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What is This?
method, as object of
study, and as research
aesthetic
Andreas Roepstorff
Aarhus University, Denmark
Chris Frith
Aarhus University, Denmark, Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging, University College London, UK, and All Souls
College, Oxford, UK
Abstract
Neuroanthropology is a new kid on the academic block. It seems to offer a
methodological and conceptual synthesis, which bridges current fault lines within
anthropology, both as discipline and as departments. We are not convinced that it
will deliver on these grounds. However, it has the potential to open up novel ways
to do and think ‘experimental anthropology’, as a method, as an object of study and as a
research aesthetic. This approach, we argue, is probably not neuroanthropological – it
may simply be anthropological.
Keywords
biology, brain, culture, experience, experimentation, phenomenology
We are grateful for the invitation to provide a commentary for this exciting special
issue. The papers chosen, each in their own way, reveal that something new is
happening in the scientific descriptions of what we as humans are. At stake is a
discussion of how nature relates to culture, and culture to nature. If Bruno Latour
(1993) was right in identifying a nature-culture separation at the heart of the
Corresponding author:
Andreas Roepstorff, Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark
Email: andreas.roepstorff@hum.au.dk
modern constitution this debate may, in fact, be negotiating a key balance in the
contemporary world as we know it.
It is high time that this discussion confronts a more mainstream anthropology
audience. As convincingly argued in Reyna’s piece, the discussion touches on a
schism that has been central to the discipline, ever since its inauguration more than
100 years ago. This is also apparent in Whitehead’s narrative of the coming of age
of an anthropologist. These contributors identify a tension that created fault lines
of non-communication, right inside academic departments. At stake are ontolog-
ical discussions about the nature of (human) reality and epistemological discussions
on how to gain knowledge. Settling these issues has many ethical and societal
implications: how to educate kids, how to understand psychiatric disorders and,
in general, how to build social realities (ethics). The fact that the discourse engages
with epistemology, ontology and ethics may suggest that, fundamentally, cosmol-
ogy is at stake (Roepstorff 2003). We believe that the brain is important in these
discussions, but perhaps the way forward may be more about looking at particular
research practices, experiments, than at brains per se.
from the experiential to the biological (cf. certain strands of transcendental phe-
nomenology; see Dominguez’s paper, this issue) or from the cultural to everything
else, as in a straw man version of cultural relativism. We therefore propose that
humans have experiences, that they have brains, that they are embedded in cultural
contexts, and that, somehow, these different factors interact with each other. This
proposal provides an important ‘ontology checklist’ that can be used to assess
various approaches to knowledge about the human.
Tensions between disciplines, such as those described in the papers here, may be
based on idealized views of what the research practice is all about.
In our research group, we have tried to counter this by making people from
different disciplines do very concrete research projects together, as a way to get out
of stereotyped views. It is not easy, and there may be some important lessons to
draw from how it gets complicated.
Following Hastrup, Dominguez argues that a key lesson from anthropology has
been to bring into scientific discussion the importance of lived experiences. We
entirely agree. This is of key importance, not least because it creates a conceptual
space for agency and interaction in between structures in the world and structures
in the mind.
There is, however, a challenge as to how to translate this into a ‘classic’
experimental setting. Shaun Gallagher (2003) has argued that one may front-
load concepts into an experimental design. Bahador Bahrami, one of our col-
leagues, tried that when he took a standard psycho-physical task and
embedded it into a communicative, collaborative scenario, where people were
allowed to discuss with each other, if they disagreed on their solution to the
same task. Our finding was that being able to freely share experiences, i.e. to
talk about what they had each seen, allowed the pairs to do better on the task
than individuals, at least under certain rather well-defined conditions (Bahrami
et al. 2010).
In a paradigmatic study, Antoine Lutz, Francisco Varea and colleagues used
individual experiences of task performance, that is, ‘what did it feel like when you
did x?’, to structure the analysis of EEG data in a visual task (Lutz et al. 2002).
