The symbolic brain represents the increasing convergence of work in anthropology and in neuroscience on questions of meaning, symbolism, subjective experience, and behavior.
In contrast, the inequality brain is more interested in outcomes, in how people end up in different life spaces and with different physical and mental problems through the joint work of many processes—inside and outside the person—that work to create differential variation.
The move to consider embodiment, phenomenology, practices, and experience represent new ways of thinking about social problems that match better with the research and ideas emerging out of recent cognitive neuroscience.
If the brain is plastic, so that activities and experience matter, then culture has a direct effect on how the brain works.
The critical brain takes on two areas. The first area, one we delight in doing, is taking on the bad use of hard-wired biology, evolutionary psychology, and the like in discussing how brains might work and how our minds and cultures link into brain function.
The second area examines the ideologies and symbolisms surrounding the brain in our culture-at-large, as well as the social uses and consequences of our technological understanding and manipulation of neurological processes on society.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) on Vimeo

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Interview: Melissa Leach | Special Reports | EducationGuardian.co.uk

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Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World

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The Interdisciplinary Game « Neuroanthropology

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Jewish in America - Waltham, MA - The Daily News Tribune

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Virtual Ethnography in Contemporary Social Science (VKS)

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Joho the Blog » Berkman lunch: Anne Balsamo on Designing Culture

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Bonnie'sBlog: farewell to constructivism

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analysis of relations between human agency and modern technology and a smart rap on the methodological knuckles for many of us
situated studies of local activity misapprehend contemporary technologies such as nuclear power, the automobile, and large information systems
“ethnographic positivism” -- the tendency to dwell on the details (which are abundant and fascinating), missing the bigger picture beyond “the horizon of the present,” and missing the “mediation of history and culture.”
dedication to the details seems to Kallinikos a failure of “theoretical imagination.”
figure-ground reversal problem
We have focused down on the local details while missing the enormous power technologies (in the hands of modern organizations) have to constrict our activity, to “enframe” our situations, to virtually eliminate huge swaths of our personalities as we conform to the rules of the game established by the organizations/technologies.
Even organizations themselves end up conforming to technologies which are designed in the abstract, not in response to local conditions.
if we agree with Kallinikos that the trend is to confine, to enframe with technology, then we can predict that the communication and self-expression afforded by the Internet-- everything the ERPs of the world suppress -- will result in suppression of the Internet itself
The Internet is a marvelous technology but it also represents a complex array of technologies and practices (writing, information processing, procedural reasoning etc.) that are superimposed upon another to construct a potent system whose immediate influence on people is not evident and cannot be accounted, at least not solely, by ethnographic interpretations.
Don Slater has a couple of years ago criticized Dreyfus book "On the Internet" in Theory, Culture and Society from such an ethnographic perspective. The more I read his critical review the more I become convinced that "situated" accounts of the Internet treat it only as an occasion for studying social groups.