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- Convenors:
-
Greg Downey
(Macquarie University)
Cameron Hay (Miami University)
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- Discussant:
-
Carol Worthman
(Emory University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
This panel presents models of developmental and dynamic complexity and how they might be applied to psychological anthropology, such as looping effects of psychiatric diagnosis, development of skill acquisition and adaptation, and the ecocultural or social determinants of health and well being.
Long Abstract:
The widespread advocacy of biocultural approaches in psychological anthropology requires a step toward forms of biocultural analysis, including especially developmental and systems theories approaches. The complexity and sheer number of factors that might be relevant to human psychological diversity, from the microscopic to the macrosocial, pose significant challenges for analytical models. Many channels of influence, some of them bidirectional, cross the boundaries between categories like "biological" and "cultural," "social" and "psychological." This panel calls for presentations of models of developmental and dynamic complexity and how they might be applied to specific case studies in psychological anthropology, such as the looping effects of psychiatric diagnosis, developmental accounts of skill acquisition and adaptation over the lifecycle, and the ecocultural or social determinants of health and well being. Our goal in this panel is to offer techniques for analysing biocultural case studies that might be transferrable or generalisable but that go beyond simply advocating for biocultural analysis to providing concrete and testable models for different types of queries in psychological anthropology. We especially call for ethnographic case studies, core concepts grounded in concrete examples, and model analyses of biocultural interaction rather than programmatic statements; we seek to demonstrate how synthetic and holistic work might be done rather than arguing for its importance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a group of Californians with Parkinson’s who fight to reassert a sense of self amid neurological changes and threats to personhood. By training as boxers, older adults have established new forms of healthy aging that promote adaptation and self-esteem over loss and decline.
Paper long abstract:
The neurological malady Parkinson’s Disease typically occurs in the second half of a person’s life supporting its clinical classification as a neurodegenerative disorder. While it is true that previously typical motor and cognitive functions, as well as dopaminergic production, become impaired by the disease, some people with Parkinson’s take exception to the clinical account of progressive degeneration believing this framing to be harmful to the human capacity for adaptation and coping. Practices like boxing and forced-rate exercise have allowed people to disrupt the narrative of consistent decline by literally fighting back and asserting control over their minds and bodies. This paper follows a group of exceptional Parkinson’s Fighters training as boxers in Southern California through the journey of diagnosis to reluctant acceptance to flourishing. I propose a dynamic model of healthy aging despite neurological disorders that enables individuals to reassert their personhood in the face of popular discourse that attempts to reduce long-lived identities to a diseased self. Refuting the notion that human development reaches a peak before turning to continuous decline, I illustrate a case study of novel skill acquisition and social engagement that affords opportunities for growth and personality development in later life.
Paper short abstract:
Conspiracies work as a successful form of cultural cognition in times of uncertainty and polarization by beating the "bottleneck effect" that affects comprehension of culture in real time. Conspiracies elicit engagement, are memorable, and provide access points to larger realms of cultural thinking.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will argue that conspiracy thinking is understandable through considering the constraints that shape culture. This constraint approach is inspired by Marr’s (1982) groundbreaking work in neuroscience as well as recent research on how constraints shape language, in particular the bottleneck effect (Christiansen & Chater 2016). In this view, conspiracy thinking is a cultural problem, rather than one of individual psychology or flawed rationality. Conspiracy thinking emerges in the same ways other types of cultural thinking emerges – in real time, drawing on local resources, and within specific speech and meaning communities.
Using examples from the United States, this paper will first outline social factors that promote conspiracy thinking including sociopolitical turmoil and uncertainty, polarization of ideas and groups, and specific authority figures that can buttress conspiracy thinking. Given these social factors, conspiracy thinking can be more successful that other types of cultural cognition at engaging the brain in real time and beating the bottleneck effect that affects comprehension. First, conspiracy thinking is particularly good at eliciting effort and engagement, rather than being simply infectious – people search and then find these explanations compelling. Second, conspiracy theories are good at providing “access points” that open up broader generalizations for individuals, and gain strength by how they draw on cultural and social contrasts to make a cognitive explanation clear and distinct. Finally, conspiracy thinking uses these contrasts to create us-versus-them thinking and support narratives in ways that create meaning communities, particular when authority figures can reinforce this type of thinking.
Paper short abstract:
Here I discuss how the biocultural becoming of the person, as a process that exchanges and reinvents multiple elements of its entwined healthy and toxic environments, might be affected through IFS (as EMB). I do this by showing how IFS-practitioners treat autoimmune diseases psychotherapeutically.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper, I report on the use and impact of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) to treat autoimmunity in the UK as a case study, and as part of my broader anthropological study on the development, circulation and regulation of immunostimulant therapies to treat autoimmunity.
My presentation is based on unstructured interviews conducted between December 2018 and February 2019 with IFS-practitioners who are members of the British IFS-community. Analytically, I discuss my findings in light of studies that, in recent decades, have pointed out causal relations between adverse childhood experiences, psychological wounds and autoimmunity. Inspired by somatic approaches, many health professionals tend to perceive autoimmune responses less as predisposed by genetic dysfunctions than as part of intergenerational stories that unfold cyclically. That points to the biocultural coming into being of the person as a process that embodies and reinvents multiple elements of the entwined healthy and toxic environments through and between which one moves and grows (family, education system, neighborhood etc.). One of the key premises of IFS is that every individual is made up of further sub-personalities. That supports an ongoing reconceptualization of the body-mind dichotomy as multiple selves that compound self-systems.
Apparently, stimulating therapies seem to provide means that enable their users to validate and recommit specific parts that co-constitute themselves, instead of suppressing them as conventional therapies do. Through it, IFS-practitioners seek to re-organize the internal script that ‘rules’ their own lives. Finally, I seek to understand whether and how IFS integrates the so-called ‘regenerative medicine’.
Paper short abstract:
For people with autoimmune diseases , the constant bioecocultural arcs endlessly connecting hyperactive neurons, immune processes, memories, and sociocultural interactions, daily impact one’s possibilities of engaging with the world. We propose a model to move towards questions of perseverance.
Paper long abstract:
Chronic pain scars every aspect of ones’ life. Pain arcs and feeds back on itself fusing bodily sensations to every thought. For people with autoimmune diseases causing chronic pain and fatigue, the constant bioecocultural adaptations, or what we refer to as arcs endlessly connecting hyperactive neurons, immune processes gone hay-wire, with traumas, memories, metaphors, impacting daily one’s possibilities of engaging with the world. How might we model these processes to move beyond claiming holistic interaction, to discuss the problem of perseverance: How does one persevere into a possible tomorrow when one’s horizon and abilities is always in the shadow of a betraying body and a judgmental society? This paper combines on 15 years of scholarly research among people with chronic, autoimmune disease, with the insights of a co-author with more than fifty years of personal experience with a chronic, autoimmune disease, to synthesize a biologically sound and experientially resonant model of autoimmune chronic pain as resulting from multidimensional arcs of the moment-by-moment and day-by-day dynamics which exacerbate pain or aid its amelioration within a broader model, informed by personal history within a local moral world, that occurs day-by-day, as life experiences can influence the severity of chronic pain which can further influence one’s life course. Our goal is to join a scholarly conversation to push holistic systems models so that they can be analytically useful in exploring human realities.