Culture like Relativity
One of the prominent ways to think about culture is as a system of symbols or beliefs. For example, Clifford Geertz wrote in 1973: Believing, with Max Weber,…
Author: daniel.lende
Common Brain Mechanisms in Mental Illness
An important new meta-analysis of brain imaging research came out this week in JAMA Psychiatry, “Identification of a Common Neurobiological Substrate for Mental Illness” which highlights t…
Applied Anthropology as Limit
Of late I’ve been saying that the constraints that come with applied work are useful for doing good theoretical and empirical work. Just as experimental models bring demands…
Oppression, Mental Health, and the House Science Committee
By Steven Folmar, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Anthropology, Wake Forest University On September 15 of this year, I learned from my Program Officer at the N…
Our Brains as Alien Technology
Our brains are alien technology. We don’t understand how they work, and the glimpses we have gotten so far indicate that our brains work quite differently than our…
Bringing Scholarly Book Review into the Digital Age: The American Anthropological Association Initiative
Better, faster, stronger. Whether Superman or Daft Punk, the motto works. But until now, these words didn’t apply to how academic books got reviewed. The American Anthropological Association…