Chapter 24 Neuroanthropology: Exploring Relations between Brain, Cognition, and Culture

Quinton Deeley

Introduction

In 1983 the British Social Anthropologist Victor Turner began his paper Body, Brain, and Culture, with the following words:

the present essay is for me one of the most difficult I have ever attempted. This is because I am going to submit to question some of the axioms anthropologists of my generation – and several subsequent generations – were taught to hallow. The axioms express the belief that all human behaviour is the result of social conditioning (Turner 1983, 221).

Turner was referring to how during the twentieth century social anthropolo- gists, as well as historians and sociologists, had tended to assert the priority of culture and social learning to account for how humans acquired patterns of thought, feeling and action which they share with other members of their so- ciety or social group (see also Bloch 2012). The physical anthropologist Irving Hallowell had earlier summarised this concept of culture as developed by such influential American cultural anthropologists as A.L. Kroeber: “the essence of the concept as originally developed is that learned behavior, socially transmit- ted and cumulative in time, is paramount as a determinant of human behavior. The cultural systems which characterize human societies are the product of social action and at the same time are conditioning factors in further action” (Hallowell 1968). It was the application of the culture concept by twentieth century anthropologists, among whom it assumed central importance, that “immensely advanced the growth of anthropological science” (Kroeber 1950, quoted in Hallowell 1968). Indeed, Kroeber stated, “the most significant ac- complishment of anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century has been the extension and clarification of the concept of culture” (Kroeber 1950, quoted in Hallowell 1968). In this view, biological perspectives had little contribution to make to un- derstanding complex social behaviour apart from explaining the general ca-

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004385375_026 Neuroanthropology 381 pacity for language and learning. In Body, Brain and Culture Turner questioned this, asking whether constraints on brain function motivated religion and ritu- alization as a characteristic form of behaviour across the human species. Turn- er referred to a recently published work, The Spectrum of Ritual, which illus- trated an interdisciplinary approach to the explanation of social behaviour called ‘biogenetic structuralism’ (d’Aquili et al. 1979). As its name suggests, biogenetic structuralism was an attempt to identify the biological underpin- nings for universal features of cultural cognition proposed in Lévi-Straussian structuralism and related approaches. It comprised “neuroanthropology”, de- fined as “the study of the relationship between the brain and sociocultural behaviour”; and “comparative ethology: the study of behaviour in a panspecif- ic [cross-species] and biological context’ (d’Aquili et al. 1979, 19). Turner could see the potential of neurobiological approaches to help explain the efficacy of ritual as an instrument of social conditioning – a question that had preoc- cupied him throughout his career as a social anthropologist: why, for exam- ple, sensory and motoric features of ritual evoked heightened experience and learning in ritual participants (Turner 1967). Turner concluded his paper with a call for what he termed a “dialogue between neurology and culturology” to account for widespread features of society and culture, such as religion, ritual, myth, magic, and kinship. Yet despite the many advances in neuroscience since Turner was writing in 1983, there is no widespread consensus about whether neuroscience has made any difference to our understanding of culture in general, and religion in particular. Indeed, the pursuit of Turner’s proposed dialogue raises ongoing questions about how the brain sciences and cultural phenomena are related which are as much conceptual as empirical. These questions have been con- sidered under the banner of neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience by some authors (d’Aquili et al. 1979; Duque et al. 2009; Lende and Downey 2012; Seligman and Kirmayer 2008), although relevant theory and research are found across the humanities and social and biological sciences – from social, cognitive and biological anthropology, philosophy of psychology, the history and cognitive science of religion, to numerous sub-specialisms of basic and clinical neuroscience, amongst many other fields. This chapter ranges across disciplines to illustrate quite different ways of understanding how the brain, cognition, and culture are related. We go on to consider specific concepts and findings which point to how the brain can be integrated into the explanation of culturally influenced cognition and behaviour – particularly in the case of religion. Three broad types of causal relationship between brain and culture have been proposed: (i) the brain creates a capacity for religion and other types