*Anthropology and Cognitive Science

Here, James Laidlaw provides a review of Maurice Bloch's new book: 'Anthropology and the cognitive challenge.'

According to Laidlaw, the book is a summary of Bloch's position on the necessary co-operation between the cognitive sciences and anthropology as well as other social sciences. He challenges both anthropologists and cognitive scientists to revise and rethink their positions. The stand-off between the two disciplines have largely, according to Bloch, stemmed from a misunderstanding of each other and the assumption that the cognitive sciences side on the 'nature' end of things while anthropology and other social sciences stand on the 'nurture' end. And while this is an age-old debate, the advances of both disciplines have made up tremendous ground and there is, in my opinion, a general view that both are necessary. Social environments are necessary for certain genes to find their expression and naturally without biology the social side of our personhood would not manifest. Furthermore, with the advancement of research in 'epigenetics' we are learning more and more about the interaction between biology and society. Research on the brain has been critical in furthering our understanding of personality and language. The brain of phineas gage has shown the importance of the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventromedial cortex for personality. H.M has shown the significance of the hippocampus and the amygdala for memory. Those with Wernicke's and Broca's aphasia have given a tremendous amount of information on understanding language. Anthropologists have contributed significantly about the various ways in which language manifests and how different systems of counting and labelling 'colour' or measuring 'time' challenge the presuppositions we have about language capacities in general. Not only have anthropologists noted the variability of language and semiotics, but they have also highlighted the ways in which language and cultural "things" can be incorporated and assimilated. In this regard, Laidlaw states, although Bloch denounces "Boasian anthropology, he is equally eloquent about the indispensability of ethnographic research based on participant-observation for any serious study of human social life, and about the richness of the ethnographic record anthropologists have progressively compiled."

One of the areas in which I am particularly excited about in bridging the gap between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is in the area of 'embodiment' and 'habitus'. Sam Whimster notes that Weber utilized 'habitus' as "a disposition to behave and view the world in a particular and distinctive manner" and Charles Camic notes that Weber's Eingestelltheit means "disposition" (109).  Bourdieu's famously put the term as a "system of durable dispositions" and Mauss simply put it as "the ways in which from society to society" persons know how to use their bodies. This becomes particularly interesting as the term invokes the function of memory. Not only memories in the sense of past autobiographical memories that tend to be what cognitive scientists call 'episodic memory' but the ways in which we know and function within society also entails 'semantic memory' which contains the basic information of our social surrounding and the conventional facts of history e.g. the capital of England is London. In other cognitive science circles 'episodic' and 'semantic' memory have been called 'declarative memory', which is often juxtaposed to 'procedural' memory. 'Procedural' memory are habits of the body. The memory that allows us to type without thinking about where our fingers are going. The memory that allows us to ride a bike without consciously thinking about how we are maintaining balance and propelling ourselves forward by pedalling. In other words, it is the memory that allows us to be doing what we are doing without consciously thinking about how we are doing. It is in this varied sense of the term 'memory' that, in my view, bridges the gap between 'habitus', 'embodiment', and 'belief'. And in between we have 'emotion'. For the sake of a blog post, these topics are a bit too rich and require more thoughtful analysis and exposition. But I think this is where the cognitive sciences and the social sciences can come together and be at their best.

The concept of dispositions can be considered within these veins of memory and more poignantly in terms of, another distinction, short-term and long-term memory. What we learn and embody must be considered within the domain of long-term memory such that they become "durable dispositions" and ways to "behave and the view the world in a particular and distinctive manner". This not only requires that our biological capacity for memory to function properly but it also requires the societal inputs and our experiences. In this regard as Bloch, via Laidlaw, puts it:

"There can be no such division of labour, Bloch insists, because everything that humans think and do is part of a complex set of processes that are equally expressions of our biological nature and of the fact that unlike all other species we are the subjects of history (p. 20). As Bloch sees it, the unique aspects of human life that Boasian anthropologists seek to capture with the label ‘culture’ do not constitute an extra layer added to our biological nature, and nor do they mean, as some seem to suggest, that our biology has somehow been transcended and may be safely ignored, but rather they mean that our biology expresses itself only but also pervasively through our being as historical agents. There is not some range of things we think or do because of ‘nature’ and a separate set that is shaped by ‘culture’, and therefore there is no possible separation between what varies between societies and what is universal: all of human thought and action is shaped by history just as it is by the substance and functioning of our bodies, including our brains. As Bloch summarizes pithily: ‘There are no non-cultural bits of us as there are no non-natural bits’ (p. 76)"

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