Carlos Castanada

Las enseñanzas de Don Juan: arugatse / Geronimo De Francesco via Flickr

Carlos Castanada (1925-1998) was a Peruvian born anthropologist and author who immigrated to California hoping to attain an academic career.

For his master thesis, he published the book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968).

The book was promoted as an anthropological account of Castanada’s encounter with a wise, benevolent Yaqui sorcerer in Mexico. It sold very well and Castanada continued with a series of best-sellers, all making the same claim of authenticity.

Critics of Castanada’s work point out that he took no real field notes and is elusive about his past, suggesting that his books are cleverly crafted fiction.

Whether they be fictional, embellished facts, or factual, these widely acclaimed stories outline a belief in interactive fields of reality. In the broadest sense these fields could be differentiated as ordinary and non-ordinary worlds, or as Mircea Eliade put it, mundane and supramundane realities.

But Don Juan’s teachings involve more than a simple “this or that” cosmology. Schematically, his vision is not unlike the mathematical fractal. The sorcerer is said to control interactive fields of power. Accordingly, he or she may exert influence from one power region to another to bring about an ethically good outcome.

Yaqui indians (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An apparent physical illness, for instance, could be healed by inwardly perceiving spiritual disturbances or fields that are interacting with a patient’s bodily organs. Don Juan claimed that, by focusing awareness and exerting the will, the sorcerer can correct a seemingly isolated physical disturbance.

This is now called distance healing. And in Don Juan’s story, distance healing could be a single or complex, multi-layered event.

This approach might seem fanciful to some, but semiotics wedded to subatomic physics seems to point in a similar direction. Leading physicists and modern science writers say that matter and energy are two humanly constructed concepts. As such, the ideas of matter and energy apparently represent two forms of one underlying essence.

Interestingly, Castanada criticized the beatnik, drug guru Timothy Leary for suggesting that psychotropic drugs, alone, could cure. For Castanada, ingesting drugs was only an initial step in a complicated inner journey requiring a great deal of prolonged training and personal discipline.

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Emic-Etic debate

Aboriginal hollow log tombs. National Gallery, Canberra, Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The emic-etic  debate originates from the work of linguist Kenneth L. Pike. It’s sometimes called the insider-outsider problem. The emic-etic debate has far-reaching implications for the social sciences.

In anthropology, the emic model refers to an indigenous people’s understanding of their own cultural representations, whereas the etic model is an outsider’s perspective of those indigenous cultural representations.

These categories have been roundly critiqued. Emic models are often said to have been discovered by an outside researcher but current trends question the neutrality of external observers. So formalized statements made by external observers are seen as exogenous constructions, making any supposed emic theory about a people’s beliefs unavoidably etic.

The idea that theories developed within the humanities and social sciences are social constructions instead of uncovered, formerly hidden truths leads to the area of poststructuralism and postmodernism.

Aboriginal art on a man hole by Ole Reidar Johansen via Flickr

Other questions arise that are seldom addressed by social scientists. For instance, we cannot be certain that each member of an indigenous community believes in their group’s cultural representations, or if each member believes in the same way. Could some be pretending to believe for material security or social expedience?

And concerning religious officials, might some secretly doubt but feign certainty not just for the previous reasons but also, perhaps, for fear of being wrong and offending a deity?

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Sir James G. Frazer

J. M. W. Turner's painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sir James G. Frazer (1854-1941) was a Scottish anthropologist best known for his classic study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough.

His work had a tremendous effect on Joseph Campbell, among others. And many see him as one of the founders of modern anthropology.

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Folklore

Burning of Marzanna as a symbol of winter during the spring equinox is one of remains of pre-Christian beliefs in Polish culture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The term folklore was coined in 1846 by W. J. Thomas to replace the previous notion of popular antiquities. Difficult to define, folklore is now understood as the knowledge, customs, beliefs, rituals and orally transmitted information of a given culture.

According to professor T. Henighan,¹ the Freudian child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim makes a distinction between folklore and fairy tales. Fairy tales are a type of folk tale in which:

• The names of heroes and heroines are absent or ordinary
• Supernatural but not divine beings are mentioned
• Positive outcomes are the norm
• Childhood and adolescence figure prominently
• The actual content (i.e. Oedipal material) is obscured through elaborate symbolism

Some suggest that the definition of folklore must also include the academic study of folkloric data, because by studying folkloric content from of a different set of cultural assumptions (those held by an academic), the original content is necessarily interpreted and altered.

Folklore is often associated with the marginalised or popular dimension of a given culture, in contrast to the written stories of orthodox religious organizations. Some scholars limit folklore to so-called primitive cultures, while others extend the concept to apply to modern social formations—e.g. the destructive folkloric beliefs and practices of the Nazis (i.e. Aryans as the ‘master race’).

The line dividing primitive folklore and contemporary belief is blurred and cannot always be easily discerned. The psychologist C. G. Jung discusses this in connection with the Nazis and their disturbing beliefs and practices. For Jung, this exemplified an entire race engulfed by the destructive power of an archetype, in this case, the Wotan archetype.

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¹ The Meanings of Myth (earthpages.org)

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Geertz, Clifford James

Clifford Geertz 1926-2006 by xeeliz via Flickr

Clifford James Geertz (1926-2006) was an influential American anthropologist. He’s best known for his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), which outlines the importance of symbolic thought and communication in the generation and reproduction of cultures.

Geertz argues for a so-called ‘thick interpretation’ of symbols instead of a ‘thin’ one. By this he means that anthropologists should interpret symbolic meanings within the context of a given culture. So instead of postulating the idea of inherited universals, as Carl Jung did with his theory of archetypes, Geertz wants to see how language and symbolic thought reflect and inform everyday life.

