Neuroanthropology and Its Applications: An Introduction

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the brain sciences have gone through a revolution in theories and methods for understanding neural function and its connections with human cognition, experience, and variation. Today the brain sciences grapple with questions of human development, cross-cultural difference, and neuroplasticity, and scientific thought about the brain plays an increasingly prominent role in public thinking about medical and social problems. In this context, anthropology faces new opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement and cross fertilization. Especially as brain scientists try to move from the lab to positions of advocacy and engagement, anthropological insight should be increasingly valuable to the enterprise, given our field's tradition of cross-cultural research and its ability to analyze how neuroscientific knowledge plays out in society. Anthropologists can also draw on neuroscience to address problems that we face in the field and to develop novel applied approaches, even as we send new questions and important data back to imaging laboratories. "Neuroanthropology and Its Applications" shows the increasing development of this interdisciplinary field. The articles in this issue demonstrate the combination of theory and application at the core of this emerging area of scholarship, focusing specifically on work in sociocultural arenas, mental and behavioral health, and political-economic influences on human functioning. This special issue together with a new edited volume (Lende and Downey 2012), indicate how rapidly this field is growing (see also Campbell and Garcia 2009;Domínguez et al. 2010;Northoff 2010;Raybeck and Ngo 2011;Reyna 2012a;Roepstorff et al. 2010; Seligman and Brown 2010). 1 We are particularly excited that applied work is playing a formative role in the early stages of neuroanthropological thought. Too often theory and application remain separate in anthropological work, and little crossover occurs between new developments in academia and in nonacademic arenas. This special issue, which includes people actively working in clinical, coaching, and communications settings, demonstrates that a holistic approach to neuroanthropology is possible that includes applied anthropology, critical theory, and interdisciplinary practice. The subfield is being built from the bottom up, from diverse ethnographic and applied problems that have driven researchers across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Why space is not one-dimensional: Location may be categorical and imagistic

“…Recognizing how cognition works in the wild (Hutchins 1995) through more interactive, extended, and embodied models (Clark 2008) might offer a starting point for achieving the authors' overall goals. Subsequently, to more fully consider the social, political, and cultural side of language learning, G-M&B could utilize recent work in neuroanthropology, which integrates cognitive science with anthropology and related fields (Lende & Downey 2012a;2012b). For example, the concept of language readiness might be transformed by considering it not just in terms of individual readiness, but also through the embodied acquisition of gestures and signs in specific situations and specific times (Downey 2010).…”

What is a gesture? A lesson from comparative gesture research

“…Recognizing how cognition works in the wild (Hutchins 1995) through more interactive, extended, and embodied models (Clark 2008) might offer a starting point for achieving the authors' overall goals. Subsequently, to more fully consider the social, political, and cultural side of language learning, G-M&B could utilize recent work in neuroanthropology, which integrates cognitive science with anthropology and related fields (Lende & Downey 2012a;2012b). For example, the concept of language readiness might be transformed by considering it not just in terms of individual readiness, but also through the embodied acquisition of gestures and signs in specific situations and specific times (Downey 2010).…”

Attention schema theory, an interdisciplinary turn? Cognition, culture and institutions

“…In this way, the paper charts the multidirectional and interactive causal relationship between intrinsic brain processes, attention and conscious awareness, and how they relate to wider institutional structures and joint attentional interactions at higher levels of aggregation. In the last few decades, a move towards interdisciplinary reconciliation and crossfertilization has occurred against the background of scientific findings emphasizing brain plasticity that have rendered the notion of the biological and the social as distinct domains untenable (Bloch, 2012;Fuentes, 2016;Lende and Downey, 2012;Reyna, 2002Reyna, , 2006. This shift has implications for all sciences dealing with human cognition and social organization.…”

“…This shift has implications for all sciences dealing with human cognition and social organization. By engaging with neuroscience and other more narrow cognitive and biological behavioral sciences using a holistic approach, rather than ignoring them on the ground that they are reductionistic, anthropologists and other social scientists can provide important criticisms of, and correctives to, the prevalent 'neurohubris' trend and the seductive appeal of often ambiguous and rather limited neuroscience findings (Birth, 2007;Fuentes, 2016;Lende and Downey, 2012;Satel and Lilienfeld, 2013). Interdisciplinary engagement requires approaches that account for human behavior in terms of a complex interaction among, and simultaneous influence of, a range of interconnected institutional, situational, biographical, psychological, neural and genetic variables in a parsimonious way.…”