9 Neuroanthropology

Diptendu Chatterjee and Meenal Dhall

Contents:

Introduction

1. Neuroanthropological holism

2. Neuroanthropology coherence

3. Nature or nurture ?

4. Aspects of neuroanthropology

5. Principles of neuroanthropology

6. Neuroanthropology – Relation with other fields of anthropology

6.1 Psychological anthropology

6.2 Biological anthropology

7. Neuroanthropology and its Applications

7.1 Neuroethnography- Application of neuroscience

Summary

Learning Objectives:

1. To understand neuroanthropological holism.

2. To identify the coherence of neuroanthropology.

3. To understand neuroanthropology as a humanistic science.

4. To elucidate different aspects of neuroanthropology.

5. To understand principles of neuroanthropology

6. To find out the relation of neuroanthropology with other fields of anthropology.

7. To learn the applications of neuroanthropology.

Introduction

Neuroanthropology is the branch of anthropology that intends to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity such as emotion, perception, cognition, motor skills and acquisitions as well as encompassing the co-evolution and development of brain and consciousness. Or, in simple words we can define neuro anthropology as the study of relationship between brain and culture, how culture influences the structure, function and development of our brain and how brain gives rise to different pathways followed by the co-evolution of brain and culture.

1. Neuroanthropological holism

Holism is a term which is used to explain a certain theory having interconnection with diverse fields or that which cannot act independently and therefore neuroanthropology exemplifies the holism that has been a hallmark of anthropology since the work of Franz Boas because the field draws on both biology and culture for data and theory, and embraces both empiricism and critical analysis !

2. Neuroanthropology coherence

Neuroanthropology coheres as an area of scholarship in two distinctive ways:

1) with neuroscience -it emphasize variation, plasticity, processes, and emerging systems in contrast with older, more mechanistic views of how human biology works (Downey and Lende, 2012; MacKinnon and Fuentes, 2012).

2) with social and cultural psychology -An insistence that brain function is always embedded in larger, living systems, including the human body, social field and the longer-term, larger-scale structures that are the products of human brains accounted into cooperative, cumulative systems. Therefore, we can conclude that in neuroanthropology the brain is plural, meaning both in the sense that there is no single human brain and that one of the distinctive traits of human nervous system is the role of others in shaping it. Thus to bridge brain and culture, neuroanthropology draws on innovations in fields like psychological and medical anthropology that have provided key insights into individual–environment interaction and approaches to addressing problems of human variation providing examples of ways to study pathology.

3. Nature or nurture ?

Neuroanthropology : A humanistic science. What neuroanthropology brings us is an appreciation of how deeply human learning can be rooted. Once one begins to do this, one of the oldest and most fruitless questions in the human sciences begins to dissolve. This question is: which is more important in determining human behavior, nature or nurture? As soon as one starts looking at how the brain interacts with culture, it becomes clear that it is time to retire this question. What we need to try and understand is how nurture becomes nature and how nature is shaped by nurture.

Neuroanthropology places human brain and nervous system at the center of discussions about human nature. Why? Because in recognizing the changes that makes distinctive characteristics such as inheres in size, specialization, and dynamic openness of the human nervous system. By starting with neural physiology and its variability, neuroanthropology situates itself in the interaction of nature and culture, the inextricable interweaving of developmental unfolding and evolutionary endowment.

Lende and Downey wrote, “Neural systems adapt through long-term refinement and remodeling, which leads to what we see as deep enculturation. Through systematic change in the nervous system, the human body learns to orchestrate itself. Cultural concepts and meaning become neurological anatomy. In short, how we are nurtured-throughout our lives creates not just ideas and values, but influences our brains at the cellular level. Our nurturing becomes part of us, becomes nature.

4. Aspects of neuroanthropology

‘Neuroanthropology’ is a broad term, intended to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity, including emotion, perception, cognitive, motor control, skill acquisition and a range of other issues. Unlike earlier, doing psychological or cognitive anthropology, this field remains open and heterogeneous, recognizing that not all brain systems function in the same way, so culture will not take hold of them in any identical fashion. Although we believe that human neural structure is biological and the product of evolution, we also recognize that the development processes shaping each individual include a host of other forces as well, including internal dynamics, so that we cannot privilege any single cause over all others.

The field of neuroanthropology has four distinct aspects:

(1) Exploring interaction of brain and culture and its implication for our understanding of mind, behavior, and self.

