Those of you looking for our weekly round up, you can now find it at PLoS Neuroanthropology – Wednesday Round Up #118.
That’s right – we’ve moved over to PLoS Blogs! Well, for the most part. Greg and I will be doing our main blogging over there now. More in just a bit about the move.
Here’s the link to our main Neuroanthropology page there. Please update your subscriptions. We really look forward to having you over there. This is a very exciting move for all of us.
How does language affect thought and perception? It’s a question we’ve looked at here at Neuroanthropology.net on a number of occasions, but Prof. Guy Deutscher, offers a nice general survey of the current state of play in the research over at The New York Times in ‘Does Your Language Shape How You Think?’ Posts on language tend to attract a lot of traffic, so I’d encourage you to take a look.
Prof. Deutscher is an accomplished linguist, who has written a number of general works as well as specialist works, including research on Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon and Assyria. Deutscher is honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester, and the article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, to be published by Metropolitan Books.
Deutscher lays out a number of different areas of research that suggest language affects thought, especially in the areas of gender, spatial perception, time, and colour perception, and suggests some areas where profound linguistic differences offer tantalizing possibilities for studying the subtle ways that linguistic practice can influence cognition.
Although I feel Deutscher is unreasonably harsh on Whorf, in part because some contemporary understandings of Benjamin Whorf paint him as a more radical linguistic determinist than I find him to be, the research Deutscher discusses is well worth considering, and it’s a nifty piece to share with our regular readers.
Continue reading “The new linguistic relativism: Guy Deutscher in the NYTimes”
Here are our top 100 posts – 10% of our overall content, given that we just hit 1000 posts. For the nitpickers, I included some of our pages in the actual list of posts. So there’s more than 100 in the table. But for actual posts, it is 100!
One note – the stats are based on on-site visits as registered by WordPress. The syndicated views are a different story, but WordPress doesn’t make it easy to tabulate those. But the #1 post based on both onsite and syndicated views looks to be Greg’s recent “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?”
This is it, post #1000! Neuroanthropology is now the house of 1000 posts, a veritable host of long-tail zombie content sure to infect the entire internet. Well, at least those synergistic people who are still alive out there after surfing for too long.
Yes, it has indeed been the most shocking tale of neuroanthropological carnage ever seen!
All I can say is that Greg and I certainly didn’t anticipate this when we started this site in December 2007. It’s been a great ride.
Some stats for that time. According to WordPress, we’ve managed 858,400 onsite visits since then.
On top of that, we have over 1500 Google Reader subscriptions for neuroanthropology.net and another 380 through our old feed of neuroanthropology.wordpress.com. Throw in the people at Bloglines, and we have more than 2000 subscribers.
Alexa, the Web Information Company, ranks us as #599,463 in worldwide traffic. Sounds impressive, when there has to be millions and millions of sites out there.
But then you dig into the statistics. “Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful.” So, being number 600,000 just isn’t meaningful. Was it supposed to be?
Let us go to Technorati, a popular tracker of internet usage. They give us an authority of 587 right now. That sounds very authorative. Until you see that Huffington Post has the most authority. Uh oh.
So how about URL Fan, i.e., how popular is your site? They have us at #30294 out of 3,783,534 websites. We were just beat out by jcpenneycouponsfreeshipping.com for spot #30293. Darn.
How about our own analysis of success? Sorry, I’m busy! But go check out our old post, Neuroanthropology @ 500,000. I went into details there on our top posts, search terms, and more and Greg and I both reflected on what has made the site popular.
Just one last thing to do. Create a post for our top 100 posts. Go see what we’ve done!
For those of you who are interested, here’s the list of readings for my class on Biocultural Medical Anthropology. To make sure I had good articles, I drew on syllabi from other professors I really respect, and also dug into the latest literature. I’m excited about this course!
I did cut out all the grading and policy details. If you’re really interested in that, drop me an email.
Anthropology 5937: Biocultural Medical Anthropology
Prof. Daniel Lende, Fall 2010, University of South Florida
Content:
This course provides a comprehensive grounding in biocultural medical anthropology, which emphasizes understanding how health and healing are shaped by both biological and cultural processes. This class will examine disease, illness, human biology, embodiment, public health, methods, and belief systems. From the biology of stress to the biopolitics of medicine, students will engage in substantive discussion and read central pieces of the scientific and anthropological literature. While the class is focused on biocultural dynamics, students will also cover the biological mechanisms of disease and applied biocultural practice.
Required Texts:
Wiley, Andrea & Allen, John. 2009. Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nichter, Mark. 2008. Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Knapp, Caroline. 1997. Drinking: A Love Story. New York: Dial.
Schedule of Classes and Readings
Week One
Aug 24: Introduction to Class
Book: None
Aug 26: Biocultural Perspectives on Health & Disease
Book: Wiley & Allen, Ch 1-2
Reading:
– R. Hahn & M. Inhorn. 2009. Introduction. In: Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition. Pp. 1-31.
Recommended
– G. Armelagos et al. 2005. Evolutionary, historical and political economic perspectives on health and disease. Social Science and Medicine 61(4):755-765.
-A. McElvoy & P. Townsend. 2009. Interdisciplinary research in health problems. In: Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective, 5th Edition. Pp. 33-80.
-P. Farmer et al. 2006. Structural violence and clinical medicine. PLoS Medicine 3(10): e449.
-A. Kleinman. 2010. The art of medicine: Four social theories for global health. Lancet 375:1518-19.
-S. McGarvey. 2007. Population health. Annals of Human Biology 34(4):393-396.
-R. Nesse. 2008. Evolution: Medicine’s most basic science. The Lancet 372: S21-S27.
Week Two
Continue reading “Get the Syllabus – Biocultural Medical Anthropology”
In the previous post Carol Worthman: From Human Development to Habits of the Heart, I covered two of Carol’s recent papers. Just after that I discovered a great lecture by Carol, where she covers her work on “Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion Regulation.” So now you can see her in action!
This lecture was part of The Evolution Institute’s Risky Adolescent Behavior Workshop. You can see all the videos from the workshop at The Evolution Institute’s Viddler Page.
Neuroanthropology 