Elements of Neuroanthropology

Abstract

Neuroanthropology is the integration of neuroscience into anthropology and aims to understand “brains in the wild.” This interdisciplinary field examines patterns of human variation in field settings and provides empirical research that complements work done in clinical and laboratory settings. Neuroanthropology often uses ethnography in combination with theories and methods from cognitive science as a way to capture how culture, mind, and brain interact. This article describes nine elements that outline how to do neuroanthropology research: (1) integrating biology and culture through neuroscience and biocultural anthropology; (2) extending focus of anthropology on what people say and do to include what people process; (3) sizing culture appropriately, from broad patterns of culture to culture in small-scale settings; (4) understanding patterns of cultural variation, in particular how culture produces patterns of shared variation; (5) considering individuals in interaction with culture, with levels of analysis that can go from biology to social structures; (6) focusing on interactive elements that bring together biological and cultural processes; (7) conceptual triangulation, which draws on anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience in conjunction with field, clinic, and laboratory; (8) critical complementarity as a way to integrate the strengths of critical scholarship with interdisciplinary work; and (9) using methodological triangulation as a way to advance interdisciplinary research. These elements are illustrated through three case studies: research on US combat veterans and how they use Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a way to manage the transition to becoming civilians, work on human-raptor interactions to understand how and why these interactions can prove beneficial for human handlers, and adapting cue reactivity research on addiction to a field-based approach to understand how people interact with cues in naturalistic settings.

Full text

REVIEW
published: 12 October 2021
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.509611
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611
Edited by:
Andrew G. Ryder,
Concordia University, Canada
Reviewed by:
Daina Crafa,
Aarhus University, Denmark
Elizaveta Solomonova,
McGill University, Canada
*Correspondence:
Daniel H. Lende
dlende@usf.edu
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Cultural Psychology,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 02 November 2019
Accepted: 26 July 2021
Published: 12 October 2021
Citation:
Lende DH, Casper BI, Hoyt KB and
Collura GL (2021) Elements of
Neuroanthropology.
Front. Psychol. 12:509611.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.509611
Elements of Neuroanthropology
Daniel H. Lende*, Breanne I. Casper, Kaleigh B. Hoyt and Gino L. Collura
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, United States
Neuroanthropology is the integration of neuroscience into anthropology and aims to
understand “brains in the wild.” This interdisciplinary field examines patterns of human
variation in field settings and provides empirical research that complements work
done in clinical and laboratory settings. Neuroanthropology often uses ethnography in
combination with theories and methods from cognitive science as a way to capture
how culture, mind, and brain interact. This article describes nine elements that outline
how to do neuroanthropology research: (1) integrating biology and culture through
neuroscience and biocultural anthropology; (2) extending focus of anthropology on what
people say and do to include what people process; (3) sizing culture appropriately, from
broad patterns of culture to culture in small-scale settings; (4) understanding patterns
of cultural variation, in particular how culture produces patterns of shared variation;
(5) considering individuals in interaction with culture, with levels of analysis that can
go from biology to social structures; (6) focusing on interactive elements that bring
together biological and cultural processes; (7) conceptual triangulation, which draws
on anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience in conjunction with field, clinic, and
laboratory; (8) critical complementarity as a way to integrate the strengths of critical
scholarship with interdisciplinary work; and (9) using methodological triangulation as a
way to advance interdisciplinary research. These elements are illustrated through three
case studies: research on US combat veterans and how they use Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a
way to manage the transition to becoming civilians, work on human-raptor interactions to
understand how and why these interactions can prove beneficial for human handlers, and
adapting cue reactivity research on addiction to a field-based approach to understand
how people interact with cues in naturalistic settings.
Keywords: neuroanthropology, culture, neuroscience, veterans, raptors, cue reactivity, addiction
INTRODUCTION
In researching how our nervous system functions in both common and varied ways across settings,
neuroanthropology has drawn on the strengths of anthropology—a holistic approach that fosters
interdisciplinarity, the theory of culture, and field-based research. Neuroanthropology has also
embraced the attention to the process that comes with biology and cognitive science as well
as increasing understanding of neuroplasticity of neuroscience. Together, these have fostered
examining “brains in the wild” (Lende and Downey, 2012a,b).
Related fields, such as cultural neuroscience and critical neuroscience, have also drawn on
shifting views of the brain, while social science research has increasingly focused on how
the explosion in neuroscience matters for society (Chiao and Ambady, 2007; Rose and Abi-
Rached, 2013; Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015; Choudhury and Slaby, 2016; Kitayama et al., 2019).

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Neuroanthropology can contribute to these exciting
interdisciplinary developments by offering ways to incorporate
the empirical and conceptual developments made by
anthropologists. By studying human variation in context,
neuroanthropology helps to bridge the gap between the
laboratory studies favored by neuroscience and field-based
anthropology focused on sociocultural phenomena.
In this paper, we review three domains that prove important
for neuroanthropological research: (1) how holism and
biocultural approaches foster interdisciplinary research that
draws on neuroscience and on field research (Hruschka
et al., 2005; Quinn, 2018), (2) ways to incorporate culture at
varying levels into a project, and (3) how different forms of
triangulation offer ways to integrate different ideas and methods
into research (Patton, 1999; Maxwell, 2004; Fusch et al., 2018).
After covering these key elements, we provide lessons learned
from three different research projects—work with veterans,
human-raptor interactions, and how people react to cues for
drugs—for neuroanthropology.
HOLISM
Combining Biology and Culture
Neuroanthropology starts with a reciprocal understanding of
how humans work: We create culture, and culture creates us.
For neuroanthropology, culture is interactive, a dynamic set of
processes both outside and under the skin. This view means that
enculturation—or how culture comes to be embodied in a specific
person—works via biocultural transformations that happen over
time and in particular settings (Hruschka et al., 2005; Worthman,
2009; Lende and Downey, 2012a).
Researchers who are less familiar with biological processes
should recognize that the specifics of neural processing are
not intuitively obvious—often times, they correspond neither
to our mechanical understandings of how the world works,
nor our representationalist view that there is a perceiving
subject somewhere inside the brain (Lende and Downey, 2012a).
For example, the popular press has covered Marilyn Monroe
or Jennifer Aniston neurons, conveying the idea that specific
neurons correspond to specific faces (or, more broadly, this
part does that function; Abbott, 2010; Goldhill, 2016). However,
research on facial recognition remains a work in progress and
shows that both higher-level and lower-level kinds of processing
matter for recognizing a face. For example, the fusiform face area
in the dorsal visual cortex does higher-order face processing of
basic visual perceptions, helping us to recognize familiar faces
(Kanwisher and Yovel, 2006) even when the perceiving subject
is blind from birth (Murty et al., 2020). At the same time, recent
primate research also has made clear that the brain makes sense
of faces by breaking faces down into separate componential
processes, attending to relatively invariant sensory features that
can then be used to create a composite (or constructed) face
(Chang and Tsao, 2017). Thus, the specifics of how the biology
actually gets a particular function done matter for doing good
neuroanthropology and for linking biology to cultural science.
From the culture side, researchers less familiar with
anthropology should recognize that their common-sense
categories of how we perceive and act and experience the world
represent western ethnopsychologies. Ethnopsychologies divvy
up the world in particular ways, and that divvying up is not
necessarily something natural or preexisting inside the world.
Rather, it comes from culture. For example, westerners rely
on a model of the five senses, each as its own separate domain
from the other, which together comprise how people perceive
the world. However, other cultures operate from different
assumptions. For example, in Ghana, the Anlo-Ewe-speaking
people view balance as a main sense and central to defining what
it means to be a person (Guerts, 2003). Moreover, the Anlo-Ewe
approach senses not as perception but as feeling, something
that is intuited and felt within the body; in contrast, western
psychology generally views perception happening at the interface
of the mind and physical body. Thus, the Anlo-Ewe view of
sensory perception/feeling is distinct from the mind-body
dichotomy commonly used in the west.
To navigate between both a nonintuitive biology and a non-
intuitive culture, neuroanthropology has drawn on neuroscience
that can connect to learning, human development, and culture
(Wexler, 2011; Lende and Downey, 2012a; Sherwood and
Gómez-Robles, 2017). At the biological level, neural reuse
provides one approach that helps to understand how the brain
can repurpose existing elements as a way to solve novel tasks
and support culture (Anderson, 2010). Via neuroplasticity acting
from cellular to circuit levels, built-in functions can be adapted
to new demands, and new functions can emerge from combining
existing neural components with learning and environmental
inputs. Culture excels at demanding exactly this sort of learning
and by structuring inputs in ways that push both human (and
sometimes nonhuman) brains to do novel things, such as using
symbols (Matsuzawa, 2009; Whiten, 2017), reading (Dehaene-
Lambertz et al., 2018), and tool use (Stout and Hecht, 2017).
Neuroconstructivism provides an approach that can
connect neural function and reuse to development in specific
contexts (Bates et al., 1996; Westermann et al., 2007).
Neuroconstructivism focuses on the experience-dependent
development of neural structures, where experience can play a
fundamental role in shaping functionality and the emergence
of both competent function and neuropathology (Campos
et al., 2019). In turn, neural reuse and neuroconstructivism can
work with embodied, enactive, and extended mind approaches.
This research connects neural and cognitive processing to local
contexts (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2008; Wilson and
Golonka, 2013). As Wilson and Golonka (2013) argue, these
approaches need to look at the task to be solved from the point
of view of the agent, and then examine the resources available
to solve that task. These resources are not just internal—brain,
body, other people, symbols, and tools can all help.
Emotion can provide an example of this integrative approach.
Work by Barrett and colleagues approaches emotions as
constructed rather than reducible to universal patterns (Barrett,
2017; Gendron et al., 2018). In their approach, emotions still
involve bodily states and brain processing but also rely on
contextual cues and learned interpretations. Thus, they can vary
cross-culturally rather than having discrete and distinguishable
signatures in brain signals or bodily states. In this type of
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 2October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
approach, emotions can be similar cross-culturally not just
because of an innate biology but because of commonalities in
our bodies and faces, how our brains process both general states
(from hunger and illness to anger and anxiety) and specific
emotions (say, schadenfreude), and similarities in social situations
and recurring cues that can guide specific interpretations (Crivelli
et al., 2016; Barrett et al., 2019; Srinivasan and Martinez, 2021). It
is the recurring combinations, from inside to outside, that can
lead to commonalities across cultures.
SAY-DO-PROCESS
Alongside theoretical considerations of how to bring together
neuroscience and anthropology, neuroanthropology builds its
approach to research problems, using insights from the field. As
Roepstorff and Frith (2012) argue, anthropology is well-equipped
to handle competing discourses and models while also providing
a focus on specific examples in concrete settings. With field
research, anthropology has stressed the importance of paying
attention to what people say and what people do. They are not
the same thing; people might say one thing and do another.
Moreover, what they say about what they do and why, does not
necessarily match up with what they actually do.
Here, we add a third element—what people process. Process
brings in emphasis of cognitive science on understanding
mechanisms, functions, and mediating factors. Psychology
has long recognized the distinction between what people
say and what people process (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977).
In contrast, field-based research in anthropology has often
focused on higher-level sociocultural phenomena. Through
a process, neuroanthropology draws on biology, cognition,
and development to better understand human variation and
outcomes in real-world settings. Process brings attention to how
things happen, not just to what people say and do.
In research, Say corresponds best to language, symbols,
metaphors, and meaning that shape how we think and
speak (Hutchins, 1995; Tedlock and Mannheim, 1995; Zarger,
2010). For neuroanthropological research, getting at Say can
happen through watching people speak together and doing
informal interviews in field settings, as well as via interviews,
questionnaires, and other forms of verbal response. Listening
to how people interpret what happens and why, as well as
developing their views on things in their own words, forms an
important part of capturing Say in field research.
Do corresponds best to practices and how people interact
in specific contexts. These often form the core of ethnographic
research, particularly participant observation where researchers
can interact informally with local people and observe firsthand
how life plays out in real time. For neuroanthropology, what
people do can connect senses and movement and action
on the neuroscience side, and the skills and practices and
doing on the anthropology side (Worthman, 2009; Downey,
2010). Neuroscience here provides a wealth of work on senses,
movement, balance, and more that can effectively work with
the emphasis that anthropology provides on how people behave,
whether following one individual or looking at coordinated
behavior in specific settings (Clark, 2008; Han, 2015; Chiao et al.,
2016; Kitayama et al., 2019).
It is important, nonetheless, to view what people do as
happening in public and between people. That means that
culture and interactions are available for observation. Provided
researchers frame questions right, questionnaires can also get
at what people do by asking about specific experiences and
behaviors, and getting informants to report on behaviors
done within specific contexts (e.g., home, work, and other
types of sociocultural contexts). Finding specific moments
where things happen that crystallize insights is the mainstay
of ethnographic research and equally important to field-
based neuroanthropology.
What people do and what people say do not provide
automatic access to how and what people process. Roepstorff
and Frith (2012) argue that anthropological approaches need
to pay attention to mechanism (or process) to effectively
bridge laboratory and field. To understand process, ethnographic
research combined with biocultural approaches can help.
