2016/06/13 by Katja Guenther, Katja M. Guenther, Volker Hess · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Neurology and Historical Studies #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/mdh.2016.24
A soul catcher is a piece of incised bear femur decorated with animal heads. Used by the Tsimshian people of the Pacific Northwest, it is plugged with cedar bark on both ends in order to catch and contain that ephemeral thing that Western Europeans have called 'the soul' -a lost soul or an evil spirit. While the soul catcher might strike us today as the cultural artefact of an animistic religious system, or perhaps as a superstitious relic, it resembles in both its form and its function a number of objects central to the modern mind and brain sciences. Many of these technologies could also in their way be labelled 'soul catchers' because they attempt to capture, render visible for study, and manipulate what otherwise eludes our physical grasp. With what justification might one consider voodoo and shamanism the products of naivety or deception, but not the devices and instruments, practices and routines used in Western science, which equally try to catch 'souls': the unconscious, the mind of the child, or the activity of a brain in a scanner? This is not to downplay differences between these technologies of 'soul catching', which are indeed impossible to miss. Even a short glance reveals differences of scale, of cultural authority and plausibility, differences which reflect many of the oppositions that structure the modern world: science versus superstition, mainstream versus marginal, and the finer differentiations between psychoanalysis, psychology, neurology, brain science, and criminology, amongst others. Nevertheless, in this special issue, we use the anthropological comparison to the soul catcher in order to open up new perspectives on the history of the contemporary mind sciences and their material cultures. Casting the machines and apparatuses of the mind and 'neuro' sciences as soul catchers, we hope to draw attention to the way in which they use material means to examine what is often taken to be immaterial. What status do we attribute to the souls that they conjure up? How do they render those souls tangible, measurable, or treatable? Material Culture 'Matter matters.' John Law's observation concisely expresses the insight that has fuelled the interest in the 'material culture' of science. Since the mid 1980s, when Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer placed them at the centre of their investigations in Leviathan and the Air Pump, scholars have investigated the ways in which instruments and scientific practice have produced and shaped epistemic objects. 1 Drawing inspiration from the methodologies