Paper short abstract:

Cross-Cultural Psychology and Cultural Neuroscience are increasingly leading the public discourse on ‘culture’ while social and cultural anthropologists refrain from research on the biological foundations of cultural phenomena. With this talk we want to initiate a discussion about our discipline’s possible contributions to newly emerging research agendas.

Paper long abstract:

Social and cultural anthropologists seem to have strong objections to studying biological foundations of human cultural practices. Other disciplines like Cultural Psychology, Cross-Cultural Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Biological Anthropology seem both more open and more progressive in this respect.

Due to 'culture's' growing popularity beyond our discourses within Social and Cultural Anthropology, particularly Cultural and Cross-Cultural Psychology have emerged as increasingly popular research fields, gaining influence in Psychology per se as well as in related disciplines of the sciences. Their 'research subjects' are ultimately defined as being 'culturally' either (European / North American) individualists or (Asian) collectivists. The varieties of "cultures" are thus narrowed down both geographically (as psychological research designs predominantly draw on East Asian vs. US-American samples) and epistemologically (by reducing culture to a fixed set of quantifiable variables).

Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) is arising as the new methodo-technology in order to locate "culture in the brain" within rapid-assessment research paradigms of an exponentially developing Cultural Neuroscience. Despite their culture reductionist approaches Cross-Cultural Psychology and Cultural Neuroscience do not only dictate interdisciplinary scientific discourses, but also highly influence public perceptions of 'culture' in the mass media.

Triggered by the experiences of our own interdisciplinary research on the experience of envy in different 'cultures' by actually trying to integrate anthropological, sociological, psychological and neuroscientific methods, we would like to self-reflexively address these 'cultural predicaments' and ultimately ask: where are the voices of social and cultural anthropologists in the dominant discourse on their field of expertise?