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Abstract

This article considers how Marilyn Strathern’s work on Western knowledge conventions can usefully contribute to debates at the intersection of the social and neurosciences: first, to understanding the nature of work at this intersection; and second, to providing new avenues for interdisciplinary engagement. The neuroscience explosion in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century held out the promise of understanding increasingly complex phenomena in terms of the brain. As the neurosciences ventured into questions of human sociality, social scientists found it difficult to make meaningful contributions within the confines of conventional models of neuroscientific work. This highlighted the need for conceptual and methodological innovation. In this article, we illustrate how Strathern’s concept of the merographic connection, which conceptualizes the link between overlapping parts belonging to separate wholes, is a useful frame for thinking about the shared objects of the social and neurosciences. We show how her consideration of analogy as an apparatus bringing different domains together assists in understanding work in this area. With social science experiments in working with neuroscientists ongoing, Strathern’s work encourages precision about what is being brought into relationship in interdisciplinary encounters and prompts innovative thinking about what might productively be brought into association.

Keywords

neuroscience social science brain merographic connection Strathern knowledge-making

Introduction

The neuroscience explosion of the last several decades promises a better understanding of increasingly broad and complex human phenomena in terms of the brain. Brain-based accounts spanning topics such as political belief (Chawke and Kanai 2016) or poverty (Noble et al. 2015) have gained prominence in industrialized and highly medicalized societies like Australia. Beginning with the establishment of a formal enterprise to understand the mind in terms of the brain (Adelman 2010), the brain was increasingly understood as a nexus of body, mind, and society (Pickersgill 2009; Lende and Downey 2012). Advancements in the biological sciences, especially neurosciences and genomics, have given rise to epistemological shifts where the biological and social are increasingly hard to disentangle (Meloni 2014; Rose 2013b). These scholars emphasized the need and the opportunity to move from critique to deeper engagements with the biosciences. Conversely, developments in the neurosciences have prompted calls for new ways to conceptualize changes in how scientists make links between biology and the social (Beaulieu 2002, Pickersgill 2009). Others have suggested that the current moment of biology’s increasing interest in sociality presents an opportunity for a “revitalized” sociology that returns to the discipline’s earlier concerns with the biological (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016b) and for a more sophisticated biohumanities project (Meloni 2014).

As the neurosciences ventured into questions of human sociality and culture where the expertise of social scientists was especially relevant, neuroscientists and social scientists attempted to collaborate on neuroscience projects. These early experiments were met with challenges as social scientists found there was little room for sociological concepts within the confines of experimental requirements (Fitzgerald et al. 2014). Despite those difficulties, scholars such as Callard and Fitzgerald, following Haraway, recommend “staying with the trouble” (Callard and Fitzgerald 2015, 109) and experimenting with new ways to work with the neurosciences, seeking conceptual and methodological innovation.

Our interest is in this ongoing discussion about the social sciences’ engagement with the neurosciences and how to think about knowledge-making at this intersection. In our research investigating the expanding scope of the neurosciences and the broader appeal of brain-based understandings beyond the lab, we have found Marilyn Strathern’s work on Western modes of knowledge-making helpful (Croy 2017). We draw particularly on Sarah Franklin’s (2003, 2013, 2014) elaboration of Strathern’s work to consider how the brain could be thought of as an object made of parts belonging to what have been treated as different domains of knowledge, whatever the ontology of the object. These parts overlap and connect different domains—whether nature and culture, the social and biological, the work of the neurosciences, and the social sciences—even if these domains do not line up neatly and as the boundaries between categories are seen to break down.

Strathern’s concepts are helpful in thinking about how brain-based explanations are able to travel, where they get stuck, and the opportunities and challenges faced by hybrid approaches to knowledge production centered on objects of overlapping parts such as the brain. This article is a theoretical reflection upon these opportunities and challenges, drawing, where relevant, on examples from our ethnographic study of neuroscience research in a major Australian city, conducted between 2012 and 2013.

This article is divided into five sections. The first section briefly describes the establishment of an organized brain science and the articulation of an object capturing both mind and brain. We outline the challenges for the social sciences: first, the analytical challenge in the need for new ways to understand the changes that the neurosciences bring, and second, the practical challenge of how to engage with the neurosciences on topics of shared significance. In the second section, we introduce the concept of the “merographic connection” that Strathern (1992) identified as a key mode of Western knowledge-making. We use Strathern’s concept, as elaborated by Franklin (2003, 2013, 2014), to show how the brain can be thought of as an object that is epistemologically made up of parts belonging to overlapping, yet distinct, domains. In the third section, we use examples from our research to highlight the role of the merographic connection in work centered on the brain. We illustrate how the brain is able to travel and the opportunities it provides as an object of overlapping parts to connect and disconnect to different domains of knowledge through analogy. Here, we show how merographic connections, as connections between what are treated as separate, self-existing domains, allow for an extension of meaning but also for contraction in which one logic is able to dominate. In the fourth section, we go on to consider what role analogy plays in knowledge-making centered on an object conceived of as both mind and brain. We suggest, following Strathern and Franklin, that despite epistemic shifts in how the brain is conceptualized, with the boundaries between categories of mind and brain collapsed, this collapse is partial, and these categories continue to do analogic work.