(2) Examining the role of nervous system in the creation of social and ideological structures.

(3) Providing empirical and critical inquiry into the interplay of neuroscience and ideologies about the brain.

(4) Providing novel syntheses and advances in social science theory and the humanities that might also prove useful to brain and behavioral sciences.

5. Principles of neuroanthropology

Neuroanthropology builds on general principles of applied anthropology. Firstly, it recognizes the importance of human variation in the success (and failure) of projects highlighting the problems we face around the globe. It also points to the patterns of human variation that are often not reducible to either biological or cross-cultural etiology alone, rather, human difference and similarity emerge through interactions across the biology–culture divide. Neuroanthropology also recognizes that applied research is different from traditional scholarly endeavors (Rylko-Bauer et al., 2006; Low and Merry, 2010; Sabloff, 2011).

6. Neuroanthropology – Relation with other fields of anthropology

Neuroanthropology brings together various strands of anthropology to address complex brain–culture problems in field and the laboratory. Biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and medical anthropology all provide important elements for the research being done by neuroanthropologists.

6.1 Psychological anthropology

(1) Examining the individual in context

(2) Consideration of internal factors.

Psychological anthropology focuses on how individual relates to the environment particularly in sociocultural environments (Moore and Mathews, 2001; Levine, 2010).

Neuroscience research often employs methods like neuroimaging that of necessity isolate individuals; from these data, however, neuroscientists often make assertions about social life or cultural patterning without considering the individual–environment interface in the richly informed way of psychological anthropology. As neuroscience increasingly aims to explore human nature, cross-cultural variation, and humans’ production of meaning, decades of research by psychological anthropologists provide an important reservoir of rich comparative cases as well as myriad examples of how to successfully draw together quantitative and qualitative data to understand larger questions about human life.

6.2 Biological anthropology

It opens a realm in evolutionary theory, providing a strong understanding of the mechanisms that underlie behavior and cognition, and an emphasis on comparative analysis and individual variation. Takes two important lessons from evolutionary theory:

i) Humans are not infinitely plastic, in spite of some social constructionists’ assumptions.

ii) Our evolutionary history—the phylogeny of our species—is central to understanding patterns of human variation.

Biological anthropology also provides important comparative data on brain evolution and function from its broad prehistoric and primatological framework (Downey and Lende 2012; Rilling 2008). By drawing on decades of primate research and paleoanthropology (Rilling, 2008; Hare, 2011; MacKinnon and Fuentes, 2012), neuroanthropologists better position themselves to understand just what the human brain can and cannot do.

iii) Mechanisms and processes underlying cognitive functions- These are the complex assemblages involving parts of the human brain in relations to external elements, such as learned culture, perceptions of the environment and material culture. During the course of time, these processes blur the division between internal and external, what is the brain and what is the environment, as experience reshapes the individual’s neurological endowment. It focuses on the diverse components that shape behavior or that form a functional cognitive system is central to how neuroanthropology analyzes problems and helps us to understand the need for hybrid research expertise, as systems virtually always cross disciplinary territories.

6.3 . Cultural Anthropology

Ethnography is one of the formative elements of neuroanthropology. Ethnographic field work provides evidence of human function and variation that is central to understanding how brains work in the wild, to borrow from Edwin Hutchins (1995). Ethnography can test the annals of anthropological practice.

6.4 Medical Anthropology

It provides important methodological and analytical tools .Medical anthropology offers a model for both critical and applied engagement with scientific knowledge, including how technology, institutions, standards of care, and patterns of practice develop in a variety of ways in different societies, even among groups in the same society.

7. Applications of neuroanthropology

1. Vulnerabilities

As our understanding of neurocultural dynamics advances, we will perceive more accurately how people might be vulnerable to particular pathologies, problems, and negative social interactions. In ways similar to evolutionary medicine’s recognition of mismatches—that evolved predispositions can be at odds with rapid social and technological change in our modern world—neuroanthropology can identify particular vulnerabilities in the mismatch between neurological resources and environmental demands.

2. Communications

Neuroanthropology bridges the biology–culture gap which is complicated. The field draws on research in neuroscience, human development, psychology, and sociology. The wider public often has views at odds with the latest scientific findings, and these mistaken understandings can undermine individual decision making and institutional policy.

