People in different cultures have strikingly different construals of the self, of others, and of the interdependence of the 2. These construals can influence, and in many cases determine, the very nature of individual experience, including cognition, emotion, and motivation. Many Asian cultures have distinct conceptions of individuality that insist on the fundamental relatedness of individuals to each other. The emphasis is on attending to others, fitting in, and harmonious interdependence with them. American culture neither assumes nor values such an overt connectedness among individuals. In contrast, individuals seek to maintain their independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and expressing their unique inner attributes. As proposed herein, these construals are even more powerful than previously imagined. Theories of the self from both psychology and anthropology are integrated to define in detail the difference between a construal of the self as independent and a construal of the self as interdependent. Each of these divergent construals should have a set of specific consequences for cognition, emotion, and motivation; these consequences are proposed and relevant empirical literature is reviewed. Focusing on differences in self-construals enables apparently inconsistent empirical findings to be reconciled, and raises questions about what have been thought to be culture-free aspects of cognition, emotion, and motivation.

/pdf/culture-and-the-self-implications-for-cognition-emotion-and-2phi5i0grk.pdf

Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.

Information processing in the cerebral cortex involves interactions among distributed areas. Anatomical connectivity suggests that certain areas form local hierarchical relations such as within the visual system. Other connectivity patterns, particularly among association areas, suggest the presence of large-scale circuits without clear hierarchical relations. In this study the organization of networks in the human cerebrum was explored using resting-state functional connectivity MRI. Data from 1,000 subjects were registered using surface-based alignment. A clustering approach was employed to identify and replicate networks of functionally coupled regions across the cerebral cortex. The results revealed local networks confined to sensory and motor cortices as well as distributed networks of association regions. Within the sensory and motor cortices, functional connectivity followed topographic representations across adjacent areas. In association cortex, the connectivity patterns often showed abrupt transitions between network boundaries. Focused analyses were performed to better understand properties of network connectivity. A canonical sensory-motor pathway involving primary visual area, putative middle temporal area complex (MT+), lateral intraparietal area, and frontal eye field was analyzed to explore how interactions might arise within and between networks. Results showed that adjacent regions of the MT+ complex demonstrate differential connectivity consistent with a hierarchical pathway that spans networks. The functional connectivity of parietal and prefrontal association cortices was next explored. Distinct connectivity profiles of neighboring regions suggest they participate in distributed networks that, while showing evidence for interactions, are embedded within largely parallel, interdigitated circuits. We conclude by discussing the organization of these large-scale cerebral networks in relation to monkey anatomy and their potential evolutionary expansion in humans to support cognition.

The organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated by intrinsic functional connectivity

This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/marcus-1995-ethnography-in-of-the-world-system_the-emergence-of-multi-sited-ethnography.pdf

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with a series of rheumatoid arthritis patients. Chronic illness is conceptualised as a particular type of disruptive event. This disruption highlights the resources (cognitive and material) available to individuals, modes of explanation for pain and suffering, continuities and discontinuities between professional and lay thought, and sources of variation in experience.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-9566.ep11339939

Chronic illness as biographical disruption

Muscle fatigue is an exercise-induced reduction in maximal voluntary muscle force. It may arise not only because of peripheral changes at the level of the muscle, but also because the central nervous system fails to drive the motoneurons adequately. Evidence for “central” fatigue and the neural mechanisms underlying it are reviewed, together with its terminology and the methods used to reveal it. Much data suggest that voluntary activation of human motoneurons and muscle fibers is suboptimal and thus maximal voluntary force is commonly less than true maximal force. Hence, maximal voluntary strength can often be below true maximal muscle force. The technique of twitch interpolation has helped to reveal the changes in drive to motoneurons during fatigue. Voluntary activation usually diminishes during maximal voluntary isometric tasks, that is central fatigue develops, and motor unit firing rates decline. Transcranial magnetic stimulation over the motor cortex during fatiguing exercise has revealed focal cha...

Spinal and Supraspinal Factors in Human Muscle Fatigue

Even though as a child I used to watch my mother in the 1940s sewing up, with the skill of a jeweller, gifts of food parcels to send from sunny Australia to her mother, who stayed behind in war-tor Vienna, parcels that always contained, as I remember, several pounds of butter, and even though I marvelled at how thickly she spread her toast, let alone at her cheerfully acknowledging such unhealthy excess, it was not until I settled down in a hot sugar plantation town in western Colombia in 1970, a town without drinking water or adequate sewage, that it was borne upon me what butter could mean as a privileged sign of affluence, golden and creamy, suspended between solid and liquid, dependent on refrigeration no less than on good milk cows, a dairy industry, a nice temperate climate, "alpine" comes to mind, indeed "alpina" was the brand name of Colombian butter, fresh cuttable bread to be buttered . . . indeed, a whole other world, an inconceivably different clean and creamy european world transplanted and superimposed, if only for a gratifying instant by the mere thought, let alone taste and incorporation, of butter. And having made his contract with the devil, he earns much more money but can only spend it on luxuries; on butter, sunglasses, a fancy shirt, liquor . .. If you buy or rent a farm, the trees stop bearing. If you buy a pig to fatten up, it gets thin and dies. Secar, was the word they used. To dry, to dry up like a green tree drying out through lack of water, drying to a crisp in the relentless sun. And the same word applied to livestock, the pig getting thinner and thinner, wasting away to skin and bone. Secar. To dry up. Too much sun. Why can only luxuries be bought and consumed with the devil pact? Butter, sunglasses, a fancy shirt, liquor ... a strange list, I thought, being thrown by the butter, a new sign precariously signalling to me both the difference of my new, third world, existence, and the way in which that existence connected

The Sun Gives Without Receiving: An Old Story

Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds

http://www.bokship.org/comingup/loveinthemorning/Taussig_Language_of_flowers.pdf

Michael Taussig

Papers

The Sun Gives Without Receiving: An Old Story

Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds

The Language of Flowers

Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest

The Right to Be Lazy