter Kilkins, journalist become anthropologist through need and circumstance.
You can read the first chapter here. The Times also runs the Baghdad Bureau blog about working in Iraq

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #29”

Neurophilosophy, the originator of the mind/brain Encephalon carnival, is hosting the 54th edition this week. Mo opens with a striking quote from Ramon y Cajal describing neural plasticity at the turn of LAST century, and gives us his editor’s choice, Caio Maximo’s piece on the evolution of modularity.

What’s interesting is the contrast between these two, a view of changing connections versus a view of functional modules. A way out might be to consider multi-level selection, with plasticity and modularity happening at different levels. Another point is to realize the the way our brains and the evolutionary process break problems down into parts is not necessarily related to the way we think about function today – machine-like, optimal, accomplishing one thing, and so forth. Mosaic evolution, canalization and hill climbing are about processes, not functional modules…

In any case, the Neurophilosopher has put together an excellent edition – watching sports is good for your brain, the hippocampus and memories of the Simpsons, and how beauty modulates pain are just a few of the things to enjoy.

Jay Sosa over at the cultural anthropology blog Savage Minds puts together a weekly round up entitled Around the Web. This week’s edition is a real stand-out.

We have an interview at the Telegraph with Nigel Barley, the anthropologist and novelist, best known for his funny The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. Here’s one great quote: “I’m not saying anthropology isn’t fiction,” [Barley] replied, “but fiction’s more fun. It lets you look inside people’s heads in a way you wouldn’t dare to do if you stuck to anthropology.”

Tim Parks at the Guardian writes Everything Is Connected on the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Bateson’s collected essays Steps to an Ecology of Mind should be required reading for every aspiring neuroanthropologist. Parks provides us a biography of Bateson, and speaks directly to how Bateson’s research, life experience and writings apply to art in today’s changing and challenged world:

Dreams, religious experience, art, love – these were the phenomena that still had power, Bateson thought, to undermine the rash/rational purposeful mind. Of these four, art enjoyed the special role of fusing different “levels of mind” together: there was necessarily consciousness and purpose in the decision to create, but creativity itself involved openness to material from the unconscious, otherwise the work would be merely schematic and transparent.

Over at Somatosphere, the medical anthropology blog, Ann Kelly writes of Mosquito Huts, Wundercabinets and Cultural Models, a wide-ranging reflection on her work in Gambia and Tanzania as part of a mosquito and malaria control project. How does anthropology intersect with public health and local architecture in a living space intermediary between a home and a laboratory? Go find out through combined entomological and ethnographic analysis…

And those are just the three pieces from Around the Web that really caught my attention. If you’re looking for culture in the suburbs, the lost tapes of Osama bin Laden, and what evangelicals really say about gays, then go find out!

Savage Minds Bonus: Kerim writes an entertaining review of Donna Haraway’s book When Species Meet. Or rather Kerim’s dog Juno (cute photo!) pens this review. Here’s one early excerpt:

I also like Haraway. She seems to engage ideas in the same way a dog might play with a dead animal: sniffing it, placing it our mouth, playing with it, rolling on it, barking at it, offering it to our master only to run away with it again. But I could tell my owner was as frustrated by this kind of play as he is when I do it. He likes to play boring, repetitive, games like fetch. He seems to prefer the easy popular style of Patricia McConnell to Haraway’s challenging prose.