Understanding how development, plasticity, neural reuse,
algorithmic processing and the like impact any particular
problem will help to capture how people process (Anderson,
2010; Worthman, 2010; Wilson and Golonka, 2013). These
processes often happen outside of conscious awareness and
cultural modes of understanding but play a major role in shaping
human variation. Observations on process have been proved
effective in getting at process in field settings (Worthman, 2009;
Xygalatas et al., 2013; McGraw and Krátký, 2017). Alongside
observations, researchers can encourage informants to do thick
description of what they experience, what happens as they do
something, and what the context is like.
CULTURE
Sizing Culture Appropriately
After establishing a holistic approach, it is important to consider
how “culture” is sized in a particular study, and how that fits
any proposed interactions or effects that culture might have
(see Table 1). Cultural neuroscience has generally taken a broad
approach to culture, approaching “culture” as a regional or
national phenomenon and linking it to changes in psychological
or neural states and functions (Chiao and Ambady, 2007;
Han, 2015). This research has yielded important insights. For
example, societies that stress interdependence over independence
show differing patterns of neural activation in self-other tasks;
interdependent cultures tend to show greater activation in
circuits that are generally considered “self” oriented in western
contexts (e.g., greater activation in Germans than Chinese in the
medial prefrontal cortex; Korn et al., 2014).
However, two potential problems can arise. First, such a
broad generalization (east vs. west) can hide significant variation,
whether within a particular group, community, or region (Lende
and Downey, 2012a; Seligman et al., 2016). Second, by using
a generic level of culture, broad differences are likely to be
distal compared to more immediate influences on psychological
and neural function. For example, context deeply shapes human
behavior but is often not assessed in large-scale generalizations
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 3October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
TABLE 1 | Sizing culture appropriately.
Level of
granularity
Symbolic/
interpretive
Societal/ political
economy
Ecological/
environmental
Macro Symbols Political economic
structures
Local ecology
Meso Rituals Social institutions Food and making
a living
Micro Interpretations Households Interspecies
interactions
Mental Subjective
meanings and
models
Individual preferences
and tastes
Local
environmental
knowledge and
practices
At a practical level, sizing culture needs to work in an iterative fashion from the broadest
considerations down to the most micro to figure out what is an appropriate level of
analysis for any particular project. Often the broadest orientations—symbolic, political
economic, ecological—are not enough to understand variation within a particular society.
Once researchers have chosen an appropriate overall approach, they will need to work
down to the level of granularity that most impacts their specific research problem. The
level of granularity in cultural analysis is presented on left, from large-scale considerations
(the bird’s eye view) down to how individuals relate to culture. On the top level, in italics,
are prominent approaches to assessing culture in its broadest sense; these different
orientations all represent decades-old research paradigms. The more fine-grained labels
(e.g., social institutions, households, and tastes) are placemarkers to indicate the level of
granularity,a label to exemplify a type of variation. Other possible research foci are possible
(e.g., Mosse’s, 2004 research on non-profit organizations, internal NGO organization, and
cognitive contradictions in goals vs. practice). Researchers should consider which type
of approach to culture best fits their research problem (Table 2), and from there, how
many levels of analysis (e.g., degrees of granularity) are feasible to include in the research.
Often times researchers might consider broad patterns of meaning making (language,
nationality, and history) but focus in on smaller-scale aspects of culture (prominent
interpretations that relate to sensory processing, and experience-near descriptions of
sensory details). Interpretive, political economic, and ecological approaches are not the
only ways to “size culture.” Research on globalization and on the materiality of cultural
life are other prominent ways to analyze the patterning of variation; however, these
approaches generally engage with one or more of these macro views on human culture.
(Moore, 2004; Medin et al., 2010; Roepstorff et al., 2010; Northoff,
2013). Thus, large-scale sizing of culture brings advantages, from
ease of research and ability to work across labs in multiple
countries, and disadvantages, such as overgeneralization across
groups and the underpowering of the specific effects of culture.
Neuroanthropology has generally focused on more proximate
approaches, sizing culture at a more local level. Research of Lende
(2005) on drug use and dopamine function framed culture at
the level of shared understandings of addiction in urban areas
in Colombia. An even more local approach came from the work
of Downey on capoeira and proprioception focused on specific
training regimes and skill acquisition in the context of the roda—
the setting where capoeira training takes place, with its concrete
patterns of play, music, and bodily movements (Downey, 2005,
2012). Rather than viewing balance as innate, research of Downey
showed how training, context, and interpretation shaped whether
capoeira practitioners could overcome initial neural reactions
such as the righting reflex while maintaining balance. In this case,
understanding the specific outcome—balance—depended on a
series of considerations that would not be available in current
neuroimaging research but were highly relevant to how capoeira
worked as a dynamic human skill.
Even these localized approaches to culture generally orient
themselves within three broad approaches: symbolic and
interpretive approaches, political economic approaches, and
ecological and environmental approaches. Research can use more
of an interpretive approach to culture, analyzing symbols, rituals,
language, and meanings, as well as associated practices (Geertz,
1973; Tedlock and Mannheim, 1995; Holland et al., 2001). Or, one
might look at how political economic structure shapes identity,
sense of self, gender, class, consumption, and even disease (Mintz,
1986; Di Leonardo, 1991; Farmer, 2004). These social structures
shape who we are, how we think and feel, our daily experiences,
and the material resources we have to solve tasks and grow
and develop. One could also take an ecological/environmental
approach, with its emphasis on how ecology shapes ways of
living, and thus ways of relating to nature and to others, as
well as how one feels and thinks about the local environment
(Biersack, 1999; Stepp et al., 2003; Zarger, 2010). Table 2 provides
a way to help figure out which of these three major approaches
to culture—interpretive, political economic, or ecological—will
be the most useful for a research project that aims to assess the
specific effects culture has within these domains.
Considering Cultural Variation
Three common issues affect “sizing culture appropriately,” or
taking into account considerations of similarity and difference in
cross-cultural variation. First is the WEIRD problem (Henrich
et al., 2010) that most psychological research has been done with
university students. These samples have been both homogeneous
and skewed; these students represent not just Western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic but also young, privileged,
and often self-indulgent and myopic (Lende and Downey, 2020).
WEIRD results do not generalize well, and the antidote is not
simply better replication of existing theories based on WEIRD
samples (Muthukrishna and Henrich, 2019). Rather, research
needs to recognize how context-dependent samples affect both
results and the interpretation of results; research that makes
broad assertions about culture and human variation must be
examined in a comparative approach that takes into account the
extraordinary range of variation already known to anthropology.
The second issue is that culture is a shared problem
rather than an individual variation problem (LeVine, 1984).
Many approaches in neuroscience and psychology focus on an
individual as the unit of analysis, and use statistical approaches
that emphasize how individuals vary from each other. Cultural
science must move beyond treating culture as just another
individual variable to measure (which often reduces culture
to quantitative demographics, whether that is gender, world
region, race, age, or similar type of measurement). This approach
to “sizing culture appropriately” gives culture the theoretical
space to be an actual working entity in the lives of the people
participating in any particular study.
In anthropology, culture is generally approached as a shared
phenomenon, for example, the shared meanings that a group uses
to understand its place in the world. Take language. Psychologists
might focus on variation in linguistic skill (say, evaluating
individual reading ability) while anthropologists might focus on
how the acquisition of literacy by a group creates broad changes
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 4October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
TABLE 2 | Cultural Approaches.
Cultural Approaches Potential Features
1. Symbolic & interpretive Symbols, language, ideology, religion, emotion and self
2. Political & economic Inequality, political institutions, capitalist or egalitarian
ideologies
3. Ecology & environment Local ecologies, forms of food production,
animal-human interactions, learning about nature
What kind of cultural approach is useful for your research? Option 1: Does your research
connect to symbols, language, ideology, religion, or something similar? Option 2: Does
your research connect to economy, inequality, political institutions, capitalist or egalitarian
ideologies, or something similar? Option 3: Does your research connect to the local
environment or ecology, learning about nature, interacting with animals, or something
similar? Option 1 is Symbolic and Interpretive, option 2 is Political Economy, and option
3 is Ecology and Environment (see Table 1). If you answered no to all three of these,
consider a following option: Globalization or Material Culture. However, globalization and
material culture approaches generally draw on one of the three main orientations—
symbols, political economy, or ecology—for help in understanding specific aspects of
how a changing world marked by migration, money, and media (globalization) or how the
physical and interactive aspects of built environments, from clothing to smart phones to
architecture to trees to reliquaries (material culture), relate to how people live, experience,
and understand. Examples of Symbolic and Interpretive Research: Shweder’s (1991)
text is foundational to this line, looking at emotion, self, and morality across culture and
centered on the person in relation to culture as a key analytic unit (see also Markus
and Kitayama, 1991; Cole, 1998; Nisbett et al., 2001). Continued work in cross-cultural
psychology (e.g., Bender and Beller, 2016; Sternberg, 2017) links cognitive phenomenon
such as perception to culture, while a great deal of psychological anthropology continues
examining culture in relation to Shweder’s classic concerns with emotion, self and person-
centered analysis (Quinn, 2018; Bock and Leavitt, 2019). Examples of Political Economic
Research include: The psychology of neoliberalism (Adams et al., 2019), Decolonizing
community psychology (McNamara and Naepi, 2018), Sense of closeness and helping
behavior (Hackman et al., 2017), Nationalism (Sapolsky, 2019), Distributed cognition
and economic reform (Lieber, 2015), and Folk-economic beliefs (Boyer and Petersen,
2018). Examples of Ecological and Environmental Research: Cultural neuroscience and
psychology have looked at how patterns of food production, whether more collective
(rice farming) or individualist (individual farmsteads), have led to changes over time in
psychological and neurological patterning (Chiao and Blizinsky, 2009; Talhelm et al.,
2014). Here, patterns of ecological productivity create both selective effects, favoring
certain gene types over others, and enculturation effects, working through value systems,
patterns of social coordination, and the demands of making a living. But this broad level
is not the only way to connect culture to mind and brain. For example, research on how
children learn about local ecologies emphasizes language, institutions like schools, family
networks, exposure and experience, and other more immediate factors that shape how
children think about nature (Hermann et al., 2010; Zarger, 2010; Quinlan et al., 2013;
Ojalehto and Medin, 2015). Globalization and Material Culture: Globalization offer another
major way to analyze cultural change (Andepson-Fye, 2003; Kirmayer, 2006; Hong and
Cheon, 2017). Similarly, materiality—or looking at how the material aspects of ourlives are
central to cognition and culture—represents an important recent area of recent research
(Hutchins, 1995; Clark, 2006; Sutton, 2008).
in how people communicate with one another. Put in statistical
terms, rather than studying normal distributions, anthropologists
study J distributions, where most people share in a common
culture (LeVine, 1984). An important research consideration
related to the shared aspects of culture is that smaller samples
become viable (Guest et al., 2006), since commonalities will occur
in most members of even small samples.
The final consideration is to recognize the shared production
of difference within members of a particular group or culture.
In other words, shared culture can, nonetheless, produce a
difference in ways that are not reducible to individual differences.
Gender, class, and age represent recurring features of social
organization, and, in turn, these social features shape what
one does and knows. While these variables are often reduced
TABLE 3 | Analytic levels: individuals and interactions.
Level Individual Interaction
Body Biology Embodiment
Mind Psychology Practices
Micro Self Context
Macro Social Self Social Structures
Alongside sizing culture, researchers should consider the levels of analysis that they take
with regards to the individual and interactions with culture. Culture can shape biology,
psychology, self, and social self, but at the same time, these levels can change the impact
and function of culture, particularly at meso, micro, and mental levels (see Table 1 on
Sizing Culture). At the same time, interactions mediate between individual and culture,
and thus can be actively considered in neuroanthropology and other research on culture,
mind, and brain. The interaction level focuses on how culture can specifically impact the
individual, from shaping physical bodies and biological functions via culture (Gravlee,
2009; Redcay and Schilbach, 2019); how social practices shape what people learn,
how their biology functions, and how they relate to others (Downey, 2010; Roepstorff
et al., 2010; Hari et al., 2015), how specific contexts shape how the brain interprets local
information as well as what sorts of practices a person might use and what sort of self
and social self they might present (Moore, 2004; Quinn, 2006; Schilbach et al., 2013),
and how larger social structures can have quite individual impacts (Lende, 2012) as well
as shaping context, practices, and embodiment (Gravlee, 2009; Roepstorff et al., 2010).
to individual-level features in WEIRD research, they actually
represent patterns of shared experience, behavior, knowledge,
interpretation, and/or language.
Individuals and Interactions
Given how patterns of shared experience form part of human
variation, neuroanthropology uses an approach that considers
individuals and interactions in relation to culture. For example,
addiction has cultural and social roots—drug-use experiences
are intimately related to symbols and meanings, while addiction
runs along the fault lines of society, both at the level of
households and of socioeconomic organization. Nevertheless,
addiction can also be potentiated by certain types of interactions
that happen in specific times and places (for example, hanging
out at a “hard drinking” bar—Alasuutari, 1992) as well as whether
drug use has sensitized the dopamine system (Lende, 2005).
Thus, understanding addiction requires putting together how
individuals interact with drugs as well as with local patterns of
inequality, people, and places that favor drug use, and cultural
meanings surrounding excessive use (Lende, 2012).
