Natureculture conference (May 2010)

The Society for Cultural Anthropology recently circulated an announcement of their biannual meeting, 7 and 8 May, 2010, at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Prof. Donna Haraway, Professor and Chair of the History of Consciousness Program of the University of California Santa Cruz, will be the keynote speaker and the theme will be ‘Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity.’ As Brad Weiss recently wrote:

In recognition of the renewed and growing drive to interrogate the longstanding ontological divide between Nature and Culture, we invite discussions that explore ways of reconfiguring this complex relationship.

Haraway is probably best known in anthropology for her discussions of human-machine hybridization — the ‘cyborg’ — and their implications for feminist theories which tended to rely upon naturalizations of women’s sex and gender, but she has also been crucial for the critical reconsideration of primate studies. Haraway’s landmark essay, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, originally published in Socialist Review, is available online here.

More information is available at the conference website here. There’s no explicit mention of anything brain-related, but the conference announcement is a bit of a ‘what’s hot’ list in cultural anthropology. Check it out if you’re in to these sorts of things…

Sidney Mintz and Reflections on Sweetness and Power

Sweetness and Power
The Racliffe Institute for Advanced Study hosts a conference series on Women, Men and Food. Video from the six conferences is available online, ranging from the introductory Food for Thought to Studying Gender, Studying Food.

The one I want to highlight is Sweetness, Gender and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work. That classic work is Sweetness and Power: The Place fo Sugar in Modern History, which links the production of sugar in slave plantations in the Caribbean with the rise of sugar consumption in England – economic history explained through anthropology. Given my interests in consumption, here’s what he writes early in the book:

What turned an exotic, foreign and costly substance into the daily fare of even the poorest and humblest people? How could it have become so important so swiftly? … The answers may seem self-evident; sugar is sweet, and human beings like sweetness. But when unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire – or are given – contextual meanings by those who use them… Uses imply meanings; to learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meaning of its uses, to discover the early and more limited uses of sugar, and to learn where and for what purposes sugar was produced (6).

The Radcliffe conference features four prominent academics – Amy Bentley, Vincent Brown, Judith Carney, and Sucheta Mazumdar – who place their work in light of Mintz’s ground-breaking book. The topics cover the academic study of food, enslaved women, gender and capitalism, and China and sweet potatoes. Mintz himself wraps up the conference with his own retrospective on his work, including an early line from his friend Eric Wolf, “Well, Mintz is a peculiar anthropologist.”

Link to the Sweetness, Gender, and Power: Rethinking Sidney Mintz’s Classic Work conference videos.

Conference: Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture

Emory University’s Center for Brain, Mind and Culture is hosting a free conference that is open to the public, The Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture, on November 12th and 13th, 2009.

The keynote address “Darwin in Genes and Culture” will open the conference at 1:00 PM on Thursday and will be given by Matt Ridley, author of books such as The Origins of Virtue and Nature via Nurture. That keynote will be followed a session on brain evolution. On Friday sessions on the evolution of mind and the evolution of culture will fill the morning and afternoon. You can see the entire schedule here. Prominent Emory scholars like Jim Rilling, Melvin Konner, and Frans de Waal will be joined by some great outside people like Pascal Boyer, Sally McBrearty, and Joe Henrich.

Wednesday Round Up #81

Back on Wednesday with a beefy one. Favs up top, drink and drugs, mind, anthropology, and then health. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Beatrice Golomb, This Is Your Brain on Politics
See Beatrice’s talk on how politics and drug company money trump science in the development, use and marketing of pharmaceuticals

Pamthropologist, Those Pyramid-Building Aliens
Frontal assault on bad archaeology and stupid cultural beliefs

Scicurious, Never Go Grocery Shopping Hungry: The fMRI Study
Those fMRI magnets really play havoc with your credit and debit cards… Or, actually, how being hungry or not changes what parts of your brain lights up when you imagine a restaurant menu

Lorenz Khazaleh, The Anthropology of Suicide
A call to research and examination of what we do know from something that takes a million lives a year

Raymond Tellis, Darwinism without Darwinitis
Looks like a brilliant talk – get the lecture and the slides here

Bird Dog, Don’t Ever Talk to the Cops
A police investigator tells you why you shouldn’t talk to the cops. Lots here about verbal interaction, besides the reflections on law and police procedure

Drink and Drugs

Michael White, The Science of Scotch
Good science, sublime taste

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #81”

Antonio Damasio: Art and Emotions

Antonio Damasio, the author of Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, opens this hour-long video featuring three substantive talks. Damasio is the head of the recently founded USC Brain and Creativity Institute.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher gives her talk, Art, Emotion, and Romantic Love, at exactly twenty minutes in. Isabelle Peretz, with The Emotional Power of Music, is at 39:00 minutes.

These talks were part of a symposium, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics, held last March at the Salk Institute. You can download videos of all the talks at the conference website, or simply catch them at the YouTube playlist, Evolutionary Origins of Arts and Aesthetics.

Come on, don’t you want to see, Art in Neanderthal and Paleolitic Cultures? Actually, this video starts by introducing the symposium, and if you stop at 5 minutes in, you can see Jean Pierre Changeux speaking broadly about the conference. Jean-Jacques Hublin’s presentation on Neanderthal art kicks in at 7:50, and Randall White follows with Paleolithic Art at 30 minutes. White’s talk is the most anthropological – and crucial to thinking about what art is and what art means and how we are to understand it.

The conference was put on by CARTA: Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny, with the tagline “to explore and explain the origin of human phenomena”.

CARTA is a virtual organization formed in order to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, drawing on methods from a number of traditional disciplines spanning the humanities, social, biomedical, biological, computational & engineering and physical & chemical sciences.

CARTA is hosting another great symposium on October 2nd, 2009: Human and Non-Human Cultures.