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Neurohistory' Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory' The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Smail, Daniel Lord. "Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory'," in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 313–318. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37366512 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Preprint MS version 15 April 2018. Published as Daniel Lord Smail, "Comment on Rob Boddice, 'Neurohistory'," in Debating New Approaches to History, ed. Marek Tamm and 1Peter Burke (London: Bloomsbury AcademiC, 2019), 313–18. When I first suggested the idea of a neurohistory some years ago it seemed obvious to me that history could learn something from neurosCienCe and vice versa. It still seems obvious to me. One of history’s great contributions to the human sCienCes springs from the historian’s instinct to suppose that nearly everything in the human world is subject to change. Looking around, it would be easy enough for a casual observer to imagine that things like the nation-state, sex roles, and ketchup are timeless givens. The work of history is to show that the modern instantiations of these things, appearances notwithstanding, actually came into being in the past, have present-day forms that are different from those of the past, and will continue to change in the future. OnCe upon a time, it seemed perfectly obvious that the brain-body system was one of those timeless givens, and therefore uninteresting to practitioners of a discipline concerned only with things that can change. Then Came the revolution. Over the last two or three deCades, Cognitive neuroscience and related fields, by virtue of what they have demonstrated about the plasticity of neurons, receptors, and other features of the Central nervous system, have made it possible to add the brain-body system to the list of things that we can usefully historicize. The brain-body system, in the neurohistorical approach, is a system whose form can change significantly over time even as the Components remain stable. The changes to the form are not random; they emerge instead from a CompleX danCe involving the body on the 1 1 2one hand and human soCiety and Culture on the other. As individual bodies continuously adapt and respond to their surroundings from one era to the neXt, the aggregate body, something we Can define heuristiCally as a statistiCally averaged set of bodily traits characteristic of a sub-population, is different from the aggregate body of eras both before and after. Crucially, the human brain-body system, in its actions and reactions to its cultural surroundings, is not simply passive, like clay in the hands of a potter. Neurohistory instead treats the body as an actor in history. Through interactions with Cultural forms and social practices, the body constantly generates unpredictable new patterns or historical trajeCtories. The body, therefore, is one of the sources of contingency in the human past. Since On Deep History and the Brain was published in 2008, the theoretical resourCes available for the framing of neurohistory have grown apaCe. ApproaChes or bodies of theory inCluding epigenetiCs, Actor-Network Theory, the history of emotions, miCrobiomiCs, and the arChaeology of entanglement, some of whiCh have been synthesized in the emerging field known as the New Materialism, have transformed the theoretiCal grounds on which we can base a neurohistorical approach to the past (Coole and Frost 2010; LeCain 2017). Understandably, certain ideas or phrases used in the book no longer sit well with current scholarship. Metaphors such as ‘wiring’ were inapt even at the time, and although I used the word ‘brain’ both in the title and in the book, this was a too- convenient shorthand for a muCh more CompleX and interesting entity, the brain-body system. From time to time, I have used small thought-pieCes to make pieCemeal adjustments to the basiC model (e.g. Smail 2014). But it is clear that neurohistory is overdue for the kind of theoretical overhaul proposed by Rob Boddice in his contribution. 