Similar to “sizing culture appropriately,” the level of
granularity can matter when considering an individual and
interactions (Table 3). For the individual, one can go from a
focus on biology to psychology and then self and social self. At
the biological level, one might consider not just brain function
(Roepstorff et al., 2010) but also physiological functions. For
example, Worthman (2009) argues that “habits of the heart”
(affective-cognitive processing) shape individual relations toward
immediate sociocultural contexts, and thus what local niches
individuals sought out and how they worked to exploit social and
material resources.
For self, one can draw on the discussion of self of
Quinn (2006) in anthropological light. She argues that “self”
references neurological and psychological processes but should
be understood as a larger unit, one that can also exist in relation
to cultural symbols and have contextual features shaped by
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 5October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
interactions with others. Self, in this case, might be understood as
a sense of identity and other types of “coherence” (in the words of
Quinn) that brings together disparate aspects of experience into
the sense of who an individual is as a person (see also Galloti and
Frith, 2013).
Finally, self can also exist socially, for how we play certain
social roles and present ourselves to others. This social self
represents two different things: (1) the overlapping aspects of
who we are, and how race, gender, class, and sexuality, as forms
of similarity and differentiation that intersect within a particular
person, shape a person (Crenshaw, 1989; Brah and Phoenix, 2004;
Veenstra, 2011; McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019), and (2) how
that intersection is not simply imposed but also agentive and
performed, enacting who we are through our behaviors in specific
settings (Butler, 1993; Barad, 2003). This acting in the social
world comes from “a regularized and constrained repetition of
norms” (Butler, 1993, p. 95), producing a certain social self, such
as cisgender man, and precluding others.
Interactions, for neuroanthropology, generally focus on
granularity that holds an individual constant rather than reaching
down into how environment-organism interactions might shape
things like epigenetic regulation, gut microbiomes, and similar
aspects of how context can drive biology. At the broadest level,
interactions between individuals and their local environments are
structured by local socioecologies, which include how political
economic factors shape neighborhoods (Chen et al., 2015,
2019; Nadan et al., 2015), scaling effects that happen in cities
(Bettencourt et al., 2010; Turchin et al., 2018) and how social
structures, in turn, shape how people learn class and other
relevant aspects of social position (Mintz, 1986; Bourdieu, 1987).
One way to understand these interactions is to use the social
science approach to practices (Bourdieu, 1977; Ortner, 1984),
among others. A study of Downey has adapted practice via
the notion of skill. Enculturation can work through skill, not
just abstract knowledge and language, indicating the need to
look at “changes in physiology, perception, comportment, and
behavior patterns” (Downey, 2010, p. S22), where learning by
doing and processes of embodied feedback shapes the creation
of shared skills. A similar approach is in the “patterned practices”
of Roepstorff et al. (2010) where social interactions can correlate
with neural and psychophysical patterns. Here, looking at specific
patterns of practice, whether in the field or experimental settings,
moves researchers beyond more abstract notions of culture.
Interactive Elements
Ritual provides an example of how practices use interactive
elements that bring neurobiology and culture together. At a
broad level, cultures structure ritual (Boyer and Liénard, 2006;
McGraw and Krátký, 2017; Hobson et al., 2018). Rituals work
because human groups create both particular settings and
practices that, in turn, can drive human biology via specific
processes that interact with a person, from the social self to basic
neurobiology. Indeed, cultures have figured out that aversive
rituals can produce group cohesion through intense events,
whereas routine rituals work through repetition (Whitehouse
and Lanman, 2014).
Researchers such as Rappaport (1999) and Turner (2011) have
highlighted how rituals are seen by individuals as compulsory
yet work through the condensation of specific elements that
can produce subjective and neurological changes in participants.
Rituals work by combining sensory elements with associative
elements (or ideological elements, in the terminology of Victor
Turner), focused on specific material instruments and bodily
practices within the ritual (Bull and Mitchell, 2015). These
interactive elements produce specific types of neurological
effects, for example, blurring self/other processing, extending
the tendency of humans toward immediate social rewards to
broader sociocultural elements, extending associative learning to
capture aspects of meaning through the concentration of linked
associations, and using intense experience to promote neural
reuse via cross-talk (as psychedelics have long done; Xygalatas
et al., 2013; Whitehouse and Lanman, 2014; Bull and Mitchell,
2015).
Interactive elements are not the same as affordances, the
concept initially devised by Gibson (1986) to refer to aspects
of the environment that can support and even help accomplish
cognition. Recently, affordance approaches have been applied
to culture (Ramstead et al., 2016; see also Lende and Downey,
2020, for a discussion). While interactive elements might be
seen as comparable to affordances, these interactive elements are
conceived first from the point of view of culture in relation to an
individual, not from an internal position of mind or cognition.
The materiality and patterning of the interactive elements
that operate between individuals and culture are central to how
culture has figured out how to hack the brain. They are, in many
ways, analogous to the material processes that mediate between
DNA and cell function. These interactive elements are another
set of mechanisms, just like epigenetics. They are interactive
elements on top of our cognition, and thus not reducible to
affordances that exist in relation to cognitive processing and
biophysical constraints. Crucially for research, these interactive
elements are there in what people say and do, not just in the
biological and cognitive processes that comprise the lower levels
of individual analysis.
TRIANGULATION
Conceptual Triangulation
A central concern for interdisciplinary research on mind, brain,
and culture is how to productively bring together different
ideas and methods. While there are many ways to do this, we
have found that triangulation proves useful. In its initial use,
triangulation meant using multiple methods to produce a more
complete picture of the phenomenon under study while also
counteracting, via those same multiple methods, the biases that
come with relying on any one data source (Patton, 1999; Maxwell,
2004; Denzin, 2010; Fusch et al., 2018). Today, triangulation
also applies to combining different theoretical viewpoints (Pitre
and Kushner, 2015; Fusch et al., 2018). In our work, two types
of triangulation help to frame research: laboratory-clinic-field
and psychology-neuroscience-anthropology.
Laboratory-clinic-field references how laboratory, clinical,
and field research can all add to understanding a problem
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 6October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
FIGURE 1 | Conceptual triangulation between field-laboratory-clinic.
Conceptual triangulation happens via asking questions and considering the
data and viewpoints from different arenas of scholarship. For example, how
can field research test ideas that come from clinical and laboratory based
settings? What results and ideas do they offer that are relevant to what I am
finding? What is lab-based research missing that is apparent in the field? How
does the clinical problem present itself in everyday circumstances? What other
factors shape this problem in the everyday that are apparent in the field but
might not be in the clinic? The onus is on the field research to, first,
understand research from laboratory and clinical settings, and second, to look
at how one can provide data that can at least inform a scholarly debate. One
might also consider what bridging ideas exist between field-clinic and
field-laboratory. Where is the common ground? What specific approaches can
mutually inform each other? What are specific methods, research foci, and
theoretical issues that overlap between field-clinic and field-laboratory? For
further ideas on integrating field and laboratory research, see Willis and Miller
(2011),Teddlie and Tashakkori (2012),Hay (2016),Gurven (2018),Hruschka
et al. (2018), and Matusz et al. (2019). For field and clinical research, see
Weisner and Hay (2015),Kirmayer and Ryder (2016),Kaiser and Kohrt (2019),
Lewis-Fernández and Kirmayer (2019), and Watson et al. (2019).
(Figure 1). Neuroanthropology, with its field-based approaches,
can provide a crucial empirical check on theories and results that
come out of laboratory and clinical settings. This research is often
presented as helping to understand how a specific problem plays
out in the “real world” but generally does not take the additional
step of testing its ideas in that real world. At the same time,
field-based research should aim to develop data that can address
relevant issues and ideas that come from the clinic and the
laboratory. Certainly, researchers using neuroanthropology can
address theoretical and practical problems that emerge primarily
from field research. But these data do not have to exist on their
own; developing conceptual triangulation increases the relevance
of field-based data to researchers and practitioners in the lab and
clinic settings; Figure 1 provides further suggestions.
The second type of conceptual triangulation is psychology-
neuroscience-anthropology. Neuroanthropology started with an
emphasis on the intellectual yields that come from integrating
neuroscience and anthropology. Cultural neuroscience performs
a similar intellectual move, focusing on psychology and
neuroscience (Kim and Sasaki, 2014; Chiao et al., 2016).
Substantive integration of all three disciplines is the logical
next step, although often difficult in practice. As a convenient
shorthand, this type of triangulation can start from a simpler
premise: research should address mind-biology-culture.
Mind is not uniquely the domain of psychology, as
there are many disciplines that consider thought, affect,
subjective experience, and more. Similarly, biology is not
unique to neuroscience; biological anthropology, evolutionary
biology, comparative biology, and physiology all explicitly
consider biology, whereas social science and humanistic
inquiry increasingly address notions of the body, embodiment,
corporality, and materiality. Finally, culture long ago escaped
anthropology, and is now considered in many disciplines,
including in evolutionary biology. Thus, mind-biology-culture
represents a pragmatic approach, ensuring that each domain is
explicitly considered during the development of research.
Critical Complementarity
Simply stating that triangulation is useful is not sufficient to
indicate how to actually triangulate approaches that can come
from disparate fields with differing types of data, theoretical
assumptions, and scholarly emphases. Triangulation is inevitably
strengthened the more it can be tied into research that comes
directly from psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology,
and even better, placed within the inevitable disciplinary
debates within that field, rather than assuming that the
insights from another discipline are somehow less laden by
constraints of methods, relevant data, disciplinary debates, and
intellectual history.
Here we advocate using “critical complementarity” as a
mechanism to figure out what is useful for robust research
on the interaction of culture and people versus what might
remain discipline- or site specific. Critical complementarity uses
critical analysis first to understand background assumptions and
methodological biases, and then stresses how different ideas can
complement each other, providing their initial limitations are
taken into account. Critical complementarity brings together
the strengths of critical approaches with the interdisciplinary
emphasis on finding which ideas and data can best illuminate a
particular problem.
Here, it is easiest to discuss the research of Lende (2005) on
incentive salience and addiction. The incentive salience approach
to dopamine function represented a cutting-edge theory about
what drives addiction (in a nutshell, incentive salience mediates
“wanting” via dopamine signaling, and drugs drive excessive
salience signaling, thus heavy users want too much and use to
great excess). However, this research had two critical limitations:
(1) it was laboratory-based research, using animal models, and
thus not tested with humans in either clinical or field settings
at the time, and (2) it advocated strongly for its particular
view of dopamine function against other interested actors in
neuroscience and thus did not fully consider how incentive
salience might usefully combine with other types of dopamine-
related research.
At the same time, there was complementarity between
what Robinson and Berridge (1993) proposed as the subjective
experience of incentive salience—wanting—and views of
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 7October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Colombians of addiction as a problem of “wanting more and
more” (quite different from the emphasis in the United States
on pleasure). Yet some anthropologists would take this
cultural view of “wanting” and assert that dopamine function
is completely constructed via culture; a critical view from
biocultural anthropology argued against reducing the subjective
experience of desire to either culture or biology (Lende, 2005).
Finally, the approach of both Robinson and Berridge and
cultural anthropology to “wanting” left it rather undefined
as a psychological process. Rather than drawing on a specific
psychological theory, this research drew on experience-near and
person-centered approaches in anthropology (Wikan, 1991; Levy
and Hollan, 1998). Intensive questions helped informants to
describe both specific experiences and how they felt and acted
in specific contexts; this qualitative understanding of wanting
then informed the development of a scale to test whether
incentive salience was actually reported by people who had
greater problems with drug use and abuse.
For guidance on the neuroscience side for how to do
critical complementarity, one can combine critical neuroscience
(Choudhury and Slaby, 2016) with cultural neuroscience (Chiao
and Ambady, 2007; Kim and Sasaki, 2014; Kitayama et al., 2019).
Developing critical complementarity also means drawing on
social science research, for example, critical analyses done by
anthropologists and others on neuroscience (Martin, 2010; Pitts-
Taylor, 2010; Rees, 2016) as well as biocultural and integrative
approaches (Hruschka et al., 2005; Seligman and Brown, 2010;
Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015). The point is not to rely excessively
on a particular perspective but to use critical complementarity to
build bridges among different areas of research.
Methodological Triangulation
By using a combination of methods, researchers can address
differing aspects of culture, examine how individuals interact
with culture, and capture aspects of say-do-process as
relevant to the research problem. Given the emphasis that
neuroanthropology places on the field, ethnographic methods are
often important. Ethnographic methods attend to the perspective
of the participants in the field, capture context effectively
(particularly through participation as well as methods that let
informants show what contexts are like, such as Photovoice),
and buttress the ability for researchers to understand how people
engage in symbolic interpretation. Similarly, qualitative methods
can permit rapid assessment of results from laboratory, clinical,
and epidemiological studies—claims that results reflect such
and such among a study population can be assessed, using
rapid ethnography, focus groups, and expert interviews. Within
mixed methods approaches, triangulation increasingly means
addressing the applied and societal implications of research to
increase its impact and relevance (Fusch et al., 2018).
At the processual level, different methods are useful. For
example, between psychology and anthropology—or what people
say—methods that rely on the language are preferred, from
studies of metaphor and embodiment on the anthropology
side to how language can work between sensory perception
and sensory discrimination, for example, with olfaction. On
the anthropology and neuroscience side—or what people do—
mobile methods can be particularly effective, whether these are
participant observations by the researcher (such as focal follows),
intensive interviews that elicit what people do during the course
of a particular day or event, and technological assessments that
permit the capture of biological and psychological data as people
move about and interact in and across settings.
