Anthropological Theory

http://ant.sagepub.com/

Neuroanthropology or simply anthropology? Going experimental as method,

as object of study, and as research aesthetic
Andreas Roepstorff and Chris Frith
Anthropological Theory 2012 12: 101
DOI: 10.1177/1463499612436467

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://ant.sagepub.com/content/12/1/101

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Anthropological Theory can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations: http://ant.sagepub.com/content/12/1/101.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Feb 28, 2012

What is This?

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Article
Anthropological Theory
12(1) 101–111
Neuroanthropology or ! The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:

simply anthropology? sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1463499612436467

Going experimental as ant.sagepub.com

method, as object of
study, and as research
aesthetic
Andreas Roepstorff
Aarhus University, Denmark

Chris Frith
Aarhus University, Denmark, Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging, University College London, UK, and All Souls
College, Oxford, UK

Abstract
Neuroanthropology is a new kid on the academic block. It seems to offer a
methodological and conceptual synthesis, which bridges current fault lines within
anthropology, both as discipline and as departments. We are not convinced that it
will deliver on these grounds. However, it has the potential to open up novel ways
to do and think ‘experimental anthropology’, as a method, as an object of study and as a
research aesthetic. This approach, we argue, is probably not neuroanthropological – it
may simply be anthropological.

Keywords
biology, brain, culture, experience, experimentation, phenomenology

We are grateful for the invitation to provide a commentary for this exciting special
issue. The papers chosen, each in their own way, reveal that something new is
happening in the scientific descriptions of what we as humans are. At stake is a
discussion of how nature relates to culture, and culture to nature. If Bruno Latour
(1993) was right in identifying a nature-culture separation at the heart of the

Corresponding author:
Andreas Roepstorff, Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark
Email: andreas.roepstorff@hum.au.dk

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

102 Anthropological Theory 12(1)

modern constitution this debate may, in fact, be negotiating a key balance in the
contemporary world as we know it.
It is high time that this discussion confronts a more mainstream anthropology
audience. As convincingly argued in Reyna’s piece, the discussion touches on a
schism that has been central to the discipline, ever since its inauguration more than
100 years ago. This is also apparent in Whitehead’s narrative of the coming of age
of an anthropologist. These contributors identify a tension that created fault lines
of non-communication, right inside academic departments. At stake are ontolog-
ical discussions about the nature of (human) reality and epistemological discussions
on how to gain knowledge. Settling these issues has many ethical and societal
implications: how to educate kids, how to understand psychiatric disorders and,
in general, how to build social realities (ethics). The fact that the discourse engages
with epistemology, ontology and ethics may suggest that, fundamentally, cosmol-
ogy is at stake (Roepstorff 2003). We believe that the brain is important in these
discussions, but perhaps the way forward may be more about looking at particular
research practices, experiments, than at brains per se.

An ontological checklist: The nature of human reality

Dominguez argues that what we really need is cultural neurophenomenology, that is,
‘a theory of the experiential and neurobiological aspects of cultural activity’ to
create a ‘neural theory of culture and a cultural theory of the brain’. We are not
convinced that what we need are more theories, and will say more about this later.
However, this call for ‘cultural neurophenomenology’ provides a minimal and very
useful claim: humans have experiences, they have brains, they are embedded in
cultural contexts, and somehow, these different factors interact with each other.
This may not appear very controversial, but, as effectively argued by all the papers
in this issue, not all recent research traditions investigating the human survive this
‘ontology checklist’.
Some positions seem to deny the importance of the biological as anything but a
physical instantiation somehow linking into the body before the body becomes too
experiential, lived in, and imbued with meaning. Some seem blind to the existence
of an experiential domain. This effectively derives people of an ability to use expe-
riences for anything. For example, to communicate with each other about some-
thing (Frith 2007), or to act on experiences, thereby creating a space for agency that
is more complex than simply deciding whether one chooses to follow instructions
and press a button (Roepstorff and Frith 2004). Some insist on cognitive univer-
salism and give too little credence to the cultural (nicely illustrated in Turner’s
paper), while others reinforce cultural differences effectively as natural kinds
(Vogeley and Roepstorff 2009), thereby running the risk of parsing people into
distinct cultural groups that bear resemblance to classical distinctions of race
(Martı́nez et al. 2011). Many take as an ontological given that effective causal
chains run only one way, either from the biological to the experiences (cf.
Francis Crick’s (1994) provocative claim ‘you are nothing but a pack of neurons’),

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Roepstorff and Frith 103

from the experiential to the biological (cf. certain strands of transcendental phe-
nomenology; see Dominguez’s paper, this issue) or from the cultural to everything
else, as in a straw man version of cultural relativism. We therefore propose that
humans have experiences, that they have brains, that they are embedded in cultural
contexts, and that, somehow, these different factors interact with each other. This
proposal provides an important ‘ontology checklist’ that can be used to assess
various approaches to knowledge about the human.

