Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience

Abstract

Anthropologists have become increasingly interested in embodiment-that is, the ways that socio-cultural factors influence the form, behavior and subjective experience of human bodies. At the same time, social cognitive neuroscience has begun to reveal the mechanisms of embodiment by investigating the neural underpinnings and consequences of social experience. Despite this overlap, the two fields have barely engaged one another. We suggest 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. These are: the social construction of emotion, cultural psychiatry, and the embodiment of ritual. We build on both current research findings in cultural neuroscience and ethnographic data on cultural differences in thought and behavior, to generate novel, ecologically informed hypotheses for future study. In addition, we lay out a specific suggestion for operationalizing insights from anthropology in the context of cultural neuroscience research. Specifically, we advocate the development of field studies that use portable measurement technologies to connect individual patterns of biological response with socio-cultural processes. We illustrate the potential of such an approach with data from a study of psychophysiology and religious devotion in Northeastern Brazil.

ADHD in context: Young adults’ reports of the impact of occupational environment on the manifestation of ADHD

“…Qualitative methods are particularly useful when studying psychiatric disorders from a developmental/contextual perspective: given the complexity of the phenomena, an open-ended approach may provide a fuller picture of experience, capturing data that can otherwise be obscured by more close-ended methods (Sullivan, 1998). This type of approach can be used to generate new ecologically-informed hypotheses for further exploration (Seligman and Brown, 2010). …”

Frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and mediumship: a comparative study between spiritist mediums and controls

“…EEG is a sensitive non-invasive method with portable technologies that allow it to be used in situ, in cultural context 21 . The specific aim of the present field study was to investigate frontal electroencephalographic activity in Spiritist mediums from Brazil and compare them with non-medium control subjects from the same cultural context.…”

How cultural is ‘cultural neuroscience’? Some comments on an emerging research paradigm

“…also Way and Lieberman, 2010) and by investigating personality traits that might mediate cultural differences in neural responses . Cooperations between anthropologists and cultural neuroscientists have been considered by several writers, too (Brown and Seligman, 2009;Domínguez et al, 2009Domínguez et al, , 2010Choudhury, 2010;Roepstorff et al, 2010;Seligman and Brown, 2010), but as yet with few practical results. 6 The range of psychological processes that have been investigated within a cultural neuroscience framework is thus quite broad.…”