Finally, on the neuroscience and psychology side—or
what people process—one can use a variety of approaches.
First, mobile psychophysiology increasingly permits real-time
assessment of ongoing bodily reactions, potentially reflecting
underlying processes. Second, biomarkers—for example, blood
spots that can assess a range of biomarkers or saliva that can
assess stress reactions—permit an assessment of accumulated
processes, and thus insight into biological processes that might
not be available using other field-based approaches. Other
approaches in this vein include elicitation techniques and quasi-
experimental techniques that can combine aspects of controls
and comparative research with specific results.
But these types of experimental and quantitative methods
are not the only ones useful to get at process. Qualitative
methods serve equally as well, provided they take into account
considerations already raised in this paper. For example,
intensive interviews can address process—for example, incentive
salience and how it relates to drug use—provided that the
interviewer focus on specific processes and moves beyond just
getting informants to describe what people say. In other words,
people often give pat answers rather than getting into the nitty-
gritty of how something actually plays out for them.
Participant observation methods can also address what
actually happens at the processual level. Here, the researcher
can take informants at face value (yes, capoeira actually changed
how my balance worked, inside and outside the roda—it is not
simply “culture” saying that) as well as using neuroscience to
attend to changes that relate to underlying processes, for example,
how the righting reflex when one falls backward gets relaxed
in capoeira. In this case, methodological triangulation involves
bringing together neuroscience of process, descriptions of change
related to practice and context of the informants, and the match
of the experience of the researcher to both the neuroscience and
the explanation of the informants from their own points of view.
This long-term inductive approach centers the validity of the
data in real-life settings, in watching and talking about how things
play out in local lives, and, from there, creating a dialog with
theoretical approaches. Rather than using the lab or clinic to
fix a theoretical perspective, ethnographic work aims to discover
patterns in the data and then find corresponding ideas for
deepening analysis.
APPROACH TO CASE STUDIES
Together, the nine elements provide a holistic approach that
sizes culture appropriately and uses effective triangulation of
theories and methods. The case studies show how these elements
come together in specific projects and illustrate three important
takeaways for this type of research: (1) do field research because
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 8October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
that matters for understanding specific problems, (2) do not
rely on just anthropological or neurobiological approaches
to get at what happens—complex problems require critical
complementarity, and (3) get types of data that help assess which
combination of theories makes sense of any particular problem.
EXAMPLE #1: BRAZILIAN JIUJITSU AND
VETERAN REASSIMILATION
In research between 2015-2018, co-author Collura worked with
a group of 20 U.S. military combat veterans to understand their
assimilation back to civilian life. In particular, he examined
how their participation in Brazilian jiujitsu (BJJ) assisted
reassimilation. This research recognized that veterans had to
negotiate dual demands: (a) entering the armed forces and going
to war were processes of enculturation with their own social
structure and reward system that shaped desired outcomes and
interactions within combative environments, and (b) returning
to civilian life brought its own challenges, from navigating a
cultural environment structured differently than the military and
the loss of the rewards and interactions from the military. For
veterans, transitioning to civilian life post-military service also
did not have the same institutional support—whether military
or civilian—to facilitate the enculturation that they encountered
when they enlisted (Finley, 2011; Collura and Lende, 2012). On
both sides, the US cultural assumption is that, as individual
adults, they had to handle this process of change on their own.
In contrast, societies elsewhere often provide specific institutions
and cultural ideas that support adult men as they transition to
new roles in their lives (Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Wood, 1999;
Worthman, 2010). This research looked at what particular
individual and institutional elements of BJJ made the difference
in the reassimilation of veterans.
Research included participant observation doing BJJ with
veterans and interviews on military life, transition to civilian
life, and BJJ. Methodologically, this research took a close-in view
of culture, sized at the level of the training academy, the mat
where participants grappled, and the social interactions between
the men. The research also emphasized an experience-near
understanding of psychology rather than utilizing measures to
assess psychological states such as trauma. The combat veterans
expressed considerable hesitancy and even distrust about these
assessments; thus, the scales initially planned were left to one
side as a way to heighten validity through increased ability to
interact freely with the veterans. Finally, the research drew on
neuroscience to go beyond “ethnography as usual” by also paying
attention to task demands, stress, neuroplasticity, and learning.
The research revealed an ethnographic model around the
engagement of veterans in the military, their transition to being
veterans, and why BJJ helped with that transition. This model
highlighted the importance of physical +mental transformations
to enculturation, often grounded in how basic training had
impacted their lives and, from there, recognized how much
the social side of military life had shaped how they became
accepted and valued members of a group. Thus, the veterans used
a mind/body model located within an individual (D’Andrade,
1987) but also stressed how the social mattered in negotiating
challenges (Quinn, 2006).
By shaping how individuals interpret what happens to them,
such cultural models can impact how the function of their
nervous system (Quinn, 2006; Lende and Downey, 2012a). For
combat veterans, “physical +mental and social” referenced
combining the mental side of a task with the physical side in
order to achieve a specific outcome in defined contexts. This
model was drilled into them time and again; the combat veterans
saw the power in their ability to deal with the real-time ebb and
flow of powerful sensations while having to cognitively filter what
needed to be done at any given time.
In subsequent analyses, we adapted this ethnographic model
to understanding why BJJ proved effective. This approach—
working with an informant model to inform subsequent theory
development—was inspired by Downey (2005, 2012), where
a “native model” of how balance changed while becoming a
capoeira practitioner integrated physiological changes with how
specific training practices mattered. For veterans, they found that
BJJ training was very similar to the “physical +mental and social”
model that they learned while going through boot camp, specialty
schools, and combat deployment. Using neuroanthropology,
we modified their ethnographic model of “physical-mental and
social” to a physical-mental-social model (see Figure 2), which
recognized how each element can flow into the next.
These different elements combined to provide an effective
task structure for combat veterans. Overall, BJJ required veterans
to negotiate intense conditioning that had specific goals. This
type of practice worked best when the cognitive side of
participation was in sync with the physical side and vice versa. For
example, not hurting your partner while engaging in combative
play was central to BJJ practice, demanding that embodied
practices work in line with specific rules and objectives. As
veterans built aptitude in a specific BJJ task, research showed
simultaneous growth between mental ability, physical prowess,
and social relationships.
Overall, BJJ combined different types of task structures
into one encounter. First, BJJ requires the synchronization
of bodies and thus parallels how coordinated behavior in
laboratory settings involves inter-brain synchronization handled
by fast, nonmentalizing neurological systems (Dumas et al.,
2010). Second, BJJ involves cooperation, where opponents
play within a set of rules and have to modify ongoing actions
and responses. At the same time, BJJ is a competitive social
encounter, looking to make an opponent submit. In task-
based studies, social coordination and competition involve
different neural systems (Decety et al., 2004; Nummenmaa
et al., 2018) to negotiate these tasks. In summary, BJJ
provides a complex task structure that brings together
synchronization, cooperation, and competition in ways that
require the activation and coordination of brain systems in
real time.
Furthermore, it was clear during the research that BJJ also
got “under the skin.” During training, physical exhaustion was
obvious, given the sweat dripping off their bodies. Given that BJJ
was similar to physical training in the armed forces, it provided
an acceptable way to engage in strenuous activity that helped
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 9October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
reduce stress and blunt the reactivity they often developed while
deployed. This type of intense training has been linked to the
promotion of neuroplasticity and thus likely has carryover effects
on helping these veterans reassimilate versus those who do not
exercise (El-Sayes et al., 2019). Moreover, almost all participants
expressed a need for something to “cut the edge” from everyday
civilian life. For some participants, the comfort and solace found
in their BJJ training also provided a way to actively avoid illegal
or prescription substances because they knew they had training
the next day or because their need to get into better physical
condition superseded their longing to use.
When navigating daily stressors and adversity, training in BJJ
helped the military veterans frame assimilation stressors in a
more productive context. In the BJJ academy, the hierarchy, the
physical sacrifice, and the demanding nature of the training took
the participants back to a familiar environment that helped them
express and change their understandings of violence and trauma.
For example, BJJ required intimate physical contact while
requiring them to be in control, thus helping to rework their
understanding of what combat and restraint meant. Moreover,
the physicality of the BJJ experience and the acquisition of new
skills often brought a new perspective on one’s self, but that
happened via negotiating relationships on the mat in ways that
were both experienced and interpreted in ways quite different
from what happened in the military settings. Returning to Wilson
and Golonka (2013), BJJ provided an extended task structure
that involved their bodies, partners, local meanings, and social
structures, thus directly linking an internal view of the tasks the
brain had to solve with the agentive and cultural ways that these
veterans engaged with BJJ.
FIGURE 2 | The physical-mental-social model as it played out in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) with military combat veterans. BJJ helped with the transition to civilian life
because it engaged all three elements, and relied on how the men talked, practiced, and experienced BJJ. It is important to note that any activity during training could
start as social, physical, or mental and mesh into the other elements. For example, the new social circles of the academy can also bring mental models that require
physical interaction; at the same time, new physical activity challenges previous mental models and push individuals to new social interactions.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 10 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Overall, this research revealed that successful assimilation is
helped by drawing on current and prior experiences to reframe
how veterans can and should act. These are conceptualized
as cultural bridges, where similarities in cultural practices and
meanings can help individuals adapt. In BJJ, familiar notions
such as a uniform, structured goals, and a sense of collectivity
and belonging signified by material culture proved useful to
participants. BJJ used similar components of self, social self, and
contextual interactions but within an environment that was both
new and welcoming to the men and their families and friends.
This applied impact resulted from bringing together neurological
function, learning, and plasticity with a task structure in a
dynamic and locally constituted context.
Veterans then were able to link these changes with successful
management of other areas of their life. Cultural bridges—rather
than individuals finding their own way—can help people take
intense enculturation experiences and reapply them to areas that
are not directly part of the initial enculturation. For the veterans,
BJJ served as a bridge activity from military to civilian life, helping
them to explore differing mentalities and identities while engaged
in both physical and social interactions. The effectiveness of
cultural bridges from one domain to another likely plays a role
in similar intense activities, such as dance and its effect on
diminishing depression (Pylvänäinen and Lappalainen, 2018),
how playing an instrument can decrease autism severity (Broder-
Fingert et al., 2017), and how being balanced helped capoeira
practitioners in other domains of their life (Downey, 2005).
For future research, it would be useful to incorporate
biomarkers into the research (Worthman and Costello, 2009).
In particular, cortisol measures might show differences in
diurnal patterns of activation on BJJ practice days versus non-
practice days, providing a measure of biological stress processing.
Building on work on storytelling and brain synchronization
(Hasson et al., 2012), BJJ practitioners could jointly recount a
story about a recent bout while being scanned, thus providing
insight into the neural dynamics of BJJ as a coordinated activity.
EXAMPLE #2: RAPTORS, INTERACTIONS,
AND CULTURE
Since 2016, co-author Hoyt has investigated human-raptor
relationships, looking at how these relationships are formed and
examining what processes make raptors such good candidates
for use in animal-assisted therapies. In the past few decades,
animal-assisted interventions (AAI) have developed alternative
forms of therapy that use animals as “emotional mediators”
and “catalysts” for facilitating improvements in health and
well-being (Kulick, 2017). While dogs and horses constitute
the majority of AAI treatments, employment of other species,
such as dolphins, cats, and smaller farm animals, have become
popular additions. Conversely, therapies involving raptors are far
from the mainstream. Raptors are the antithesis of “cute” and
“cuddly” pets that comprise the majority of human-animal bond
research. Working with raptors requires considerable attention
and patience, as one misstep could mean the difference between
a successful training session and a spontaneous trip to the
ER. Yet volunteers who work with raptors claim to experience
similar therapeutic outcomes to those described in other animal-
assisted approaches.
Our research looked specifically at a program in the
southeastern United States that facilitated interactions between
birds of prey who were not able to be released back to the
wild and local volunteers. The research used a multispecies
approach situated within ecological anthropology, recognizing
that animals, plants, and the natural environment participate
in the formation of culture (Haraway, 2003; Kohn, 2013;
Rees et al., 2018). This multispecies approach combined with
neuroanthropology to provide a framework to examine the
assemblage of social, environmental, and neuroanatomical
pathways that connect us with other species. Specific methods
used in the research included focus group discussions, semi-
structured interviews, and over 150 h of participant observation.
Alongside assessing the program as a whole, research specifically
engaged the participants who self-identified as suffering from
trauma and stress. These participants indicated that working with
raptors improved their ability to manage their daily lives. Field-
based research of Hoyt focused on examining how and why
raptor therapy made a difference.
Research on raptor cognition has long had to deal with
culturally embedded ideas about animals, particularly higher
versus lower animals (e.g., “bird brains”; Shimizu, 2009). For
example, the presence of a six-layered neocortex in mammalian
brains not seen in birds was long thought to afford the ability to
perform complex computations and behaviors only in mammals.