Some epistemological challenges: What defines the

experimental?
The major claim of this special issue is that neuroimaging can provide a useful tool
for the anthropologist. A similar idea was previously espoused by cognitive psy-
chologists who believed, among other things, that brain data would resolve dis-
putes between different accounts of mental processes. This aim has proved very
difficult to fulfill. It is notoriously easy to over-interpret brain imaging data and
many have fallen into statistical and logical traps created by underpowered studies
(Kriegeskorte et al. 2009) and attempts to make reverse inferences (Poldrack 2006).
Avoidance of such traps requires that brain imaging data be collected in the context
of well designed and tightly controlled experiments. The problem highlighted here
is even greater for anthropology than that for psychology since we need to include
culture as well as experience and behavior in our studies of the brain.
The most difficult issue, then, is how one would gather knowledge about
these different levels. It is this problem that makes the enterprise so complex.
In any research field, there is an obvious tension between the ideals of method
and the realities of the research. For experiments, it is very much about con-
trol of those factors that make the experiment possible: control of the variables
studied, of the technologies applied, of the experimental design. It does not
take much experience as a researcher, or as a fieldworker in a laboratory
setting (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Roepstorff 2001), to realize that the
research process is rarely just like that. Experimental research is, it is increas-
ingly clear, a complicated practice, a bricolage tinkering with the possible ele-
ments (Pickering 1995) to make things work. In the everyday reality of lab
work, the ideal experiment to end all experiments and settle discussions once
and for all seems usually a utopian dream. In reality, it only seems to exist in
hindsight, in that painful realization that only after one has struggled to create
some facts from the usually somewhat messy data does one know how one
should really have constructed the experiment.
In a similar way, the realities of fieldwork are very far from the naive
‘Malinowskian’ ideal of pitching the tent among the natives who readily share
their daily life and intimate secrets with the omnipresent and omnipotent fieldwor-
ker. As tales from the field tell again and again, it is usually a matter of frustration,
of uncooperative or over-cooperative informants who follow their own agendas, of
loneliness, boredom, of making the most of those events which suddenly occur.

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

104 Anthropological Theory 12(1)

Tensions between disciplines, such as those described in the papers here, may be
based on idealized views of what the research practice is all about.
In our research group, we have tried to counter this by making people from
different disciplines do very concrete research projects together, as a way to get out
of stereotyped views. It is not easy, and there may be some important lessons to
draw from how it gets complicated.
Following Hastrup, Dominguez argues that a key lesson from anthropology has
been to bring into scientific discussion the importance of lived experiences. We
entirely agree. This is of key importance, not least because it creates a conceptual
space for agency and interaction in between structures in the world and structures
in the mind.
There is, however, a challenge as to how to translate this into a ‘classic’
experimental setting. Shaun Gallagher (2003) has argued that one may front-
load concepts into an experimental design. Bahador Bahrami, one of our col-
leagues, tried that when he took a standard psycho-physical task and
embedded it into a communicative, collaborative scenario, where people were
allowed to discuss with each other, if they disagreed on their solution to the
same task. Our finding was that being able to freely share experiences, i.e. to
talk about what they had each seen, allowed the pairs to do better on the task
than individuals, at least under certain rather well-defined conditions (Bahrami
et al. 2010).
In a paradigmatic study, Antoine Lutz, Francisco Varea and colleagues used
individual experiences of task performance, that is, ‘what did it feel like when you
did x?’, to structure the analysis of EEG data in a visual task (Lutz et al. 2002).
They found that using these experiential accounts as ways to structure the data
analysis gave meaningful clusterings of the data, indicating that it indeed some-
times pays off for an experimenter to trust the subjects (Jack and Roepstorff
2003a). These may be small steps towards coming up with experiments which sur-
vive the ontology checklist, and are often framed in script-report rather than
‘stimulus-response’ terms (Jack and Roepstorff 2002).
But one would limit oneself, if the contribution from anthropology was only
about helping psychologists and cognitive scientists to do better experiments.
In fact, in our experience, this mainly works at an early stage of the research
process, when one tries to identify relevant questions to ask. It is, however, one
thing to help asking novel questions, which take interaction and experience
seriously; it is quite another to come up with concrete and feasible experiments
which may help address these questions using a particular method. While anthro-
pologists may have some skills in the former, usually, very little in their actual
training qualifies them well for the latter task.
In fact, once one gets into the necessary nitty-gritty details of experimental
design and subsequent data analysis, the anthropological intervention seems
rarely very useful in its own right. So much of this work is a matter of
identifying and dealing with confounds and alternative explanations. More
often than not, it exposes to the anthropologist all the many potential

