ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS最新文献

Thilmany, Drew Nathan. “Experiencing Harpa: Revelatory Architecture and the Spatial Encounter.” Anthropology of Consciousness, vol. 34, no. 2, 2023, pp. 330–60, https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12207.

The last name of the interlocutor Jakob Strømann-Andersen was misspelled as Strohman-Andersen.

We apologize for this error.

Within recent years, an increasing number of people and researchers in the Global North have become interested in psychedelic substances and their therapeutic application. While much of the current media attention and research effort mainly concentrate on the therapeutic potential and actions of the individual's acute psychedelic experience, this article explores the user-perceived, therapeutic dynamics of psychedelics in a more long-term perspective by charting the lived experiences and practices of ‘integration’ among psychedelic users in Denmark. Based on ethnographic fieldwork from November 2020 to June 2021, I offer a dual typology of self-related integration as narrative and experiential-somatic. Combining the two, I argue that psychedelic integration in contemporary Denmark can be viewed as a processual self-transformation of the users' experiential orientation where understandings and/or modes of being from the acute psychedelic experience are woven into, prolonged, and/or embodied in their everyday existence.

A recent Letter to the Editor in Anthropology of Consciousness, by Sosteric, Ratkovic, and Sosteric, is positioned as a critique of my article “Imaginal Research for Unlearning Mastery: Divination With Tarot as a Decolonizing Methodology.” The letter posits that the esoteric tarot is a repository of colonial ideological propaganda, and because of that, it cannot and should not be used as a tool for decolonial practices. However, the letter is misleading in its implications that what I have proposed in my article cannot be a methodology for decolonizing mental models, and includes statements about my position which are incorrect. This response clarifies and expands on ideas from my article—both about the tarot and also about the carceral mental models my article attempts to address—in part by highlighting the modern/colonial underpinnings of Sosteric et al.'s critique.

“A Brief Hystery of the Phantasm.” Anthropology of Consciousness, 2023, 34 (1), 181–228.

In paragraph 8 of the “The Return of the Mythological Phantasm” section, the text “Deleuze's phantasm becomes the ‘transcendental ideal of phantasy’³¹ (1987, 155) juxtaposed to his earlier Nietzschean-Bataillian notion of phantasm as immanence and deeply subversive, base materialism” was incorrect. This should read: “Deleuze's phantasm becomes the ‘transcendental ideal of phantasy’³¹ (1987, 155) juxtaposed to his earlier Nietzschean-Bataillian notion of phantasm as immanence and deeply subversive difference in itself”.

In the “References” section, the text “Tracz, R. Brian. ‘Imagination and the Distinction between Image and Intuition in Kant.’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6 (38): 1087-1120.” was incorrect. This should read: “Tracz, R. Brian. 2020. ‘Imagination and the Distinction between Image and Intuition in Kant.’ Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6 (38): 1087-1120.”

In the “References” section, the text “Hollan, Douglas W. and C. Jason Throop. The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books.” was incorrect. This should read: “Hollan, Douglas W. and C. Jason Throop. 2011. The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books.”

In the “References” section, the text “Baudelaire, Charles. ‘Every Man His Chimæra.’ In Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith and translated by F.P. Sturm, 113–114. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm#Page_113.” was incorrect. This should read: “Baudelaire, Charles. 2014. ‘Every Man His Chimæra.’ In Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, edited by Thomas Robert Smith and translated by F.P. Sturm, 113–114. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 2, 2022. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47032/47032-h/47032-h.htm#Page_113.”

We apologize for these errors.

The theme of this paper is that people in Northeast Brazil refuse to let a good person who helped them during his (or her) lifetime die. They do this through several of the religious traditions practiced in the region. Beings, human and other, now in another plane of reality established in modern thinking, cross the conceptual divide and return through mediums or other intermediaries to heal the living. We examine two religious traditions, “folk” or “popular” Catholicism and Kardecist-Spiritism, focusing on the spirit of Argeu Hebster, a medical doctor who lived in the municipality of Marangaupe in the state of Ceará until his death in 1977. The return of the doctor is told in stories told to the authors while doing ethnography that provide the data used in analyzing the enchanted worlds of the two religions.

Here, we describe how Casas Grandes Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) shamanic practices of the North American Southwest used tobacco shamanism, a ritual stance called the Tennessee Diviner (TD) posture, and cultural expectations to generate trance experiences of soul flight and divination. We introduce a conceptual model that holds that specific trance experiences are the emergent result of human minds interacting with additional factors including entheogens, cultural expectations, physiological states, postures/movement, and sound/stimulation. Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates initiating trance with either tobacco intoxication or the TD posture accompanied with a rapidly beating drum or rattle corresponds with perceptions of soul flight, transformation, and divination/information acquisition. Both have similar results but pairing them together as they were during the Medio period likely helped ensure the culturally desired trance experiences. This practice of mutually reinforcing factors was likely part of tobacco-based shamanism found in other New World cultures as well. We suggest our general model can be applied to other contexts to examine how various aspects of trance induction interact to produce the cultural patterns (and resulting cosmological and spiritual frameworks) anthropologists have documented in other cultures.

A recent article in Anthropology of Consciousness entitled ‘Imaginal research for unlearning mastery: Divination with Tarot as a decolonizing methodology’ argues that the Western Tarot may be a useful tool to facilitate decolonization despite (or perhaps in spite) of the colonial and imperial imprints of the accumulating class. This response points out the Tarot is in fact a tool developed by the accumulating class, designed specifically to facilitate the imposition of elite master narratives. This letter calls into question the appropriateness and effectiveness of using the Tarot as a tool for decolonization.

The point of departure of this paper is Penrose's definition of conscious action as that in which stimulus and response are linked by a non-algorithmic relationship, which Penrose defines as ‘understanding’. My purpose is to explore the nature of this understanding by means of a two-step process. The first step is provided by Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. This theory provides us with a quantitative measure of conscious states that we need to transform into qualitative meaning. In the second step, we obtain this qualitative meaning with the help of the structuralist theory of mind. From this perspective, meaning originates in the set of qualitative contrasts that define the alternative courses of action that might have been implemented. Work on the analogy between quantitative bits and qualitative binary oppositions does not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but it might help to reformulate it in a new, productive way.