On the varieties of empathic experience: tactility, mental opacity, and pain in Yap.

This article argues that empathy should be considered a multimodal process that not only involves perception, intellection, affect, and imagination but also the bodily and sensory aspects of lived experience. The problem of empathy in anthropological, philosophical, and therapeutic contexts is discussed and a phenomenological approach to empathic experience is advanced. An outline of local orientations to empathy on the island of Yap is provided. The place of pain, tactility, and empathy in the context of a local healer's therapeutic practice is detailed, and a series of specific therapeutic interactions are analyzed. It is argued that local moral orientations to suffering require the healer to rely on alternate modalities of empathic discernment in her attempts to gain access to what her patients are feeling and how their treatment is progressing through time.

From pain to virtue: dysphoric sensations and moral sensibilities in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia.

This article contributes to the development of a medical anthropology of sensation through providing a thick ethnographic description of pain's significance in the context of a particular community's - Yap (Federated States of Micronesia) - understandings of subjectivity, social action, and morality. After first proposing an attentional-synthetic model of the patterning of sensory experience, the article goes on to describe in some detail the linguistic, moral, and cultural frameworks that serve as the semiotic, existential, and practical resources providing the background against which individual sufferers tend to interpret their dysphoric sensory experiences. Central to the article is an exploration of a local illness category maath'keenil' that is implicated in two, at times competing, models of ethical subjectivity. It is argued that through configuring their subjective experiences in light of these virtues individual sufferers are at times able to transform their experiences of pain from excruciating dysphoric sensations to meaningful, morally valenced, lived experiences.

Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology.

We introduce a special issue of Ethos devoted to the work of Jerome Bruner and his careerlong attempts to seek innovative ways to foster a dialogue between psychology and anthropology. The articles in this special issue situate Bruner's meaning-centered approach to psychology and his groundbreaking work on narrative in the broader context of the developmental trajectory of both of fields of inquiry. Bruner's work has been enormously influential in the subfields of cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, especially because of his important contributions to our understanding of the intimate relationship between culture and mind. We examine Bruner's past and ongoing engagement with such luminary figures as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, Alfred Kroeber, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Clifford Geertz to highlight points of convergence and tension between his version of cultural psychology and contemporary theorizing and practice in psychological anthropology. We also review his practical and theoretical contributions to the fields of medicine, law, and education.

On crafting a cultural mind: a comparative assessment of some recent theories of 'internalization' in psychological anthropology.

This article reviews a number of recent publications in psychological anthropology that draw in varying degrees from psychoanalytic premises in order to theoretically address problems concerning the internalization of cultural meaning. The article begins with a discussion and critical comparison of Spiro's and Obeyesekere's perspectives on internalization that are in line with a number of classical formulations in anthropological and psychoanalytic theory, before turning to explore what appears to be an emerging new wave of perspectives in contemporary psychological anthropology that set out to discuss problems of internalization in the context of a complex modeling of psychological, social, and cultural processes. The article concludes with a brief discussion of where researchers may need to turn to further our understanding of 'internalization' in relation to those intrapsychic, interpsychic, and extrapsychic processes underpinning the crafting of cultural minds.

Minding experience: An exploration of the concept of "experience" in the early French anthropology of Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, and Lévi-Strauss.

In line with the growing concern with the unexamined reliance upon the concept of "experience" in anthropology, this article explores in some detail the various usages and definitions of the concept in the work of three of early French anthropology's most influential theorists: Emile Durkheim (1858-1918), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-). With its important influence on both British and American anthropology, the early French anthropological tradition, as epitomized in the writings of these three thinkers, has indeed played a pivotal role in shaping many current taken-for-granted understandings of the concept of experience in the discipline of anthropology as a whole. In the process of exploring how experience is viewed by these three scholars, this paper will thus take some initial steps toward the historical contextualization of many of the unquestioned assumptions underpinning current understandings of experience in the discipline of anthropology and the social sciences more generally.

Watching social interactions produces dorsomedial prefrontal and medial parietal BOLD fMRI signal increases compared to a resting baseline.

Some human brain areas are tonically active in a resting state when subjects are not engaged in any overt task. The activity of these areas decreases when subjects are engaged in a wide variety of laboratory tasks designed to study cognitive operations. It has been suggested that these areas, among them the medial parietal (precyneus) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, may support a "default state" of the human brain. Passive visual observation of laboratory stimuli typically yields no change in activity in these default areas compared to rest. Here we report functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on normal subjects watching realistic movie clips depicting everyday social interactions. In contrast with previous findings on default state brain areas, the observation of the relational segment of the movie clip, during which two persons interact, yielded increased activity in the medial parietal (precuneus) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, compared to rest and to observation of the segment of the movie clip depicting a single individual engaged in everyday activities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of joint increased activity in medial parietal and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices. We suggest that the default state areas may participate in the processing of social relations in concert with regions previously identified as critical for social cognition that were also activated by our stimuli, including the inferior frontal cortex, the superior temporal cortex, and the fusiform gyrus.