scholarly journals Elements of Neuroanthropology

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel H. Lende ◽  
Breanne I. Casper ◽  
Kaleigh B. Hoyt ◽  
Gino L. Collura

Neuroanthropology is the integration of neuroscience into anthropology and aims to understand “brains in the wild.” This interdisciplinary field examines patterns of human variation in field settings and provides empirical research that complements work done in clinical and laboratory settings. Neuroanthropology often uses ethnography in combination with theories and methods from cognitive science as a way to capture how culture, mind, and brain interact. This article describes nine elements that outline how to do neuroanthropology research: (1) integrating biology and culture through neuroscience and biocultural anthropology; (2) extending focus of anthropology on what people say and do to include what people process; (3) sizing culture appropriately, from broad patterns of culture to culture in small-scale settings; (4) understanding patterns of cultural variation, in particular how culture produces patterns of shared variation; (5) considering individuals in interaction with culture, with levels of analysis that can go from biology to social structures; (6) focusing on interactive elements that bring together biological and cultural processes; (7) conceptual triangulation, which draws on anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience in conjunction with field, clinic, and laboratory; (8) critical complementarity as a way to integrate the strengths of critical scholarship with interdisciplinary work; and (9) using methodological triangulation as a way to advance interdisciplinary research. These elements are illustrated through three case studies: research on US combat veterans and how they use Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a way to manage the transition to becoming civilians, work on human-raptor interactions to understand how and why these interactions can prove beneficial for human handlers, and adapting cue reactivity research on addiction to a field-based approach to understand how people interact with cues in naturalistic settings.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Kilius ◽  
David R. Samson ◽  
Sheina Lew-Levy ◽  
Mallika S. Sarma ◽  
Ujas A. Patel ◽  
...  

AbstractSleep studies in small-scale subsistence societies have broadened our understanding of cross-cultural sleep patterns, revealing the flexibility of human sleep. We examined sleep biology among BaYaka foragers from the Republic of Congo who move between environmentally similar but socio-ecologically distinct locations to access seasonal resources. We analyzed the sleep–wake patterns of 51 individuals as they resided in a village location (n = 39) and a forest camp (n = 23) (362 nights total). Overall, BaYaka exhibited high sleep fragmentation (50.5) and short total sleep time (5.94 h), suggestive of segmented sleep patterns. Sleep duration did not differ between locations, although poorer sleep quality was exhibited in the village. Linear mixed effect models demonstrated that women’s sleep differed significantly from men’s in the forest, with longer total sleep time (β ± SE =  − 0.22 ± 0.09, confidence interval (CI) = [− 0.4, − 0.03]), and higher sleep quality (efficiency; β ± SE =  − 0.24 ± 0.09, CI = [− 0.42, − 0.05]). These findings may be due to gender-specific social and economic activities. Circadian rhythms were consistent between locations, with women exhibiting stronger circadian stability. We highlight the importance of considering intra-cultural variation in sleep–wake patterns when taking sleep research into the field.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (17) ◽  
pp. 4688-4693 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Clark Barrett ◽  
Alexander Bolyanatz ◽  
Alyssa N. Crittenden ◽  
Daniel M. T. Fessler ◽  
Simon Fitzpatrick ◽  
...  

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.


1991 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 247-253
Author(s):  
Devinder S. Sodhi

The data from a small-scale experimental study on ice-structure interaction are used to compute the energy exchanges that take place during creep deformation and intermittent and continuous crushing of ice. The energy supplied by the carriage is partly stored in the structural spring, partly converted to kinetic energy, partly dissipated in deforming and extruding the ice and partly dissipated as heat in the damping mechanisms of the structure. Except for the heat dissipation, all other forms of energy were computed from the experimental data, and the heat dissipation was computed from the energy balance using the first law of thermodynamics. Plots of all forms of energy are shown in graphical form, in which their relative magnitudes, times of occurrence and interplay can be seen. The main result of this study is the thesis that intermittent crushing or ice-induced vibration takes place whenever there is an imbalance between the rates of work done by the carriage and the indentor and that there are no vibrations when these rates of work are equal.