They found that using these experiential accounts as ways to structure the data
analysis gave meaningful clusterings of the data, indicating that it indeed some-
times pays off for an experimenter to trust the subjects (Jack and Roepstorff
2003a). These may be small steps towards coming up with experiments which sur-
vive the ontology checklist, and are often framed in script-report rather than
‘stimulus-response’ terms (Jack and Roepstorff 2002).
But one would limit oneself, if the contribution from anthropology was only
about helping psychologists and cognitive scientists to do better experiments.
In fact, in our experience, this mainly works at an early stage of the research
process, when one tries to identify relevant questions to ask. It is, however, one
thing to help asking novel questions, which take interaction and experience
seriously; it is quite another to come up with concrete and feasible experiments
which may help address these questions using a particular method. While anthro-
pologists may have some skills in the former, usually, very little in their actual
training qualifies them well for the latter task.
In fact, once one gets into the necessary nitty-gritty details of experimental
design and subsequent data analysis, the anthropological intervention seems
rarely very useful in its own right. So much of this work is a matter of
identifying and dealing with confounds and alternative explanations. More
often than not, it exposes to the anthropologist all the many potential
confounding factors and ordering effects that in the view of other disciplines
for very good reasons may question the validity of his or her work. On the
other hand, the more these factors come to structure the experiments, the
further one tends to get away from an understanding of ‘lived experience’,
of the kind that the anthropologist would be happy with. Somehow, ratings
of pain on a 5-point scale don’t really give a thick description of what it is
like to have electrical currents through your chin (Abrahamsen et al. 2010).
We read an undertone of frustration about what it is like to go experimental
in Dominguez’s and Whitehead’s papers. When one, as an anthropologist,
tries, out of the best of intentions, to go down the experimental route, one
runs the risk of experiencing a double failure. On the one hand, one may be
selling out on what anthropology is good at but, on the other hand, one is not
gaining the rigor and/or style which is required for other experimentalists to
take one seriously.
Luckily, there are other ways to do experimental anthropology. Just as ‘cultural
anthropology’ is about studying cultures, not making culture, one reading of
‘experimental anthropology’ is an anthropological study of experiments.
Dominguez (this issue) makes an important contribution to experimental anthro-
pology in this sense. By following up on an earlier claim that imaging experiments
transform subjects into objectivity (Roepstorff 2002), he shows how it is indeed
possible, at least on paper, to close the circle and get back to the subjects, by taking
seriously their experiences. This form of ‘experimental anthropology’, where
anthropologists use tools and tricks of the trade to understand experiments as a
very peculiar human practice, is potentially fruitful and productive. Our intuition is
that ethnographically mapping human experiments, with or without scanners, as
particular forms of intersubjective and interobjective practices may show how
agency gets redistributed from the individual actors to the script that frames the
experiment. In that sense, experiments may remind us of rituals, and it is no
wonder that those who use experiments to identify agency find very little of it
inside the experiment (Roepstorff and Frith 2004).
There is a third sense in which anthropology may become – or, probably, always
was – experimental. It can be an aesthetics of research practice, experimental in the
sense of trying out new ways of writing, new ways of being in the field, or novel
forms of intervention (Marcus 2010; Roepstorff 2011b), such as using films as an
experimental tool, which is fed back to the community to elicit new forms of
knowledge (Suhr et al. 2009; Suhr and Otto 2011). Combining this third sense of
experimental with the first sense of experimental allows for ‘experimental experi-
mental anthropology’ that tries out new ways to work experimentally in an anthro-
pological setting. One example could be to take experiments to the field
(Konvalinka et al. 2011). If one examines both the results emerging from experi-
ments and the social setting and questions which experiments generate (Astuti
2007), one may be outlining an anthropological research practice that is simulta-
neously experimental in all three meanings, as research aesthetic, as method and as
object of study (Roepstorff 2011b).
