Basic concepts and case studies from an emerging field that investigates human capacities and pathologies at the intersection of brain and culture. The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropology places the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture. Anthropology offers brain science more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable difference in brain function; neuroscience offers anthropology evidence of neuroplasticity's role in social and cultural dynamics. This book provides a foundational text for neuroanthropology, offering basic concepts and case studies at the intersection of brain and culture. After an overview of the field and background information on recent research in biology, a series of case studies demonstrate neuroanthropology in practice. Contributors first focus on capabilities and skills—including memory in medical practice, skill acquisition in martial arts, and the role of humor in coping with breast cancer treatment and recovery—then report on problems and pathologies that range from post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans to smoking as a part of college social life. Contributors Mauro C. Balieiro, Kathryn Bouskill, Rachel S. Brezis, Benjamin Campbell, Greg Downey, José Ernesto dos Santos, William W. Dressler, Erin P. Finley, Agustín Fuentes, M. Cameron Hay, Daniel H. Lende, Katherine C. MacKinnon, Katja Pettinen, Peter G. Stromberg

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

This Handbook examines disparities in public health by highlighting recent theoretical and methodological advances in cultural neuroscience. It traces the interactions of cultural, biological, and environmental factors that create adverse physical and mental health conditions among populations, and investigates how the policies of cultural and governmental institutions influence such outcomes. In addition to providing an overview of the current research, chapters demonstrate how a cultural neuroscience approach to the study of the mind, brain, and behavior can help stabilize the quality of health of societies at large. The volume will appeal especially to graduate students and professional scholars working in psychology and population genetics. The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience represents the first collection of scholarly contributions from the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC), an interdisciplinary group of scholars from epidemiology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and psychiatry dedicated to advancing an understanding of culture and health using theory and methods from cultural neuroscience. The Handbook is intended to introduce future generations of scholars to foundations in cultural neuroscience, and to equip them to address the grand challenges in global mental health in the twenty-first century.

This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.

Ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy.

In this National Book Award–winning novel from a “brilliantly breathtaking writer,” a young Southerner searches for meaning in the midst of Mardi Gras (The New York Times Book Review). On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is a lost soul. A stockbroker and member of an established New Orleans family, Binx’s one escape is the movie theater that transports him from the falseness of his life. With Mardi Gras in full swing, Binx, along with his cousin Kate, sets out to find his true purpose amid the excesses of the carnival that surrounds him. Buoyant yet powerful, The Moviegoer is a poignant indictment of modern values, and an unforgettable story of a week that will change two lives forever. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Walker Percy including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about. To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption. For more information, please visit www.caughtinplay.com.

How do people think about the world? How do individuals make sense of their complex social environment? What are the underlying mechanisms that determine our understanding of the social world? Social cognition - the study of the specific cognitive processes that are involved when we think about the social world - attempts to answer these questions. Social cognition is an increasingly important and influential area of social psychology, impacting on areas such as attitude change and person perception. This introductory textbook provides the student with comprehensive coverage of the core topics in the field: how social information is encoded, stored and retrieved from memory; how social knowledge is structured and represented; and what processes are involved when individuals form judgements and make decisions. The overall aim is to highlight the main concepts and how they interrelate, providing the student with an insight into the whole social cognition framework. With this in mind, the first two chapters provide an overview of the sequence of information processing and outline general principles. Subsequent chapters build on these foundations by providing more in-depth discussion of memory, judgemental heuristics, the use of information, hypothesis-testing in social interaction and the interplay of affect and cognition. Social Cognition will be essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, communication studies, and sociology.

Explores the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of color lexicons.