Open Anthropology

Open Anthropology, a blog run by Maximilian Forte, is dedicated to moving anthropology out of its academic straight-jacket. As Forte describes in About This Project, this project has two aims: one, “to significantly restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the constraints of professionalization and institutionalization;” the other, “to transform anthropology into something that is neither Eurocentric nor elitist” and thus move beyond anthropology’s roots in colonialism. It is about creating new world knowledge.

Open Anthropology has two recent posts which resonate with themes that crop up on Neuroanthropology—an anthropology open to wider influences, an anthropology engaged with a wider public, an anthropology that forgets its own fears, both self-inflicted and institutional.

First, in Towards a More Public Social Science Forte posts the statement by Social Science Research Council president Craig Calhoun. Calhoun outlines four steps for a more engaged social science: (1) Engagement with public constituencies must move beyond a dissemination model. (2) Public social science does not equal applied social science… [T]he opposition of applied to pure is itself part of the problem. It distracts attention from the fundamental issues of quality and originality and misguides as to how both usefulness and scientific advances are achieved. (3) Problem choice is fundamental. What scientists work on and how they formulate their questions shape the likelihood that they will make significant public-or scientific-contributions. (4) A more public social science needs to ask serious questions about the idea of “public” itself… Can ideas of the public be reclaimed from trivialization by those who see all social issues in terms of an aggregation of private interests? What are the social conditions of a vital, effective public sphere and thus of an important role for social science in informing public culture, debate, and decision-making?

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Wednesday Round Up #13

Neuroanthropology

David Freedberg, Empathy, Motion & Emotion and Composition & Emotion
Two pdfs on art and the neurosciences by the Columbia art history professor

Sam Harris et al., Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief and Uncertainty
Pdf of 2008 article from Annals of Neurology: “truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense”

John Horgan, Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists
Yearning for brain chips, and the problems therein

Literary Trends

Kenneth Goldsmith, In Barry Bonds I See The Future of Poetry
Welcome to our post-human future

Anne Harrington, The Inner Lives of Disordered Brains
The Harvard historian of science’s excellent take on the recent rise in neuro-lit

Jonathan Gottschall, Measure for Measure
Literary criticism needs to embrace science

Henry Bowles, It’s in the Genes: Criticism Devolved
How about criticism of the literary embrace of dubious science?!

Bob Meagher, Socrates on the Campaign Trail
Hope or fear this fall? Socrates will help guide you

Elinore Longobardi, Think Globally, Read Locally
Journalism needs to embrace anthropology

Three-Toed Sloth, Books To Read While Algae Grow In Your Fur
Books recommendations; eclectic from liberalism and math brains to comic books…

Lorenz at Antropologi, Anthropology Blogs More Interesting Than Journals?
For some of us at least… a summary from a quick-and-dirty ethnography of blogging

Language

Liz Danzico, Telling Stories Using Data: An Interview with Jonathan Harris
“Stories should have feeling, to the extent that they want to be human.”

Michael Price, Outside Language Looking In
Children who learn signing at home: language helps organize the mind’s underlying architecture

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New Humanities Initiative Proposal

Yesterday in The Battle between the Sciences and the Humanities I blogged about Natalie Angier’s NYT’s article on the interdisciplinary New Humanities Initiative being created by David Sloan Wilson and Leslie Heywood at Binghamton University. I contacted both of them about the article and the post, and also offered to put up their proposal here as the Initative does not yet have its own website. Sloan Wilson assured me that a website will be up soon as part of the EvoS site at Binghamton. But he also sent me the proposal and letter of support for our readers to look at.

So here is the proposal itself: new-humanities-proposal

And the letters of support for their NEH grant: new-humanities-letters

It is heartening to read in their opening:

It is important to emphasize that integrating the humanities and the sciences is not a matter of making the humanities more “scientific.” It is genuinely a two-way street, in which intellectual perspectives and subject areas currently associated with the humanities occupy center stage as part of the study of what it means to be human from a scientific perspective, and where the humanities are instrumental in articulating the transformative power of the imagination, a perspective that, for the first time in a very long time, is again taken seriously by science.

