Cultural Analysis of the Brain : Michael Andersen, A Question of Location – Lifewith Fatigue after Stroke. Det Humanistiske Fakultet, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2014.187 pp. Diss.

The brain has received little attention in ethnology. Yet it is the brain that in many ways both shapes our actual lives, and today, through neuroscience, shapes the way we look at ourselves. Knowledge produced by neuroscientists is to a large extent shaping our understanding of the Self. In simple terms we could say that we have gone from seeing the man with a Soul to seeing the man with a Brain. This is knowledge in constant transformation, which should be of ethnological interest as regards how knowledge is produced and reproduced in people’s everyday lives. It can be neuroscientists’ work in the laboratory or living with, for example, Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that results from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the midbrain. But the reverse perspective is also of interest for the cultural analysis of the brain. Even if the brain is absent in our everyday lives and we don’t need to think on or with the brain, it is part of our bodies’ being-in-the-world. This becomes clear when a person gets a brain disease and the symptoms become something that defines the features of our being. From this perspective the brain becomes a thing that an individual starts relating to, but also something that the individual no longer can control. For a person with Parkinson’s disease the brain is the uncontrollable factor that rapidly changes the perception of the everyday life of eating, walking and dressing oneself. The experiences of the brain, the everyday with an illness and the neuroscientific knowledge will together create and affect what we can call beingin-the-world. Ethnology should be more progressive when it comes to research questions that relate to these field because it is rapidly changing