The XIV National Conference on Biological Anthropology was held on October 8-12, 2019 in the city of San Salvador de Jujuy (Argentina). In this event, Dr. Jimena Barbeito Andrés (Assistant Researcher of ENyS) coordinated the symposium Biological anthropology and neuroscience: contributions and cross-cutting debates. “The proposal was to give a space to reflect on the possible relationships between neuroscience and anthropology. I think it is a discussion that we have to give in contexts such as this due to the presence that neuroscience is having both in the scholarly field and the society in general. The object of study of anthropology for a long time has been and continues to be the object of study of neuroscience: the brain, its evolution, its development, behavior. Then necessarily theoretical and methodological categories overlap between these fields,” said Dr. Barbeito Andrés.
Dr. Paula González (Independent Researcher and Vice-Director of ENyS) participated in the symposium with her paper Contributions of biological anthropology to neurosciences, in which she outlined the approaches of anthropology, which is of interest to neuroscience, and presented her Current lines of work in the field of population neuroscience. On the other hand, Dr. Barbeito Andrés presented the talk Development, neurosciences and biological anthropology, whose main objective was to highlight the contributions and limitations of biological anthropology in the study of the ontogenic development of the nervous system. In addition, Dr. María Paula Tujague (Institute of Subtropical Biology, Misiones National University) who discussed the contribution of primatology in cognition studies, and Mr. Guido Rocatti (School of Natural Sciences and Museum, La Plata National University) talked about about the morphological evolution of the brain in primates that are phylogenetically related to humans. The closing of the activity was in charge of Dr. Mariana Smulski (CEMIC, CONICET and University of Buenos Aires) who reflected on her fieldwork as an anthropologist in neuroscientific contexts and proposed interaction strategies between anthropology and neuroscience in terms of production of knowledge, scientific languages and professional identities.
For more information about the event, visit: https://jnabjujuy2019.wixsite.com/jnab.
