In celebration of Social Sciences Week 2022, we hear from interim Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Professor Greg Downey, on activities for the week ahead, his past research in a Brazilian martial art and recent John Templeton Foundation grant.
1. What is your background and what brought you to Macquarie?
I was originally born in Chicago and went back there to do my doctorate at the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. During that time, I spent a couple of years living in Brazil, but eventually wound up teaching at the University of Notre Dame. I met an Australian woman at a conference and – as someone once said to me – “followed her home.” I managed to get the job at Macquarie University in 2005, arriving in 2006. When I first interviewed, I didn’t even know how to pronounce “Macquarie,” but the move to this country and to join the Macquarie University community has been one of the best things I’ve ever done.
2. How did you originally become interested in your area of research, and what keeps you interested in it?
When I was getting ready to go to graduate school, I thought I would study vodun, the Afro-Haitian religion, but a visit to a university library in the US made me realise that there was about a three-meter shelf of previous research I’d have to wrap my head around. I was too intimidated. So, I was looking for a thesis topic and remembered conversation I had when I was doing karate and other martial arts about a Brazilian martial art – capoeira. This was the late 1980s and early 1990s, so capoeira was not big outside of Brazil; now, it’s a global martial art.
I decided to do my doctoral research on capoeira, and spent about two years in Brazil, training with some of the traditionalist masters of the art, including some legendary capoeira mestres, the real “old guard.” They kept telling me that doing capoeira changed them: their senses, body composition, their psyches, attitudes, and relationships. I kept taking notes on it, but when I got back to the US and started writing, I eventually started exploring how physical practice might have psychological, physiological, and neurological consequences.
I went on to advocate for neuroanthropology, an integration of brain science research with deep investigations into cultural differences: not just university students in a couple of countries, but people who develop really unusual skills. The people with unusual skills might better show how the human nervous system could be shaped by learning and culture. I’ve gone on to do work with cage fighters, free divers, tango dancers, and vision impaired people who learn to use sonar to get around.
3. Tell us a bit about your current research and what makes it so important?
In my new project, which just received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, I’ve partnered with a biological anthropologist from Princeton University, Prof. Agustín Fuentes, to explore the evolutionary implications of the kind of research I’ve been doing for 20 years. In evolutionary theory, there’s a tendency to treat culture as information inside people’s heads or as a separate channel from biology for passing on traits from one generation to the next, but the kind of research I do suggests that culture – specifically, concepts – get under the skin and affect us biologically and neurologically. If so, then the ability to form concepts is not a superficial addition to human beings, but a capacity to shape ourselves, even down to our skeletons, senses, and non-conscious nervous responses.
4. Is there something you would like staff to know about?
We are looking forward to Social Sciences Week in my school, with a real variety of great activities, some for students, some for staff, and some for the public. We have a special focus on food this year, with a public talk about obesity policy and a panel discussion about food and poverty, but there’s also a lot of practical and career-building activities.
5. What is something you have recently accomplished?
I recently got married! After more than two years of separation due to border closures, my partner was able to come to Australia, and we got married. She loves Australia too, so I am busy juggling married life, editing a journal, temporarily being Dean, and getting a new research project off the ground.
6. What do you need to do your best work?
Writing group! One of our PhD students in anthropology started a writing group, and we’ve expanded it to try to offer it to everyone in social sciences, students and staff alike. We just jump on Zoom in the morning together, talk briefly, and then write together. It’s magic for productivity! Having writing group means that staff don’t just talk about policy changes or teaching and administration. We share the sometimes solitary work of writing. While it’s easy to cancel a writing session for something “more important” when I’m by myself, it’s much harder when other people are expecting me. It’s made me so much happier and more productive to build writing time into my schedule regularly – even if it’s only a short time.
7. What is the most impressive/useful/advanced piece of equipment you use in your work?
The most exciting thing I think we’re doing is using low budget technology, including Go Pros and even phone cameras, to try to improve observational research in the field. One of the doctoral candidates in cognitive science, Sara Kim Hjortborg, a student of Emeritus Prof. John Sutton, did some observational session of Muay Thai sparring using multiple recordings. The result was pretty fascinating: a kind of intensified observation of “life in the wild” – in this case, in the middle of the ring – that we are calling “microethnography.” What I find so exciting is that we are using off-the-shelf technologies, sometimes mobile phones, to get better data than we would normally be able to get in anthropological fieldwork.
8. What do people always ask you when they find out what you do for a living?
If I’m lucky, they ask me where I dig. If I’m not lucky, they ask me if I study ants.
9. What would people be surprised to know about you or your work?
Very little. I’m probably guilty of over-sharing, and a lot of my personal interests wind up in my research.