In fact, avian brains are capable of performing highly complex
tasks, including remembering the past, reasoning about how to
manipulate objects and thinking about perspectives of others
(Clayton and Emery, 2015). Yet birds use a different neural
architecture that relies on an alternatively designed nuclear
pallium and an enlarged optic tectum (Shimizu, 2009). Avian
brain studies have also helped to debunk myths like “bigger
is better.” Brain-body scaling techniques focused on neuronal
densities, rather than relative brain size, have revealed how
ravens possess 1.2 billion more pallial neurons than capuchin
monkeys (Olkowicz et al., 2016). Based on this avian research,
we approached raptors as capable of complex cognition that is
both responsive and situationally dependent. Drawing on the
systemic approach of Hutchins (1995) to cognitive tasks like
flight and navigation, we viewed birds as shaping both the
larger systemic context and the specifics of interactions between
handlers and raptors.
Our research first explored the infrastructure of the nonprofit
raptor program to better grasp the larger elements involved
in bringing people and raptors closer together; these elements
formed the dynamic backdrop through which raptor-human
relationships developed. Data indicated the importance of
“charismatic leadership” and “sense of community among
volunteers” for the program. The director provided guidance,
wisdom, and motivation for volunteers through continual
program expansion, generation of new ideas, passion for birds,
and willingness to offer advice whenever necessary. A strong
sense of “volunteer community” played a significant role in
retaining long-term volunteer handlers through the formation
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 11 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
of friendships and shared interests in raptors that did not exist
outside of the park. Thus, the reasons for volunteering with the
raptor program ran deeper than simply interacting with the birds;
the experience provided a chance to spend quality time in nature
with other “bird nerds.”
Humans have cultivated relationships with raptors for at
least 2,500 years (Epstein, 1943; Oggins, 2004; Soma, 2012),
making these relations part of the novel multispecies cultures that
emerged throughout the Anthropocene (Prummel, 1997; Ikram
et al., 2015). However, relations with raptors are often different
from those with mammals. As apex predators, raptors possess a
number of adaptations uniquely suited for spotting and killing
an unsuspecting quarry. When dealing with humans, raptors can
be dangerous, often temperamental creatures who can evidence
significant disinterest and even distrust toward humans. Thus, it
was not intuitively obvious why interacting with raptors helped
the participants.
Over the course of the research, participant observation
helped guide the development of an approach for understanding
how multispecies relationships facilitate novel forms of
regulatory processing. In 1992, Bagozzi called for an approach to
self-regulation that addressed the “processes that occur between
intentions and goal-directed behaviors” (Bagozzi, 1992, p. 200).
Argument of Bagozzi against reductive terms like “attitude”
resonated with holism of anthropology, and his proposal that
both intentions and behaviors matter for self-regulation provided
a way to understand that raptors and people were actors within a
regulatory network of any person.
Building from critical complementarity to field research, our
research focused on identifying the interactive mechanisms that
happen in small-scale contexts between individual raptors and
humans. Self-regulation, as a generic concept, discounts aspects
of context and individual experience that proved important for
human and non-human interactions observed during fieldwork;
in turn, these interactions shaped whether human participants
had positive or negative outcomes. These interactions are akin
to the “hidden regulators” that Hofer (1994) described. Hofer
viewed “attachment” as an overarching concept to understand
specific physiological processes that played out between rat pups
and mothers. These hidden regulators are identified through
breaking attachment into smaller pieces—specific interactions
and physiological processes then constitute the differential effects
the mother can have on the rat pup.
This project recognized the need to capture data that were
relevant to psychological and AAI approaches while engaging in
participant observation. By moving between ecological validity
(data to relate back to laboratory and clinical approaches) and
ethnographic validity (data that capture how they interact in
specific contexts, and examining that interaction from the point
of view of both the bird and the handler), the research aimed to
build a better model of what happens between birds and handlers.
By using neurobiology and psychology to help interpret the
data, we identified six processes that existed in raptor-human
interactions that could be linked to regulation. These were
selective attention, modified response, physiological feedback,
reward, novelty/threat, and resiliency. For example, “modified
response” referred to how a bird of prey trainer could
intentionally change his or her approach to accommodate the
needs of the raptor he or she is holding; consequently, this
behavioral shift afforded raptors the opportunity to return
“physiological feedback” to their handler as the raptor equivalent
to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”
However, bating behavior—when a raptor jumps off the
glove—was often interpreted as a direct result of things, such as
particular personality traits that make some birds less amenable
to training, a lack of proficiency on the part of the handler,
or an outright form of protest against living in captivity.
The anthropomorphic associations at times limited multispecies
interactions because nonhuman behaviors were viewed as either
static and unchanging or responding only to human activity.
For example, “selective attention” mattered in the context of
bird handling. If the person was training, he or she should be
looking at the bird. This might seem obvious; however, raptors
can sit still for long times, and some handlers interpreted the bird
as calm and then started to look at other things in their local
environment. By not paying attention, handlers might not notice
that the bird could become fidgety. In such a case, “selective
attention” could create waves that the handlers had to correct.
In the context of a specific training bout, the bird jumping off the
glove was not good. However, these unexpected reactions were
generally good in the long term, because it added to the novelty
of continuing to work together and finding a balance between the
bird and the handler.
Overall, this project demonstrated the need for a two-
step approach to understanding how interactions can impact
regulation and therapeutic outcomes between birds and
handlers. First, having an on-the-ground understanding
of the institutions and specific contexts proved important.
Second, getting at the processes that constitute interactions
between raptors and handlers is crucial. Figure 4 illustrates
how a general model of raptor-human interaction then
takes life with the specifics of ethnographic research and
the neuroanthropology of interaction and regulation.
Future research could bring in portable electrophysiology
to measure arousal and engagement while participants interact
with raptors.
EXAMPLE #3: FROM CUE REACTIVITY TO
THE NEUROANTHROPOLOGY OF
CUE-DRIVEN DRUG USE
The final example covers research on cues and substance use
currently in development. Cues have long been used as a way
to investigate how individuals learn, from the dogs of Pavlov
salivating at the sound of the dinner bell to rats pushing a lever
to access a drug reward (Yokel and Wise, 1975). With addiction
research, cue reactivity has formed a theory of relapse, which
proposes that people can be “particularly vulnerable to drug use
when in the presence of stimuli related to previous episodes of
use” (Carter and Tiffany, 1999, p. 327). Over time, models for cue
reactivity have moved beyond the stimulus-response paradigm,
in which addicts are unilaterally drawn toward use by cues,
because of changes in understanding how complex addiction and
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 12 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
FIGURE 3 | Multispecies feedback and raptor regulation.
recovery are. But research on cue reactivity has also shown several
limitations. First, research relating to cue reactivity and rates of
relapse has produced mixed results; for example, physiological
and subjective reactions to cues are not directly linked, and only
physiological cues have been shown to be correlated with future
rates of relapse (Witteman et al., 2015).
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 13 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Another limitation is that cue reactivity has yet to yield
significant clinical applications (Childress et al., 1993; Conklin
and Tiffany, 2002; Mellentin et al., 2017). While there is some
recent evidence of cue-based approaches having value-added
clinical impact (Wiers et al., 2014, 2015; Kober et al., 2017), the
most clinical practice still focuses on established therapies and
on dealing with the consequences and family impacts that come
with addiction. The lack of a match between lab results and
clinical outcomes demonstrates the complex nature of the cue
reactivity phenomenon.
Here, we draw on the integration of clinical and laboratory
research of Drummond, which highlights three domains of
reactivity: symbolic-expressive, physiological, and behavioral
(Drummond et al., 1995; Drummond, 2000). The first domain
is craving, or the reactive surge in wanting a cue such as seeing
someone use. Symbolic-expressive cue reactivity represents the
interpreted urge people feel when presented with an internal
(stress, anxiety, etc.) or external (paraphernalia, advertisements,
etc.) cue. The second domain is physiological cue reactivity, the
bodily effects (increased heart rate, skin conductance, changes in
temperature, etc.) that come from tolerance, opponent process
reactions, and other physiological reactions that come with
interaction with cues (Smith, 1990; Robinson and Berridge, 1993,
2008); physiological reactivity can happen both in anticipation of
use and withdrawal.
Finally, behavioral cue reactivity comes via obtaining and
using drugs; these actions in themselves can be cues that prompt
relapse and augment use. On the seeking side of behavioral
cue reactivity, the cue of the lever can drive lever pressing in
laboratory animals; for humans, seeing alcohol might lead to
an impulsive purchase and then relapse. On the consumption
side, behavioral cue reactivity lends itself to excess, for example,
the speed or overall amount of drinking. Pregaming on college
campuses, where students get together to drink large amounts
before going to a sporting event, is a social situation that can drive
behavioral cue reactivity leading to extreme intoxication.
Overall, most of the research has looked at symbolic-
expressive and physiological drug craving in a laboratory or
otherwise controlled settings (Rohsenow et al., 1994; Carter and
Tiffany, 1999; Conklin and Tiffany, 2002; Sinha, 2007; Carpenter
et al., 2009; Verdejo-Garcia et al., 2012; Witteman et al., 2015).
Recently, some behavioral research has aimed to bridge the gap
between the lab and the field. For example, Witteman et al. (2015)
utilized long-term journaling as a method of data collection, and
Shiffman et al. (2008) used ecological momentary assessment
(EMA) as a way to study cue reactivity in context (Shiffman et al.,
2008). In these studies, participants employ mobile technology
to do stimulus-response activities at intervals throughout a day
(Warthen and Tiffany, 2009; Wray et al., 2015). However, these
studies present cues specifically selected by investigators rather
than naturally occurring environmental cues and generally assess
the relationship between cues and seeking after the fact.
Despite these developments, cues remain undertheorized
in terms of how they form part of the interactions between
individuals and their local environments. Here, we view cues
as forming part of the everyday, even mundane aspects of
using and recovery. Cues can signal opportunities to use, to
forget, and to do something different; as such, cues provide
an adaptable framework to consider many different factors
that can be important to facilitating and sustaining recovery.
In this way, cues are amenable to ethnographic work, using
a neuroanthropological lens. From the point of view of
neuroanthropology, cue reactivity connects the brain, learning,
and the environment.
Conceptual triangulation can first focus on the field-clinic-
lab triangle. Given the experimental approach, cue-reactivity
research, in general, cannot focus on actual moments of drug
seeking and relapse; rather, cue reactivity has examined often
artificial aspects of context (e.g., generic pictures of someone
drinking or of liquor bottles). Thus, this research could benefit
from triangulation that can provide field-based data on how
cue reactivity might work in naturalistic settings. Conceptual
triangulation can also pull together insights from anthropology,
psychology, and neuroscience to drive forward a greater
understanding of context-driven cue reactivity (illustrated in
Figure 4). Neuroscience and psychology together help make
clearer how people engage with their environment, how they
attend to meaningful cues and the physiological components and
outcomes of deep-rooted attentional bias.
Cue reactivity research sets the expectation that meaningful
cues lead to craving, drug seeking, and, potentially, relapse.
A neuroanthropological approach can consider biological
and ethnographic variables and assess the relationship
between physiological, interpretive, and behavioral craving
and encounters with stimuli. In particular, an ethnographic
approach can better capture the moments participants actually
encounter cues and how they react in their everyday lives. For
example, the incentive salience approach to associative learning
and cues can also provide insights via neuroscience. According
to this theory, cues—to be compelling—have to be imbued
with incentive salience, or something that causes people to pay
attention, move toward, and desire what is linked to that cue
(Robinson and Berridge, 1993, 2008). However, what cues work
better in real-world settings to capture the attention of people
and to be the targets for greater attribution of incentive salience
are questions that are hard to address, particularly, initially, in
the lab.
Thus, anthropology, through its understanding of how
contexts can funnel drug use and other activities like gambling
(Schüll, 2012), provides a way to understand cues from the
perspective of the context. This field-based work can also increase
validity and potentially provide both theoretical understanding
of how cues work in contexts as well as novel stimuli that can be
more contextually and individually relevant. By understanding
field-based dynamics better, we might be able to reinvigorate
ideas and implementations of this research in clinical settings.
To make these insights come together will require
methodological triangulation. First, by spending time in
the local environments, ethnographers can capture instances of
use and craving, when they occur, and the surrounding events
(internal and external cues). From there, a combination of EMA
research (real-time assessment of cues and craving), assessment
of physiological reactivity (heart rate and electrodermal activity),
and prolonged participant observation and/or interviews could
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 14 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
look specifically at how to relate contexts and experiences to
the types of considerations of cues and cue reactivity outlined
above. Finally, participants could use photovoice (photos
taken by informants on a specific topic, for example, what
triggers a craving) to capture what cues look like for them
in real-life settings, providing both prompts for subsequent
interviews as well as personalized cues that could be utilized in
a laboratory setting. Overall, a neuroanthropological approach
to cue reactivity employs interdisciplinary theoretical and
methodological innovations to better approach how cue
reactivity can be applied in clinical settings.
CONCLUSION
Ethnographic research in field settings often reveals gaps between
laboratory research and the specifics of a particular problem in a
naturalistic setting. The three examples above all used qualitative
approaches to better bridge between how problems manifest and
what is known from experimental research. This interdisciplinary
negotiation between anthropological approaches to human
variation and specific studies that tease apart the variables
and processes that shape that variation is central to how
neuroanthropology contributes to cultural science.
