Neuroanthropology

It's that time of year when we have to set our 'goals' for the upcoming year, engaging in the stultifying prelude to the annual kabuki theatre piece that is performance evaluation. As the author puts it:

"The typical performance review system doesn't work because you're demotivating half your population, poking them in the eye with a sharp stick," she says. And, apparently, dulling sections of their brains for a while too.

Or, in other words, just count our publications and the students in our classes and our number of advisees and leave us alone to actually do our work....

Includes good discussion of adult neurogenesis and its therapeutic uses:

"Research I’m involved in has shown that environmental enrichment, with increased levels of cognitive stimulation and physical activity, can delay disease onset and slow progression in a genetic model of the fatal inherited disorder, Huntington’s disease."

Barbara King's excellent discussion of the whole Chagnon affair.

Peggy Trawick passed along this piece on the resignation of Sahlins. It's short, but it also highlights that the issue wasn't just the admission of Napoleon Chagnon.

One of the most difficult tasks we people of Oriental descent face when we live here in North America is precisely this urgent need to explain to our friends and colleagues why is it that our folks "back home" so loathe their shoes that they throw them at their enemies while here in North America the anthropological fact we immediately notice is exactly the opposite and how people so utterly adore their shoes that throwing it at a person is nothing short of a stirring sign of adoration and even flirtations, depending on the season of the year, region of the US, where the ritual takes place, and/or the age and sex of the shoe-thrower.    

Vaughan Bell's stuff is always good, but this little post is particularly suggestive. Vaughan identifies some of the currents that fed into the idea that the brain was the seat of the self, including psychedelic drugs, military research, and pharmaceutical company advertising. On the last, he writes:

"In the following years, as neuroscience became prominent and psychoanalysis waned, pharmaceutical companies realised they had to sell theories to make their drugs marketable. The theories couldn’t be the messy ideas of actual science, however, they needed to be straightforward stories of how specific neurotransmitters were tied to simple psychological concepts, not least because psychiatric medication was now largely prescribed by family doctors. Low serotonin leads to depression, too much dopamine causes madness. The fact these theories were wrong was irrelevant, they just needed to be reason enough to prescribe the advertised pill. The Prozac generation was sold and the pharmacology of self became dinner table conversation."

If you're not over Jared Diamond's account of the differences between Us and Them, and his shtick about fearing the shower, there's more from an interview he did with sociologist Peter Christoff. For example, he has no time for criticisms that he's homogenizing indigenous groups:

'The traditional societies that we see today are not frozen models of the past, on the one hand. On the other hand, they’re not irrelevant to the past because they are still small-scale societies. And when you’ve got 200 people, and whether the 200 people are from today or whether the 200 people are from 30,000 years ago, there are some things that you have to have with 200 people. So in short, I think my book is faithful to the complexities of the problem.'

In other words, I acknowledge what my critics say, but then dismiss it and suggest it's irrelevant because I thought of it. 

If you don't already know about it, ANU Press is one of the really interesting presses out there, offering ebook versions of their titles for free to download. 

Great discussion of the genre of satirical reviews by Celia Emmelhainz. Well worth a read, although did not make me cry laughing like the Goat Edition of Whitney Houston 'I Will Always Love You.' Still excellent enough though that I will not write a satirical comment on this piece by Celia.

The morally and technically dubious Human Terrain System also riddled with financial improprieties. As Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University put it, mincing no words: 'The program recruited the human flotsam and jetsam of the discipline and pretended it was recruiting the best. Treating taxpayer money as if it were water, it paid under-qualified 20-something anthropologists more than even Harvard professors. And it treated our ethics code as a nuisance to be ignored.'