Link to applied neuro-anthropology

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

New blog: Neuroanthropology

I’ve been a little less active on Culture Matters of late. Not only did I have a really rough end of the semester (nothing like two new units from scratch to set you back), but I’ve also been working on getting a new blog project up and running, so I thought I’d let all Culture Matters readers in on it.

Since around 2002, I’ve become extremely interested in the neurosciences and the implications of new research in the brain sciences for socio-cultural theory in anthropology. This isn’t the space to go into it all, but new findings on neural and phenotypic plasticity allows us to think much more seriously about how culture might shape development, allowing us to think seriously about a kind of deep enculturation of the brain, senses, endocrine system, and the like. Researchers in fields that specialize in these topics are increasingly aware of the degree to which developmental variables affect developmental outcomes, creating opportunities for anthropological research to influence a host of other fields.

This might allow us to think more seriously about the organic dimensions of embodiment, as Tim Ingold has recommended. The relevance for applied anthropology are many: from medical anthropology to the study of trauma, from a reinvigoration of anthropological studies of childhood to the potential to engage in the public sphere with biological scientists who advocate reductionist approaches, a robust neuroanthropology might really enrich what we do.

So we’ve started a blog, Neuroanthropology, and you’re welcome to surf on over, check it out, and even join up as a contributor if this is your sort of thing (just contact me either through the blog or at greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au). I may cross-post a few things, but you should especially look for Daniel Lende’s discussions of stress, addiction, and medical anthropology’s links to neurosciences. It’s our Holiday present to the blogosphere.

Early fetal gender detection (gender contagion?)

A U.K.-based company markets an early fetal gender detection test; they claim remarkable accuracy (”99%”) at only 6 weeks gestation. DNA Worldwide’s website describes the test as involving a “blood spot” obtained by doing a finger prick that the woman then mails in to their laboratory, and claims that results published in a Science article in 2005 proved the technique. (They don ‘t provide a link, but a search of the Science archives reveals this article as the one they seem to be refering to; the article does not “prove” their company’s technique and doubts their claims of accuracy.)

Another company, Urobiologics, claims to be able to detect fetal gender using a sample of the pregnant woman’s urine as early as one day after her first missed period. (See this Obstetrics and Gynecology article for an assessment of the science possibly behind the blood test; a search of the PubMed database revealed this review article that is very skeptical of the possibilities of finding extracellular fetal DNA in sufficient quantities to detect in maternal urine, and my cursory PubMed search suggests that no publishing scientists are currently experimenting with fetal gender detection based on testosterone levels in maternal urine.)

Let us set aside entertaining thoughts of a lucrative business scheme in which a private, proprietary (therefore unverified and not monitored by national regulatory bodies) lab test does not have to have any scientific merit whatsoever in order to produce 50% satisfied customers who will receive an apparently correct diagnosis. There remain a couple of interesting things to note here, from an anthropological perspective.

First, the ability of consumers to discover gender at such an early stage in pregnancy has provoked hand-wringing from anxious pundits who seek weighty opinions from certified bioethicists. DNA Worldwide, which manufactures the “Pink or Blue® Gender Test,” attempts to alleviate concerns about sex-selective abortion with reassurances that they are not selling the test “into China and India and some other areas” and that they are a company that “operates in the UK, a liberal society that does not prize babies of one sex over another.” Note the easy deferral of ethics problems to a vague, far away, Oriental Other. Anthropologist Sarah Pinto, in a personal e-mail exchange, articulated the matter well when she questioned

“this idea that gender detection, among other repro technologies, is rationally mediated and managed and used in the west - that there would be no dubious uses of it here because The Problem is in son preference (or whatever gloss is used to apply to a whole complex of issues…) which lives Elsewhere in The East (kind of like female genital cutting, which only lives in Africa and the Middle East, while things like routine episiotomies, re-virgining surgery (or whatever it’s called), genital cosmetic surgery etc etc are completely different things).”

The second interesting point arises from a little line in the homepage of the test website, which states that “It is important…that No Males are in the room during collection” (punctuation as in original document). Sarah brought this to my attention and I was fascinated. What trouble could arise from the mere physical presence of a man in the same room where the blood is drawn? Was it a contamination theory?

New research on infant ‘intelligence’

Here’s a summary piece on recent research suggesting that infants have a host of previously unexpected abilities, including a surprisingly facility to distinguish languages by lipreading (!), discern among different monkey faces (that adult humans can’t distinguish), and recognize rhythms. I have a personal soft spot for infant research, in part because I have overly-romanticized images about how this research would actually take place. When I read the reports, they summon images of cute babies in front of video screens or stacks of toys or listening to music, startling when researchers change the stimulus, leading a bunch of adults to excitedly write down notes…

but enough of that. Anyway, the research again points to the possibility that humans enter the world with a substantial amount of structure to the way that they perceive, and that much of early development is actually the foreclosing of potential developmental pathways in perceptual ability. For example, infants seem to recognize more speech sounds than do older children, leading scientists to suggest that unused ability to differentiate these sounds eventually atrophies and disappears: use it or lose it. The process seems entirely consistent with what Gerard Edelman calls ‘neural Darwinism’ (no relation to illegitimate step-sibling, ’social Darwinism’), a process of development in which an ‘over-wired’ neural system learns by eliminating unused connections.

Unfortunately, in anthropology, the people who have paid the closest attention to research findings like this have tended to use the research to argue for ‘innate’ ability, such as innate grammars or innate brain modules. The big story for me here though is not innateness, but the dynamics of development, working not from a ‘blank slate’ brain but instead from a promiscuously connected nervous system, one that is challenged to eliminate extraneous information and stimuli.