Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

By Dan Fessler via International Cognition and Culture Institute

As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.

Lesson 1: Look beyond your local circle of colleagues. If you are fortunate (as I have been), you will be surrounded by brilliant scholars; however, even the best such group is but a tiny fraction of all of the scientists in the world. Learn from those around you, but do not limit your horizons to their interests or perspectives. Instead, seek out investigators whose views are different from those with which you are familiar.

While I was writing my dissertation, a friend gave me a copy of the newly-published The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992). Although this book proved to be seminal, unfortunately for me, the key chapters by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992) had minimal impact on me at the time. While I am to blame for not having been more diligent, part of the problem lay in the way that these chapters were written. Much as I admire Drs. Cosmides and Tooby, their early work suffered from two limitations. First, their writing packed numerous complex ideas into overly dense language. Second, their style was dismissive of substantial bodies of prior scholarship, waiving it off as misguided — although I too was critical of conventional social science, I nevertheless knew from my own research that there was much of value therein. Puzzled and put off, I (and others like me) regrettably ignored many aspects of The Adapted Mind for quite a while. More…

By Ashis Nandy via Economic & Political Weekly

This is based on the 13th Kappen Memorial Lecture, delivered at Bangalore on 22 September 2011.

It has grown out of a trialogue among Tamotsu Aoki, Nur Yalman, and the author, organised some years ago by Iwanami Shoten at Tokyo. The discussion spilled into a conference on “Culture and Hegemony: Politics of Culture in the Age of Globalisation”, organised by GRIPS project of the University of Tokyo and by the Institut fur Ethnologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universit, Heidelberg, and into a small article published in Spanish in an Yearbook.

Ashis Nandy (reasonbuster@csds.in) is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.  More…

From Eric Michael Johnson at Scientific American, The Primate Diaries…

Let’s face it, as a species we’re obsessed with ourselves. The vast majority of us spend our days at work or school where a considerable amount of time is taken up not discussing the important issues of the day, but rather the juicy details of one another’s personal lives. Then we go home only to sign on to social network services like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and continue where we left off. In this respect we’re fairly typical primates. Most of our simian relatives, particularly our great ape cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos, like nothing better than keeping a watchful eye on what other members of their troop are up to. But our species has taken this preoccupation one step further.

Human beings are the most social of the primates and have the largest group sizes of any species in our order. For about 90% of our existence we lived in hunter-gatherer societies with populations that likely clustered around 150-200 individuals. By way of comparison, baboons come in a distant second with an average of about 50 group members. Now, thanks to modern industrial agriculture, our species has pushed that range well into the millions, a development that has resulted in considerable stress on our slightly above average primate brains. Of course, all organisms need to successfully predict and navigate their environments in order to relay their genes on to the next generation. It’s just that this becomes increasingly complicated when there are many individuals all interacting in the same environment simultaneously. Merely keeping track of these relationships requires a considerable amount of time and energy, not to mention brain power. More…