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- Convenors:
-
Veronica Strang
(Oxford University)
Robert Barton (Durham University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Cognition and evolution
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 10
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to reconcile social and material perspectives on the mind and their diverse spatial and temporal scales. Via a question as to where the mind is located, it will explore different disciplinary and cultural understandings about the internal and external agencies that compose the mind.
Long Abstract:
By exploring the ways in which diverse cultures and academic disciplines conceptualise and locate the mind, this panel seeks to develop a pan-anthropological perspective that reconciles its social and material dimensions. Concepts of mind encompass vastly differing temporal and spatial scales, from a focus on fleeting micro-neurological events to broader understandings about evolutionary development, and from assumptions that the mind is located in individual phenomenological experience to more abstract visions of shared consciousness and extended minds. Spatially distributed views, for example ideas about sentient and/or agentive landscapes, highlight a reality that the 'matter' of the mind is both internal and external. This draws attention to the multiple forms of social and material agency that direct the mind, and the need for disciplines to collaborate in developing a comprehensive and coherent view of these. Addressing a shared question about where the mind is located will highlight similarities and points of confluence between different understandings. Through this traversal of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, the panel hopes to enable the co-creation of new ideas about human thought and imagination.
The panel seeks participants from anthropological sub-disciplines and other relevant areas, such as the cognitive and neurological sciences. Observing that a commitment to disciplinary equality is foundational to successful interdisciplinarity, it will replace the conventional discussant model with a round-table conversation. Each participant will be asked to engage directly with contributions from the 'other' side of the social-material divide, and to reflect on their own research in the light of these.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Frances Morphy (The Australian National University) Howard Morphy (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
Is it productive to take 'mind' as a starting point for cross-cultural or cross-temporal comparison? The answer is a qualified 'yes', if mind is seen not as a 'thing' but as a metacategory for analysing how different cultures conceptualise mental states and processes in language-specific ways.
Paper long abstract:
Is there such a 'thing' as 'mind'? English speakers, including anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers, rarely pose this question; because the word exists in English it is assumed that the thing itself exists. In Yolngu-matha (YM), and other Australian Aboriginal languages, there is no word that translates as 'mind'; linguist Anna Wierzbicka claims that no language except English encodes the concept in its precise 'Anglo' form. So when we talk of 'mind' in analysing how other languages and cultures conceptualise mental processes are we just scratching a cultural blindspot of our own?
The answer is both 'yes' and 'no'. It is 'yes' if we take for granted the existence of 'mind' rather than analysing what we mean by it in our own linguistic and cultural context. However if we unpack what we mean by 'mind' it may then prove useful as a comparative term—or metacategory—for exploring how other languages and cultures categorise mental states and processes, and whether they differentiate them explicitly from other kinds of states and processes, in the way that we do when we speak of 'mind'. Through this mediatory process we can begin to explore the concept of mind cross-culturally. We will consider whether 'mind' is a useful metacategory for exploring YM speakers' conceptualisations of mental states and processes. We observe in conclusion that YM speakers, when speaking in English, sometimes use the word 'mind', and ask whether a YM speaker means the same thing by 'mind' as we native English speakers do.
Veronica Strang (Oxford University) Robert Barton (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
Supporting an interdisciplinary discussion bringing evolutionary and cultural anthropology together, this paper considers how systematic consideration might be given to cognitive engagements with social and material agencies, and the processes through which the mind is composed.
Paper long abstract:
Recent research increasingly emphasises the unity of cognitive, affective and sensory-motor processes that, through the individual’s interaction with and experience of its world, also co-constitute that world. Understanding the mind as a holistic and recursive process of engagement acknowledges both human commonalities and the specificity of cultural and historical contexts in which the mind is represented and experienced. Articulating a cross-cultural ‘meta-categorical’ concept of mind may be assisted by considering the range of social and material agencies with which people engage, and their spatialities and temporalities.
Locating and describing the mind in a way that is both comprehensive and comprehensible requires a cross-cultural model similar to that which enables ethnographic comparison. It calls for a systematic account of the broad categories of agentive interactions experienced by individuals and groups. Given the intangibility of the mind, it may be useful to employ a fluid proxy. Human engagements with water flow through and connect the diverse internal and external, social and material agencies with which the mind interacts. Considering how the mind is ‘reflected in water’ therefore assists an interdisciplinary conversation about the location of the mind, and the dialectical processes through which it is composed.
Elia Vardaki (Technical University of Crete)
Paper short abstract:
My interest is to explore the effects of the Automated Vehicles in human cognition, in knowledge transmission, memory practices, spatial and temporal perception.
Paper long abstract:
If the mind is relationally affected by collective and environmental factors which is turn shape our cognition and interaction with the social, material and biological environments, then how the emergent technology of the Automated Vehicles would affect human cognition and embodied minds? This new technology can change the perception of urban space in multifarious ways, whilst creating new relational connections between mind, material culture and bodily practices.
My interest is to explore along the lines of cognitive approach, the way these new environmental factors and new material worlds interact with and in turn will affect human cognition. As the automated technology influences nearly every aspect of everyday practices, anthropologists should pose questions on the way this new artificially intelligence such as autonomous agents would affect cognition related to various aspects of human life like spatial perceptions, memory practices, emotions, embodied practices, creativity and imaginary perspectives.
Amidst growing concerns over the implication of such technology in human life social scientists point to the fact that the use and implementation of technology is viewed linear, while human practices and social implications aren't linear. Social forces like environmentalist, concerned citizens, government regulators, state mechanisms would regulate and control these technologies (Brown and Duguid, 2017). Although, these responses are true they only highlight the external restrictions and control mechanisms for regulating autonomous technology. The implication of Automated Vehicles in the shape on cognition, the aspects of human mind that would be affected, the embodied practices, knowledge patterns and memory mechanisms call for anthropological attention.
Nayanika Mookherjee (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to make preliminary explorations into the process through which a baby’s mind is ‘scanned’, assumed to be ‘hardwired’ and how that is translated into government policies on adoption.
Paper long abstract:
Research in developmental neuroscience has stressed the importance of the first three years of a child’s brain development and the importance of a stable family environment in this period. This evidence has been influential in UK child welfare policy. For example, there is an increase in early removal of children from their birth families into adoptive families. However, the use of such evidence by policy makers has been criticised by some academic disciplines. The experiences of adoptees and birth parents nonetheless remain absent from this debate.
This paper is a preliminary exploration as to how the mind was seen to be a ‘gap’ in government understandings and how that framework seemed to impact on policies relating to early years intervention. Through an examination of movements like ‘First Three Years movement’, ‘Two is Too Late’, ‘The 1001 Critical days’, the paper seeks to locate the biological, material and social aspects of the mind that come to determine these government policies. The paper will also bring into conversation bio-social debates relating to developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience as well as engage with nature/culture debates relating to infant mind/brain, their well-being, ideas of loss and attachment. Through this we could draw out broad implications as to what this policy focus on the mind might have on the role of ‘hard’ science, ideas of parenting, social and material engineering.