Neuroanthropology: Evolution and Emotional Embodiment

The Decade of the Mind is a proposal for a research initiative focused on four areas of neuroscience, including mental health, high-level cognitive function, education, and computational applications. Organizing efforts to date have primarily included cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and engineers, as well as physicians. At the same time anthropologists have started to explore the implications of neuroscience for understanding culture. Here we suggest that evolutionary neuroscience can be used to bridge knowledge obtained by social scientists with that obtained in the neurosciences for a more complete appreciation of the mind. We consider such a perspective as neuroanthropology. We use embodiment, an anthropological concept that has been substantiated by recent findings in neuroscience, to illustrate an integrative biocultural approach within neuroanthropology and suggest future possible directions for research

Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity--how is it to be defined, characterized and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence.Ethnicity, Conflict, Interdisciplinary Approaches, International Development, International Relations/Trade,

The resurrection of group selection as a theory of human cooperation

Two books edited by members of the MacArthur Norms and Preferences Network (an interdisciplinary group, mainly anthropologists and economists) are reviewed here. These books in large part reflect a renewed interest in group selection that has occurred among these researchers: they promote the theory that human cooperative behavior evolved via selective processes which favored biological and/or cultural group-level adaptations as opposed to individual-level adaptations. In support of this theory, an impressive collection of cross-cultural data are presented which suggest that participants in experimental economic games often do not behave as self-interested income maximizers; this lack of self-interest is regarded as evidence of group selection. In this review, problems with these data and with the theory are discussed. On the data side, it is argued that even if a behavior seems individually-maladaptive in a game context, there is no reason to believe that it would have been that way in ancestral contexts, since the environments of experimental games do not at all resemble those in which ancestral humans would have interacted cooperatively. And on the theory side, it is argued that it is premature to invoke group selection in order to explain human cooperation, because more parsimonious individual-level theories have not yet been exhausted. In summary, these books represent ambitious interdisciplinary contributions on an important topic, and they include unique and useful data; however, they do not make a convincing case that the evolution of human cooperation required group selection

Troping the Enemy: Metaphor, Culture, and the Big Data Black Boxes of National Security

This article considers how cultural understanding is being brought into the work of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), through an analysis of its Metaphor program. It examines the type of social science underwriting this program, unpacks implications of the agency’s conception of metaphor for understanding so-called cultures of interest, and compares IARPA’s to competing accounts of how metaphor works to create cultural meaning. The article highlights some risks posed by key deficits in the Intelligence Community\u27s (IC) approach to culture, which relies on the cognitive linguistic theories of George Lakoff and colleagues. It also explores the problem of the opacity of these risks for analysts, even as such predictive cultural analytics are becoming a part of intelligence forecasting. This article examines the problem of information secrecy in two ways, by unpacking the opacity of “black box,” algorithm-based social science of culture for end users with little appreciation of their potential biases, and by evaluating the IC\u27s nontransparent approach to foreign cultures, as it underwrites national security assessments

‘The uses of ethnography in the science of cultural evolution’. Commentary on Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A. and K. Laland ‘Toward a unified science of cultural evolution’

There is considerable scope for developing a more explicit role for ethnography within the research program proposed in the article. Ethnographic studies of cultural micro-evolution would complement experimental approaches by providing insights into the “natural” settings in which cultural behaviours occur. Ethnography can also contribute to the study of cultural macro-evolution by shedding light on the conditions that generate and maintain cultural lineages

Where did anthropology go?: or the need for 'human nature'

I was recently asked the question: “Where did anthropology go? ” by a psycholinguist from a famous American university. She was commenting on the fact that she had tried to establish contact with the anthropology department of her institution, hoping that she would find somebody who would contribute to a discussion of her main research interest: the relation of words to concepts. She had assumed that the socio- cultural anthropologists would have general theories or, at least, ask general questions, about the way children’s upbringing in different cultures and environments would constrain, or not constrain, how children represented the material and the social world. She was hoping for information about exotic societies in order to gain a broader cross-cultural perspective. She was hoping that her enquiry about a topic that is inevitable in any discussion about culture would be equally central to the three disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology, and would therefore be an ideal ground for constructive co-operation, that is, one where the different parties could articulate and challenge the theories on which their different disciplines are built. In fact she found that nobody was interested in working with her, but what surprised her most was the hostility she perceived, caused, not only by the suggestion that cultural social anthropologists were interested in simple exotic societies, but even more by the idea that they might be interested in formulating and answering general questions about the nature of the human species and that, therefore, their work could be compatible with disciplines such as hers. The lack of any generalising theoretical framework within which her research interest might find a place is not surprising when we look at what kind of thing is done in many university departments under the label social or cultural anthropology. Take for example the interests listed on the web site of th