this could be a key element in the efficacy of rituals in creating group cohesion
(Xygalatas 2008). We front-loaded that idea into an experimental investigation of
spectators and fire-walkers talking part in a ritual in Spain, and we used measures
of heart beat as a very simple proxy for arousal. Using well established mathemat-
ical models, we found that related spectators and fire-walkers shared a level of
synchronization in the patterns of heart rhythms over the ritual, which was not
seen in non-related spectators (Konvalinka et al. 2011). This finding does not
attempt to reduce a particular ritual to a measure of physiology, but it suggests
that front-loading a basic anthropological concept, rituals work on groups, into an
experimental design may allow for very concrete investigations to be made.
weave across the apparent cleft, and we hope that this paper and the rest of the
special issue may be one element in creating such patterned textures.
However, we are not convinced that what the field currently needs is the naming
of a new hybrid discipline such as neuroanthropology. This suggests a grand theory
of how, on an abstract level, the cultural, the experiential and the neurological
relate to each other. We believe that something else is more important, something
at the same time less ambitious and perhaps more difficult to provide. We need
novel cases that can examine and illustrate how these factors interrelate in concrete
settings. We need questions and models that can be tested in the field and in the lab,
and we need to formulate potential mechanisms as a way to gain a better foothold.
There may be dialectics at stake here, but the dialectics may be a matter of sending
questions, approaches and models back and forth. We need to develop a metalevel
discourse that can grasp what happens when experiments and concepts travel. This
approach is, we argue, not neuroanthropological, it is simply anthropological. If
there is a need for a specific identifier, it could be an ‘experimental anthropology’
that will attempt to maintain the three meanings of experimental: as a method, as
an object of study, and as a research aesthetic (Roepstorff 2011b).
Reyna (this issue) suggests that going back to Boas may be one useful way to
move the field forward. We would not disagree (see another use of Boas in
Roepstorff et al. 2010). In fact, there are interesting ways in which current discus-
sions mirror those that took place at the turn of the last century. Reading up on
these may provide directions for taking current discussions further. However, we
are not convinced that this would also entail a neo-structuralism, which is mainly
concerned with identifying links between structures in minds and structures in the
world. Taking that approach may precisely miss out on the experiential domain,
and this has important implications for how one may understand agency, subjec-
tivity, and communication. Structuralist approaches have long been criticized for
bracketing out the person in an attempt to identify structural parallels between
worlds and minds. We think this may be problematic, on several levels. Within the
anthropological tradition it runs the risk of forgetting important lessons developed
in the discipline, e.g. the importance of taking seriously and indeed representing
experiential domains. On a cognitive level, such an approach runs the risk of
missing out on what may appear to be the most important function of human
consciousness: our ability to use experiences as anchor points for actions and to
share them with others in the process of constructing worlds that are both mental
and social (Frith 2002, 2007; Roepstorff and Frith 2004). A neo-structuralism may
thereby fail the ontological checklist outlined above. Ultimately, it may be unable
to capture humans as persons, and this seems not to be a good starting point for
anthropology.
If instead of outlining abstract theories one would attempt the dangerous pro-
cess of constructing one potential bridge, what would it, then, look like? Our sug-
gestion is to start out with joint research projects, do things together, and then be
sensitive both to the type of facts and the types of contexts produced by going
experimental.
Acknowledgement
The research of Andreas Roepstorff and Chris Frith is supported by grants from the Danish
National Research Foundation (Interacting Minds) and the Danish Agency for Science,
Technology and Innovation UNIK initiative (MINDlab). Andreas Roepstorff also receives
support from the Velux Foundation (Technologies of the Mind) and the Danish Research
Council for Cognition and Communication (DRUST).
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Chris Frith is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College, London, and is Niels Bohr Visiting Professor
at Aarhus University and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He trained in nat-
ural sciences and clinical psychology and was a pioneer in the application of brain
imaging to the study of higher cognitive functions. He has a special interest in the
mechanisms underlying social interactions.