Hello to everyone out there from San Francisco! The Encultured Brain session went very well yesterday. Robert Sapolsky gave us some wonderful encouragement, and all the panelists delivered strong papers. And we were actually on time, which is a minor miracle for a AAA session.
So just wanted to give a shout-out to everyone. You guys have been such a part of our success. Thank you!
-Daniel
This week we have some favs, then anthropology, the brain, diet and a dash of philosophy. Enjoy.
Top of the List
Anthropology Now!
The new popular magazine brings cultural anthropology to the world! Features this provocative article, Are Women Evolutionary Sex Objects?
Bioephemera, And Another One Sucks Our Blood…
Vampire moths. And you thought it was safe to sleep at night.
Edge, The Problem of Consciousness: A Talk with Alva Noe
Video with the noted philosopher. “Life is the way the animal is in the world.”
Sasha Aslanian/Weekend America, Kids and Stress
Chronic adversity and stress responsivity – the latest from some good research
Anthropology
Third Tone Devil, Pictures from a Cellphone
Budapest, the beautiful brutal city, as explored by an anthropologist and his snapshots
Stephanie Lloyd, Field Notes from Paris: Social Pathology and the Globalization of Sentiments
Why such social anxiety now in France? The world-wide expansion of psychiatric models of self and pathology
For the Encultured Brain session we have three great discussants.
Naomi Quinn is Professor Emeritus in anthropology at Duke University. From her profile there, here’s a snippet of why she is such a great person to discuss our work: “Her enduring interest is in the nature of culture: its sharedness, force, enduringness, and thematicity. She is part of a current effort in cognitive anthropology to explain these and other properties of culture on the basis of schema theory and, within this framework, to relate culture to language, cognition, motivation, affect, psychodynamic processes, and individual experience, research and theory represented by a series of books, book chapters, and articles.” She is the co-editor of one of the foundational texts in psychological anthropology in the last 25 years, Cultural Models in Language and Thought. And she and Claudia Strauss co-authored A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning, which brings us connectionism, schema theory, language and more to bear on the hard problem of culture and meaning.
Robert Sapolsky is a professor in biology, neurology and medicine at Stanford. He is author of the classic Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and lots more great books besides. An expert on stress, baboons, inequality, and more, Sapolsky is one of the most integrative and popular scientists around. His most recent book is Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals. The Publishers weekly blurb makes one blush: “There are many things one might expect to find within the covers of a collection of essays by a Stanford professor of biology and neurology: a rich understanding of the complexities of human and animal life; a sensitivity to the relationship between our biological nature and our environmental context; a humility in the face of still-to-be-understood facets of the human condition. All these are in Sapolsky’s new collection, along with something one might not expect: wry, witty prose that reads like the unexpected love child of a merger between Popular Science and GQ, written by an author who could be as much at home holding court at the local pub as he is in a university lab. ”
Claudia Strauss is professor of anthropology at Pitzer University. Strauss is co-editor of another classic in recent psychological anthropology, Human Motives and Cultural Models. Her chapter in that volume, What Makes Tony Run? Schemas as Models Reconsidered (Flickr even has the schema!), still presents a consideration of individual-cultural relations that stands as a direct challenge to neuroanthropological work today. Along with Naomi Quinn, Strauss introduced a 2006 issue of Anthropological Theory on key terms – like the imaginary (her chapter) – in psychological anthropology.
Final entry for the Encultured Brain presenters. Daniel Lende will give the paper Ethnography and the Encultured Brain: Design, Methods and Analysis with the following abstract:
This paper outlines core methodological considerations for neuroethnographic research, covering research design, methods and data analysis. With design, researchers focus on the interaction between neuropsychological processes and local cultural practices, often by attending to the interplay between experiences, behaviors, and contexts. For example, compulsive drug use involves both the function of the mesolimbic dopamine system and the meaning of changes in subjective experience, and is linked to specific contexts that separate users from normative cultural domains.
With methods, researchers use interviews that help informants to produce their own “thick descriptions” of their daily experiences; utilize participatory phenomenology to grasp possible linkages between brain functions and social practices; and employ participant observation to attend to people’s embodied interactions within specific contexts, often focusing on how context and practice feedback to shape behavior and experience. For example, substance abuse involves a series of linked behaviors and experiences in distinct settings. Informants can describe each step in this “cycle of addiction” if asked for more than the knee-jerk answers they often give about illegal drug use.