In our concluding section, we discuss how Strathern’s merographic connection and model of analogic reasoning can prompt questions for social scientists to consider as they seek to understand the work of neuroscience, and the possibilities and limits of their engagement with neuroscientists. We ask what is brought into relationship through developments in the neurosciences, and what can social scientists usefully bring into relationship to prompt innovative work at this intersection?

While there is undoubtedly a role for the social sciences to play in the work of the neurosciences, what this role is remains an open question. There is a need, as we go on to elaborate, for conceptual tools that can contribute to understanding epistemological shifts in developments in the neurosciences and to reimagine relations between the neurosciences and the social sciences. Our central argument is that Strathern’s theorization of Western knowledge-making and her approach to seeking conscious and deliberate connections across disciplines are valuable additions to the conceptual tool kits of social scientists seeking to engage with the neurosciences and the biosciences more broadly.

The Neuroscience Explosion and a Changing Neural Object

Research on mind and brain has a long history that spans neurology, physiology, and psychiatry, with a still longer history of speculation about the role of the brain in human life. Scholars who study the contemporary phenomenon of neuroscience point to the 1960s as the period when a formalized discipline called “neuroscience” came together with a distinct set of aims (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) identify the 1962 establishment of the Neuroscience Research Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by biologist Francis O. Schmitt as a key moment in the coming together of the field. Schmitt envisioned an endeavor rooted in the unity of science thesis, according to which mind could be explained in terms of brain (Adelman 2010). This approach would combine those disciplines devoted to the study of mind and brain with the chemical and physical sciences (Swazey 1992).

In his articulation of this new interdisciplinary field, Schmitt explicitly described an object for a neural science called mind/brain (Adelman 2010). Just as molecular biology had addressed the “cell-molecule problem,” the challenge of understanding the cell at the molecular level, Schmitt saw the new neural science as having the capacity to address the “mind-brain-neuron-molecule problem” (Swazey 1992, 541). Kandel and Hudspeth (2013) similarly describe such an enterprise in the seminal textbook, Principles of Neural Science, a staple of university neuroscience teaching in the English-speaking world (Olivo 1992; Schultz 2001). Kandel and Hudspeth, both trained in neurobiology, and Kandel, in psychiatry as well, go further and situate the endeavor of understanding the mind in terms of the brain within a broader “unification within biology,” where key tasks included understanding how cells give rise to human thought, behavior, and feeling, and further still, how these cells are “influenced by the environment which includes social experience” (Kandel and Hudspeth 2013, 5).

Abi-Rached and Rose (2010, 12) describe neuroscience as the epitome of interdisciplinarity, a “hybrid of hybrids” bringing together different scientific disciplines including molecular and cell biology, psychology, physics, mathematics, and computer science, as well as social sciences. More accurately described in the plural, neurosciences encompass research into the mechanisms of nerve cells or the processes that occur in the brain when someone has a stroke, to studies of what happens in the brain when two people interact, or when an individual is subjected to the actions of a group of people. In the 2000s, neuroscience techniques began increasingly to be applied to questions arising from disciplines including economics, politics, literature, ethics, and anthropology, to name a few among an ever-growing number of “neuro-fields” (Vidal and Ortega 2011).

The brain as an object of scientific investigation continues to change with developments in neuroscience and its collaborations across multiple disciplines. As Daston (2000) notes, objects under scientific scrutiny shift and new avenues open up in the process of their investigation. In a state of constant flux, the objects of science “broaden and deepen” in the process of being studied and reveal “ever more layers of hidden structure” (Daston 2000, 13). The brain, in the neuroscience explosion, has served as a gathering point (Knorr Cetina 1997) for researchers from a host of disciplines, each bringing knowledge, tools, and techniques that reconfigure the brain as an object of scientific investigation.

The neurosciences’ expanding remit (Choudhury and Slaby 2012; Mahfoud 2014: Pickersgill, Van Keulen, and Katz Rothman 2011) presents several challenges for social scientists. The first challenge is to develop new ways to understand the work in the field that considers the changing nature of how the brain is understood. Pickersgill (2009) notes that the expansion of neuroscience into studying complex phenomena cannot be understood as simple reductionism in which a reductionist method corresponds to a reductionist ontology. Instead, Pickersgill suggests that the brain in contemporary neuroscience is understood to be a locus of interaction between body, mind, and society. In his research with neuroscientists investigating psychopathology, Pickersgill (2009) showed the complex links neuroscientists made between the biological, the psychological, and the social, performing “multiple and nuanced reductions” that reshaped relations between these domains. Indeed, referring to the entwinement of body, mind, and society, researchers developing a neuroanthropology have described the brain as a biological organ that is “shot through with the environment down to its cellular structure” (Lende and Downey 2012, 49).

Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh (2016b) argue that the usual sociological arguments that cast the entanglement of the biological sciences with the social as “biologization” are outdated and do little to offer a meaningful way for social scientists to engage with the neurosciences. Social scientists need new ways of talking about epistemological changes in the biological sciences in order to be open to their growing interest in sociality. Scholars have pointed to how developments in the life sciences, including epigenomics, break down boundaries between the biological and the social (Meloni 2014) and the organism and its environment (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016a). At the same time, Fitzgerald et al. (2016b) argue that the split between biology’s reductive past and its present-day openness to concepts from the social sciences is a fiction that ignores the intertwinement of ideas.