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Roepstorff and Frith 105

confounding factors and ordering effects that in the view of other disciplines
for very good reasons may question the validity of his or her work. On the
other hand, the more these factors come to structure the experiments, the
further one tends to get away from an understanding of ‘lived experience’,
of the kind that the anthropologist would be happy with. Somehow, ratings
of pain on a 5-point scale don’t really give a thick description of what it is
like to have electrical currents through your chin (Abrahamsen et al. 2010).
We read an undertone of frustration about what it is like to go experimental
in Dominguez’s and Whitehead’s papers. When one, as an anthropologist,
tries, out of the best of intentions, to go down the experimental route, one
runs the risk of experiencing a double failure. On the one hand, one may be
selling out on what anthropology is good at but, on the other hand, one is not
gaining the rigor and/or style which is required for other experimentalists to
take one seriously.
Luckily, there are other ways to do experimental anthropology. Just as ‘cultural
anthropology’ is about studying cultures, not making culture, one reading of
‘experimental anthropology’ is an anthropological study of experiments.
Dominguez (this issue) makes an important contribution to experimental anthro-
pology in this sense. By following up on an earlier claim that imaging experiments
transform subjects into objectivity (Roepstorff 2002), he shows how it is indeed
possible, at least on paper, to close the circle and get back to the subjects, by taking
seriously their experiences. This form of ‘experimental anthropology’, where
anthropologists use tools and tricks of the trade to understand experiments as a
very peculiar human practice, is potentially fruitful and productive. Our intuition is
that ethnographically mapping human experiments, with or without scanners, as
particular forms of intersubjective and interobjective practices may show how
agency gets redistributed from the individual actors to the script that frames the
experiment. In that sense, experiments may remind us of rituals, and it is no
wonder that those who use experiments to identify agency find very little of it
inside the experiment (Roepstorff and Frith 2004).
There is a third sense in which anthropology may become – or, probably, always
was – experimental. It can be an aesthetics of research practice, experimental in the
sense of trying out new ways of writing, new ways of being in the field, or novel
forms of intervention (Marcus 2010; Roepstorff 2011b), such as using films as an
experimental tool, which is fed back to the community to elicit new forms of
knowledge (Suhr et al. 2009; Suhr and Otto 2011). Combining this third sense of
experimental with the first sense of experimental allows for ‘experimental experi-
mental anthropology’ that tries out new ways to work experimentally in an anthro-
pological setting. One example could be to take experiments to the field
(Konvalinka et al. 2011). If one examines both the results emerging from experi-
ments and the social setting and questions which experiments generate (Astuti
2007), one may be outlining an anthropological research practice that is simulta-
neously experimental in all three meanings, as research aesthetic, as method and as
object of study (Roepstorff 2011b).

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

106 Anthropological Theory 12(1)

Front-loading concepts and models

We earlier introduced Shaun Gallagher’s idea of front-loading concepts into exper-
imental designs (Gallagher 2003). That idea was presented as part of a discussion on
how phenomenology and neuroscience could relate to each other (Jack and
Roepstorff 2003b). Gallagher’s suggestion is that ‘the results of phenomenological
investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications
that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial frame-
work for experimentation’ (2003: 85). This approach may be translated also to the
current discussion. This entails that concepts are used as vectors that move between
different levels of investigation, experimentation and explanation, both in the field
and in the lab. This is not the right place for a full exposition of this argument, but
we will briefly indicate three potential candidates for such moves.

Predictive coding: A Bayesian interpretation of the (neuro)-hermeneutic circle?

