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net/2011/12/the-neuroanthropology-of-
embodiment-absorption-and-dissociation.html)
Science,
(http://somatosphere.net/2011/12/the-
studies, cultural psychiatry,
psychology and bioethics.
neuroanthropology-of-
embodiment-absorption-and-
dissociation.html)
By Neely Myers (http://somatosphere.net/author/neely-myers)
So, I will begin with a warning – this is a pale attempt to summarize the ideas
of 12 people plus various discussion questions and theorists mentioned by
presenters. With that in mind, let’s get an overview of what happened, which
was immensely interesting.
Chris also discussed a fireside study that compared a simulated electronic fire,
and electronic fire with noise (for a more multi-sensory approach), and a
blank TV screen showing fuzz. Chris found reduced blood pressure with the
fire, which was enhanced by the multisensory fire. Further data involving
EEG patterns and skin conductance are pending data collection. Chris
suggested that his findings may have implications for addiction interventions.
“I came here to conquer!”: The Role of the Holy Spirit and Prosperity
Theology in the Well-being of Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals.
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22656059/AAA_2011_DengahHJF.pdf )
Dengah also argued that Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) was
changing the religious marketplace in Brazil as it circulates to over 6 million
households. He plans to make other arguments about spiritual experience
and health measures like perceived stress, depression, and blood pressure,
when he is done collecting his data! He also had a fascinating model of the
ways absorption and embodiment interact to produce dissociation and well-
being, so if this is your line of interest you should beg him to share.
Changizi, for example, claims that culture has shaped itself to be like nature in
order to reshape ancient brains so that they are more capable of thriving. In
this kind of model, shamanic madness is a hyper-receptivity to the larger,
more-than-human field. Enskilment is a receptivity to the meaningful
interpretation of the exercise.
Frank is asking not a question of dissociation or absorption but rather a
pedagogical question – how are practices taught. If we take this as a moment,
then how is it felt or understood by the practitioner? Frank argues that bodily
memory aligns with practice when the practitioner is training with his teacher
and he finds a moment of peace. Frank gives an ethnographic example of a
teacher who continually overcomes the charge of a larger, stronger, younger
man on a nice spring day outdoors. When asked how he manages this, the
teacher explains that he can “hear” the student’s movement before he begins
to execute the movement.
Frank found himself feeling skeptical – was what he saw real? He turned to
Marcel Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body
(http://www.scribd.com/doc/29890878/Marcel-Mauss-Techniques-of-the-
Body)” and Tim Ingold’s enskilment and decided that the novice’s
observation of accomplished practitioners is perceptually grounded in his
surroundings – in the whole sphere of bodily experience. Knowledge of these
techniques is passed on generationally by repeatedly exposing novices to
surroundings in which there are selected opportunities for attention and
action. Bodily experience, then, is related to social life and engagement but
moves beyond, Frank argues, the acquisition of technique. There is a body-
environment spatial connection that exists beyond the body, he concludes.
Lerch herself works with people of the Umbanda religion of Brazil. She has
used Erika Bourguignon (http://pro.osu.edu/profiles/bourguignon.1/)’s
work on possession trance in which she wanted to get at an individual belief
system. She then offers an overview of trance and possession studies since
2000, which I am probably going to butcher here. But there are correlations,
she argues, between trance and social marginality and rigid social hierarchies.
And there is a local social context from which embodied meanings of gender,
power and resistance may be drawn. Winkelman offers an integration of
cross-cultural studies of shamanism and neurological perspectives and leads
to the conclusion that shamanism constitutes humanity’s first theological and
spiritual system.
Lerch concludes that there is a universal human capacity for absorption and
dissociative “disorders” and that ethnographic data about dissociation is rich
with information on the ways people use this capacity to heal through
meaning-making, mind-brain-body connections, and the intertwining
notions of self, gender, and relationships. This claim provocatively suggests
that dissociation is not a disorder, but rather, an adaptive mind-body-culture
pathway for healing by a re-ordering of the self through ritual.
Matthew Amster
(http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/anthropology/faculty/employee_detail.dot?
empId=02263606649019065&pageTitle=Matthew+H.+Amster)’s
presentation on “Tripping through Time” focused on the immersion of Civil
War re-enactors and Vikings in battles to the point where they lose their
connection with reality. He presents the similarities of these groups as those
of camaraderie and an appreciation of history. However, the groups also have
differences. Civil War re-enactors reminisce about rare and magical moments
like “civil war-gasms” or “going into the bubble,” which are very intense and
brief moments of being transported into the past. Amster describes these as
positive dissociative experiences.
These dissociative experiences are more common in the early years of re-
enacting until people become more experienced and habituated and the
surreal becomes less frequent. I am not sure how this aligns with Luhrmann
and Nussbaum’s model of proclivity, practice and outcome, though.
Amster notes that re-enactors become caught up in such moments and report
a temporary loss of orientation as they taste the chaos and confusion of what
happened during real battle.
