Rita Astuti

Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain?: Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories

If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized natural groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, one must understand why. The A. presents a hypothesis and evidence that humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were species because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the living-kinds mental module that initially evolved to process species-level categories. The main similarities responsible are (i) category-based endogamy and (2) descent-based membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing ethnic groups as species - at least in the ancestral environment - solved adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many strongly intercorrelated properties that are not obvious on first inspection. Since interaction with out-group members is costly because of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups, thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional discriminations towards the in-group (including endogamy). It also promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction with out-group members. The relevant cognitive-science literature is reviewed, and cognitive field-experiment and ethnographic evidence from Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.

Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural madagascar.

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8-17 years) and adults (19-71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5- and 7-year-olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven-year-olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5-year-olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated-a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence.

Anthropologists as Cognitive Scientists

Anthropology combines two quite different enterprises: the ethnographic study of particular people in particular places and the theorizing about the human species. As such, anthropology is part of cognitive science in that it contributes to the unitary theoretical aim of understanding and explaining the behavior of the animal species Homo sapiens. This article draws on our own research experience to illustrate that cooperation between anthropology and the other sub-disciplines of cognitive science is possible and fruitful, but it must proceed from the recognition of anthropologys unique epistemology and methodology.

The causal cognition of wrong doing: incest, intentionality, and morality

The paper concerns the role of intentionality in reasoning about wrong doing. Anthropologists have claimed that, in certain non-Western societies, people ignore whether an act of wrong doing is committed intentionally or accidentally. To examine this proposition, we look at the case of Madagascar. We start by analyzing how Malagasy people respond to incest, and we find that in this case they do not seem to take intentionality into account: catastrophic consequences follow even if those who commit incest are not aware that they are related as kin; punishment befalls on innocent people; and the whole community is responsible for repairing the damage. However, by looking at how people reason about other types of wrong doing, we show that the role of intentionality is well understood, and that in fact this is so even in the case of incest. We therefore argue that, when people contemplate incest and its consequences, they simultaneously consider two quite different issues: the issue of intentionality and blame, and the much more troubling and dumbfounding issue of what society would be like if incest were to be permitted. This entails such a fundamental attack on kinship and on the very basis of society that issues of intentionality and blame become irrelevant. Using the insights we derive from this Malagasy case study, we re-examine the results of Haidt’s psychological experiment on moral dumbfoundedness, which uses a story about incest between siblings as one of its test scenarios. We suggest that the dumbfoundedness that was documented among North American students may be explained by the same kind of complexity that we found in Madagascar. In light of this, we discuss the methodological limitations of experimental protocols, which are unable to grasp multiple levels of response. We also note the limitations of anthropological methods and the benefits of closer cross-disciplinary collaboration.

'It's a boy', 'It's a girl!' : reflections on sex and gender in Madagascar and beyond

The reflections on sex and gender presented in this chapter were set in motion by the experience of giving birth to my son four years ago in London. Under the influence of the National Birth Association, I was determined to have a “natural birth,” free of any unnecessary medical intervention. Accordingly, one of my requests was that the midwife should refrain from telling me the sex of my baby, for I wanted to be allowed to register it “in my own time,” and to decide for myself whether the fact that the newborn was male or female should be of any relevance at all. At the time, I imagined that my Vezo friends in Madagascar, unlike some of my British and Italian friends at home, would have no difficulty in understanding why I did not want the sex of my baby to be the first thing to be uttered about him or her, only seconds after the birth. I thought they would understand my attempts to escape the strictures of the dominant “gender system of the west” (as in Errington 1990), in which a person, from the very beginning, cannot be anything at all if it is not sexed. I thought they would understand because the Vezo with whom I had lived and worked for almost two years had impressed me for their lack of interest in the difference between people with male and female genitals – a difference which, in many contexts, appeared to make very little difference (Astuti 1993).

Death, ancestors and the living dead: learning without teaching in Madagascar

At the time of my last period of fieldwork in Madagascar,1 Brika was seventeen. I had invited him to my house to participate in the study I was conducting about death and the ancestors (cf. Harris, Chapter 2). As with all other participants, I introduced Brika to the task by telling him that I was going to narrate a short story followed by several questions. I reassured him that these questions did not have “right” or “wrong” answers, because people have different opinions about them. I told him that I just wanted to learn about his own way of thinking. Brika carefully listened to the story and patiently answered all my questions. Once the formal interview was over, he engaged thoughtfully with a number of additional open-ended questions about the meaning of the word angatse, the reasons for offering food to the ancestors, the significance of dreams, and the existence of people who, having died, come back to life. He explained that when a person dies “the body rots and turns into bones,” but the spirit (known as fanahy when the person is alive and as angatse once the person has died) “continues to be there.” He knew that the enduring presence of the angatse is revealed through its apparition in people’s dreams, and he was aware that such dreams are serious matters that call for ritual action:

Learning that there is life after death

The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.

On keeping up the tension between fieldwork and ethnography

The transition from participant observation to ethnography is full of tensions and challenges. The author argues that anthropologists should strive to keep up the tension and respond to the challenge and she suggests two ways in which this can be done: return visits and the use of experimental techniques.

Taking people seriously (the 2015 Robert H. Layton Lecture)

Taking the people we study seriously has resurfaced in recent years as a core aim of the ethnographic and anthropological endeavor. In this lecture, I present my way of taking people (i.e., my Vezo friends in a fishing village in Madagascar) seriously. For me, this involves understanding the multiple sources of their knowledge and the different ways of knowing that they mobilize in particular contexts and for particular purposes, at different ages, and fueled by different kinds of experience and cognitive resources. The argument is developed on the basis of empirical material that draws on an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and cognitive psychologists.

On combining natural and social histories into one and the same process

Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.