keyholez:

Traditional society choked this [the flourishing of open homosexuality] down — some more progressive parts of it did, anyway — by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity.

Um. What the fuck else are you going to attribute same-sex love to? Or different-sex love (how weird (gross) does that sound!), for that matter? This has nothing to do with whether there is anything so crude as a single, all-powerful “gay gene.” This has to do with being a materialist — i.e. not a religion-crazed imbecile. Where do you, o wise and honorable Reverend Greif, think love happens? The soul, you little muppet? […]

These people call themselves intellectuals, but they have yet to adjust their worldview to align with the basic scientific discoveries of the last several centuries, so they end up accidentally spouting nonsense, invoking some ghostly person-essence that does all the loving and the smooching, totally independent from nasty, Scrooge-like “brain chemistry,” which no one should trust their daughter with.

For those looking for a fairly solid explanation of the non-muppet perspective: “Why Neuroanthropology? Why Now?”:

Unlike some people working in this area, the organizers of this conference do not believe that only one research method will contribute to neuroanthropology, nor that this emerging field of thought will become dominated by a single account of how the brain functions. The brain itself is baroque, fashioned over evolutionary time out of a host of modules and functional units that are still incompletely integrated. Every type of neurological activity does not obey the same rules, nor are they equally susceptible (or immune) to self-reflection and conscious thought. Some cognitive capacities are characterized by deeply-ingrained stereotypical species-general responses; other functions are remarkably plastic, even susceptible to substantial revision and conscious redirection. No one simple theory can explain how every system works so we should recognize that enculturation will vary even among the regions and networks within the brain. If an account of one system remains consistent with its functioning while defying expectations arising from other systems, this is as likely to be a product of the brain’s heterogeneity as it is a reflection of differences in research methods or approaches. [emphasis added]

That last point is pretty key in dealing with impulse to negatively connote “brain chemistry”. To be overly generous, one could read the bit Keyholez excerpted as referring to some sort of static, immutable brain chemistry that dictates behavior. This would makes sense in terms of forming a set with a gay gene or eternal sexual identity.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no such thing (in fact, genetics isn’t even as static as I think is being implied…). “Science” has only recently been getting its collective head around neuroplasticity and though the idea seems to easily slip into popular magazine articles it doesn’t seem to really settle in to the extent of dispelling the enlightened intellectual distaste for attributing selfhood to brains.

The part of this rallying cry for a neuroanthropological research agenda that I think really does point strongly in that direction is a knock against the ever popular subject of “brain scans”:

By placing the focus on the individual’s nervous system and its relation to the world, neuroanthropology asks challenging questions of scale and depth for both neuroscientists and anthropologists, demanding both groups stretch beyond accustomed frames. For neuroscientists, seriously considering human diversity may require changes in research methods, in such basic processes as averaging and amalgamating imaging data, removing outlying data points (some of the most interesting individuals), and in finding test subjects. It can help cultural neuroimaging researchers to develop a much more sophisticated understanding about what results of comparative brain scan of Asians and Western Europeans might mean and why seeing doesn’t always translate into cultural believing. Thus, neuroanthropology offers to neuroscientists more sophisticated ways of thinking about neural environment, based upon over a century of debate about the nature of cultural variation and how to conceptualize patterns of behavior.

Little known fact (I think): those funny heat map pictures of “brain activity” that accompany those wonderful articles about how Facebook makes people stupid or whatever are actually the averages of many scans, not any individual one. Placing a great deal of faith in that convention is worth or derision as a reductive way to explain behavior.

So, I guess my point is that the latent-fundamental-belief-in-the-soul club might be reacting to the version of “brain chemistry” that gets translated into popular discourse as precisely the type of foundational explanatory framework they are looking to object to, even though it is in fact so much the opposite that as a field of study it defies more than anything else the impulse towards single explanatory frameworks.

If an account of one system remains consistent with its functioning while defying expectations arising from other systems, this is as likely to be a product of the brain’s heterogeneity as it is a reflection of differences in research methods or approaches.

“Neuroanthropology”, or as one might also call it “studying stuff that exists”, I think could be understood as a field of study that would so definitively be in charge of the extent to which brain chemistry does or does not equal love (whatever each of those might mean) that it would disenfranchise our erstwhile general humanists from speculating on the topic and pushing thought about human-ness back twoards the dark ages.

And isn’t that all anyone really wants?