by Vanessa Marshall“Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience” by Rebecca Seligman and Ryan Brown builds the idea of cultural neuroscience as the marriage of cultural anthropology and neuroscience. The ideas presented are very similar to the ideas that have been discussed in class: combining aspects of anthropology observational research with more scientific experimental methodologies. Anthropologists’ contributions are built around the idea of embodiment – the way that socio-cultural factors influence form, behavior, and subjective experience of human bodies. Social cognitive neuroscientists’ contributions are built around revealing the mechanisms of embodiment by investigating the neural underpinnings and consequences of social experience. Embodiment in culture is recognized as lacking biological and cognitive mechanisms through which to process bodily function and experience via social processes. Biological anthropologists are acknowledged as having made use of sophisticated measurements, but the results are static outcomes of social forces rather than indicators of how physiological systems function dynamically within the realm of social experience.
The authors specifically build on three “interconnected domains of inquiry in which the intersection of neuroscience and anthropology can productively inform our understanding of the relationship between human brains and their socio-cultural contexts: the social construction of emotion, cultural psychiatry, and the embodiment of ritual.” They also advocate the development of field studies that use portable measurement technologies to connect individual patterns of biological response with socio-cultural processes.
7 Comments
Casey Fulkerson
2/5/2019 06:38:47 pm
Something that Seligman & Brown discussed that stood out to me was the idea of sociocultural construction of emotion. It is interesting that social forces and general cultural perception of emotions has such an effect on the appraisal and regulation of emotions. Even more so, how we perceive our emotions being received profoundly determines if we allow ourselves to feel them or bury them and move on with out lives. I also thought that their discussion of cultural psychiatry was interesting, especially when they pointed out that American-Euro cultures, dissociation is something that is pathologized and stigmatized, yet in other cultures it is something that is desirable and celebrated. The authors said that they wanted to discuss the relationship between environment, behavior, and the brain, and I feel like they did an excellent job of that.
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Vanessa Marshall
2/5/2019 11:34:06 pm
I also found the idea of emotion and culture as something interwoven to be interesting as I'd always viewed emotions as universal, even if physical manifestations of emotions varied culturally. A common theme in neuroanthropology is the interplay of language, culture, and the brain, so it was fitting for the example in this section of the paper to discuss culturally specific emotion words. Perhaps the best example thus far of how neuroanthropology research would work was also provided here: combining existing ethnographic research on emotions while employing an experimental approach such as neuroimaging to then cross-ethnically compare neural signatures to culturally specific emotions.
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Casey Fulkerson
2/26/2019 02:02:57 pm
That would certainly be an interesting study. Seligman & Brown mention that ethnographic research can give researchers insight on culturally specific emotions and also what stimuli should be used for each group to elicit the desired emotion. It would be interesting if, when comparing neural signatures, two culturally different emotions actually had the same signature. It would also be interesting to see how the brain treats "good" vs. "bad" emotions in regards to neural signatures and if there are any general physiological trends associated with experiencing those emotions and if they vary from culture to culture.
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Moe Prince
2/6/2019 08:29:45 am
Seligman and Brown really caught my interest when they discussed using existing research on emotional variation between cultures and mixing it with new experiments in neural mapping. They also look deeper into how emotional control is learned in different cultures. From parenting style to community ritual, these behaviors are taught and enforced from a young age by the group. They acknowledged the role the brained played, while also showing that it can be changed well after maturity. Many different aspects were taken into account and were brought together in an extremely beneficial way.
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Zach Obaji
2/6/2019 09:39:04 am
Vanessa, I enjoyed reading your blog post. What caught my attention the most in the readnig was the topic on culutral psychiatry. In short, it describes that psychiatric disorders are curtually variable based on evidence gathered from anthropology. I beleive that all of us who took ANT 311 last semester wtih Dr. DeCaro can make understand how factors such as enviorment, location, poverty can all affect human health. I found an article that studies subsrtance abuse and poverty in 24 urban areas. I'd recommend this article to anyone who has not taken ANT 311 to better understand how important cultural variables can be factored into neuroanthropology.
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Zach Obaji
2/27/2019 06:35:38 pm
Another part of the article that I found quite interesting was the discussion about biological anthropologists using tools from endocrinology, psychoneuroimmunology, and psychophysiology. It was fascinating to learn that the tools from these areas are used to learn more and study the effects of the environments on human physiology.
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Vanessa Marshall
2/27/2019 09:36:46 pm
The idea of embodiment is much more defined for me after having read Ch. 6 and 7 about capoeira and taijutsu. I think Seligman and Brown did a better job of utilizing Dunbar and Shultz's front-loading technique to combine a social situation with experimental neural imaging for a case-study of neuroanthropology. However, the success with the cultural emotion embodiment makes me think the same principals and methodologies could be applied to the studies on capoeira and taijustsu for an even more comprehensive study about how culture affects emotion, but also the relationship between the neural and musculoskeletal systems in the body.
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AuthorThis blog is group authored by Dr. DeCaro and the students in his ANT 474/574: Neuroanthropology. Archives
April 2019
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