3. Policies

One arena where neuroanthropologists can contribute substantially is to the basic knowledge that informs policy improvements. This approach takes doing “basic research” one step further by explicitly considering the applied dimensions while designing projects, including working with experts, getting data relevant to applied outcomes, and testing policy-oriented ideas where possible

4. Programmes

Neuroanthropologists can help to transform existing programs and develop novel proposals to address pressing social, behavioral and mental health problems. These initiatives will often focus more on a micro- or individual level than most centrally initiated, large-scale policy efforts, because neuroanthropology places an emphasis on the practices and experiences that lie between embodied biology and social dynamics. Brandon Kohrt, Sujen Maharjan, Damber Timsina, and James Griffith, in “Applying Nepali Ethnopsychology to Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Mental Illness and Prevention of Suicide among Bhutanese Refugees,” use ethnography, therapeutic work, and applied neuroanthropology to address mental health issues among Nepali refugees from Bhutan. Ethnographic work with Nepali Bhutanese living in camps in southeastern Nepal provided an account of how these people interpret mental health and illness; this knowledge, in turn, informed work with refugees in the United States. Kohrt and colleagues review step-by-step how cognitive behavioral, interpersonal, and dialectal behavior forms of therapy can be applied to the Bhutanese once the therapist recognizes.

Table 1.1 Neuroanthropology and its Applications: Finding and Filling the Gaps

(Source Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-9588.2012.01090.x/abstract)

7.1 Neuroethnography- Application of neuroscience

Five theories drawn from neuroscience, psychology, or elsewhere against the complexity of the world. Long-term ethnography provides qualitative data that is essential to inform our understanding of human function and enculturation. Moreover, the point of view of our informants can be an important counterbalance to the expertise of lab-based researchers. Although neuroscientists and other researchers possess distinctive and powerful forms of knowledge making without which neuroanthropology would be impossible, their mantle of authority often conceals when their theories have moved beyond the strict purview of the data, smuggling in folk interpretations or culture-based assumptions. For example,the insights that highly skilled practitioners can offer into how they are able to do what they do may provide a level of detail in data that is just not available in university laboratories when college student participants do not have such highly developed skills. Field research may alert us to specialized neurocultural mechanisms that are not developed by all individuals. Alongside ethnography, cultural anthropology has developed cross-cultural comparison and relativism, analytical tools ideal to combat consistent problems that crop up when dealing with questions of human nature and variation in the brain sciences. Cultural anthropology’s emphasis on variation, understanding cultural behavior in context, and using firsthand experience with cultural diversity as leverage to critique one’s own cultural and intellectual assumptions, all prove crucial resources in moving neuroscience out of the laboratory and into a much broader consideration of how the human nervous system might function. Finally, neuroanthropologists pay attention to how processes like enculturation, child rearing, embryonic environment, skill acquisition, socialization, and critical life experiences like ritual shape brain function and development, aligning the field with cultural anthropology’s long-standing emphasis on the social and cultural constitution of human beings.

We seek to recognize how elements like systems of symbols, systemic inequality, diverse practices, cultural embodiment, ideology, and power can shape the everyday patterning of our nervous systems, and also affect how we conduct neuroscience itself. Political economy and culture are a constitutive part of how brains work, not just an “influence” in the environment. The brain’s developmental context does not simply inflect or influence the wiring, firing and connecting of our brains and bodies; we would not have a functioning nervous system without patterned stimulation and behavior, elements that are inherently varied across our species.

Neuroanthropology must both collaborate and engage critically with neuroscience, particularly as institutions and our informants increasingly draw on the knowledge offered up by neuroscience in a wide variety of settings. Research in neuroscience involves highly formalized laboratory experiments aimed at uncovering clear cause–effect relationships between cognitive function and brain structure and activity. Neuroscience is regarded as the authority of science, the power of medical technology, the ability to justify policy, and the rich pool of symbolic meaning.

Fig 1.1 Methods of ethnography

Following are the three different methods of neuroethnography:

1) Cognitive Anthropology – It is also known as consensus analysis. It assumes that widely shared information is reflected in high agreement among individuals (of different groups) that uses cognitive ability in decision-making and behaviour.

2) Cultural Psychology – It uses interpretive ethnographic methods to understand the cultural context.

3) Social Neuroscience –It uses various means such as interviews and questionnaires that indicates range, intensity and duration of the participants’ feelings. Also, includes findings from physiological and behavioural psychology.

