Academic Cross-Training
My Academic Cross-Training project is guided by the premise that each culture develops in the context of a unique physical and social ecology, which leave marks on its patterns of thought, philosophy, emotion and behavior. I started the interdisciplinary study of factors that have made China Chinese by interpreting features of Chinese philosophy in light of psychological norms that render people in China the same as, and also different from, others. For examples, I tried to understand the unique Confucian norms wrapped tightly around the parent-child relationship, and how the special role of shame influences culturally-embedded social emotion and cognition in Confucian Heritage Cultures. In doing this research, I supplemented ‘close reading’ method familiar from history of philosophy. In the interest of finding new methods of inquiry, my collaborators Ted Slingerland and Kristoffer Nielbo and I began to explore historical Chinese corpora for patterns and to test interpretive hypotheses about the Confucian canon through corpus-based machine-learning. This set my ideas about early Chinese thought on firmer foundations, raised my confidence that formal methods like these had much to teach me, and pulled me in many different directions. To move beyond the texts I needed further help.
When I was told about the John Templeton Foundation’s call for applications for an “Academic Cross-Training” grant, I knew this would be the best (if not also the only plausible) way to reach my research goals. Once Justin Barrett, a research psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary, agreed to serve as the faculty mentor on my project, I decided to apply. I expected to fail. Failure had already become familiar. The cross-training grant offered funding for three years. With a budget that included generous in-kind contributions by Cal State Fullerton and the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, I earmarked money for tuition for courses with best-of-breed researchers at universities here in Los Angeles and Orange counties from whom I could learn about varied influences on Chinese culture. To my surprise I was awarded the grant.
I’ve been an active member of a cross-training gym for years. Double-unders, wall balls, box jumps, chest-to-bar pull-ups, power snatches, handstand pushups, one after another, until you are a pool of sweat. (Failure became familiar here.) But mustering the discipline to return to the gym day in, day out, and feeling the need to push myself, and the knowledge that I could often do what I earlier thought I couldn’t, has prepared me for my work on the Academic Cross-Training grant. I’ve now re-trained in several areas with sequence in statistics and methods courses in psychology, and done courses in evolutionary anthropology, behavioral endocrinology, experimental economics, contemporary Chinese anthropology, cross-cultural genetics, bronze age archaeology of China, and more.
I am working so that discoveries and insights from this coursework are reflected in my ongoing attempt to understand the factors that made China Chinese. The grant is now complete as of July 2020. since you may have arrived here to seek information about what such a grant is for, let me offer you a few teasers about what I have been learning:
In a pair of graduate-level anthropology courses, I studied footbinding from fields including economics, game theory, evolutionary psychology and literature, Chinese history and women’s studies. The reigning theory, a labor market theory, says parents were motivated by financial profit to bind feet of daughters because that was the best way parents found to keep their girls inside making yard and cloth. This theory is based upon cultural anthropological observation and survey data. If correct, this broadly Marxist interpretation eschews an explanation from behavioral ecologists that footbinding served parents’ interests in hypergamously marrying their daughters. Advocates of the labor market theory refuse to release the dataset for supplemental testing. Instead I authored a methodological review paper about the labor market theory , and am working with Laura Smith Chowdhury and Yile Zhang on the development of an agent-based model of footbinding.
In a course on bronze age China I studied the initial social, physical and genetic conditions of early China. In this connection, the mtDNA of the Dawenkou Culture from Neolithic Shandong was fascinating for its lack of diversity relative to other early Neolithic cultures in Continental East Asia. Further, the frequency and severity of bone diseases in men and in women over Neolithic time from Erlitou to the Zhou Dynasty was revealing for what it tells about social stratification. Social status as measured with grave goods, like number or quality of vessels, and social status as measured by laboratory archaeologists in terms of isotopes of nitrogen and carbon in extant bone, which indicate rates of meat-eating, I discovered, were mutually supporting.
In a course in behavioral endocrinology, I was surprised to learn that people descended from members of East Asian haplogroups tend to have a distinctively patterned set of receptors for oxytocin, a neurohormone associated with social bonding. These patterns are now identified with a small set of alleles, for example, on rs53576. This gene has been associated with children’s social and emotional growth through the lifespan. Individuals have three pairs of alleles associated with rs53576, but these pairs are distributed in very different rates across people group. Though I studied the dispersal of these rates by group, I have not yet learned how specific alleles influence social bonding. I have more work to do.
John Templeton Foundation, you have my sincerest thanks.