2 2 In this response, I will summarize some of the highlights of Boddice’s own approach to neurohistory and the challenging and interesting revision he proposes, and will use the oCCasion to amplify or eXtend some of his important observations. As I shall suggest, the approach he has laid out here runs the risk of removing the keystone that supports the edifice of neurohistory. That keystone consists of a materialist understanding according to whiCh the body is a CompleX assemblage of eleCtriCal impulses and ChemiCals, all of whiCh influenCe mood, feeling, emotion, and behavior. This assemblage, by virtue of its material properties, is susceptible to environmental influenCes. Recent work has shown that our own miCrobiome is not the least of these faCtors (Cryan and Dinan 2012). In this materialist understanding, neurohistory should be seen as a branCh of environmental history, allowing the brain-body system to be viewed as a node in a CompleX entanglement of historical actors. Ultimately, I believe it may be more appropriate to interpret BoddiCe’s model not as a revision to neurohistory so muCh as a neCessary and useful Complement that expands the approach to inClude forms of historical explanation that operate at miCrohistoriCal sCales. Boddice has proposed the possibility of reframing neurohistory in a way that will allow it to harmonize with the history of eXperienCe and the history of emotion. His approach is designed in part to solve one of the CruCial methodologiCal problems assoCiated with neurohistory. Any approaCh to the past informed by neurosCienCe runs up against the fact that we Cannot aCtually know anything about the movement of ChemiCals or the action of synapses in the bodies of actors in the past. Even if we could devise a way to assemble such evidence, perhaps via ChemiCal analyses of bone or tissue, it is diffiCult to imagine how any of these findings Could be meaningful, given the fact that neurohistory treats only with 3 aggregates and never with individuals. What ‘evidence’ we have, therefore, is rarely more than suggestive, and one is reduced to constructing plausible scenarios or models grounded in very little that any would regard as evidence. The modern evidenCe generated by neurosCientifiC researCh is robust, but eXtrapolating from this to the past in a simple- minded way would violate the very premise of the approaCh. Boddice has offered an intriguing way to skirt this methodologiCal pitfall, namely, by taking experience itself as the subject of analysis. If we proCeed from the assumption that human eXperienCe is shaped by ConteXt, then we Can take the Changing forms of individual eXperienCe as the direCt subjeCt of historiCal inquiry without the need to worry overmuCh about whether that Change has any measurable material dimension. To use Jeremy Burman’s terminology, we Can seek to develop a ‘history from within’ (Burman 2014). BoddiCe’s fasCinating disCussion of pain offers a useful model of this approach. Pain research in recent years has shown that the relationship between an injury and the experienCe of pain is not nearly as automatiC as the Commonsense understanding suggests. Pain can be experienced in very different ways, including (sometimes) not at all. To some degree, individuals are Capable of managing their own pain. To the eXtent that people take their cues from Culture, this research suggests that whole cultures may have tools or devices that modify the pain thresholds of those who partiCipate in the culture. Furthemore, Cultural norms Can assoCiate eXperienCes of pain with stimuli that vary from one society to the next. Given these insights, we can take historical accounts of pain that seemed bizarre or ineXpliCable to previous historians and treat them as reasonably accurate reports of individual experience. 4 In an important section, Boddice appropriately loCates neurohistory’s grounding principle in the understanding that the human brain-body system, far from being fiXed or hard-wired in some genetiC way, is partially open to environmental or developmental influences and permeable to Culture. That he chose to label this section ‘Genetics’ rather than ‘Epigenetics’ is something of a misdireCtion, in my view, but the ensuing disCussion conveys well why it is that most historians have ceased to use the word ‘biology’ as if it were synonymous with ‘universal’, ‘unchanging’, and ‘hardwired’. One of the problems with this syllogism, which used to be widespread, always lay in the fact that this is not what ‘biology’ means to evolutionary biologists, a group whose opinion on the matter is worth listening to. As ConCeived by Charles Darwin, evolutionary biology is the science of change. The Darwinian revolution challenged the reCeived idea that species and phenotypes were timeless givens, created by God and incapable of change. The putative distinction between biology and Culture, in other words, should never have been framed as the difference between fixity and changeability. It should have been understood instead as a matter of differenCe at the level of temporal sCales, distinguishing the deep time of genetic change from the short time of reCent human history. The differenCe in temporal sCales, of Course, is not insignifiCant. In the last two decades of the twentieth Century, some sCholars in the fields of soCiobiology and evolutionary psychology developed an approach based on the assumption that the human brain and body undergoes adaptation over time but at a paCe so slow as to be irrelevant for short-term historical analysis.
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