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What Is Interpretation? a Cultural Neurohermeneutic Account What is interpretation? A cultural neurohermeneutic account Steve Reyna Abstract: This essay answers the question: what is interpretation? It does so by pro- posing that interpretation involves certain brain operations. These utilize percep- tual and procedural culture stored in neural networks. The parts of the brain performing interpretation are said to constitute a cultural neurohermenetic sys- tem, hypothesized to function according to an interpretive hierarchy. It is argued that such an approach has two benefits. The first of these is to provide a non- socio-biological, non-reductionist way of analyzing interactions between culture and biology. The second benefit is to provide conceptual tools for explaining how the micro-realm within individuals (I-space) makes connections in the macro- realm (E-space) of events in social forms. Conceptualization of such connections forms a basis for a variety of social analysis termed complex string being theory. Keywords: interpretation, culture, brain, interpretive hierarchy, string being theory This text concerns a recent swerve in social and condition as a place of the construction of string cultural studies. Since the 1970s, many practi- being. Second, the argument works to convince tioners of social and cultural thought have readers that neurohermenetics is a useful tool taken an ‘interpretive turn’ to hermeneutics for an anthropology seeking collaboration be- (Geertz 1983). The position argued in this arti- tween biological, social, and cultural analyses, cle has two parts. First, my argument seeks to thereby allowing more complex accounts of the answer a question that lies behind hermeneutic human condition. My argument begins by an- practice: what is interpretation? The response swering the queries: what is a string being on- given is that interpretation is the brain, a struc- tology and what biology is required to study it? ture of structures, operating reflexively to analyze individuals’ lived being in the past to produce their future being. So conceptualized the func- What Biology? What Ontology? tion of interpretation is to connect past with fu- ture human being, i.e., to string being together. [B]iological and cultural life is a whole. (Boas The complex of structures in the brain doing 1938: 5) this interpretation is theorized to be a cultural neurohermeneutic system. Implicit here is a Franz Boas created a holistic, four-field anthro- novel ontological conception of the human pology because he believed that in some man- Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 48 (2006): 131–143 132 | Steve Reyna ner human biology and culture were a ‘whole’. ral, and parietal regions allowed hominids to Since the 1970s, Boasian anthropology has improve their probabilistic and deductive calcu- tended to fracture into its sub-disciplinary fields. lating capabilities, especially concerning percep- There are a number of reasons for this. One is the tual and procedural implications of sensations. rise, starting in the late 1960s, of socio-biology Addition of reciprocal neural networks between and evolutionary psychology. Both biologies tend the enlarged prefrontal cortex and the limbic to be different variants of genetic determinism. system facilitated coordination by the prefrontal Both also tend to be reductionist (Rose and Rose cortex of emotion (produced in the limbic sys- 2001). Reductionism “is any doctrine that claims tem) and various categorizations and their pro- to reduce the apparently more sophisticated and cedural implications (produced in the association complex to the less” (Flew 1976: 279). Socio- areas). This made it possible to feel good about biology and evolutionary psychology are reduc- action your brain categorized as desirable, and tionist because social and cultural complexity are bad about action categorized as undesirable. So explained by genetic determinism, with evolu- a new type of brain had evolved which Dennett tionary psychology exhibiting a hyper-Darwinist, characterized as an ‘anticipation’ machine, whose or hyper-selectionist, form of this determinism. “fundamental purpose is to produce the future” As Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin put it, individu- (ibid.: 177). als, societies, and cultures tend to be “governed I would go further and suggest that a brain by a chain of determinants that runs from the which makes the future is also a reflexivity con- gene to the individual to the some of the behav- traption.