Rose (2013b) notes that there is a tension in the life sciences between methodological reductionism and a more open approach to thinking about biology. This is something that social researchers engaging in neuroscience projects have faced. While the neurosciences’ articulation of the brain may imaginatively capture the complexity of a human being in the context of a biological organ, the epistemological work involved in characterizing such an object of science has been less straightforward. First, where work dealing with concepts drawn from the humanities and the social sciences proceeded without the involvement of scholars in these areas, everyday concepts failed to capture the nuances and range of the ideas being examined. For example, Racine et al. (2017) showed that declarations that studies of the brain had shown that free will did not exist referred to a layperson’s definition of the concept and did not account for varying philosophical positions. In other cases, folk versions of concepts might were used long after being abandoned by the disciplines they were drawn from (Callard and Fitzgerald 2015). As Callard and Fitzgerald (2015, 53) have noted, the version of “the social” at work within neuroscience experiments was often not the same as what social scientists would consider to represent the social.

Even as there was a clear need for social scientists to engage in neuroscience work that was increasingly opening up to the social, how to do so meaningfully was less certain. Nikolas Rose and colleagues, through the European Neuroscience and Society Network, organized weeklong neuroschools (Rose 2013a) which brought together scholars from the neurosciences, humanities, and social sciences. The aim was for researchers to learn from each other and explore possibilities for interdisciplinary work that adhered to the epistemological and methodological requirements of the disciplines involved (Frazzetto 2011). Yet even with the best intentions of genuinely collaborative work, in these interdisciplinary encounters, the pragmatic necessities of experimental science took precedence, and social science and humanities concepts proved difficult to incorporate in the laboratory (Fitzgerald et al. 2014).

Callard and Fitzgerald (2015) have detailed the challenges of interdisciplinary work, from the logistics of making it happen, the inevitable reduction of concepts, to the emotional labor of managing unequal relations where one discipline’s methods and concepts take precedence over another’s. Yet these authors and others have emphasized the necessity of engaging with the neurosciences on matters of direct relevance to social scientists, furnishing “thicker” versions of the social through such work (Callard and Fitzgerald 2015, 3). Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh (2016b) further argue for a role for the social sciences in directly contributing to questions about human beings as neurological beings. Callard and Fitzgerald (2015) have called for “experimental entanglements” that risk disciplinary logics, principles, and methods and for the development of new topologies of relation.

Work that grapples with some of these issues has helped to reconceptualize the relation between the biological and the social, as well as the role of different disciplines in neuroscience research. Callard and Fitzgerald (2015, 223) call for the creation of new objects that “sutur(e) the social to the biological” and facilitate meaningful interdisciplinarity. Recent work by Fitzgerald and colleagues in the area of neuroscience, and Roberts and Sanz’s (2018) “bioethnography” that combines ethnography with biological sampling, starts with philosopher of science Karen Barad’s assumption of undifferentiated phenomena where boundaries only arise out of “intra-actions”:

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular material articulations of the world) become meaningful. (Barad 2007, 139)

Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh (2016b) and Roberts and Sanz (2018) have drawn on Barad’s concept of “intra-action” in thinking about research investigating phenomena that is relevant to both the social and natural sciences. Fitzgerald et al. (2016b, 153) note that interdisciplinary attempts to consider the effect of stress on the body, for example, have often maintained sharp divisions between biology and the social. The authors propose that researchers should consider instead “the ‘intra-actions’ through which vital forms of life are not shaped by a binary split, but actually inhere in the complex of organism and milieu.” A case in point could be the concept of the “neuropolis,” an imagining of cities through their impacts on the brains of city dwellers, which deliberately brings together the neural and social (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016a).

With social scientists experimenting with ways of working with and alongside the neurosciences—allowing them to make meaningful contributions to areas of study where their expertise is clearly relevant—Strathern’s approach to interdisciplinarity and her attention to the conventions of Western knowledge-making are useful. As interdisciplinary work in the neurosciences brings together multiple epistemic traditions with differing authority to define reality, Strathern’s approach brings precision to analyses of how knowledge is being made while also prompting novel opportunities for meaningful engagement. For Strathern, disciplines are not confining but are “generative and enabling, the repositories of a responsible kind of epistemological reflexivity” (Barry and Born 2013, 7). The value of a discipline “is precisely in its ability to account for its conditions of existence and thus as to how it arrives at its knowledge practices” (Strathern 2004, 5). Strathern’s (2011) approach to interdisciplinarity seeks precision about where ideas have come from while seeking unconventional connections in which all one’s conceptual tools are at stake (Edwards and Petrović-Šteger 2011, Tsing 2014).

In the next section, we introduce Strathern’s (1992) concept of the merographic connection, her model of Western knowledge-making. We suggest that this model can serve as a way of attending to the transformations brought on by the neurosciences and of prompting reflexivity in a line of work that brings different disciplines and bodies of knowledge into relation. Drawing on examples from our fieldwork, we go on to explore how this model can contribute to two challenges facing social scientists, namely: first, how to analytically think about changes afoot in the meeting of neuroscience and social science; and second, how to practically engage with the neurosciences in a way that does justice to human beings as neural beings among a host of other things.