We find both in Dominguez’s paper and in Turner’s paper an underlying assump-
tion that people make sense of, and indeed construct, particular worlds. In inter-
esting ways, these discussions resonate with a state-of-the-art discussion in
cognitive neuroscience: the claim that a key work of the brain is to predict
events in the world, and that these predictions rely on models of their surroundings
that allow predictions to be made and tested (Friston 2003; Frith 2007; Roepstorff
2004). However, the fact that notions of models, predictions, and anticipations may
work well both at a neural level and at a cultural level is not a guarantee that they
mean the same, and that one may seamlessly move them from one domain to
another. We have begun to front-load a notion of predictive coding into experi-
mental and conceptual work both on basic and more complex cognitive processes
(Hohwy et al. 2008; Hohwy and Rosenberg 2005; Vuust et al. 2009). These
Bayesian models can be seen as resolving the problem of the hermeneutic circle,
since the whole (i.e. the prior) determines how the parts are understood but, at the
same time, the parts (via prediction errors) modify the whole. In human cognition,
a key element is the ability to share and exchange such models for interpretation.
This allows for cultural shaping of cognitive processes, mediated via sharing of
implicit and explicit framework for understanding. The apparent ease with which
ideas of modeling, anticipation and prediction may also resonate with discussions
in anthropology suggests that there is important work to do in figuring out the uses
and limitations in these conceptualizations, both in the field and in the lab
(Roepstorff et al. 2010).

One function of rituals: Synchronized arousal mediating group cohesion?

One of our colleagues, the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, who studied fire-
walking rituals in different settings, has argued that in a ritual setting, both
performers and related spectators experience synchronized high arousal, and that

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Roepstorff and Frith 107

this could be a key element in the efficacy of rituals in creating group cohesion
(Xygalatas 2008). We front-loaded that idea into an experimental investigation of
spectators and fire-walkers talking part in a ritual in Spain, and we used measures
of heart beat as a very simple proxy for arousal. Using well established mathemat-
ical models, we found that related spectators and fire-walkers shared a level of
synchronization in the patterns of heart rhythms over the ritual, which was not
seen in non-related spectators (Konvalinka et al. 2011). This finding does not
attempt to reduce a particular ritual to a measure of physiology, but it suggests
that front-loading a basic anthropological concept, rituals work on groups, into an
experimental design may allow for very concrete investigations to be made.

Neural implementations of cultural dimensions of the self?

In parallel with the attempt to turn neuroanthropology into a novel subdisci-
pline, another group of researchers has tried to create cultural neuroscience
(Chiao 2009). Interestingly, there is very little overlap between these two
attempts which seem to have developed independently. A key topic in cultural
neuroscience concerns how relating to ‘the self’ may elicit different cultural
responses between different proclaimed cultural groups, typically ‘East
Asians’ and ‘Westerners’. The approach challenges claims for cognitive univer-
salism by attempting to demonstrate that the neural substrates of selfhood may
be culturally dependent and contextually modified. However, at another level
the approach, unintended but problematical, may come to reify very abstract
notions of identity (Roepstorff 2011a). The story of how a particular cognitive
task, built on ascription of trait adjectives (e.g. ‘Are you trustworthy?’), came
to be a tool for eliciting neural dimensions of the self is in itself instructive
(Zahavi and Roepstorff 2011). This demonstrates very succinctly how front-
loading a concept into an experimental design may in itself carry unintended
implications, which may need to be discussed at the meta-level of what script
the experiment is actually enacting. For both anthropologists and neuroscien-
tists the findings, which are currently emerging, call out for careful conceptu-
alizations. On the one hand, it challenges neuroscientists to understand how
contextual effects and personal experiences can affect brain activity underlying
specific self-related processes, and to what extent these patterns may be shared
within and differ between particular cultural groups (Ma et al., in preparation).
On the other hand, it challenges anthropologists to revisit classical discussions
on patternings of culture and putative relations between biology and person-
ality (Roepstorff et al. 2010).

Neuroanthropology or experimental anthropology?

The title of this special issue, Neuroanthropology, suggests that it is indeed possible
to straddle the conceptual divide, to bring knowledge from one domain to the
other. We agree. It is worth trying to develop novel strands of knowledge that