With analysis, “mutually consistent” interpretations should attend to the concerns of both cognitive neuroscience and psychological anthropology. Using this consistency criterion, grounded theory can be used to build from experiences, behaviors and contexts towards robust explanations that draw on both the relevant neurobiological and sociocultural processes. For example, the cycle of addiction can be usefully explained through the combination of compulsive drug use and ritualized behavior jointly driving highly destructive levels of drug use.
Daniel is a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. He specializes in medical and psychological anthropology, with a particular focus on neuroanthropology and the integration of biological and cultural theory. He is also concerned with applied outcomes and community-based research.
Daniel’s research centers on behavioral health, with on-going projects on substance abuse, breast cancer, HIV/AIDS, and eating behaviors. His main research problem has been addiction, where he aims to build a holistic approach to understanding substance use and abuse. His publications on addiction range over evolution, desire and intentions, and culture (pdfs available from the author).
Evolution Meets Biopsychosociality: An Analysis of Addictive Behavior
Evolution and Modern Behavioral Problems: The Case of Addiction
Wanting and Drug Use: A Biocultural Analysis of Addiction
Functional Methamphetamine Use: The Insiders’ Perspective
Colombia y la Prevención Sociocultural del Uso de Droga (Colombia and the sociocultural prevention of drug use)
With addiction or any anthropological problem, Lende is interested in theory development – theory that reaches for what we know about a phenomenon – rather than theory that reduces the phenomenon to one perspective or cause (say, evolution or brain circuits or social structures). As Walt Whitman wrote long ago in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Theory can aim for what Whitman expressed in a mere six words.
To accomplish that, it is important to adequately describe the problem in question, as well as challenge basic assumptions and have a framework to think through problems. Ethnography can help greatly with comprehensive description – if we see the problem better, then we can see where theory needs to go. Ethnography also helps us engage directly with a particular problem, and thus in its own way is a way to “think through” things. Those acts of description and thinking through generally end up challenging what we thought we knew about something like addiction.
Ethnography that attends to evolution, brain function and individual experience, as well as to cultural practices and social structures and symbols, is one of the most powerful methods we have at our disposable. But that requires opening our view about what qualitative research is after – it can help us examine brain problems as much as culture problems, and everything in between too.
For those of you who cannot make the AAA meeting in San Francisco, here is the paper Daniel will give: Lende 2008 AAA Paper. It opens the Encultured Brain session, so provides some initial background before turning to ethnography and neuroanthropology.
If you wish to contact Daniel, you can reach him at dlende at nd.edu
Prof. Robert Logan, the author of The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture, got in touch with me, offering to provide a synopsis of his book. I thought it was well worth putting up, even if frequent readers of this blog will recognize from the things I’ve written — well, not lately — that I disagree with Prof. Logan on a couple of things (like the fact that I think Chomsky’s idea of innate grammar doesn’t help us to deal with culture). I find Prof. Logan’s way of talking about language and culture really intriguing and productive. He is in the Physics Department at the University of Toronto (his university homepage is here), but his writing ranges over a wide variety of topics. This posting is really his contribution (except for this part in the block quote box).
Logan started using the phrase ‘extended mind’ independent of Andy Clark and Andy Chalmers (for more on the concept, here’s Wikipedia’s discussion of ‘extended mind’). If you’re interested in his book, it was published in 2007 from the University of Toronto Press (here’s a preview on Google Books, the book’s listing at U of Toronto Press, and Amazon).
By Robert Logan
The origin and evolution of human language is one of the great mysteries confronting contemporary scholarship and science. I became interested in this problem because of my work in media ecology in which I studied the evolution of notated language, namely, writing, mathematics, science, computing and the Internet. In a book entitled The Sixth Language (2004 Blackburn) I showed that speech, writing, mathematics, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of six languages. The thesis that was develop was that a new form of language emerged as a bifurcation from an older form of language each time an information overload was created that the older form of language could not handle.
