Neuroanthropology

Harold Odden is another presenter at our Encultured Brain session. His paper is on Ethnopsychologies and Children’s Theory of Mind: Finding Common Ground between Anthropology, Psychology, and Neuroscience. So the abstract:

Developmental psychologists have argued that successful negotiation of everyday social interactions rests on having a “theory of mind,” an understanding of how others’ behaviors can be understood in terms of internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Substantial research efforts over the past 30 years have been directed at understanding the trajectory and psychological impact of the development of a theory of mind in young children. A consistent thread in this work has been questions regarding the relative role of contextual features in the ontogeny of theory of mind. Recent research has pointed to ways by which different aspects of the child’s developmental milieu, such as social ecology and the use of mental-state language, may indeed have an appreciable impact. This attempt to situate this developmental process in a social and cultural context should be met with enthusiasm by psychological anthropologists, who have long held an interest in local models of self, emotion, and psychology across cultures. Further impetus for a renewed interdisciplinary conversation has been generated by recent discoveries and methodological advancements in neuroscience. In particular, work on mirror neuron systems suggests them to be possible neural mechanisms underpinning theory of mind and other key social cognitive processes such as imitative learning. This paper will discuss some of the possible linkages to be drawn in these three fields of research, and argue that there are great opportunities for developing a more robust understanding of theory of mind and ethnopsychologies through an interdisciplinary approach.

Hal is at the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (or IPFW). We started grad school at Emory together, where Hal did his doctoral research on children’s learning in Samoa. Here is the abstract to his thesis (which you can download in all its glory here).

This doctoral dissertation examines the processes of cultural learning by which Samoan children (0-12 years of age) come to understand local concepts of hierarchy, social rank, and respectful behavior. This is a particularly important domain of cultural knowledge in contemporary Samoa as titular chiefs exercise wide-ranging social, political and economic powers in their families and villages, and concerns with relative rank organize social interactions between all members of society. Consequently being able to understand local models of hierarchy is an essential component of children’s developing social and cultural competence.

This dissertation documents how children are socialized to use observational, imitative, and participatory learning as primary modes of social learning, as they adapt to familial demands and practices, prevailing ethnotheories of child development, and other aspects of their developmental niche. The ways in which social learning is structured in this context are compared with predictions from Vygotskian “cultural-historical” activity theory to demonstrate the analytic necessity of attending far more to the socio-cultural context in which children develop to more adequately understand the nature and full range of variation in developmental processes.

Hal’s new research in Samoa combines his interest in children’s socialization and development with a concern for their well-being, with a particular focus on mental and behavioral health. He plans to examine how variations in biological, psychological and sociocultural processes (e.g. children’s temperament, attachment relationships, household organization and dynamics, and social rank) interact at the level of the individual to generate diversity in developmental trajectories and outcomes.

Hal is co-author with Tara Callaghan and Phillippe Rochat of the paper Synchrony in the Onset of Mental-State Reasoning: Evidence From Five Cultures (pdf), which examines mental-state reasoning as a universal milestone in child development (see this press release). He also has a paper in Educational and Child Psychology that argues that observational learning is an important and culturally promoted form of social learning in Samoa.

If you want to get in touch with Hal, his email is oddenh at ipfw.edu

Another presenter at our Encultured Brain session is M. Cameron Hay-Rollins, a professor of anthropology at Miami University in Ohio. Her talk is The Relevance of Neurology to an Indonesian Healing Tradition, based on her work with the Sasak people on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. Here is the abstract:

Jampi are central to healing among the Sasak of Indonesia. When someone is ill, people respond with jampi — secret, oral formulae that are memorized verbatim. The ethnographic processes through which Sasaks memorize and later treat illness with jampi rely and elaborate upon neurological processes. In this paper, I explore the co-emergence of the social and neurological processes that facilitate verbatim oral memory and enable people to respond to illness constructively. Specifically I examine how Sasaks remember jampi, noting that the social contexts surrounding illness promote remembering in ways that fit the neurological evidence on successful effortful recall of episodic memories. Because research suggests that moderately stressful events promote memory accuracy, the Sasak practice of gathering around an ill person and urgently discussing the illness likely promotes jampi recall. In analyzing the Sasak reliance on jampi as a unique way of culturally elaborating neurological processes, I show the central importance of anxiety in facilitating memory and motivating agency in a world of compelling concerns. By integrating neurology into my analysis of Sasak healing practices, I conclude that methodologically examining anxiety in ethnographic contexts may contribute significantly to our understanding of social action.