In contrast, Amster found that the Vikings did not desire extreme mental
states. They had real weapons like hatchets and wanted to try and stay in the
moment so they would not hurt people. They wanted to take a step back from
the “frenzy” of acting, and so they frame their involvement in regular training
like a martial art rather than in terms of authenticity as the Civil War re-
enactors did.
Some people do occasionally freak out among the Vikings, Amster noted, but
there are rules about what you can and cannot do. The hard part, for them, is
not hurting each other. But both groups must learn to keep focus – to remain
immersed in and transformed by the enactments while keeping one foot in
the every day. During questions following his paper, it was discussed how
Amster and others might link ethnography to structured measures like
oxytocin and attention (and a host of other measures that I did not document
clearly enough to repeat here).
Part I. Discussion
It was suggested that rather than experimental design we can use experiments
to get at what we think is going on the brain, but unfortunately the f MRI is
not particularly portable. Nor, I might add and Daniel Lende
(http://anthropology.usf.edu/faculty/dlende/) mentioned, does it capture
more than the “tip of the iceberg” because it documents the combined brain
activity of a composite group of humans and so captures the most prominent
mental activity across people and throws away the rest (Lende suggested
85%) away. For anthropologists who want the variation, then, the rest of the
iceberg is hidden. Lende also talked about using experiments, for example,
Greg Downey (http://www.anth.mq.edu.au/staff/staff_gdowney.html) was
trying to use portable imaging devices to avoid the artifacts of imaging studies
and capture “cognition in the wild.” Other audience members argued that
heart rate and other physiological data might be more useful than scanning.
Another audience member asked if neuroscientists have any interest in
cultural variability. Will they be willing to begin to step back and realize that
cultural variability plays a significant part and throw it into the hopper?
Another good question.
Ben Campbell
(http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/anthropology/faculty/campbell.cfm) and
Thomas Malaby
(http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/anthropology/faculty/malaby.cfm) then
offered a joint presentation on massive multi-player online games, which they
seek to understand anthropologically because, they argue, the “game” is a
cultural form. For example, in The Savage Mind
(http://books.google.com/books?
id=CSdGIIZes9UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+savage+mind&source=bl&ots=EN-
UMO3OrW&sig=E0cIpdcxqphnwcEMndKloXL9QL8&hl=en&ei=fJ1sS_mEOYaMtAPE9aWxDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=resu
Lévi-Strauss lists games as a serious ritual. Campbell and Malaby will be
situating cultural-historical games in cultural-historical moments.
In this case, online games are complex, implicit conditions. Their research
looks at the ways the dopaminergic system is implicated in gaming. Citing
work by neurophysiologists, they note how dopamine re-establishes the cue
and reward until the brain experiences a dopaminergic firing in expectancy of
the reward – one example of learning and relearning in a contingent world.
There is also a hedonic value of rewards, they argue, which links various
aspects of the attention and brain (that is again beyond my ability to recount
properly) to make an emotionally compelling game. In other words, they
explain, playful attention is coaxed from us by a good game that strikes a
balance between randomness and challenge to keep us engaged. Marshall
Sahlins
(http://books.google.com/books/about/Stone_age_economics.html?
id=_qPSLy9564cC) speaks of this as fragile reciprocity at the edge of the
social during which socially contingent circumstances become situations in
which networks can form or fall apart.
In this case, researchers are discussing the “social brain,” which maps onto the
human brain but appears to arise out of what generated the brain in the first
place (presumably, experience). In the social brain, there are two systems –
one is slow, deliberative and cognitive. The other is fast and emotional (the
anterior cingulated cortex). These two systems combine so that we might
imagine the self or another and their actions. In the social brain, then,
embodied emotional salience is the most important for learning and
cooperation.
In this case, the lapse in a sense of agency is “the most salient subjective sub-
component.” Something is happening to replace agency. Automaticity and
imitation leads to a lapse in sense of agency during a wide range of
phenomena, for example, reading literature. It is easiest, Stromberg argues, to
become caught up in the formulaic. But why is beach reading such an
appropriate vehicle for absorption?
He argues that this activity is similar to games and rituals and characterized by
awareness and predictable patterns of action. Conscious control, he explains,
is cognitively expensive, but we can assign any familiar situation to
automation.
Remember? Culture unites us and culture divides us. There are states in ritual
and play that can enhance our understanding by looking at component
processes. Automatized behaviors thus work together to produce some of
what we call absorption. The brain, Stromberg suggests, may be primed to
perform great tasks – creativity from extensive practice. For some, he adds,
this process may lead to anxiety instead of to flow.
Certainly children use play as part of their social and emotional development,
suggesting a certain plasticity in the process. At play, we shed habitual
responses and experience a reprieve from fears of injury or death. People,
Heller explains, forget selves, censorship, and concerns as they become
absorbed in their playscape.
Heller describes dark play, specifically, as play that may be dangerous or cruel.
In the dominant capitalist culture, one risks being labeled irrational or insane
when they play. They may earn or lose social capital in the process. Dark
players thus require more help to get caught in play. Play is like a trance
within a playscape.
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