Still, as I wrote yesterday, I do think there need to be concrete projects and people in the middle to work the synthesis. I am all in favor of building an evolutionary approach that can reach across the table, as I’ve done that sort of work myself. Similarly, imagination and meaning can also reach out to science, as my research with drug abuse has shown me.

But the reaching out approach still leaves the synthesis on the table, and here is where I think endeavors like neuroanthropology can step in. Evolution and imagination meet in the everyday behaviors and sociocultural and neurological processes that shape how we live and what we experience.

So, in the end, I believe we need all three things. Two cultures that work better together, that have a more open orientation and theoretical stance to what creative people are doing “on the other side.” And then the specific work that Leslie Heywood discussed yesterday about wolves—a synthesis on a specific subject, with wolves and people and a real relationship with an actual wolf (well, seven eighths of one) there in the middle.

In any case, I wanted to get these documents out to people for their own perusal. I look forward to hearing what people think.

Also, by happy coincidence, today’s weekly round up fits perfectly with this initiative, with sections on neuroanthropological work, literary trends, language, and evolution. So please check it out!

Don’t Deep Six Number Forty Six

The 46th Edition of Encephalon is up at Neurocritic. It’s a great edition, really a stand-out.

Here are some favorites. Cognitive Daily has a discussion of the persistence of racism even among the well-intentioned.

Neuroscientifically Challenged writes on The Neuroscience of Distributive Justice.

In My Mascot Only Gave Me Sex Appeal Podblack Cat takes on superstition, luck, and natural disasters, with a focus on toys, Tibet and the earthquake in China.

And the Neurocritic himself has a very nice You’re My Favorite Person… on beauty, relations, dopamine, and immune activity.

The Battle between the Sciences and the Humanities

Natalie Angier writes today on a “Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science.” She starts where most people in this area start, with CP Snow’s famous lecture The Two Cultures and the “mutual dislike” between “natural scientists” and “literary intellectuals.” Snow’s gap has widened in recent decades, Angier implies, through the increased Balkanization of knowledge and vicious academic turf wars.

Today, however, Angier declares, “a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems.”

One new proponent of this synthesis is the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, author of the recent Evolution for Everyone. As Angier relates, “In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?”

Wilson will work with Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, in the New Humanities Initiative at Binghamton University. Heywood is a poet; examines women and sports, for example, her co-authored book Built to Win; and is a proponent of Third Wave Feminism. Not the most obvious pair to an evolutionary biologist. It gives me some hope.

As for the New Humanities Initiative, it is a program under development. Angier writes:

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No wonder the altar boys look spaced out…

(And before I go any further, yes, I know that girls outnumber boys as servers in most American Catholic Churches — I just couldn’t get a title with the same ring…)

I just came across a recent story on PsyOrg.com, Incense is psychoactive: Scientists identify the biology behind the ceremony, that confirms something I have long suspected. As a veteran Catholic altar boy who has spent more than my fair share of hours inhaling incense, I knew the stuff made me loopy. I even once watched a friend of mine take a slow, sideways dive with a half twist off a kneeler into the front row of church after he got a little over-enthusiastic swinging the incense boat around and checked out of conscious-ville for a few minutes. Turns out that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent that can be isolated from frankincense, lowers anxiety and acts as an anti-depressant in mice (unless those mice are forced to kneel for long periods of time in heavy cassock and surplus, or chant in Latin).

The danger of this sort of data is that someone will say that they can use it to ‘explain’ religion, as if everytime someone got mildly baked off of psychoactive chemicals in bark or tree resin, they came up with two-millenia-lasting notions of a triune God, the Resurrection of Man, and other assorted ideas. That is, psychoactive chemicals can explain certain phenomena within religion, but they certainly could not explain any religion as a whole. Otherwise, there’d be a lot more theological creative stoners shambling around.

And so we’re left with the advice in Exodus (30:34-37):

And the Lord said to Moses: Take unto thee spices, stacte, and onycha, galbanum of sweet savour, and the clearest frankincense, all shall be of equal weight. And thou shalt make incense compounded by the work of the perfumer, well tempered together, and pure, and most worthy of sanctification. And when thou hast beaten all into very small powder, thou shalt set of it before the tabernacle of the testimony, in the place where I will appear to thee. Most holy shall this incense be unto you. You shall not make such a composition for your own uses, because it is holy to the Lord.