Dr. Joop de Jong's lecture of December 11th, 2012, organized by the Institute of Anthropology at Universität Heidelberg. Title: "The Perennial Debate on Culture and Psychopathology: from Inferior Frontal Lobes to Cultural Neuroscience"

In this talk four perspectives on psychopathology that prevailed over the past 150 years will be discussed. The first perspective is the "dichotomous perspective" that focused on either biology or culture as an explanatory model. This perspective was dominant during colonial times and was partially substituted by and overlapped with the second "continuum-perspective" that attributed a "disorder" to the biological, socio-cultural, cognitive, emotional and linguistic aspects of behaviour. The third perspective is the "spectrum-perspective" that filters psychopathology through a prism into divergent behavioural patterns that can be studied. The fourth, which is also the latest and overlaps with the other ones, is the "cultural neuroscientific perspective". Cultural neuroscience tries to answer two main questions: 1) how do cultural traits (e.g., values, beliefs, practices) shape neurobiology (e.g., genetic and neural processes)and behaviour; and 2) how do neurobiological mechanisms (e. g., genetic and neural processes) facilitate the emergence and transmission of cultural traits? This article concludes with an example of traumatic stress disorder showing how cultural neuroscience may help to transcend the dichotomy between universalism and relativism, between nature and nurture, and between genotype and phenotype.

The Perennial Debate on Culture and Psychopathology: Inferior Frontal Lobes to Cultural Neuroscience

mocha