ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS最新文献

The use of perfumes, incense, colognes, and plant and flower essences in Amazonian healing practices is a hallmark feature of vegetalismo, a form of healing in Peru’s Amazonian regions. Sprayed, smoked, rubbed on bodies, and poured in medicinal baths, these odorous tools are vital allies to the curandero for cleansing bodies and spaces, for protection, or to add potency to medicinal plants. Certain perfumes are more common than others, particularly the citrusy Agua de Florida, an 18^th Century eau de cologne from the United States. Focusing in on the history of Agua de Florida and its ubiquity in Western Amazonia, I suggest the necessity of a sensory anthropology for exploring the vast healing potential of vegetalismo. Going beyond the visual to consider other sensory experiences lends insight into the various healing mechanisms in Amazonian shamanism that are often overlooked by western epistemologies of health and healing.

In lowland South America, sacred food plants have taken an ethnographic back seat to psychotropic plants. Yet, such foods are often central to local understandings of mythology, healing, ceremony, and spiritual well-being. In this article, I elucidate the sacred nature of two kinds of food plants that occupy special sociocultural spaces among the A’uwẽ (Xavante) in Central Brazil: cultivated maize and collected root vegetables. Although these are not the only sacred food plants in A’uwẽ society, they are iconic because they are considered uniquely appropriate gifts during certain ceremonial and ritual events. I also explore how I conducted research about ceremonial ethnobotanical topics in a society that considers most sacred and spiritual knowledge privileged. Both sacred plant foods highlighted here continue to be commonly given as presents expressing gratitude to others during popular ceremonial occasions, thereby maintaining them in the collective consciousness as integral components of contemporary social life.

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche’s critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual’s growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, who represent the last nail in the imagination’s coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche’s wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze’s early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille’s emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno’s art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos.

This article proposes an exposition and analysis of perceptions intrinsic to rituals carried out with the use of the jurema plant, especially when mixed with Syrian rue (juremahuasca) in contexts of contemporary esoteric re-actualizations in Brazil. These rituals are conducted by people who look at jurema as a spiritual path, once acquainted with its psychedelic properties. We highlight the mystical attributes and the cultural bricolage elaborated by these individuals, who conduct ceremonies in ritual spaces in which participants experience altered states of perception and consciousness. Considered as an entheogen, jurema leads to states of mystical transformation in people. Such personal changes are often considered by users as the rhetoric of healing. Life stories and ethnographic contexts form the background of the article, which seeks to advance understandings about jurema based on speculations around the intertwining of the themes of consciousness, mysticism, and healing.

The “plant turn” in anthropology, while controversial, has led to a renewed focus on how humans relate to different species of plants. In this article, I aim to contribute to our knowledge of human-plant relationships by analyzing how historical actors used sacred plants in past ritual settings. I study criminal and civil cases involving shamans in late colonial Ecuador, with a focus on plant use. Legal records from 1782, 1793, 1800, and 1802 reveal information about the use of fragrant plants believed to have transformative properties, the use of entheogens for non-visionary purposes, and even the incorporation of the sacred wanduc (Brugmansia sp) into the punishment of one shaman. This plant-focused approach to the reading of ethnohistorical documents provides a history of particular plants as they were used by individual actors in specific geographic and historical contexts, and sheds light on people’s understanding of human-plant-spirit relationships.

This editorial discusses the function of COVID as what the Indigenous scholar and psychologist, Eduardo Duran, describes as a “great teacher.” The author engages with the opportunities of learning that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided, especially in the realm of anthropological studies of consciousness. The author encourages both scholars and practitioners to use the current pandemic as an opportunity to practice what Andy Fisher identifies as a “decolonial praxis,” as a tool for liberation and healing.

It has long been argued that one of the main appeals of contemporary Euro-American shamanism lies in its ability to reenchant the world in the disenchanted present. As observed during field research among shamans in the Czech Republic and based on an analysis of their techniques and discourse, the source of this reenchantment lies in journeys to non-ordinary reality, internally experienced by participants during drumming. The reason those journeys are experienced as real is found in the autonomy of imagination, in images that come to mind spontaneously without participants' deliberate construction. The faculty of imagination provides a mechanism for the experience of a reenchanted world, whereas shamanic techniques and lectures on the nature of the world provide its emotional and cognitive contours. In ceremonial space, shamanic praxis then tunes a certain mode of being with its intertwined moments of corresponding understanding, attunement, and speech, such as those analyzed by Heidegger in Being and Time.

The narrative template is the form into which consciousness populates its memories and assembles a coherent self. A specific brain circuit exists to create and comprehend story. This circuit generates simulations or small stories, mostly about the important people in our lives and about ourselves. A salience network helps us switch between story brain and central-executive function or task mode, in which we get things done. Memory is not stored accurately but more as a skeletal framework with gaps to which we add generic detail upon recall. At each recall, the memory changes in accordance with the demands of the situation in which we find ourselves and is re-stored in that modification. A simple narrative structure characterizes the activity of the default mode in which characters interact sequentially with beliefs and intents (theory of mind) to produce outcomes that are more or less desirable to us. People are fundamentally narrative, whether or not they are conscious of the stories they generate. Memory is fundamentally flawed with gaps that are filled at recall to fit the needs of the situation for which our story is being told. Life may be more fiction than we have previously realized. Our goal is a conceptual review of narrative concepts in relation to neuroscience and neuroscience in relation to narrative concepts.