Overall, Cameron integrates neurobiological insights into memory with anthropological research on social memory through a focus on ritual, language and enculturation through development. These concretes processes are what can get biological and cultural ideas together, and are a core focus of neuroanthropological research. She describes this research more in the forthcoming article “Anxiety, Remembering and Agency: Biocultural Insights for Understanding Illness” which will appear next year in Ethos. You can see all her publications at her website. But I’ll be happy to provide some highlights myself.

Her book Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia comes with this Amazon description:

Sasaks, a people of the Indonesian archipelago, cope with one of the country’s worst health records by employing various medical traditions, including their own secret ethnomedical knowledge. But anxiety, in the presence and absence of illness, profoundly shapes the ways Sasaks use healing and knowledge. Hay addresses complex questions regarding cultural models, agency, and other relationships to conclude that the ethnomedical knowledge they use to cope with their illnesses ironically inhibits improvements in their health care.

Cameron recently published on her new work examining clinical interactions and medical information in the US in the paper Reading Sensations: Understanding the Process of Distinguishing `Fine’ from `Sick. Here’s a relevant part of the abstract where she is using a biocultural approach to understand how we move from our own experience to an illness category: “Perceptional and interpretive decisions regarding what sensations need to be attended to as potential symptoms may be the result of personal awareness of cultural ideas about vulnerability, sensation duration, and interference with activities. The interpretation of sensations is always tentative, conditional on further cultural information regarding whether the sensation should be constructed into a symptom.”

If you want to get in touch with Cameron, her email is hayrolmc at muohio.edu

Christina Toren is a professor of anthropology at the University of Saint Andrews. In the Encultured Brain session, she will give a talk on Inter-subjectivity and the Development of Neural Processes. The abstract goes like this:

How might inter-subjectivity be understood to inform the development over time of each one of us considered as an autopoietic (self-creating, self-organizing) system? This paper argues that the development of the neural processes that characterize human conceptual development is an emergent aspect of the functioning of an embodied nervous system for which inter-subjectivity is a necessary condition. The genuine multiplicity of human beings as organisms characterised by historicity is not explained, indeed usually not even fully acknowledged, by current neuroscience models of infant and child development.

This paper proposes a dynamic systems approach to the anthropology of human development which shows why cognitive science on the one hand and, on the other, cultural construction, cannot explain the multiplicity of human being – that is, how it comes to be the case that what differentiates us is a function of what we have in common.

In her paper Christina draws on the founders of the idea of autopoiesis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who co-authored the book Autopoiesis and Cognition. She also discusses the recent book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind by Evan Thompson. Varela and Thompson, along with Eleanor Rosch, co-wrote the classic The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.

Christina approaches the problem of the embodied mind, our development, and our ways of understanding each others’ ideas and experiences as an ethnographer first. Insisting on the importance of ethnography has been a consistent theme in her work. In her chapter Ethnography: Theoretical Background in the volume Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods for Psychology and the Social Sciences, she argues for an ethnography “that is open, phenomenologically oriented, reflexive and free of predetermined hypotheses.” More recently, she wrote in How Do We Know What Is True? in Questions in Anthropology, “The explanatory power of our ethnographies must be made to reside in rendering our informants’ categories analytical,” by which she means amenable to historical and social analysis. “The meaning of a category cannot properly be taken for granted… it requires, always, an ethnographic investigation to establish how it is used and what its implications may be.”

Christina does a lot of her ethnographic work in Fiji in the South Pacific. Recently she published the article Sunday Lunch in Fiji: Continuity and Transformation in Ideas of the Household, which examines how the ritualization of eating, the intensification of commodity exchange, and children’s development help us understand both cultural continuity and change over time in the concept of what we might call home (even though household means something rather different there). Her earlier book Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography has the following Amazon description:

Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography is the outcome of over a decade’s research into how Fijians live their lives and constitute their knowledge of the world. Through this exploration, the author aims to derive a new theory of embodied mind that works as well for explaining ourselves as it does for explaining others. Investigating the processes by which humans interact with the material world of objects and with other people, the book addresses the issue of how we form our identities in connection with, and in contrast to, the identities of those around us. Mind, Materiality and History demonstrates that the human mind is the fundamental historical phenomenon.

Fiji. Some anthropologists get the best field sites… But that’s not why we do it! As Christina writes in her profile, “As an anthropologist, I am fascinated by the extraordinary variety and complexity of human beings. What interests me is how we become who we are – each one of us uniquely ourselves – and how the history of our relations with others informs this process of becoming ourselves.”

If you want to get in touch with Christina, her email is christina.toren at st-andrews.ac.uk