As a traveler, Elizabeth Bishop valued direct experience and the particularity of other cultures, key elements of anthropology. During her residence in Brazil, she drew on anthropological works of Richard Burton, Gilberto Freyre, Charles Wagley and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Introducing her translation of Minha Vida de Menina, she cited Burton’s Brazilian travels. She thought Freyre “really gives one some idea what it’s like” to live in Brazil, but, like him, ventured into controversy about race and class in several works, notably “Manuelzinho.” Wagley’s Amazon Town was a direct source of her poem “The Riverman,” articulating her regard for the intuitive power of dreams and dreamlike experience in folk arts and in poems. In works such as “Questions of Travel” and “Crusoe in England,” Bishop reveals her affinity with the skepticism of Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Both articulate doubts about modernity and our mastery of knowledge.

Neuroanthropology is an interdisciplinary approach to studying human variation that integrates brain and cognitive sciences with anthropology and uses theoretically and biologically informed ethnography to examine specific problems at the intersection of brain and culture. This chapter shows how, for instance, the theoretical construct, habitus, can be integrated with accounts of human development and brain enculturation to better understand the internalization of social structures, including how socialization produces both diversity as well as shared outcomes. We also show how ideas from computational neuroscience, such as work on prediction errors and the free energy principle, can augment the understanding of cultural consensus and consonance, or how culture is at once shared and individual. The overarching goal of neuroanthropology is to bolster biocultural exploration of individual enculturation and ground social theory in a more accurate account of individual neurobiology in order to encourage a broader, multidisciplinary study of human cultural variation.