ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS最新文献

The medicinal plant diet is a healing process used in traditional Amazonian medicine (TAM), and it is poorly described within the scientific literature. This work analyzes the experience of seven participants in this therapy performed at the Takiwasi Center in Peru. Semistructured interviews were performed before and after treatment, documenting participants’ motivation, psychological experience, and perceived personal changes (physically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually), as well as the role played by each medicinal plant. All the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Reasons to participate in the plant diet included self-discovery, personal development, interest in plant medicine, and professional realization. The experience was perceived as intense and allowed participants to experience self-acceptance, self-discovery, mental balance, rest, cleansing, and connection with nature. Three months after the experience, participants felt physical changes (n = 6), psychological changes (n = 7), social changes (n = 5), and spiritual changes (n = 5).

Anthropological theories about the techniques broadly labeled magic and related practices as sorcery, witchcraft, divination, and ritual curing are in need of reformulation. Theoretical considerations of these phenomena within anthropology have neglected to consider the basic assumptions of magical belief, instead departing from Western cultural assumptions that beliefs about magic are empirically untenable and that there can be no such cause-and-effect relations as they imply. An impetus to the reformulation of theories of magic comes from experimental parapsychology where laboratory research has produced empirical support for some of the phenomena claimed by magical traditions. Parapsychologists interpret their findings as evidence for extrasensory perception, or clairvoyance and telepathy, and for foreknowledge or precognition, as well as evidence for the ability of human consciousness to effect physical systems. They postulate a force called psi responsible for such phenomena, and reports from anthropologists suggest that some aspects of magical practice involve psi. Consequently, anthropologists should examine more systematically the idea that magic has a psi-related aspect—that some magical practices facilitate or produce empirically verifiable effects outside of the currently understood cause-and-effect processes of nature. This article reviews the findings of laboratory studies of parapsychology and their correspondences with principles of magical practices and beliefs reported by anthropologists. Magical theories, principles and practices share certain of the conditions found through parapsychological research to be conducive to psi manifestations: altered states of consciousness, visualization, positive expectation, and belief. This suggest that the indigenous rationale for magical practices are related to psi rather than delusional thought processes.

The founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) can only be understood within the cultural context of its heritage. This paper is an historical narrative tracing the intellectual lineage of the SAC. The immediate causes were a series of symposia in 1974, including several on the challenge to anthropology represented by Carlos Castaneda, who attacked the way a critical part of anthropology was conducted. The argument in his own narrative was that one could not understand the shamanic world view without becoming a shaman. No informant could ever convey this, because so much of it was experiential. It could not be properly known unless one entered with sincerity into the experience, as a participant not just an observer. Two insights central to this thesis are particularly relevant to SAC: an aspect of human consciousness exists independent of time and space susceptible to volitional control; and, there is an interconnection between all life forms, which must be understood if the universal impulse humans feel toward the spiritual component of their lives is to properly mature. The SAC can be seen in pure Kuhnian terms as one response to the reassessment that Castaneda forced on anthropology.

What is new in the literature of the social sciences and humanities has been the proliferation of the word “network” to describe contemporary society. Society nowadays is being referred to as a network of relations. Although these descriptions, especially in anthropology, try to reconfigure the modernist distinction between subjects and objects, most of them share the postmodernist aversion to granting any grand narrative or ideal to the network society. The aim of this paper is to give an anthropological perspective on contemporary network theories and to add a new quality of verticality in the architecture of network societies. The paper argues that any worldview that tries to define the contours of society and individuals living in it must provide for a higher ideal or a grand narrative to enable its inhabitants their gradual evolution and progression. The sustainability of any ideology or worldview, this paper argues, comes from this fact of ensuring a continuous and gradual movement to higher dimensions of life.

Taijiquan is a Chinese martial art currently passed on in its various forms worldwide. The following text draws a map of bodies, places, and entities that compose the act of becoming a Taijiquan practitioner in the Czech Republic. The purpose of this study is to create a space for a discussion between the research of martial arts and the anthropology of consciousness by illustrating the transformations of consciousness that originate in years or decades of rigorous martial art practice. This focus contrasts traditional anthropology of consciousness subjects as there is no significant immediate shift of consciousness from “ordinary” to “extraordinary” states—a result of the different rhythm and tempo of practicing Taijiquan. The theoretical framework that allows this discussion is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's cosmology, which proves useful for understanding those longitudinal changes in consciousness. Their conceptions of the arborescent and rhizomatic provide a tool to illustrate consciousness as an ever-changing map, never stabilized in a normal conserved state as it outlines how the dissolution of borders of consciousness (deterritorialization) should always be observed complementarily with their tightening (reterritorialization).

In this paper, I develop the integrative concept of “shared experience of sense” as a heuristic model to design interventions in multicultural health encounters in the field of mental health promotion. For this purpose, I use extensive ethnographic material from the Mapuche’s territory in Chile, analyzing the interactions between an outpatient community mental health center and deinstitutionalized patients in their home settings. The patients and their families navigate the medical pluralism of their domestic settings and make varying use of each of the different therapeutic options that are available to them, offered by the outpatient community mental health center, Indigenous healers, and Pentecostalism.

The concept of “shared experience of sense” characterizes a specific form of meaning-making that may be beneficial to health in mental illness. This “positive” meaning making is made possible by a person's emotional and physical participation in the social events of therapeutic settings. In this regard, I highlight the bridges that the community mental health center builds to the everyday lives of patients and their families. Because of the support and access to resources provided by such therapeutic settings, persons are able to cope with their illness in everyday life, which can mean different things depending on the context. This is what I mean when I refer to “health promotion” in this article.

This paper explores Henri Bergson’s understanding of time in relation to the experience of the sensory deprivation tank. In this exploration, the tank is presented as a time machine: a machine that separates time from space and takes the floater into an experience of what Bergson describes as pure time. At the same time, the tank acts as a kind of phenomenological epoché that, through the disabling of the floater’s sensory-motor schema, literally suspends the human being outside of the world and forces them to reconsider their previous judgements and understandings of consciousness and time. The tank is tied in with contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses on consciousness, such as those of David Chalmers and what he has described as the hard problem of consciousness. As Chalmers discusses, the hard problem requires a radically new type of thinking beyond contemporary science and its inherent materialistic and mechanistic worldview. The tank is presented as a machine that could play a part in this radical rethinking of consciousness—a literal black box working through the black box problems of consciousness.

This article is based on a conversation between the president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and the editor-in-chief of its journal. The aim of this conversation is threefold: (1) to engage a broader audience within the field of the anthropology of consciousness, (2) to discuss the recent history of the organization and its current direction, and (3) to recognize why concrete efforts toward a practice of decolonization is essential to maintaining the relevance of an anthropology of consciousness.

An increasing number of people worldwide are living with chronic conditions that have an aspect of bodily fragility as part of the condition or as an effect of treatment. In this article, I explore the temporal experience of bodily fragility and the particularities of consciousness states among people with the chronic condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) in Denmark. My aim is threefold. First, my goal is to give an insight into life with OI, a rare and rarely studied condition. Second, I shed light on bodily fragility, a theme that lives in the shadows of other analytical foci in anthropology. Third, I will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the connection among body, physical environment, and consciousness. I argue that the lifeworlds of people with OI are haunted by mental and bodily memories and fearful future scenarios, which makes the past and the future collapse into the present.