Each case study can also illustrate specific elements of the
overall framework shown in Table 4 for how to engage in
neuroanthropological research. For example, the research by
Collura with veterans located the problem of the veterans at the
intersection of biology and culture. What the veterans faced was
not simply an individual problem, for example, PTSD or a lack
of coping. As combat soldiers, they had been encultured into the
military; becoming veterans was also an encultured transition.
For Collura, considering cultural variation also made a
difference. The research recognized the United States as unusual,
as weird, in how it handles veteran transitions. Becoming a
veteran is not a natural thing, but something mediated through
culture, and thus related to the production of shared variation.
A crucial insight came with recognizing that transitioning
FIGURE 4 | Theoretical triangulation for cue reactivity research. This figure demonstrates how to use theoretical triangulation to help develop aneuroanthropological
approach to cue reactivity. Psychology and anthropology both look at human experience and behavior. For example, psychology lends insights into how humans
interact specifically with cues while anthropology brings an understanding of how contexts can structure both cues and behavior. Psychology and neuroscience
inform models of cue reactivity, including the psychophysiological basis of reactions to cues and cognitive models on the interpretation of cues. Neuroscience and
anthropology overlap in the theoretical understanding of incentive salience, specifically understanding the relations between the external environment and the internal
human environment.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 15 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
effectively was about finding new ways of generating shared
variation. BJJ fostered exactly that. Finally, as Figure 2 illustrates,
Collura pushed the say-do of normal ethnographic research
into the say-do-process. The “mental +physical and social”
model of veterans became a way to examine the processes
involved in how BJJ worked to foster the production of
shared variation.
The study of Hoyt first represents sizing culture. The work
with raptors situated itself within an ecological approach, which
fit well the animal-human interactions taking place at both
institutional and individual levels, and how raptors can have
agentive characteristics. Drawing on critical complementarity,
the research navigated between insights coming from Animal
Assisted Interventions research, interspecies anthropology, and
the psychology of regulation. The critical part helped overcome
assumptions about “lower animals” (like birds) that existed
in some of the literature, as well as how animals can
be anthromorphized. The complementarity part also helped
connect AAI with psychology and anthropology. From there,
the research identified specific interactive elements between the
handler and the raptor that shaped mutual regulation, as shown
in Figure 3. Specific behaviors and interpretations on both sides
shaped both positive and negative outcomes.
The developing work by Casper drew on conceptual
triangulation (Figure 4). Cue reactivity is a well-established
approach in laboratory research but has not had as much impact
on clinical practice; field-based work can address some of the
shortcomings of laboratory work while also using real-world
experiences to increase clinical relevance. Accomplishing that
means drawing on anthropology as a crucial way to understand
how cues work in real-world contexts.
Rather than relying on an exclusively cultural approach,
however, this research considers how individuals and interactions
in specific contexts can help tease apart how cues work
and what types of interactions can drive reactivity. This
framework moves beyond seeing “cue reactivity” as a thing
in itself—a psychobiological phenomenon reducible based on
learning theory and the pharmacological power of drugs—
to examining how learning happens in specific contexts, how
cues might get concentrated in specific arenas, and how
interpretations can form part of why people react more
or less.
To get at how reactivity adheres to individuals and learning
and contexts requires using multiple methods together. Here,
methodological triangulation provides a nested approach to
address ideas about cue reactivity, to gather data that can relate
to clinical relevance, and have data from multiple sources to aim
to tease apart some of the broad conceptual framings that need to
be tested against what actually happens with cues and reactivity
in the field.
As this review of the three projects shows, successful research
within neuroanthropology does not have to use the overall
framework to get the job done. The nine features represent a
set of guidelines and considerations that help promote successful
research; however, specific emphases can be developed that
are most related to the research problem and to the specific
stage of the research. Indeed, for people interested in culture,
mind, and the brain, specific elements will likely be more
useful than others. Sizing culture might facilitate how to bring
cultural insights to bear on what are often seen as individual
problems, say-do process might help anthropologists develop
new ways to view their ethnographic research, and critical
TABLE 4 | The elements of neuroanthropology.
Element Aspect #1 Aspect #2 Aspect #3
Biology and culture Identifying specifics of biology and culture Going beyond assumptions Combining components
Say-do-process What people say: Language, cognition,
symbols
What people do: Movement, senses,
actions and reactions
What people process: How
outcomes/variation come to be
Sizing culture Granularity of cultural lens: Macro, meso,
micro, mental
Specific approach: symbolic, political
economy, ecological
Identifying specific effects of culture
Cultural variation Beyond WEIRD Level of sharedness Production of difference
Individuals and
interactions
Individual: Biology, Psychology, Self, Social
Self
Interaction: Embodiment, Practices,
Context, Social Structures
Culture: How interactions hack brain
processes
Interactive elements Cultural practices that structure
interactions
Materiality and patterning of interactive
elements
How elements engage specific biological
systems
Conceptual
triangulation
Anthropology-Neuroscience-Psychology Field-Lab-Clinic Mind-Body-Culture
Critical
complementarity
Draw on critical neuroscience, philosophy
of science, cultural anthropology for critical
analysis
Use complementary fields, such as
cultural neuroscience and psychological
anthropology
Complement strengths, Minimize analytical
weaknesses
Methodological
triangulation
Ethnographic methods, participants’
perspectives, real-world empirical testing
Experimental, quantitative, biological,
qualitative methods for assessing process
Include macro framing–culture, history,
evolution–for interpretation of data
These nine elements outline how to approach doing neuroanthropology. Researchers can work through the entire set in developing and executing their research. That said, different
projects are likely to emphasize different elements as most relevant to their research problem. Specific elements can also be utilized for other types of research. Each element is
condensed into three aspects that represent how to operationalize it for research. For example, cultural variation first implies getting beyond the individual-based and convenience-
sample aspects of a lot of research (e.g., available university students), and then looks at shared aspects of variation and whether there are systematic differences within any particular
aspect of shared variation.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 16 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
complementarity might be useful for interdisciplinary research
more generally.
For cultural science more broadly, we believe that by using
this type of approach we can start to figure out the building
blocks out of which patterns of variation are built both within
and across societies. Neuroanthropology aims to go from a
local to a comparative level and, from there, a comparative
to a generalizable level. Good comparative work builds on
good local work; good generalizations build from comparisons
that accurately assess both the pattern of variation and a
range of potential causes for that pattern. For many human
problems, these patterns of variation emerge in the interaction
of individuals with specific features of local culture and larger
political economies and ecologies. Neuroanthropology offers an
approach to understanding these types of human problems.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
DL wrote the main sections of the manuscript. BC, KH, and GC
wrote their corresponding sections. All authors contributed to
the article and approved the submitted version.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors recognize the support of the University of South
Florida, particularly the support provided for graduate students.
REFERENCES
Abbott, A. (2010). “Marilyn Monroe” neuron aids mind control. Nature 2010:568.
doi: 10.1038/news.2010.568
Adams, G., Estrada-Villalta, S., Sullivan, D., and Markus, H. R. (2019). The
psychology of neoliberalism and the neoliberalism of psychology. J. Soc. Iss. 75,
189–216. doi: 10.1111/josi.12305
Alasuutari, P. (1992). Desire and Craving: A Cultural Theory of Alcoholism. New
York, NY: SUNY University Press.
Andepson-Fye, E. P. (2003). Never leave yourself: ethnopsychology as mediator
of psychological globalization among Belizean Schoolgirls. Ethos 31, 59–94.
doi: 10.1525/eth.2003.31.1.59
Anderson, M. L. (2010). Neural reuse: a fundamental organizational principle of
the brain. Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 245–266. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10000853
Bagozzi, R. P. (1992). The self-regulation of attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Soc.
Psychol. Quart. 55, 178–204. doi: 10.2307/2786945
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how
matter comes to matter. J. Women Cult. Soc. 28, 801–831. doi: 10.1086/345321
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., and Pollak, S. D.
(2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: challenges to inferring emotion
from human facial movements. Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 20, 1–68.
doi: 10.1177/1529100619832930
Bates, E., Elman, J., Johnson, M. H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., and Plunkett,
K. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/5929.001.0001
Bender, A., and Beller, S. (2016). Current perspectives on cognitive diversity. Front.
Psychol. 7:509. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00509
Bettencourt, L. M. A., Lobo, J., Strumsky, D., and West, G. B. (2010). Urban scaling
and its deviations: revealing the structure of wealth, innovation, and crime
across cities. PLoS ONE. 2010:e13541. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013541
Biersack, A. (1999). Introduction: from the “new ecology” to the new ecologies.
Am. Anthropol. 101, 5–18. doi: 10.1525/aa.1999.101.1.5
Bock, P. K., and Leavitt, S. C. (2019). Rethinking Psychological Anthropology: A
Critical History, 3rd Edn. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of A Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511812507
Bourdieu, P. (1987). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boyer, P., and Liénard, P. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? precaution systems and
action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. Behav. Brain
Sci. 29, 595–613. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X06009332
Boyer, P., and Petersen, M. B. (2018). Folk-economic beliefs: an evolutionary
cognitive model. Behav. Brain Sci. 41:e158. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X170
01960
Brah, A., and Phoenix, A. (2004). Ain’t i a woman? revisiting intersectionality.
J. Int. Women’s Stud. 5, 75–86. Available online at: https://link.gale.com/apps/
doc/A131356397/AONE (accessed 22 September, 2021).
Broder-Fingert, S., Feinberg, E., and Silverstein, M. (2017). Music therapy for
children with autism spectrum disorder. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 318, 523–524.
doi: 10.1001/jama.2017.9477
Bull, M., and Mitchell, J. P. (2015). Ritual, Performance and the Senses. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter. Hove: Psychology Press.
Campos, R., Nieto, C., and Núñez, M. (2019). Research domain criteria
from neuroconstructivism: a developmental view on mental disorders.
WIREsCognSci 10:e1491. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1491
Carpenter, M. J., Saladin, M. E., DeSantis, S., Gray, K. M., LaRowe, S. D.,
and Upadhyaya, H. P. (2009). Laboratory-based, cue-elicited craving and cue
reactivity as predictors of naturally occurring smoking behavior. Addict. Behav.
34, 536–541. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2009.03.022
Carter, B. L., and Tiffany, S. T. (1999). Meta-analysis of cue-reactivity in
addiction research. Addiction 94, 327–340. doi: 10.1046/j.1360-0443.1999.943
3273.x
Chang, L., and Tsao, D. Y. (2017). The code for facial identity in the primate brain.
Cell 169, 1013–1028. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.05.011
Chen, E., Hayen, R. V. L., Austin, M. K., Shalowitz, M. U., Story, R. E., and
Miller, G. E. (2019). Neighborhood social conditions, family relationships, and
childhood asthma. Pediatrics 144:3300. doi: 10.1542/peds.2018-3300
Chen, E., Miller, G. E., Brody, G. H., and Lei, M. (2015). Neighborhood
poverty, college attendance, and diverging profiles of substance use and
allostatic load in rural African American Youth. Clin. Psychol. Sci. 3, 675–685.
doi: 10.1177/2167702614546639
Chiao, J. Y., and Ambady, N. (2007). “Cultural neuroscience: parsing universality
and diversity across levels of analysis,” in Handbook of Cultural Psychology, eds
S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 237–254.
Chiao, J. Y., and Blizinsky, K. D. (2009). Culture-gene coevolution of
individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. Proc. R. Soc. B
277, 529–537. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1650
Chiao, J. Y., Li, S. C., Seligman, R., and Turner, R. (2016). The Oxford
Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357376.013.24
Childress, A. R., Hole, A. V., Ehrman, R. N., Robbins, S. J., McLellan, A. T., and
O’Brien, C. P. (1993). Cue reactivity and cue reactivity interventions in drug
dependence. NIDA Res. Monogr. 137, 73–95. doi: 10.1037/e495912006-006
Choudhury, S., and Slaby, J. (2016). Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social
and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philos. Psychol. 19, 291–307.
doi: 10.1080/09515080600689872
Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action,
and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.001.0001
Clark, A., and Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis 58, 7–19.
doi: 10.1093/analys/58.1.7
Clayton, N. S., and Emery, N. J. (2015). Avian models for human
cognitive neuroscience: a proposal. Neuron 86, 1330–1342.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.04.024
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 17 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Cole, M. (1998). Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Collura, G. L., and Lende, D. H. (2012). Post-traumatic stress disorder and
neuroanthropology: stopping PTSD before it begins. Ann. Anthropol. Pract. 36,
131–148. doi: 10.1111/j.2153-9588.2012.01096.x
Conklin, C., and Tiffany, S. T. (2002). Applying extinction research and
theory to cue-exposure addiction treatments. Addiction 97, 155–167.
doi: 10.1046/j.1360-0443.2002.00014.x
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black
feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine feminist theory and antiracist
politics. Univ. Chicago Legal For. 1, 139–167.
Crivelli, C., Jarillo, S., and Fridlund, A. J. (2016). Multidisciplinary approach to
research in small-scale societies: studying emotions and facial expressions in
the field. Front. Psychol. 7:1073. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01073
D’Andrade, R. G. (1987). Modal responses and cultural expertise. Am. Behav. Sci.
