1. Paul H. Mason PhD Candidate Macquarie University
Neuroanthropology
Paul H. Mason
PhD Candidate
Macquarie University

2. REALITY EMBODIED BRAIN dance ENVIRONMENT music language CULTURE
SOCIETY
brain-
brain
interactions
brain-
culture
interactions
experience
ENVIRONMENT
music
dance
language
history
brain-
environment
interactions
culture-environment interactions
REALITY
Sebagai sistem evolusi yang bisa berubah dengan perubahan dengan konteks kebudayaan atau tuntutan sosial.
time
time

3. neuroanthropology neuroanthropology
‘Neuroanthropology of Tourette’s Syndrome’,
Oliver Sacks awarded Guggenheim Fellowship (1989)
Neuroanthropology aims to study both how culture shapes neurological processes and how neurological substrates may produce distinctive cultural behaviours (Couser 2001)
The approach I use is called Neuroanthropology. You may already be familiar with Oliver Sack’s work in neuroanthropology.
“explore my subjects’ lives as they live in their real world, feeling in part like a naturalist, examining rare forms of life, in part like an anthropologist, a neuroanthropologist, in the field.” (1995)
Oliver Sacks “has gone a considerable distance toward demonstrating what neuroanthropology might look like in practice” (Couser, 2001:11).
TenHouten and others apply neuroanthropology to both social anthropology and to the sociology of culture.
Neuroanthropology, as a discipline of research was first defined 1976.
In 1979, Laughlin defined it as ‘ The study of the relationship between the brain and sociocultural behaviour’. My more recent definition, that neuroanthropology is the study of the cultural basis of mind and the biological basis of cultures, isn’t a large departure from Laughlin and others’ early definition. The field exists in recognition of the fact that the relationship between brain and culture is co-evolutionary and co-developmental. The main aim of neuroanthropology is to study and understand the retroactive causality between brain and culture. It is, in essence, the study of the relationship between elements and systems.
while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's version of structuralism, Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974 did not turn away from a fundamental structural basis for human culture. They argued that some kind of structural foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures. They proposed a kind of neuroanthropology which would lay the foundations for a more complete scientific account of cultural similarity and variation by requiring an integration of cultural anthropology and neuroscience. This program was also embraced by such theorists as Victor Turner. The perspective grounds discussions of learning, culture, personality and social action in neuroscience. universal structures characteristic of human language and culture, cognition about time and space, affect, certain psychopathologies, and the like were due to the genetically predisposed organization of the nervous system. It seemed preposterous to Laughlin and d’Aquili that the invariant patterns of behavior, cognition and culture being discussed in various structuralist theories in anthropology, psychology and literary criticism could be lodged anywhere other than in the nervous system. After all, every thought, every image, every feeling and action is demonstrably mediated by the nervous system. Moreover, it seemed possible to develop a theoretical perspective that: was non-dualistic in modelling mind and body, was not reductionistic in the positivist sense (i.e., that the physical sciences can give a complete account of all things mental/cultural), and was informed by all reasonable sources of data about human consciousness and culture. In other words, no explanatory account of culture is complete without incompassing what we know about the structures in the nervous system mediating culture -- for example, music, which is a cultural universal mediated by demonstrable neurophysiological structures

4. neurology and anthropology
Paul Broca
19th century anthropologist
and neuroscientist
(Monod-Broca 2005)
Jean Pierre Changeux,
L’homme Neuronal (1983)

5. (Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1979)
neuroanthropology
neuroanthropology
“One of the most fundamental intellectual contributions of cultural anthropology is the illumination of the role of cultural patterning in human cognition.” (Paredes and Hepburn 1976)
“The investigation of the cultural determinants of the ways in which our brains are developed historically and put to use”
(Ten Houten et al. 1976:506)
“The study of the relationship between the brain and sociocultural behaviour.”
(Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili 1979)

6. neuroanthropology neuroanthropology
“Just as anthropological … research has promoted our understanding of the variety of ways people process and interpret information from the external world, so researchers in neuroscience have been doing much to introduce us to the variety of forms of mental processing that have evolved on this earth.” (Duffy 2001:64)
A field of enquiry at the intersection of
science and culture, neuroanthropology
is “The study of the cultural basis of mind
and the biological basis of cultures.”
(Mason 2005)