That study in which it is posited that the notated forms of language emerged from speech led naturally to the question of how speech, the first form of verbal language, emerged. So I must confess that I virtually stumbled into the origin of language field as a result of my earlier research with notated language within the context of media ecology, a field of study pioneered by Marshall McLuhan with whom I collaborated.
My goal in the book was threefold. First, I presented the model I developed, the Extended Mind model, to explain the emergence of language. Secondly, I supplemented my simple model with other models that I felt were consistent with my approach. In achieving the second goal I reviewed the extensive literature that had emerged in the past 15 years critiquing it from the perspective of my approach. I believe that the Extended Mind model sheds some light on a number of controversies raging in evolution of language field. Finally my third goal was to use the insights in my work and that of others to draw parallels between language and culture and develop the notion of Universal Culture, which is to culture what Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is to language.
Greg Downey is a lecturer in anthropology at Macquarie University. As part of the Encultured Brain session, he will give the presentation A Comparative Neuroanthropology of Equilibrium in Sports and Dance. His abstract goes:
Retaining one’s balance, especially given bipedalism, is a complex sensorimotor challenge. Some theorists, such as philosopher Jerry Fodor, have suggested that the extraordinary speed and facility of human equilibrium suggest it is a mental “module,” a domain specific, automatic, encapsulated neural tool. This presentation examines the claim that equilibrium is a mental module in light of comparative ethnographic and psychological data, and proposes a more complex “nodular” neural system of equilibrium that is subject to enculturation. This nodular system model is more consistent with neurological imaging and other research, including successful efforts to compensate for damaged vestibular systems using prostheses to the sense of touch.
In fact, balance is not so much “a sense” as a shifting synthesis of motor responses and multiple sensory streams — including the vestibular system, vision, and certain key proprioceptive regions. The system typically operates without conscious awareness, but training in physical disciplines such as sports can lead individuals to develop new ways of achieving equilibrium in demanding situations, such as while spinning and leaping, grappling, colliding with others, or even standing on one’s hands.
Ethnographic research on the acrobatic Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira, and the presenter’s practical experience as a dance instructor and athlete, suggest how variations in training can affect an individual’s “senses” of balance, practically, phenomenologically and neurologically. For example, because vision can compensate when the vestibular system is unable to function normally (for example, when spinning, inverted, or moving violently), so strategies of looking can directly impact how people successfully balance.
Greg’s book Learning Capoiera: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art discusses his long-term ethnographic work with capoiera masters in Brazil. Here is the Amazon blurb:
Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey’s extensive research about capoeira and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players’ perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the “ring” where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives. He brings together an experience-centered, phenomenological analysis of the art with recent discoveries in psychology and the neurosciences about the effects of physical education on perception. The text is enhanced by more than twenty photos of capoeira sessions, many taken by veteran teacher, Mestre Cobra Mansa.
Greg is presently writing another book tentatively titled “The Athletic Animal: Sports, Evolution, and the Human Body’s Potential.” As he writes on his website, “This book uses elite athletes to demonstrate how humans modify their own bodies, nervous systems, and senses. Far from being the “brainy geeks” of the animal kingdom, I argue, humans are among the most physically versatile because of the plasticity of our nervous system and our ability to guide the development of our own (and each other’s) bodies. Ironically, the subject has led me to a type of holistic anthropology I was not trained to do, one that brings social and cultural research and theory together with attention to psychology, the brain sciences, physiology, and ecology.”
Why do sports matter? Here is one answer from Greg. “I’m working on a new project on rugby across three different ethnographic sites, looking into how different training techniques generate different types of skills, even in the same positions and sports, in Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. I think it has profound implications for things like national differences in sporting ability, the sort of thing that people point to frequently to demonstrate that differences between ‘races’ are obvious. It’s an interesting flipside to the medical anthropology work, which studies cultural impacts on dysfunction, because I’m really looking at heightened functioning.”
Greg has published the articles Producing Pain: Techniques and Technologies in No-Holds-Barred Fighting; Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education; and most recently Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art. You can also read his piece on the neuroanthropology of balance and equilibrium here on-site.
If you would like to get in touch with Greg, his email is gdowney at mq.edu.au
Neuroanthropology 