31, 194–202. doi: 10.1177/000276487031002005
Decety, J., Jackson, P. L., Sommerville, J. A., Chaminade, T., and Meltzoff,
A. N. (2004). The neural bases of cooperation and competition: an fMRI
investigation. NeuroImage 23, 744–751. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.05.025
Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Karla, M., and Dahaene, S. (2018). The emergence
of the visual world form: longitudinal evolution of category-specific
ventral visual areas during reading acquisition. PLoS Biol. 2018:2004103.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2004103
Denzin, N. K. (2010). Triangulation 2.0. J. Mixed Method. Res. 6, 80–88.
doi: 10.1177/1558689812437186
Di Leonardo, M. (1991). Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist
Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press. doi: 10.1525/9780520910355
Downey, G. (2005). Educating the eyes. Anthropol. Act. 12, 56–71.
doi: 10.3167/096720105793233922
Downey, G. (2010). “Practice without theory”: a neuroanthropological
perspective on embodied learning. J. Royal Anthropol. Inst. 16. S22–S40.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01608.x
Downey, G. (2012). “Balancing between cultures: equilibrium in capoeria,” in The
Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology, eds D. Lende and G.
Downey (Cambridge: The MIT Press), 169–194.
Drummond, C. D. (2000). What does cue-reactivity have to offer clinical research?
Addiction 95, S129–S144. doi: 10.1080/09652140050111708
Drummond, C. D., Tiffany, S. T., Glautier, S., and Remington, B. (1995). “Cue
exposure in understanding and treating addictive behaviors,” in Addictive
Behavior: Cue Exposure Theory and Practice, eds D. C. Drummond, S. T.
Tiffany, S. Glautier, and B. Remington (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons
Ltd), 1–17.
Dumas, G., Nadel, J., Soussignan, R., Martinerie, J., and Garnero, L. (2010).
Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction. PLoS ONE 5:e12166.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012166
El-Sayes, J., Harasym, D., Turco, C. V., Locke, M. B., and Nelson, A. J.
(2019). Exercise-induced neuroplasticity: a mechanistic model and prospects
for promoting plasticity. Neuroscientist 25, 65–85. doi: 10.1177/10738584187
71538
Epstein, H. J. (1943). The origin and earliest history of falconry. Isis 34, 497–509.
doi: 10.1086/347874
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Farmer, P. (2004). An anthropology of structural violence. Curr. Anthropol. 45,
305–325. doi: 10.1086/382250
Finley, E. P. (2011). Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD Among Veterans of Iraq
and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Fitzgeral, D., and Callard, F. (2015). Social science and neuroscience beyond
interdisciplinarity: experimental entanglements. Theor. Cult. Soc. 32, 3–32.
doi: 10.1177/0263276414537319
Fusch, P., Fusch, G. E., and Ness, L. R. (2018). Denzin’s paradigm shift:
revisiting triangulation in qualitative research. J. Soc. Change 10:2.
doi: 10.5590/JOSC.2018.10.1.02
Galloti, M., and Frith, C. D. (2013). Social cognition in the we-mode. Trends Cogn.
Sci. 17, 160–165. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.02.002
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Newe York, NY: Basic Books.
Gendron, M., Crivelli, C., and Barrett, L. F. (2018). Universality reconsidered:
diversity in making meaning of facial expressions. Curr. Direct. Psychol. Sci.
27, 211–219. doi: 10.1177/0963721417746794
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hove:
Psychology Press.
Goldhill, O. (2016). The “Jennifer Aniston Neuron” Is the Foundation of Compelling
New Memory Research. Quartz. Available online at: https://qz.com/740481/the-
jennifer-aniston-neuron-is-the-foundation-of-compelling-new-memory-
research/ (accessed November 3, 2020).
Gravlee, C. C. (2009). How race becomes biology: embodiment of social inequality.
Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 139, 47–57. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.20983
Guerts, K. (2003). Culture and the Sense: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African
Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Guest, G., Bunce, A., and Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough?
an experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods 18:59.
doi: 10.1177/1525822X05279903
Gurven, M. D. (2018). Broadening horizons: sample diversity and socioecological
theory are essential to the future of psychological science. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
U. S. A. 115, 11420–11427. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1720433115
Hackman, J., Munira, S., Jasmin, K., and Hruschka, D. (2017). Revisitinv
psychological mechanisms in the anthropology of altruism. Hum. Nat. 28,
76–91. doi: 10.1007/s12110-016-9278-3
Han, S. (2015). Understanding cultural differences in human behavior:
a cultural neuroscience approach. Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 3, 68–72.
doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2015.01.013
Haraway, D. J. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press), 3–17.
Hari, R., Henriksson, L., Malinen, S., and Parkkonen, L. (2015). Centrality
of social interaction in human brain function. Neuron 88, 181–193.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.022
Hasson, H., Ghazanfar, A. A., Galantucci, B., Garrod, S., and Keysers, C. (2012).
Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and sharing a social world.
Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 114–121. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.12.007
Hay, C. M. (2016). Methods That Matter: Integrating Mixed Methods for More
Effective Social Science Research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226328836.001.0001
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., and Ara, N. (2010). Beyond WEIRD: towards
a broad-based behavioral science. Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 111–135.
doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10000725
Hermann, P., Waxman, S. R., and Medin, D. L. (2010). Anthropocentrism is not
the first step in children’s reasoning about the natural world. Proc. Natl. Acad.
Sci. U. S. A. 107, 9979–9984. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1004440107
Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., and Inzlicht,. M. (2018).
The psychology of rituals: an integrative review and process-based framework.
Personal. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 22, 260–284. doi: 10.1177/1088868317734944
Hofer, M. A. (1994). Hidden regulators in attachment, separation,
and loss. Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 1994:tb01285.
doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5834.1994.tb01285.x
Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. S., Skinner,D., and C ain, C. (2001). Identityand Agency
in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hong, Y.-,y., and Cheon, B. K. (2017). How does culture matter
in the face of globalization? Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 12, 810–823.
doi: 10.1177/1745691617700496
Hruschka, D. J., Lende, D. H., and Worthman, C. M. (2005). Biocultural
dialogues: biology and culture in psychological anthropology. Ethos 33, 1–19.
doi: 10.1525/eth.2005.33.1.001
Hruschka, D. J., Munira, S., Jesmin, K., Hackman, J., and Tiokhin, L.
(2018). Learning from failures of protocol in cross-cultural research. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 115, 11428–11434, doi: 10.1073/pnas.17211
66115
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ikram, S., Slabbert, R., Cornelius, I., du Plessis, A., Swanepoel, L. C., and Weber,
H. (2015). Fatal force-feeding or Gluttonous Gagging? the death of Kestrel
SACHM 2575. J. Archaeol. Sci. 63, 72–77. doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2015.08.015
Kaiser, B. N., and Kohrt, B. A. (2019). Why psychiatry needs the anthropologist:
a reflection on 80 years of culture in mental health. Psychiatry 82, 205–215.
doi: 10.1080/00332747.2019.1653142
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 18 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Kanwisher, N., and Yovel, G. (2006). The fusiform face area: a cortical region
specialized forthe perception of faces. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B361, 2109–2128.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2006.1934
Kim, H. S., and Sasaki, J. Y. (2014). Cultural neuroscience: biology
of the mind in cultural contexts. Ann. Rev. Psychol. 65, 487–514.
doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115040
Kirmayer, L. J. (2006). Beyond the “new cross-cultural psychiatry”: cultural
biology, discursive psychology and the ironies of globalization. Transcult.
Psychiatr. 43, 126–144. doi: 10.1177/1363461506061761
Kirmayer, L. J., and Ryder, A. G. (2016). Culture and pscyhopathology. Curr. Opin.
Psychol. 8, 143–148. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.10.020
Kitayama, S., Varnum, M. E. W., and Salvador, C. E. (2019). “Cultural
neuroscience,” in Handbook of Cultural Psychology, eds S. Kitayama and D.
Cohen (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 79–118.
Kober, H., Brewer, J. A., Height, K. L., and Sinha, R. (2017). Neural
stress reactivity relates to smoking outcomes and differentiates between
mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral treatments. Neuroimage 151, 4–13.
doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.09.042
Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Korn, C., Yan, F., Kai, Z., Chenbo, W., Shihui, H., and Hauke, H. (2014). Cultural
influences on social feedback processing of character traits. Front. Hum.
Neurosci. 8:192. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00192
Kulick, D. (2017). Human–animal communication. Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 46,
357–378. doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041723
Lende, D. (2005). Wanting and drug use: a biocultural approach to the analysis of
addiction. Ethos 33, 100–124. doi: 10.1525/eth.2005.33.1.100
Lende, D., and Downey, G. (2012a). The Encultured Brain: An
Introduction to Neuroanthropology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
doi: 10.7551/mitpress/9219.001.0001
Lende, D., and Downey, G. (2012b). Neuroanthropology and its
applications: an introduction. Ann. Anthropol. Pract. 36, 1–25.
doi: 10.1111/j.2153-9588.2012.01090.x
Lende, D. H. (2012). Poverty poisons the brain. Ann. Anthropol. Pract. 36, 183–201.
doi: 10.1111/j.2153-9588.2012.01099.x
Lende, D. H., and Downey, G. (2020). “Neuroanthropological perspectives on
culture, mind, and brain,” in Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts,
Models, and Applications, eds L. J. Kirmayer, C. M. Worthman, S. Kitayama,
R. Lemelson, and C. A. Cummings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
277–299.
LeVine, R. A. (1984). Properties of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Levy, R. I., and Hollan, D. W. (1998). “Person-centered interviewing and
observation,” in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed H. R.
Bernard (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press), 333–363.
Lewis-Fernández, R., and Kirmayer, L. J. (2019). Cultural concepts of distress
and psychiatric disorders: understanding symptom experience and expression
in context. Transcult. Psychiatr. 56, 786–803. doi: 10.1177/13634615198
61795
Lieber, A. (2015). The distributed cognitive economics of reform: a framework. J.
Interdiscipl. Econ. 27, 49–75. doi: 10.1177/0260107914560860
Markus, H. R., and Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: implications
for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychol. Rev. 98, 224–253.
doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224
Martin, E. (2010). Self-making and the brain. Subjectivity 3, 366–381.
doi: 10.1057/sub.2010.23
Matsuzawa, T. (2009). Symbolic representation of number in chimpanzees. Curr.
Opin. Neurobiol. 19, 92–98. doi: 10.1016/j.conb.2009.04.007
Matusz, P. J., Dikker, S., Huth, A. G., and Perrodin, C. (2019). Are we ready for real-
world neuroscience? J. Cogn. Neurosci. 31, 327–338. doi: 10.1162/jocn_e_01276
Maxwell, J. A. (2004). Using qualitative methods for causal explanation. Field
Methods 16, 243–264. doi: 10.1177/1525822X04266831
McCormick-Huhn, K., Warner, L. R., Settles, I. H., and Shields, S. A.
(2019). What if psychology took intersectionality seriously? changing how
psychologists think about participants. Psychol. Women Quart. 2019, 1–12.
doi: 10.1177/0361684319866430
McGraw, J. J., and Krátký, J. (2017). Ritual ecology. J. Mater. Cult. 22, 237–257.
doi: 10.1177/1359183517704881
McNamara, R. A., and Naepi, S. (2018). Decolonizing community psychology
by supporting indigenous knowledge, projects, and students: lessons from
Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada. Am. J. Commun. Psychol. 62, 340–349.
doi: 10.1002/ajcp.12296
Medin, D., Waxman, S., Woodring, J., and Washinawatok, K. (2010). Human-
centeredness is not a universal feature of young children’s reasoning: culture
and experience matter when reasoning about biological entities. Cogn. Dev. 25,
197–207. doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2010.02.001
Mellentin, A. I., Skot, L., Nielsen, B., Schippers, G. M., Nielsen, A. S.,
Stenager, E., et al. (2017). Cue exposure therapy for the treatment of
alcohol use disorders: a meta-analytic review. Clin. Psychol. Rev. 57, 195–207.
doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2017.07.006
Mintz, S. (1986). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New
York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Moore, D. (2004). Beyond “subculture” in the ethnography of illicit drug use.
Contemp. Drug Probl. 31, 181–212. doi: 10.1177/009145090403100202
Mosse, D. (2004). Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and
Practice. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
Murty, R. N. A., Teng, S., Beeler, D., Mynick, A., Oliva, A., Kanwisher, N.
et al. (2020). Visual experience is not necessary for the development of face-
selectivity in the lateral fusiform gyrus. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 117,
23011–23020. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2004607117
Muthukrishna, M., and Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nat. Hum. Behav.
3, 221–229. doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1
Nadan, Y., Spilsbury, J. C., and Korbin, J. E. (2015). Culture and context
in understanding child maltreatment: contributions of intersectionality
and neighborhood-based research. Child Abuse Negl. 41, 40–48.
doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.10.021
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., and Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems
of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychol. Rev. 108, 291–310.
doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.108.2.291
Nisbett, R. E., and Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can
know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychol. Rev. 84, 231–259.
doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231
Northoff, G. (2013). What is culture? Culture is context dependence! Cult. Brain 1,
77–99. doi: 10.1007/s40167-013-0008-y
Nummenmaa, L., Lahnakoski, J. M., and Glerean, E. (2018). Sharing the social
world viaintersubject neural synchronisation. Curr. Opin. Psychol. 24, 7–14.
doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.021
Oggins, R. S. (2004). The Kings and Their Hawks: Falconry in
Medieval England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
doi: 10.12987/yale/9780300100587.001.0001
Ojalehto, B. L., and Medin, D. L. (2015). Perspectives on culture and concepts. Ann.
Rev. Psychol. 66, 249–275. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015120
Olkowicz, S., Kocourek, M., Luˇ
can, R. K., Porteš, M., Fitch, W. T.,
Herculano-Houzel, S., et al. (2016). Birds have primate-like numbers of
neurons in the forebrain. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113, 7255–7260.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517131113
Ortner, S. (1984). Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparat. Stud. Soc.
Hist. 26, 126–166. doi: 10.1017/S0010417500010811
Patton, M. Q. (1999). Enhancing the quality and credibility of qualitative analysis.
Health Servic. Res. 34, 1189–1208.
Pitre, N. Y., and Kushner, K. E. (2015). Theoretical triangulation as an extension of
feminist intersectionality in qualitative family research. J. Family Theor. Rev. 7,
284–298. doi: 10.1111/jftr.12084
Pitts-Taylor, V. (2010). The plastic brain: neoliberalism and the neuronal self.
Health 14, 635–652. doi: 10.1177/1363459309360796
Prummel, W. (1997). Evidence of hawking (falconry) from bird and mammal
bones. Int. J. Osteoarchaeol. 7, 333–338. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1212(199707/
08)7:4<333::AID-OA374>3.0.CO;2-7
Pylvänäinen, P., and Lappalainen, R. (2018). Change in body image among
depressed adult outpatients after a dance movement therapy group treatment.
Arts Psychother. 59, 34–45. doi: 10.1016/j.aip.2017.10.006
Quinlan, M. B., Quinlan, R. J., Council, S. K., and Roulette, J. W. (2013). Children’s
acquisition of ethnobotanical knowledge in a Caribbean Horticultural village.
J. Ethnobiol. 36, 433–456. doi: 10.2993/0278-0771-36.2.433
Quinn, N. (2006). The self. Anthropol. Theor. 6, 362–384.
doi: 10.1177/1463499606066893
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 19 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Quinn, N. (2018). Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology.
New York, NY: Springer Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-93674-1
Ramstead, M. J. D., Veissière, S. P. L., and Kirmayer, L. J. (2016). Cultural
affordances: scaffolding local worlds through shared intentionality and regimes
of attention. Front. Psychol. 7:1090. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090
Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity.
Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511814686
Redcay, E., and Schilbach, L. (2019). Using second-person neuroscience to
elucidate the mechanisms of social interaction. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 20, 495–505.
doi: 10.1038/s41583-019-0179-4
Rees, T. (2016). Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in
Embryogenetic Terms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
doi: 10.1525/9780520963177
Rees, T., Bosch, T., and Douglas, A. E. (2018). How the microbiome challenges our
concept of self. PLoS Biol. 16:e2005358. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2005358
Robinson, T. E., and Berridge, K. C. (1993). The neural basis of drug craving:
an incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Brain Res. Rev. 18, 247–291.
doi: 10.1016/0165-0173(93)90013-P
Robinson, T. E., and Berridge, K. C. (2008). The incentive sensitization theory
of addiction: some current issues. Philos. Trans. Royal Soc. B 363, 3137–3146.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0093
Roepstorff, A., and Frith, C. (2012). Neuroanthropology or simply anthropology?
Going experimental as method, as object of study, and as research aesthetic.
Anthropol. Theory 12, 101–111. doi: 10.1177/1463499612436467
Roepstorff, A., Neiwöhner, J., and Beck, S. (2010). Enculturing
brains through patterned practices. Neural Netw. 23, 1051–1059.
doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2010.08.002
Rohsenow, D. J., Monti, P. M., Rubonis, A. V., Sirota, A. D., Niaura,
R. S., Colby, S. M., et al. (1994). Cue reactivity as a predictor of
drinking among male alcoholics. J. Counseling Clin. Psychol. 62, 620–626.
doi: 10.1037/0022-006X.62.3.620
Rose, N., and Abi-Rached, J. M. (2013). Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and
the Management of the Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
doi: 10.1515/9781400846337
Sapolsky, R. (2019). This is your brain on nationalism: the biology of us and them.
Foreign Affairs 98, 42–45. Available online at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/
articles/2019-02- 12/your-brain-nationalism
Schilbach, L., Timmermans, B., Reddy, V., Costall, A., Bente, G., Schlicht, T., et al.
(2013). Toward a second-person neuroscience. Behav. Brain Sci. 36, 393–414.
doi: 10.1017/S0140525X12000660
Schüll, N. D. (2012). Addiction by Design. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. doi: 10.1515/9781400834655
Seligman, R., and Brown, R. A. (2010). Theory and method at the intersection of
anthropology and cultural neuroscience. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 5, 130–137.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp032
Seligman, R., Choudhury, S., and Kirmayer, L. J. (2016). “Locating culture
in the brain and in the world: from social categories to an ecology of
mind,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience (Oxford Library of
Psychology). 1st Edn, eds S-C. Li, R. Seligman, R. Turner, and J. Chiao (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 3–20. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199357376.
013.3
Sherwood, C. C., and Gómez-Robles, A. (2017). Brain plasticity
and human evolution. Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 46, 399–419.
doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-100009
Shiffman, S., Stone, A. A., and Hufford, M. R. (2008). Ecological
momentary assessment. Ann. Rev. Clin. Psychol. 4, 1–32.
doi: 10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415
Shimizu, T. (2009). Why can birds be so smart? Background, significance, and
implications of the revised view of the avian brain. Comp. Cog. Beh. Rev. 4,
103–115. doi: 10.3819/ccbr.2009.40011
Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking Through Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Sinha, R. (2007). The role of stress in addiction relapse. Curr. Psychiatr. Rep. 9,
388–395. doi: 10.1007/s11920-007-0050-6
Smith, J. B. (1990). Situational specificity of tolerance to decreased operant
responding by cocaine. Pharmacol. Biochem. Behav. 36, 473–477.
doi: 10.1016/0091-3057(90)90243-B
Soma, T. (2012). Contemporary falconry in Altai-Kazakh in Western Mongolia.
Int. J. Intangible Heritage 7, 103–111. Available online at: https://www.ijih.org/
volumes/article/419
Srinivasan, R., and Martinez, A. M. (2021). Cross-cultural and cultural-specific
production and perception of facial expressions of emotion in the wild. IEEE
Trans. Affect. Comput. 12, 707–721. doi: 10.1109/TAFFC.2018.2887267
Stepp, J. R., Jones, E. C., Pavao-Zuckerman, M., Casagrande, D., and Zarger, R.
K. (2003). Remarkable properties of human ecosystems. Conserv. Ecol. 7:11.
doi: 10.5751/ES-00577-070311
Sternberg, R. J. (2017). Types of generalization: introduction to special section of
perspectives on psychological science on cultural psychology. Perspect. Psychol.
Sci. 12, 757–761. doi: 10.1177/1745691617708633
Stout, D., and Hecht, E. E. (2017). Evolutionary neuroscience of
cumulative culture. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 114, 7861–7868.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620738114
Sutton, J. (2008). “Material agency, skills and history: distributed cognition and the
archaeology of memory,” in Material Agency, eds C. Knappett, and L. Malafouris
(Boston, MA: Springer). doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-74711-8_3
Talhelm, T., Zhang, X., Oishi, S., Shimin, C., Duan, D., Lan, X., et al. (2014). Large-
scale psychological differences within China explained by rice versus wheat
agriculture. Science 344, 603–608. doi: 10.1126/science.1246850
Teddlie, C., and Tashakkori, A. (2012). Common “core” characteristics of mixed
methods research: a review of critical issues and call for greater convergence.
Am. Behav. Sci. 56, 774–788. doi: 10.1177/0002764211433795
Tedlock, D., and Mannheim, B. (1995). The Dialogic Emergence of Culture.
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Turchin, P., Currie, T. E., Whitehouse, H., François, P., Feeney, K., Mullins, D.,
et al. (2018). Single dimensions of complexity in human societies. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 115, E144–E151. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1073/
pnas.1708800115
Turner, V. (2011). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structrue. Taylor
& Francis.
Veenstra, G. (2011). Race, gender, class, and sexual orientation: intersecting axes
of inequality and self-rated health in Canada. Int. J. Equity Health 10:3.
doi: 10.1186/1475-9276-10-3
Verdejo-Garcia, A., Clark, L., and Dunn, B. (2012). The role of interoception
in addiction: a critical review. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 36, 1857–1869.
doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.05.007
Warthen, M. W., and Tiffany, S. T. (2009). Evaluation of cue reactivity in the
natural environment of smokers using ecological momentary assessment. Exp.
Clin. Psychopharmacol. 17, 70–77. doi: 10.1037/a0015617
Watson, L. K., Kaiser, B. N., Giusto, A. M., Ayuku, D., and Puffer, E. S.
(2019). Validating mental health assessment in Kenya using an innovative gold
standard. Int. J. Psychol. 2019:12604. doi: 10.1002/ijop.12604
Weisner, T. S., and Hay, M. C. (2015). Practice to research: integrating evidence-
based practices with culture and context. Transcult. Psychiatr. 52, 222–243.
doi: 10.1177/1363461514557066
Westermann, G., Mareschal, D., Johnson, M. H., Sirois, S., Spratling, M.
W., and Thomas, M. S. (2007). Neuroconstructivism. Dev. Sci. 10, 75–83.
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00567.x
Wexler, B. E. (2011). “Neuroplasticity: biological evolution’s contribution
to cultural evolution,” in Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and
Communication. On Thinking, eds S. Han, and E. Pöppel (Berlin, Heidelberg:
Springer), 1. doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-15423-2_1
Whitehouse, H., and Lanman, J. A. (2014). The ties that bind us: ritual,
fusion, and identification. Curr. Anthropol. 55, 674–695. doi: 10.1086/
678698
Whiten, A. (2017). Social learning and culture in child and chimpanzee.
Ann. Rev. Psychol. 68, 129–154. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-
044108
Wiers, C. E., Stelzel, C., Gladwin, T. E., Park, S. Q., Pawelczack, S., Gawron,
C. K., et al. (2014). Effects of cognitive bias modification training on neural
alcohol cue reactivity in alcohol dependence. Am. J. Psychiatr. 172, 335–343.
doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2014.13111495
Wiers, W. R., Houben, K., Fadardi, J. S., van Beek, P., Rhemtulla,
M., and Miles Cox, W. (2015). Alcohol cognitive bias modification
training for problem drinkers over the web. Addict. Behav. 40, 21–26.
doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2014.08.010
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 20 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611

Lende et al. Elements of Neuroanthropology
Wikan, U. (1991). Toward an experience-near anthropology. Cult. Anthropol. 6,
285–305. doi: 10.1525/can.1991.6.3.02a00020
Willis, G. B., and Miller, K. (2011). Cross-cultural cognitive interviewing: seeking
comparability and enhancing understanding. Field Methods 23, 331–341.
doi: 10.1177/1525822X11416092
Wilson, A. D., and Golonka, S. (2013). Embodied cognition is not what you think
it is. Front. Psychol. 4:58. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058
Witteman, J., Post, H., Tarvaninen, M., de Bruijn, A., De Sousa Fernandes
Perna, E., Ramaekers, J. G., et al. (2015). Cue reactivity and its relation
to craving and relapse in alcohol dependence: a combined laboratory and
field study. Psychopharmacology 232, 3685–3696. doi: 10.1007/s00213-015-
4027-6
Wood, J. C. (1999). When Men Are Women: Manhood Among The Gabra Nomads
of East Africa. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press.
Worthman, C. M. (2009). Habits of the heart: life history and the developmental
neuroendocrinology of emotion. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 21, 772–781.
doi: 10.1002/ajhb.20966
Worthman, C. M. (2010). The ecology of human development: evolving
models for cultural psychology. J. Cross Cult. Psychol. 41, 546–562.
doi: 10.1177/0022022110362627
Worthman, C. M., and Costello, E. J. (2009). Tracking biocultural pathways in
population health: the value of biomarkers. Ann. Hum. Biol. 36, 281–297,
doi: 10.1080/03014460902832934
Wray, J. M., Gray, K. M., McClure, E. A., Carpenter, M. J., Tiffany, S. T., and
Saladin, M. E. (2015). Gender differences in responses to cues presented in the
natural environment of cigarette smokers. Nicotine Tobacco Res. 17, 438–442.
doi: 10.1093/ntr/ntu248
Xygalatas, D., Mitkidis, P., Fischer, R., Reddish, P., Skewes, J., Geertz, A. W.,
et al. (2013). Extreme rituals promote prosociality. Psychol. Sci. 24, 1602–1605.
doi: 10.1177/0956797612472910
Yokel, R. A., and Wise, R. A. (1975). Increased lever pressing for amphetamine
after pimozide in rats: implications for a dopamine theory of reward. Science
187, 547–549. doi: 10.1126/science.1114313
Zarger, R. K. (2010). “Learning the environment,” in The Anthropology of
Learning in Childhood, eds D. F. Lancy, J. C. Bock, S. Gaskins (Lanham, MD:
AltaMira Press).
Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a
potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s Note: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of
the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in
this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or
endorsed by the publisher.
Copyright © 2021 Lende, Casper, Hoyt and Collura. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the
original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original
publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these
terms.
Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 21 October 2021 | Volume 12 | Article 509611