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

108 Anthropological Theory 12(1)

weave across the apparent cleft, and we hope that this paper and the rest of the
special issue may be one element in creating such patterned textures.
However, we are not convinced that what the field currently needs is the naming
of a new hybrid discipline such as neuroanthropology. This suggests a grand theory
of how, on an abstract level, the cultural, the experiential and the neurological
relate to each other. We believe that something else is more important, something
at the same time less ambitious and perhaps more difficult to provide. We need
novel cases that can examine and illustrate how these factors interrelate in concrete
settings. We need questions and models that can be tested in the field and in the lab,
and we need to formulate potential mechanisms as a way to gain a better foothold.
There may be dialectics at stake here, but the dialectics may be a matter of sending
questions, approaches and models back and forth. We need to develop a metalevel
discourse that can grasp what happens when experiments and concepts travel. This
approach is, we argue, not neuroanthropological, it is simply anthropological. If
there is a need for a specific identifier, it could be an ‘experimental anthropology’
that will attempt to maintain the three meanings of experimental: as a method, as
an object of study, and as a research aesthetic (Roepstorff 2011b).
Reyna (this issue) suggests that going back to Boas may be one useful way to
move the field forward. We would not disagree (see another use of Boas in
Roepstorff et al. 2010). In fact, there are interesting ways in which current discus-
sions mirror those that took place at the turn of the last century. Reading up on
these may provide directions for taking current discussions further. However, we
are not convinced that this would also entail a neo-structuralism, which is mainly
concerned with identifying links between structures in minds and structures in the
world. Taking that approach may precisely miss out on the experiential domain,
and this has important implications for how one may understand agency, subjec-
tivity, and communication. Structuralist approaches have long been criticized for
bracketing out the person in an attempt to identify structural parallels between
worlds and minds. We think this may be problematic, on several levels. Within the
anthropological tradition it runs the risk of forgetting important lessons developed
in the discipline, e.g. the importance of taking seriously and indeed representing
experiential domains. On a cognitive level, such an approach runs the risk of
missing out on what may appear to be the most important function of human
consciousness: our ability to use experiences as anchor points for actions and to
share them with others in the process of constructing worlds that are both mental
and social (Frith 2002, 2007; Roepstorff and Frith 2004). A neo-structuralism may
thereby fail the ontological checklist outlined above. Ultimately, it may be unable
to capture humans as persons, and this seems not to be a good starting point for
anthropology.
If instead of outlining abstract theories one would attempt the dangerous pro-
cess of constructing one potential bridge, what would it, then, look like? Our sug-
gestion is to start out with joint research projects, do things together, and then be
sensitive both to the type of facts and the types of contexts produced by going
experimental.

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Roepstorff and Frith 109

Acknowledgement
The research of Andreas Roepstorff and Chris Frith is supported by grants from the Danish
National Research Foundation (Interacting Minds) and the Danish Agency for Science,
Technology and Innovation UNIK initiative (MINDlab). Andreas Roepstorff also receives
support from the Velux Foundation (Technologies of the Mind) and the Danish Research
Council for Cognition and Communication (DRUST).

References
Abrahamsen R, Dietz M, Lodahl S, Roepstorff A, Zachariae R, Østergaard L and Svensson
P (2010) Effect of hypnotic pain modulation on brain activity in patients with temporo-
mandibular disorder pain. Pain 151(3): 825–833.
Astuti R (2007) Weaving together culture and cognition: An illustration from Madagascar.
Intellectica: revue de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive 46/47: 173–189.
Bahrami B, Olsen K, Latham PE, Rees G, Roepstorff A and Frith CD (2010) Optimally
interacting minds. Science 329(5995): 1081–1085.
Chiao JY (2009) Cultural neuroscience: A once and future discipline. Prog Brain Res 178:
287–304.
Crick F (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Friston KJ (2003) Learning and inference in the brain. Neural Networks: The Official
Journal of the International Neural Network Society 16(9): 1325–1352.
Frith CD (2002) How can we share experiences? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(9): 374.
Frith CD (2007) Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Gallagher S (2003) Phenomenology and experimental design: Toward a phenomenologically
enlightened experimental science. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(9-10): 85–99.
Hohwy J and Rosenberg R (2005) Unusual experiences, reality testing, and delusions of
control. Mind & Language 20(2): 141–162.
Hohwy J, Roepstorff A and Friston K (2008) Predictive coding explains binocular rivalry:
An epistemological review. Cognition 108(3): 687–701.
Jack AI and Roepstorff A (2002) Introspection and cognitive brain mapping: From stimu-
lus-response to script-report. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(8): 333–339.
Jack AI and Roepstorff A (2003a) Why trust the subject? Journal of Consciousness Studies
10(9-10): vi–xx.
Jack AI and Roepstorff A (eds) (2003b) Trusting the Subject, vol 1. Exeter: Imprint
Academics, (also published as special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(9–10)).
Konvalinka I, Xygalatas D, Bulbulia J, Schjødt U, Jegindø E-M, Wallot S and Roepstorff A
(2011) Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking
ritual. PNAS 108(20): 8514–8519.
Kriegeskorte N, Simmons WK, Bellgowan PS and Baker CI (2009) Circular analysis
in systems neuroscience: The dangers of double dipping. Nat Neurosci 12(5): 535–540.
Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Latour B and Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, 2nd
edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lutz A, Lachaux JP, Martinerie J and Varela FJ (2002) Guiding the study of brain dynamics
by using first-person data: Synchrony patterns correlate with ongoing conscious states
during a simple visual task. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99(3): 1586–1591.

