The Foundations of Neuroanthropology

Studies of culturally-based phenomena within neuroscientifi c frameworks represent one of the most dynamic tendencies in contemporary cognitive science. They have provided the foundations of social neuroscience, which comprise studies on brain correlates of social cognition, abilities , and disabilities (Cacioppo, 2002), and have contributed to the consolidation of evolutionary neuroscience as a multidisciplinary epistemological fi eld, which frequently involves social neuroscientifi c topics, considered in terms of their function and evolutionary basis (for an authoritative introduction and discussion: Platek et al., 2007). The new horizons that these studies revealed now allow for neuroscientifi c approaches to topics that once were conceived to be beyond the scope of a natu-ralistic framework, because they remained subordinated to contingent dimensions of the cultural environment (e.g., embodiment ; Campbell and Garcia, 2009). Such efforts have widened the scope of social neuroscience and raise very interesting perspectives for evolutionary neu-roscience, in terms of the adaptations and brain circuits that appear to lie at the base of these phenomena, as well as suggest an incursion into a dialogue with studies pointing in the opposite direction, which question the bases of certain universal cog-nitive and behavioral phenomena that are, by and large, thought of in terms of their functional basis – like Everett et al. (2005) did in relation to universal grammar, when arguing that the Pirahã language has no recursion, no subordination, no numeral, and " in effect, no phrase structure " (Everett, 2007, p. 4); and like Henrich et al. (2010) did in their critical review of research on " WEIRD " people (" Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic "), which they claim to have biased several generalizations about " human nature " , from perception (e.g., different standpoints in relation to the Mueller-Lyer illusion) to abstract cognition (e.g., egocentric vs. geocentric reasoning styles in tasks requiring spatial cognition) 1. The study of the relation between culturally-specifi c phenomena and brain activity has been named neuroanthropology (a term coined by E. D. Lewis, from the University of Melbourne) and proposes to be " the study of the experiential and neurobiological aspects of cultural activity " (Dominguez Duque et al., 2009, p. 3). Considered within this perspective , it seems compelling to assume that we are moving into the era of neuroanthropology (see: Campbell and Garcia, 2009), where the tradition of studies of culturally-dependent phenomena meets the tradition of studying brain mechanisms to consolidate …