Summary

Neuroanthropology is the branch of anthropology that intends to embrace all dimensions of human neural activity such as emotion, perception ,cognition ,motor skills and acquisitions as well as encompassing the co-evolution and development of brain and consciousness. Neuroanthropological holism is a term which is used to explain a certain theory having interconnection with diverse fields or that which cannot act independently and therefore neuroanthropology exemplifies the holism that has been a hallmark of anthropology since the work of Franz Boas because the field draws on both biology and culture for data and theory, and embraces both empiricism and critical analysis.

Using social and cultural neuroscience in combination with psychological anthropology and cultural psychology, neuroanthropology builds in-depth analyses of mind, behavior and self based on an understanding of both neurological function and ethnographic reality. Anthropologists have not participated extensively in the growing movement toward cultural neuroscience. What neuroanthropology brings us is an appreciation of how deeply human learning can be rooted. It situates itself from the beginning in the interaction of nature and culture, the inextricable interweaving of developmental unfolding and evolutionary endowment.

The field of neuroanthropology has four distinct aspects :exploring interaction of brain and culture and its implication for our understanding of mind, behavior, and self; examining the role of nervous system in the creation of social and ideological structures; providing empirical and critical inquiry into the interplay of neuroscience and ideologies about the brain; providing novel syntheses and advances in social science theory and the humanities that might also prove useful to brain and behavioral sciences. It recognizes the importance of human variation in the success (and failure) of projects highlighting that few exist to the problems we face around the globe. It also points to the patterns of human variation that are often not reducible to either biological or cross-cultural etiology alone, rather, human difference and similarity emerge through interactions across the biology–culture divide.

Neuroanthropology also recognizes that applied research is different from traditional scholarly endeavors and builds on general principles of applied anthropology. Biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and medical anthropology all provide important elements for the research being done by neuroanthropologists.

Neuroanthropology specializes in the field of identifying gaps between local dynamics as revealed by ethnographic or community-based research and existing super local programs, policies, and public understanding. It can identify particular vulnerabilities in the mismatch between neurological resources and environmental demands. The wider public often has views at odds with the latest scientific findings, and these mistaken understandings can undermine individual decision making and institutional policy. It takes “basic research” one step further by explicitly considering the applied dimensions while designing projects, including working with experts, getting data relevant to applied outcomes, and testing policy-oriented ideas where possible. Neuroanthropologists can help to transform existing programs and develop novel proposals to address pressing social, behavioral, and mental health problems.

The different methods of neuroethnography are: Cognitive Anthropology -It assumes that widely shared information is reflected in high agreement among individuals (of different groups) that uses cognitive ability in decision-making and behavior ;Cultural Psychology – It uses interpretive ethnographic methods to understand the cultural context ;Social Neuroscience – It uses various means such as interviews and questionnaires that indicates range, intensity and duration of the participants’ feelings. Also, includes findings from physiological and behavioral psychology.

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GLOSSARY

1. Neuroanthropology – the study of how brain and culture interwines around each other and influences the mechanism of growth, structure, function and pathway of the brain .

2. Holism – a term which is used to explain a certain theory having interconnection with diverse fields or that which cannot act indepently.

3. Neuroscience- The branch of science that studies the field of psychology, neurochemistry that is associated with brain structure and function.

4. Neuroculture- The branch of science that studies how various cultural practices shapes the mind ,genes and brain of an individual.

5. Neuroethnography- Various methods and techniques such as MRI and electroencephalography are used for subtractive ,factorial and parametric experiments and test.

Did you know?

Neuroanthropologists asks how inequality differentiates people and what we might do about that rather than assuming structural inequality is basic to all societies as the field of neuuroanthropology focuses on how social and cultural phenomena actually achieve the impact they have on people in material terms(experience)

Interesting facts

Neural systems adapt through long-term remodeling and refinement that leads to deep enculturation. Through systematic change in the nervous system caused by change in material of the brain i.e experience, the human body learns to orchestrate itself as well as change in brain, learning, memory and maturation happen . Cultural concepts and meanings thus become anatomy.

Points to ponder:

All animal nervous system is open to the world wherein the human nervous system is especially open to adapt in transforming the environment into a socio-cognitive niche that scaffolds and extends the brain’s abilities which leads to creation of a niche and is constructed through social relationships, physical environments, ritual patterns and symbolic constructs that shape behavior , ideas, create divisions, and pattern lives

References

Suggested Readings

https://neuroanthropology.net/2009/10/08/the-encultured-brain-why-neuroanthropology-why-now/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroanthropology