AAA panel - looking for contributors
Stephen Chrisomalis
SAS members and friends,
I am looking to put together an in-person panel for the AAAs on the topic “Thinking Outside the Brain-Box: Extended, Embodied, and Enactive Cognition in Anthropology”, with the Society for Anthropological Sciences as sponsoring section. I am looking for 4-5 people interested in doing oral presentations on this topic at the November meetings in Toronto. Feel free to distribute to anyone who might be interested.
Thinking Outside the Brain-Box: Extended, Embodied, Embedded, and Enacted Cognition in Anthropology
Cognitive anthropology offers an unparalleled interdisciplinary perspective across cultural and cognitive sciences. Over the past 20 years, a suite of new approaches known as “4E cognition” – extended, embodied, embedded, enacted - take seriously the notion that cognition is not merely in the mind, but builds on and marshals external resources for problem-solving, decision-making, and information-sharing (Newen et al. 2018). 4E approaches in anthropology may look traditionally ethnographic, build on discourse analysis, or employ innovative analyses of material culture (Hutchins 1995; Lave 1988). They offer key resources for practicing and public anthropologists in fields such as design, whose audiences may be largely non-academic. Working against what Levinson (2012) calls ‘the original sin of cognitive science’, the failure of methodological and theoretical imagination to include culture in cognition, we take as axiomatic that anthropology is ideally suited to bridge the mind and the world around it. This panel brings together perspectives from all anthropological subfields and allied sciences to show how anthropological methods can contribute to an integrative cognitive science beyond the brain.
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, 1995.
Lave, Jean. Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Levinson, Stephen C. "The original sin of cognitive science." Topics in cognitive science 4, no. 3 (2012): 396-403.
Newen, Albert, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds. The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Anyone would be welcome, but I would be especially interested in students, folks who haven’t participated in SAS panels before, and folks from across different subfields. Write me (Steve Chrisomalis) directly at chris...@wayne.edu with your name, paper title, and brief abstract (max. 250 words), no later than March 20. Feel free to ask any questions. You do NOT need to be an AAA member or register for the conference at this time – once accepted in July, you have until Sept. 8 to do those steps.
(Relatedly: this listserve is a great medium for you to put out your own call for a SAS-sponsored panel. All panels / presentations must be started by March 22, which is less than three weeks away, and completed no later than March 29.)
Stephen Chrisomalis (he/him)
Professor of Anthropology, Wayne State University
President, Society for Anthropological Sciences
3019 FAB, 656 W. Kirby,
Detroit, MI 48202
chris...@wayne.edu
https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/dz6179