Merographic Connection and Analogy

Strathern (1992) first developed the concept of the merographic connection in After Nature, where she analyzed English kinship thinking and highlighted how ideas of kinship contain categories of both the biological and the social. In developing this model, Strathern drew from her work in Melanesia and England, comparing “Euro-American” and “Melanesian” concepts. This Euro-American/Melanesian coupling is a central heuristic of Strathern’s analytical approach and one she applies to a range of topics including her later analyses of new genetic and reproductive technologies (Hirsch 2014; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). By placing Euro-American and Melanesian kinship concepts alongside each other, Strathern (1992) identifies what she sees as a Euro-American tendency to sort things into domains of knowledge such as nature or culture, biological or social, and mind or brain (Edwards and Petrović-Šteger 2011).

Barad’s (2007) notion of “intra-action” is an attempt to move away from the conceptual boundaries artificially placed around phenomena. In her response to Barad, Strathern notes that retaining attention to concepts is still useful. She writes:

But I have work for the concept. I retain the notion precisely for its place as a device through which people organize their thoughts and give accounts of a world populated by other thinkers and speakers. Indeed, it is illuminating to envisage the concept as a piece of apparatus. (Strathern 2020, 17)

Strathern’s central project is not developing theories or concepts for their own sake but to develop better descriptions (Boric and Strathern 2010) and redescription (Lebner 2017). Strathern’s (2004) concern is precision in how knowledge is assembled and awareness about the dangers of making connections that appear commonsensical but which paper over different epistemic origins and logics (Strathern 2011). The neologism “merograph” combines the prefix “mero” meaning “part,” with “graph” meaning “to write.” With this term, Strathern (1992, 204) captures “the way ideas write or describe one another.” The concept foregrounds that the way in which things are known is always relational and theorizes the “cultural borrowing involved in the way ideas travel, connect, disconnect, and contain one another” (Franklin 2003, 66).

In After Nature, Strathern (1992) identifies what she perceived to be a particular Euro-American mode of sense-making and knowledge production. This involves a tendency to continuously seek to describe things as part of something else (Schlecker and Hirsch 2001; Street and Copeman 2014). Placing things in new contexts, Strathern (1992) argues, generates connections to different domains of knowledge, with each act of contextualizing able to illuminate that object from a different angle.

An important insight of this work is that in Western sense-making, things, whether people, concepts, or objects, are able to be standalone entities even as they are seen to also contain parts belonging to separate wholes (Schlecker and Hirsch 2001). Strathern (1992) notes that for the English, relations are seen to be between (and separate from) individuals, whereas in Melanesia, people are considered to contain relations. The idea that someone could be both an individual and part of society is specific to the West. For the English, Strathern (1992, 76) argues, “Society” is seen to exist as a whole “different order of phenomena.”

While theorists have developed new concepts to capture the collapse of boundaries between nature and culture, biology and the social, and so on (Rabinow 1996, Rose, Birk, and Manning 2022), Strathern’s concept of the merographic connection is akin to Haraway’s idea of the cyborg in the way that it considers the relations between categories (Franklin 2003). While Haraway’s cyborg provides a mode of rethinking hierarchies and dualisms (Haraway 1991), Strathern’s merographic connection considers how connections are made between domains through analogy (Franklin 2014; Strathern 1992). Strathern (1992) writes:

Culture and nature may be connected together as domains that run in analogous fashion insofar as each operates in a similar way according to laws of its own; at the same time, each is also connected to a whole other range of phenomena which differentiate them—the activities of human beings, for instance, by contrast with the physical properties of the universe. The second connection makes the partial nature of the analogy obvious. It presupposes that one thing differs from another insofar as it belongs to or is part of something else. I call this kind of connection, link or relationship merographic. (p. 73)

The merographic connection, Franklin (2014, 243) notes, is a model that highlights an “analogical perspective, or agentic comparison.” Analogy, within this model, is an “apparatus through which connections can be forged, resisted, or refigured” (Franklin 2014, 246).

While the evidently artifactual boundaries between nature and culture, or biology and the social, have led some to argue that these distinctions are no longer relevant, others continue to find analytic use in them (Franklin 2003; Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000). Franklin (2003, 68) writes that “(f)or Strathern, the apparent dissolution of the differences between nature and culture, or biology and society, derives from a collapse of the analogy between nature and culture, that is only sustained partially.” Franklin, Lury, and Stacey (2000, 9) argue that these categories were more crucial than ever in developments from the biosciences, even as they change:

while nature and culture are increasingly isomorphic, in that they are acquiring each other’s powers, their distinctiveness continues also to remain crucial. It is in these processes of overlap and opposition, of borrowing from each other while remaining distinct, where we argue a particular set of generative effects can be seen to lie.

Maintaining these distinctions in one’s analysis keeps in view the work that these categories do in processes of exchange even as they are transformed (Franklin 2003) and highlights how their power in such exchanges comes from their separateness (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000).

Franklin describes the objects of biomedicine, following Strathern, as “condensed epistemic point[s] of many intersecting strands” (Franklin 2013, 6). Biomedical entities such as the gene or brain are considered to contain parts that belong to different domains, such as biology and kinship, or nature and culture. These different domains, Franklin notes, form the backdrop against which such objects are figured, offering opportunities for connection and disconnection according to context. This ability to connect and disconnect lends objects of biomedicine an interpretive flexibility as they connect domains with distinct logics (Franklin 2013). In the following section, we explore how the brain acts as one such object of biomedicine and illustrate how connection and disconnection occurs.

The Brain as an Object of Overlapping Parts: Extension and Displacement of Meaning

In this third section, we demonstrate the use of Strathern’s model of the merographic connection by considering how a changing neural object—the object of investigation for many different disciplines—can be thought of as comprising overlapping parts that connect and disconnect to multiple domains merographically. We show how this can facilitate an extension of meaning beyond the biological as well as a displacement of meaning. We draw on our own research investigating neuroscientists’ perspectives on the expansion of their field. We were interested in neuroscience's ability to sustain the study of increasingly broad phenomena as it makes links between what has traditionally been considered “mind” and what has traditionally been considered “brain.”

Between 2012 and 2013, we conducted participant observation in two Australian laboratories: a behavioral neuroscience laboratory working with mice, and a cognitive neuroscience laboratory (Croy 2017). In addition to interviews with the twelve members of the two laboratories, some of whom were interviewed multiple times, we also interviewed eleven laboratory heads working in similar areas dealing with aspects of human thought, behavior, and feeling. Our participants had trained in genetics, psychology, molecular and cellular neuroscience, endocrinology, neuropsychology, pharmacology, psychiatry, and physics, with areas of expertise and interests spanning cognitive, behavioral, social, cellular and molecular neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, psychophysics, neuropsychology, and neuroinformatics. They worked on a breadth of topics including addiction, schizophrenia, perception, neural plasticity, connectivity, anxiety, adolescent mental health, and autism. In our interviews, we asked all participants how they came to be neuroscientists, what questions drove their research, the nature of their day-to-day work, and their perspectives on the significance of the field and the direction it was moving in. This research sought to understand the expansion of the neurosciences from the perspectives of its practitioners. We adopted an anthropological approach beginning from the assumption that neuroscience is a unique cultural world and that to understand this world, it is necessary to understand the points of view of the people involved (Hess 1997, 2001).

The ways in which our participants talked about the significance of the brain illustrates how it works as an object of overlapping parts. It demonstrates the work of the merographic connection in enabling the brain to function as an object across multiple contexts and disciplines. In discussions about the significance of neuroscience and their own interest in the brain, it was common for participants to describe the importance of the brain by referring to its essential role in selfhood. As Franklin (2003) has argued, the concept of the gene already contains ideas about individuality and kinship. Likewise, the brain that the field of neuroscience takes as its object of investigation is seen to contain associations with selfhood and personhood (Vidal 2009). Our participants described the brain as central to selfhood and what made an individual who they were. Yet even when the brain was described as an organ with unique significance for human life, it could also be described as an organ like any other. This was often illustrated when participants described problems such as mental illness as being like any other disease that might affect another organ of the body. For example, when addiction researcher Steven¹ described addiction as a “brain disorder” rather than a “moral flaw,” he emphasized the brain’s biology rather than its role in selfhood, saying: “It’s a disorder, it’s a disease, just as hypertension is, just as Alzheimer’s disease is, just as diabetes is. It’s just a different disease.”

As Franklin (2014) noted, because of the ability of objects of overlapping parts to selectively connect and disconnect from different domains, contradiction and paradox are common. Others have found that the brain can simultaneously be substituted for the self and yet be seen as separate from the self, an object to be acted on (Brenninkmeijer 2019). Autism researcher Scott made a similar argument to Steven, pointing to the paradoxical way in which the brain could be understood:

The difference is that you experience some sort of abnormalities in the brain, that it changes who you are as a person, it can change personality, it changes the way that you behave, the way that you therefore interact and impact upon other people.…People are not necessarily looking at mental illness, oh ok, that’s dysfunction within a biological organ.

The brain can be mere biology in one context and extend far beyond the biological in others where it is connected to the domain of something called “the mind.” When an object of overlapping parts such as the brain is placed in different contexts, there are multiple opportunities for selective connection, sitting as it does against a background of nature and culture; the biological and the social; and increasingly against a backdrop of a growing number of disciplines. In our participants’ comments about stigma, the brain’s bare physicality and rootedness in the domain of the biological was emphasized while its role in selfhood was eclipsed. From another angle, its role in what “made me me” (Belinda, cognitive neuroscientist) was “activate[d]” (Franklin 2014, 254). This ability to selectively connect and disconnect facilitates the movement of knowledge and the creation of new knowledge each time an object of overlapping parts is placed in a different context (Strathern 1992; Franklin 2014). The brain, conceived of as mind/brain, is an object that is ripe for transfers of logic (Franklin 2013), for “traffic” of ideas and “borrowings” (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000, 9) when the brain is moved into new contexts. As an object of overlapping parts, the brain brings with it logics that extend beyond the singularly neural, as Franklin (2014) noted in the case of genes, slipping easily into everyday talk in ways that seem “obvious and normal” (Franklin 2013, 16). For our participants, there were many opportunities where the brain could be inserted into everyday contexts, from child-rearing to the work of psychotherapy, where the brain is substituted for a human being.

It is a cultural truism that the brain is deeply involved in everything that human beings do. In Strathern’s identification of a specifically Western merographic mode of constructing knowledge, the status of the brain as an object of overlapping parts provides opportunities for both the extension and displacement of meaning when placed in different contexts. Indeed, it allows for a singularly biological organ to contain the complexity of a human person in their social environment. Strathern’s articulation of these knowledge conventions, when used to analyze the changing conceptualization of the brain in the neuroscience explosion, points to the “generative effects” (Franklin, Lury, and Stacey 2000, 9) of such a conceptualization.

Strathern points out that the repetition of ideas matters and that placing objects in different contexts change the nature of that object by changing the background against which it is figured (Franklin 2014; Strathern 1992). This model is a useful addition for social scientists seeking ways to understand neuroscience’s increasing interest in the social. We have shown that it is useful to consider the brain in neuroscience as an object of overlapping parts and to consider the domains that form the backdrop of such an object even if the boundaries between domains are artificial. Attending to the role of the merographic connection as a Western knowledge-form in the neuroscience enterprise’s conceptualization of brain as mind/brain illustrates that this conceptualization has opened up epistemic space for complex phenomena to be studied in brain terms. It also illustrates that while these domains may not refer to ontological realities, they are, have been, and continue to be the ways in which ideas are organized—notably, ideas that drive research projects. Strathern’s model draws attention to the existing confines of knowledge-making even as boundaries are challenged in interdisciplinary work. These epistemic shifts might signal the casting aside of distinctions between the domain of the biological and social, yet domaining continues to hold power. Strathern’s model of the merographic connection demonstrates the usefulness of attending to work that “old” categorizations do, which allows for the object to be versatile. We go on to consider the role of analogy within this merographic model and illustrate the usefulness of considering analogy even if mind and brain are articulated as one and the same.

Considering Analogy as an Apparatus in Neuroscience Work

In neuroscience parlance, processes of mind are seen to be “what brain does.” Mind and brain are considered to be commensurable through neuroscience research, with this commensuration limited only by technology and technique. Our participants talked about how far away they were from the ultimate goal of understanding the mind in terms of the brain: they were at the “tip of the iceberg” (Thomas, behavioral neuroscientist) in this quest. In this section, we use the example of memory to illustrate how even when mind and brain are seen to be one and the same, considering the role of analogy, and what is connected merographically, is analytically helpful.

The Memory Lab, where we conducted participant observation, was involved in the search for fear-learning neurons. John, the laboratory head, had started out with the broader vision of studying personality in terms of the brain. Understanding personality as a combination of genes and environment, he had settled on memory as a useful starting point to achieve this larger goal. The Memory Lab had started off training mice in a behavioral maze with the aim of studying changes in the brain that resulted from such learning. The laboratory found that learning a maze involved multifaceted memories that could include visual, audio, olfactory, and tactile information. When they looked at rodents’ brains after the learning had occurred, they found, John said, that it was “too complicated in terms of what was happening in the brains of these animals” and that they “just couldn’t get anywhere with it.”

The laboratory eventually settled on the fear learning model that had been used successfully in previous learning and memory research, where an audio tone is paired with an electric shock to the mouse’s foot (LeDoux 1993). This allowed them to create a “very, very simple” memory that they could then correlate with observable changes in a mouse’s brain. Yet even the isolation of this simple fear learning event that would lead to a clear, distinguishable mark on the brain was not an easy feat: the team had to get the mice to “do exactly what [they] wanted it to do,” namely, to learn when they were supposed to learn and not learn when they were not.

John was doing work he hoped would become the building blocks of his larger vision of understanding personality in terms of the brain, tackling the questions he was investigating “because [he] can” while maintaining the hope that eventually, a “clear” picture would emerge. John saw that the neural underpinnings of personality were “sort of probably beyond [his] reach,” but it was this aim that kept driving him, he said.

Mind was seen to be what brain did and there was an expectation that it would, in theory, be possible to line up mind with brain. Yet in the everyday work of the laboratory, this was by no means easy to arrive at experimentally. The laboratory had to manage the tension between what was hoped for, on the one hand, and what was possible with their materials, tools, and techniques, on the other. They still had to deal with distinct domains of biological processes in the neurons they were characterizing and the domain of psychological processes in the formation of memories. They must also, as Nelson (2013) points out, do the delicate work of building the “epistemic scaffold” of analogues of mouse behavior and human experience to make claims about the relevance of mouse research to human neuroscience.

Here, the methodological challenges are stark, despite the expansive vision of a brain that captures the human person in context. But the ways in which mind/brain is articulated are compelling. Thinking with Strathern points us to what is brought into relationship when people talk about mind and brain as one and the same. For example, Bryan, another behavioral neuroscientist who was based in a psychology department, said of the brain:

It’s the thing that holds the essence of you. If you think about memories, right, you are your memories. The memories [are] the story of what’s happened to this collection of cells, your toenails, to the tips of your hair. And the memory is the story of those things, and the memory is stored in patterns of synaptic strengthening or weakening, and they’re stored in circuits in your brain.

Bryan expressed frustration over his psychologist colleagues’ lack of appreciation for the relevance of understanding neural processes in psychological work. Bryan argued that in their psychotherapeutic work, his colleagues were “changing the physical structure of someone’s brain. That is exactly what they are doing.”

In Bryan’s description of the self as a “collection of cells,” a reductionist move par excellence, Bryan draws on analogy. He likens memory to a human being’s life narrative, and the breaking of habitual thought patterns and establishment of new ones to the breaking and making of synaptic connections. Bryan was not speaking metaphorically. Yet, while he speaks of mind and brain as one and the same and would not consider himself to be drawing an analogy between them, Strathern’s model of merographic connection prompts us to consider what is brought into association in his remarks. As Franklin (2013, 2014) notes, the merographic work that analogies do connects biological facts to social ones.

While John and Bryan are convinced of the equivalence of mind and brain even though these processes are yet to be scientifically lined up, other participants indicated that, as Strathern has argued, analogies have limits (Hirsch 2014). Even where it seemed mental processes had successfully been translated into neural ones, not all were convinced of the equivalences drawn. One participant, Ann, was a cellular neuroscientist who, at the time of our interview, had just started collaborating with behavioral neuroscientists in the area of learning and memory. Ann described herself as a “nuts-and-bolts” person who would “never be the one that makes the connection between the brain and the mind” because she would “be still measuring pieces of brain.” Ann was reluctant to make the leap to calling the processes she was working with “memory.” For Ann, the processes she studied were “very molecular and cellular.” She said, “Even now, everyone thinks that long-term potentiation is possibly a synaptic event that might underlie aspects of memory, but you can’t even make that one statement clear, that memory is long-term potentiation.”

For Ann, these attempts to translate mind into brain through a meeting of psychology and neuroscience lacked the concreteness she required as a scientist. Even in examples where the work of commensurating mind and brain can be considered successful, the fact that people are working out of different disciplinary domains with their own sets of conventions, requirements, and logics is evident. People continue to work within the confines of what has come before, even while they seek to transcend them, including when reimagining the ontology of mind and brain. As our neuroscientist participants articulate, enact, and question the object of brain as mind/brain, we see how analogy, as Franklin (2014, 246) observed, is “a type of apparatus through which connections can be forged, resisted, or refigured.”

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that Strathern’s concept of the merographic connection is a useful framework for thinking about neuroscience knowledge-making. Drawing on empirical examples from our fieldwork, we have shown how the brain as figured in the neuroscience enterprise (mind/brain) brings multiple domains relating to the biological, psychological, and social into relationship. Through our analysis of the field’s objects of overlap, such as the neuronal self, we have illustrated that considering what is brought together through analogy is a useful strategy even when the things brought together (e.g., neural processes and memory) are understood to be indistinct.

Despite the breakdown in boundaries following transformations in the neurosciences, and current social science efforts to avoid domaining through innovative concepts and methodologies, it remains crucially important to keep in view the traditional domains and disciplinary inheritances of the things brought into association. Social scientists analyzing neuroscience might ask what is brought into relationship in the field’s new concepts, objects, and methods. What merographic work do these categories and domains continue to do even as they are seen to have been superseded?

Those seeking to work with neuroscientists might ask what they themselves are bringing into relation through their investigation of shared objects. Furthermore, they could consider what kinds of objects they could intentionally co-construct that would be conceptually and methodologically generative. These might be unique concepts, like the neuropolis (Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016a), or physically constructed things that provide opportunities for connection. For Kelly (2011, 72), Strathern’s use of analogy as an apparatus suggests that things might be brought into alignment in a way that facilitates connection “between different empirical accounts of the world while preserving their distinct epistemic integrities.” Kelly gives the example of the artificial entomological hut in Tanzania, a constructed object that provides a physical environment in which the relations between parasite, vector, human, infrastructure, and environment can be observed.

Given the generative potential of Strathern’s notion of the merographic connection, researchers might ask what conceptual opportunities exist beyond the obvious and commonsensical. While Strathern presented the merographic connection as a form to which all knowledge must conform to be recognized as new knowledge in Western contexts, she herself aims to use the same conceptual moves in ways that furnish better description (Street and Copeman 2014). What heuristic analogues like Euro-American and Melanesian knowledge production can social scientists employ as they seek meaningful connection with the neurosciences on topics of shared significance? For instance, what might the heuristic coupling of neuroscience and social science, or neuroscientist and social scientist prompt? Drawing inspiration from Strathern’s use of analogy as her mode of “agentic comparison” (Franklin 2014, 243), what opportunities might we find for cross-disciplinary or cross-cultural comparison on shared topics of interest, like mental well-being? Strathern has continually used her early ethnographic work in Melanesia to think through contemporary Western technological and societal developments analogically (Hirsch 2014). How might social scientists draw on ethnographic work in different cultural contexts to reimagine relations between brain, mind, environment, and the social?

Strathern (2011) was suspicious of hybrid totalities and neat, new epistemic wholes made up of parts whose different conceptual origins and nuances are easily overlooked. This too can serve as a source of inspiration for social scientists working with and alongside neuroscientists. As Tsing (2014, 264) notes, “[a]wkwardness is her tool for thinking,” and the things brought awkwardly into relation create opportunities for connection and helpfully reveal their limits and the patterns of thought that produce them. This has inspired cross-species work such as Anna Tsing’s use of tricholoma mushroom spores’ relations to each other and their environment to imagine humans’ modes of relating and acting in the world (Tsing 2014). Researchers might also pause when things seem too obviously comparable or commensurate to ask whether such comfortable comparisons make ignoring disjuncture all too easy (Strathern 2011). In the new objects that social scientists conceptualize as opportunities for collaborative work, Strathern’s model of merographic connections can serve as an inspiration to think beyond what is usually brought into association.

There are a number of limitations to the Strathernian approach presented here in the context of work at the intersections of neuroscience and social science. First, Strathern’s approach may be more useful in prompting theoretical over methodological innovation. Drawing on anthropology’s comparative method and seeking connection in unexpected places, Strathern’s work is focused foremost on the development of conceptual tools. Allowing for the preservation of epistemic integrities of the disciplines involved, Strathern’s work may have less to say about the practical task of working with neuroscientists and may be less useful in prompting the kind of methodological entanglement that Callard and Fitzgerald (2015) have called for.

Second, in prompting researchers to consider connections that are less obvious, and often jarring and awkward (Tsing 2014), Strathern’s approach has less to say specifically about the synergies between social and neurosciences. With no areas of knowledge off-limits (Edwards and Petrović-Šteger 2011), relations between things as disparate as tricholoma mushroom spores and human beings are open to comparison (Tsing 2014). Thus, a Strathernian approach would be a tool that all researchers working across a number of different fields could draw on and may not be specific to efforts to deepen social science engagement with the biosciences.

Nevertheless, we argue that Strathern’s work on Western knowledge conventions, her identification of the merographic connection as knowledge form, and the role of analogy within this framework are important conceptual tools to add to the social scientist’s tool kit. These concepts will be of use to social scientists seeking to more accurately describe epistemic transformations arising from the neurosciences’ increasing interest in sociality and to develop ways of making meaningful contributions at the intersection of neuroscience and social science. We see a Strathernian approach as complementary to current experiments in interdisciplinary work (e.g., Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh 2016a, 2016b; Roberts and Sanz 2018) that take the indivisibility of phenomena as a starting point (Barad 2007). Furthermore, social scientists’ engagement with the neurosciences may itself be fertile ground for experiments in Strathernian social theory. The explosion of the neurosciences occurred after the publication of After Nature in 1992, at the start of the Decade of the Brain. As Rose (2013b) notes, twenty-first-century genomics and neuroscience involve a new thought style that introduces a temporal dimension to the biological, opening up possibilities for understanding how biology interacts with its milieu. Here too are opportunities for using Strathern to develop social theory in response to the biological sciences to further refine our understanding of knowledge-making about the human. What shifts in the domaining of knowledge has the neuroscience explosion entailed, and how might social theorists drawing on Strathern consider changes in the way that nature and culture are made analogous?

Strathern’s focus on where ideas come from encourages attunement to the consequences of connection, encouraging intentional knowledge-making as social scientists work with neuroscientists on topics of shared significance. Strathern offers ideas for how social scientists might capitalize on the strengths of their own methods and intellectual traditions, even as they seek opportunities to create better conceptual tools through engagement with the neurosciences. Her approach draws attention to the artifices of knowledge-making that can be used in better ways and to the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary work. Strathernian insights offer opportunities where the complexity of human life might be studied, as it relates to the brain, while drawing on the strengths of all the disciplines relevant to these questions.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-sth-10.1177_01622439241248923 - Beyond Neural Connections: Using Strathern to Explore Knowledge-making at the Intersections of the Social and Neurosciences

Supplemental Material, sj-docx-1-sth-10.1177_01622439241248923 for Beyond Neural Connections: Using Strathern to Explore Knowledge-making at the Intersections of the Social and Neurosciences by Samantha Croy and Marilys Guillemin in Science, Technology, & Human Values

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the neuroscientists who generously took time to tell us about their research, especially the laboratories that allowed us to observe their work and who patiently explained their projects to us. We would also like to thank Timothy Marjoribanks, Rosemary Robins, Jenny Lewis, Alison Young, Michael Arnold, Richard Chenhall, Cordelia Fine, and Michael Salzberg who all provided helpful guidance along the way, especially James Bradley. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Australian Government (Australian Postgraduate Award).

ORCID iD

Samantha Croy

Note

Author Biographies

Samantha Croy is a Social Researcher with a background in the anthropology and sociology of health, medicine, and science. Her PhD research, completed at the University of Melbourne, was an ethnographic study of neuroscience looking at its investigation of increasingly broad, complex human phenomena.

Marilys Guillemin is an Health Sociologist and Professor in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She has conducted research and published widely in sociology of health, illness and technology, innovative research methodologies, research practice, narrative ethics, and ethical practice in research and in healthcare.

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