‘Reflexivity’,according to Anthony Gid- iors of all individuals” (1984: 6). Lost is any sense dens’s influential definition, is “the monitored of how the biological and the cultural might be character of the ongoing flow of social life” a complex ‘whole’,and with this loss goes Boasian (1984: 3). The brain is a reflexivity contraption anthropology. Racism and defense of social in- because its structures perform the monitoring equality have been associated with at least some of the ‘ongoing flow of social life’. A particular variants of this biological reductionism. Socio- social ontology is implied by the preceding. On- biology and evolutionary psychology have been tology “aims at discovering a framework for un- critiqued elsewhere.1 These criticisms are weighty. derstanding the kinds of things that constitute However, my concern in this article is not that the world’s structure” (Fetzer and Almeder 1993: their explanations are faulty, but that what they 101). Social ontology in the framework being chose not to explain includes realities that if in- suggested is an ‘ongoing flow’ that undergoes vestigated can account for how cultural and bi- ‘monitoring’.The concepts of Exterior-space (E- ological life are to some extent a ‘whole’. space) and Interior-space (I-space) are intro- Socio-biology and evolutionary psychology duced to assist with navigation in the ‘ongoing ignore a key adaptation made by Homo sapiens. flow’. ‘E-space’ denotes organizations of prac- The creatures that went from prehominids on tices that are external to persons but which, in to Homo sapiens did not fancy claws, fangs, wings, some way, impinge upon them. ‘I-space’ de- poisons, electrical zappers, or other dew-dads notes the organization of structures in the brain to be stronger and more shocking. Rather, they that monitor, by reflecting on, events in E-space. got smarter by evolving bigger brains. This well- The ‘ongoing flow’ is history. History in this op- documented evolutionary sequence is called by tic is one damn E-space strung to another, with Daniel Dennett the ‘Great Encephalization’ events in I-space doing the stringing. This is a (1991: 190). The parts of the brain added were social ontology where antecedent being (E-space) in association areas, especially in the frontal lobe, is strung to subsequent being (E-space) by in- largely the prefrontal cortex, and their recipro- tervening I-space, so that such being is literally cal neuronal connections with the limbic system. string being. Enlargement of the left dorsolateral cortex, as It is essential in such ontology to learn how well as associative areas in the occipital, tempo- the brain in I-space strings antecedent to subse- What is interpretation? A cultural neurohermeneutic account | 133 quent E-space. The brain in I-space, because it not a cultural, phenomenon. How this is the case consists of interconnected neurons, may be con- is explained below, and requires further explica- sidered a ‘neurological’ complex of structures. tion of Tyler’s notion of culture. Further, when the brain monitors, or reflects upon, ‘Semantic domains’ are systems of signs that events in E-space, it comes to understand them, involve cultural categories (hereafter simply cat- and understanding being is interpreting it. The egories). For example, any child can work in the reflexive brain is an interpretive neurological semantic domain, or category, of ‘animals’ and organ. This means that the brain’s interpreting interpret one furry thing as a ‘kitty-cat’ and of events in E-space is literally a ‘neuroherme- another as a ‘doggie’. ‘Cats’ and ‘dogs’ are cate- neutic’ process. So, in a string being ontology, gories within categories; with cats including the biology needed to clarify how events get everything from the domestic house pet to lions, connected is a neurohermeneutics; a hermeneu- and dogs including everything from the Mexi- tics of how everyday lives are actually lived in the can Chihuahua to mastiffs. When a three year here and now. Being intrigued by the selective old insists—“that is a kitty”—she is making an pressures in hominid prehistory that possibly led interpretation; and she could not do this unless to the evolution of certain genes, socio-biology she could think in terms of categories. Where and evolutionary psychology are oblivious to are categories found? the realities of this ontology. The next section Recent research in cognitive neuroscience offers a foreword to a neurohermeneutic biol- by David Freedman and colleagues (2001) has ogy; an introduction that leads to culture and sought places in the brain where the categories the notion of a cultural neurohermeneutic sys- of ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are represented. The term ‘rep- tem (CNHS). resentation’ is used literally here to mean the re- presenting of one reality as another. Freedman’s “Men’s judgment is a function of … team worked with monkeys to whom he pre- the brain” sented images that were either 60, 80, or 100 percent ‘dogs’ or ‘cats’.The different percentages The view that the brain is involved in interpre- of one animal or the other in the images were tation is old. Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth different variants of the categories ‘cat’ or ‘dog’. century remarked,“men’s judgment is a function The monkeys were adept at interpreting the dif- of the disposition of the brain” (in Changeux ference between cats and dogs. If the image was 1985: 201). Emmanuel Swedenbourg in the eigh- 60, 80, or 100 percent some variant of a ‘dog’, teenth century insisted, “the cortical substance the monkeys responded by indicating ‘dog’.They imparts … understanding” (in Allman 1998: responded ‘cat’ to a display of variants of ‘cat’.
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