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

110 Anthropological Theory 12(1)

Ma Y, Bang D, Wang C, Allen M, Frith C, Roepstorff A and Han S (in preparation)

Sociocultural patterning of neural activity during self-reflection.
Marcus GE (2010) Contemporary fieldwork aesthetics in art and anthropology:
Experiments in collaboration and intervention. Visual Anthropology 23(4): 263–277.
Martı́nez MM, Cabanis M, de Echeverrı́a Loebell NC and Krach S (2011) Concerns
about cultural neurosciences: A critical analysis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral
Reviews 1–10.
Pickering A (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Poldrack RA (2006) Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in
Cognitive Science 10(2): 59–63.
Roepstorff A (2001) Brains in scanners: An umwelt of cognitive neurosicence. Semiotica
134(1/4): 747–765.
Roepstorff A (2002) Transforming subjects into objectivity: An ethnography of knowledge
in a brain imaging laboratory. FOLK, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 44:
145–170.
Roepstorff A (2003) Clashing cosmologies. Contrasting knowledges in the Greenlandic fish-
ery. In: Roepstorff A, Bubandt N and Kull K (eds) Imagining Nature: Practices of
Cosmology and Identity. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 117–142.
Roepstorff A (2004) Cellular neurosemiotics: Outline of an interpretive framework. In: Scult
J (ed.) Studien zur Theorie der Biologie, Vol. 6: Biosemiotik – Praktische Anwendung und
Konsequenzen für die Einzeldisziplinen. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung,
133–154.
Roepstorff A (2011a) Culture: A site of relativist energy in the cognitive sciences. Common
Knowledge 17(1): 37–41.
Roepstorff A (2011b) Eksperimentel antropologi. Tidsskriftet Antropologi 63.
Roepstorff A and Frith CD (2004) What’s at the top in the top-down control of action?
Script-sharing and ‘top-top’ control of action in cognitive experiments. Psychological
Research 68: 189–198.
Roepstorff A, Niewohner J and Beck S (2010) Enculturing through patterned practices.
Neural Networks 23: 151–159.
Suhr C and Otto T (2011) Unity through Culture (Film). Aarhus: Department of Social
Anthropology, Aarhus University.
Suhr C, Dalsgaard S and Otto T (2009) Ngat is Dead: Studying Mortuary Traditions (Film).
Denmark: http://www.der.org/films/ngat-is-dead.html.
Vogeley K and Roepstorff A (2009) Contextualising culture and social cognition. Trends in
Cognitive Science 13(12): 511–516.
Vuust P, Ostergaard L, Pallesen KJ, Bailey C and Roepstorff A (2009) Predictive coding of
music: Brain responses to rhythmic incongruity. Cortex 45(1): 80–92.
Xygalatas D (2008) Fire-walking and the brain: The physiology of high-arousal rituals.
In: Bulbulia J, Sosis R, Harris E, Genet R and Genet C (eds) Evolution of Religion:
Studies, Theories, and Critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press,
189–195.
Zahavi D and Roepstorff A (2011) Faces and ascriptions: Mapping measures of the self.
Consciousness and Cognition 20(1): 141–148.

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014

Roepstorff and Frith 111

Andreas Roepstorff is Professor in Cognition, Communication and Culture at the

Section for Anthropology and the Centre for Functionally Integrative
Neuroscience, Aarhus University. Trained in neuroscience and in social anthropol-
ogy, he works on the interface between cognitive science, brain imaging and eth-
nography of knowledge. He is co-director of MINDlab at Aarhus University, an
interdisciplinary research cluster equipped with the latest tools for functional imag-
ing. With Chris Frith, he directs the Interacting Minds research group that exam-
ines markers of human interaction in the lab and in the field.

Chris Frith is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College, London, and is Niels Bohr Visiting Professor
at Aarhus University and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He trained in nat-
ural sciences and clinical psychology and was a pioneer in the application of brain
imaging to the study of higher cognitive functions. He has a special interest in the
mechanisms underlying social interactions.

Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at CAMBRIDGE UNIV LIBRARY on October 11, 2014