2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 795-815 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Henrich ◽  
Robert Boyd ◽  
Samuel Bowles ◽  
Colin Camerer ◽  
Ernst Fehr ◽  
...  

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (15) ◽  
pp. 5386-5403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Zhou ◽  
Adam H. Sobel ◽  
Raghu Murtugudde

Abstract A kinetic energy budget for the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) is established in a three-scale framework. The three scales are the zonal mean, the MJO scale with wavenumbers 1–4, and the small scale with wavenumbers larger than 4. In the composite budget, the dominant balance at the MJO scale is between conversion from potential energy and work done by the pressure gradient force (PGF). This balance is consistent with the view that the MJO wind perturbations can be viewed as a quasi-linear response to a slowly varying heat source. A large residual in the upper troposphere suggests that much kinetic energy dissipates there by cumulus friction. Kinetic energy exchange between different scales is not a large component of the composite budget. There is a transfer of kinetic energy from the MJO scale to the small scale; that is, this multiscale interaction appears to damp rather than strengthen the MJO. There is some variation in the relative importance of different terms from one event to the next. In particular, conversion from mean kinetic energy can be important in some events. In a few other events, the influence from the extratropics is pronounced.


Music ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Lerner ◽  
Blake Howe

In the final decades of the 20th century, as disability rights activists protested ableist prejudice and discrimination, scholars began to group themselves around the topic of disability. In 1982 the Society for Disability Studies was founded; 1990 saw the passage of the US Americans with Disabilities Act, a piece of landmark legislation that sought to address systemic discrimination on the basis of physical and mental disabilities; and conferences and journals devoted to Disability Studies began to flourish in the 1990s. The relatively young interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies approaches disability beyond the traditional epistemologies of medical science and instead considers bodily and mental differences as both embodied experiences and constructs of particular cultures and societies. Following earlier work done on gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity, Disability Studies explores the social, cultural, and historical meanings of disability as a manifestation of human variety, celebrating disability as a difference while acknowledging the lived experience of possessing a bodily or mental impairment. While music scholars have long been aware of the possibility of composers and performers with impairments—Beethoven’s deafness is central to the narrative of Western music history—they only began to engage with ideas from Disability Studies in the first decade of the 21st century. The year 2006 was notable for both an article in a major music journal (Straus 2006, cited under Music and Disability Studies) and the first book-length study on disability in music (Lerner and Straus 2006, also under Music and Disability Studies). A large body of music scholarship quickly followed, including dissertations, conferences papers, journal articles, and monographs, and the scope and approaches to music and disability have been as varied and distinct as the human bodies and minds under study.


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey M. Zacks

Events make up much of our lived experience, and the perceptual mechanisms that represent events in experience have pervasive effects on action control, language use, and remembering. Event representations in both perception and memory have rich internal structure and connections one to another, and both are heavily informed by knowledge accumulated from previous experiences. Event perception and memory have been identified with specific computational and neural mechanisms, which show protracted development in childhood and are affected by language use, expertise, and brain disorders and injuries. Current theoretical approaches focus on the mechanisms by which events are segmented from ongoing experience, and emphasize the common coding of events for perception, action, and memory. Abetted by developments in eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computer science, research on event perception and memory is moving from small-scale laboratory analogs to the complexity of events in the wild.


1989 ◽  
Vol 120 ◽  
pp. 389-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo van Woerden ◽  
Ulrich J. Schwarz ◽  
Bart P. Wakker

AbstractThis contribution reports results of recent absorption-line studies on La Palma and reviews earlier work done elsewhere. CaII has been found in absorption in five HVCs, mostly against extragalactic background sources. The CaII/HI ratios differ strongly, from 0.002 to 0.1 times solar, suggesting different origins of HVCs. Nondetections of CaII absorption in stellar spectra may provide lower limits to HVC distances, or be caused by small-scale structure or a low CaII/HI ratio in the HVC. Proper interpretation requires comparison of CaII/HI ratios in stellar and extragalactic probes, and use of high-resolution HI maps. No solid direct distance determinations of HVCs are available yet. The distance of Complex C is controversial.


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