History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research (original) (raw)

Neuroanthropology: a humanistic science for the study of the culture-brain nexus

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010

In this article, we argue that a combined anthropology/neuroscience field of enquiry can make a significant and distinctive contribution to the study of the relationship between culture and the brain. This field, which can appropriately be termed as neuroanthropology, is conceived of as being complementary to and mutually informative with social and cultural neuroscience. We start by providing an introduction to the culture concept in anthropology. We then present a detailed characterization of neuroanthropology and its methods and how they relate to the anthropological understanding of culture. The field is described as a humanistic science, that is, a field of enquiry founded on the perceived epistemological and methodological interdependence of science and the humanities. We also provide examples that illustrate the proposed methodological model for neuroanthropology. We conclude with a discussion about specific contributions the field can make to the study of the culture-brain nexus.

Culture and neuroscience: additive or synergistic?

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2010

The investigation of cultural phenomena using neuroscientific methodscultural neuroscience (CN)is receiving increasing attention. Yet it is unclear whether the integration of cultural study and neuroscience is merely additive, providing additional evidence of neural plasticity in the human brain, or truly synergistic, yielding discoveries that neither discipline could have achieved alone. We discuss how the parent fields to CN: cross-cultural psychology, psychological anthropology and cognitive neuroscience inform the investigation of the role of cultural experience in shaping the brain. Drawing on well-established methodologies from cross-cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience, we outline a set of guidelines for CN, evaluate 17 CN studies in terms of these guidelines, and provide a summary table of our results. We conclude that the combination of culture and neuroscience is both additive and synergistic; while some CN methodologies and findings will represent the direct union of information from parent fields, CN studies employing the methodological rigor required by this logistically challenging new field have the potential to transform existing methodologies and produce unique findings.

CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Culture and the Brain

2014

ABSTRACT—The goal of this article is to highlight recent work examining how culture affects neural activation. We suggest a framework for cultural neuroscience in which there are two objectives: culture mapping—or the mapping function from patterns characteristic of cultures to their neural processing—and source analysis—or the attempt to determine the sources of observed commonalities and differences. We review links between culture and the brain across fundamental domains of cognitive and social psychology. KEYWORDS—culture; neuroscience; brain Culture and the brain historically have often been the subjects of different forms of discourse. But a growing recognition of the extent of the brain’s plasticity, of the evolutionary basis of cognition, and of the coevolution of culture and the brain makes

Broadening the scope of cultural neuroscience

Chiao, Cheon, Pornpattananangkul, Mrazek, and Blizinsky offer a comprehensive review of cultural neuroscience research. For such a young field, cultural neuroscience has made great strides in the effort to understand the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying cultural differences in psychology. Here, we pose a set of questions that, if addressed in the future, may help develop the field. First, can cultural neuroscientists more deeply probe how environmental factors, such as pathogen threats, may have influenced genetic selection and, in turn, cultural differences in psychology (i.e., the culture-gene coevolutionary theory)? Second, can cultural neuroscientists help unravel whether and how aspects of cultural psychology are susceptible to change? Third, what can a cultural neuroscience perspective give back to other, related disciplines such as social cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and psychology more broadly?

Anthropology of Emotions - Review of Sources - 1

All of the three articles reviewed provide good insights concerning the importance of thinking about and through the body in anthropology, and offer valuable suggestions on how one might approach the relationship between the lived experiences, affects and/or emotions encountered by embodied human subjects. At the same time, a range of social-theoretical and philosophical issues have been foregrounded by the authors -very broadly, the perennial question of the mind/body dualism (most famously evidenced in Rene Descartes' philosophical writings, but later contested by other thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza), the question of how to understand our being-in-the-world (taken up by a range of European philosophers and theorists, from Sartre, Heidegger and Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu), as well as the issue of how to conceptualize the relationship between human agency and sociocultural structure/convention. For the purposes of this review however, I wish to focus specifically on how the body, in all its dimensions -lived, still, dynamic, malleable, resistant, etc -has been thought through by these authors. At the same time, I hope to juxtapose and relate some of their thoughts on the bodily dimensions of sociocultural life in relation to what certain contemporary social theorists (for instance, Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough) are calling "the affective turn" in the human sciences.

Culture: by the brain and in the brain?

Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. For the most part, they aim at capturing the commonalities that underlay the heterogeneity of human behaviors and experiences. Neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, or the “neurodisciplines of culture,” appear different, since their goal is to understand specificity rather than commonality and to address how cultural differences are inscribed in the brain. After offering an overview of these disciplines, and of their relation to endeavors such as cultural psychology and social neuroscience, this article discusses some of the most representative studies in the area in order to explore in which ways they are relevant for an understanding of culture.