Greg Downey

Melissa S. Fisher

Ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy.

Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy

Frontiers of Capital

Daniel H. Lende

The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system isespecially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size andopen to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropologyplaces the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture. Anthropology offersbrain science more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable difference in brainfunction; neuroscience offers anthropology evidence of neuroplasticity's role in social and culturaldynamics. This book provides a foundational text for neuroanthropology, offering basic concepts andcase studies at the intersection of brain and culture. After an overview of the field and backgroundinformation on recent research in biology, a series of case studies demonstrate neuroanthropology inpractice. Contributors first focus on capabilities and skills -- including memory in medicalpractice, skill acquisition in martial arts, and the role of humor in coping with breast cancertreatment and recovery -- then report on problems and pathologies that range from post-traumaticstress disorder among veterans to smoking as a part of college social life.

An Introduction to Neuroanthropology

The Encultured Brain

With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the “New Economy” of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others. Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy. Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom

Aad Blok

Senior Lecturer Greg Downey

Discussion of the current Information Revolution tends to focus on technological developments in information and communication and overlooks both the human labour involved in the development, maintenance and daily use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the consequences of the implementation of these ICTs for the position and divisions of labour. This volume aims to redress this imbalance by exploring the role, position and divisions of information and communication labour in the broadest sense through periods of revolutionary technological change.

Greg Downey

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