While Geertz is to be applauded for his desire to understand people within the context of their cultures, just how this is done without subjective bias remains an important question for anthropologists.

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Internet Addiction

Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them via Wikipedia

Internet Addiction is a term created in response to a relatively new psychosocial phenomenon, that of compulsive internet use. It may involve pornography, hacking, harassment, stalking and other unsavory activities. It may also entail an excessive use of social media, chat forums and the abuse of educational sites.

According to contemporary pop psychologists, internet use becomes a compulsion when the user finds that their activity makes them more unhappy and unduly interferes with their jobs or family life.

Internet addiction can arise as a compulsive, non-therapeutic escape from dealing with real personal problems, loneliness being just one of them. However, the American Psychiatric Association has not formally included it as a disorder specific to itself:

In 2006, the American Medical Association declined to recommend to the American Psychiatric Association that they include IAD as a formal diagnosis in DSM-V,^[11] and recommended further study of “video game overuse.”^[12] Some members of the American Society of Addiction Medicine opposed identifying Internet overuse and video game overuse as disorders.^[13] Among the research identified as necessary is to find ways to define “overuse” and to differentiate an “Internet addiction” from obsession, self-medicating for depression or other disorders, and compulsion.¹

Moreover, it would be a fallacy to say that all regular and heavy internet users are escaping reality or avoiding unresolved problems. In fact, the whole question of the legitimacy of the internet as a kind of new community type is now being reexamined, especially with the success of YouTube and other social media.

In the past, excessive TV watching hit the news headlines. Now it’s the internet. No doubt the next revolutionary technology that captures the imagination of many and compels us to relate in new ways will be demonized by those who don’t understand the importance of change. But again, like anything, too much of a good thing can ruin it, just as the perversion of a good thing can turn it into a bad thing. So the term internet addiction is by no means spurious.

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss taken in 2005 by UNESCO/Michel Ravassard via Wikipedia

Claude Lévi-Strauss  (1908- ) was a Brussels-born French social anthropologist who was influenced by the pioneering sociologist, Emile Durkheim.

Levi-Strauss studied the kinship, ritual and myths of so-called primitive societies from the perspective of structuralism. He observed that the human mind uses language to classify cultural objects. And he believed that it does this in a series of binary classifications (e.g. black vs. white, hot vs. cold, raw vs. cooked, dead vs. alive).

All objects are understood in relation to other objects. For Lévi-Strauss this way of understanding outer reality mirrors fundamental structures within the the human mind.

Lévi-Strauss generalized a theory, one originally based on specific groups, to try to explain universal cultural patterns. This theory suggested that the so-called savage and civilized mind were essentially the same.

During his intellectual development he also asked whether the tendency to structure the environment came from inside (i.e. inherited brain structures) or outside (i.e. arbitrary social and cultural structures).

In contrast to John Locke’s tabula rasa, Lévi-Strauss came to see the external environment as an object classified according to innate mental structures. Lévi-Strauss believed that Freud’s theories contributed to a structuralist perspective because Freud tried to explain human history and psychology according to underlying laws.

In The Raw and the Cooked (1966) Lévi-Strauss suggests that music behaves like a mythology because both “appeal to mental structures that the different listeners have in common.”

His Mythologiques (1964-72) forwards the notion that a systematic order lies behind all forms of cultural expression. He has been critiqued for generalizing his own way of structuring data onto others. Also, contemporary psychiatry notes that individuals brains can differ significantly by the degree of differentiation for a given area or areas of the brain. Einstein, for instance, apparently had an unusually high degree of differentiation in the areas associated with abstract thinking.

So although Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist theories may be attractive to some who wish to simplify our complex world to simple binary oppositions, they’re really yesterday’s news, at best.

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Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien

Collective:Unconscious Theater at 145 Ludlow in 1997 by Justin Davila via Wikipedia

Lucien Lévi-Bruhl (1857-1939) was a pioneering French anthropologist. His studies of so-called primitive cultures had an impact on depth psychology, sociology and philosophy.

Lévi-Bruhl believed that so-called primitive cultures existed in a “pre-logical,” mystical state of mind characterized by non-contradiction and, more importantly, participation in a collective, totemic idea.

He contrasted the pre-logical to the apparently individualized, “rational” peoples possessing contemporary scientific cognition.

Thus Lévi-Bruhl made a fundamental distinction between ‘primitives’ (or ‘natives’) and Western ‘moderns’ or the ‘scientific’ man. He also believed that mankind naturally evolved from the primitive to the scientific and that this was an inevitable process.

In his work How Natives Think (1910), Lévy-Brühl speculated about what he posited as the two basic mindsets of mankind, “primitive” and “Western.” The primitive mind does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but rather uses “mystical participation” to manipulate the world. According to Lévy-Brühl, moreover, the primitive mind doesn’t address contradictions. The Western mind, by contrast, uses speculation and logic.¹

Late in his career Lévi-Bruhl conceded that modern people also experience mystical dimensions–but not as visibly as so-called primitives. C. G. Jung adopted Lévi-Bruhl’s term participation mystique to assert that the collective unconscious is a buried storehouse of psychological energy inherited from mankind’s ancestral past.

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¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_L%C3%A9vy-Bruhl

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Mana

Image via Wikipedia

Mana is a Melanesian term referring to a spiritual power that apparently pervades the universe but which is embodied in a person or object.

Those believing they can direct this power may try to manipulate it for their own helpful or harmful purposes. Such persons are often revered, worshipped as well as feared and avoided within a community.

Popular figures like Joseph Campbell sometimes equate the idea of mana with that of numinosity, which isn’t entirely wrong considering numinosity is said by both Rudolf Otto and C. G. Jung to display various textures and intensities.

But Otto’s concept of the numinous – which includes lower demonic and higher forms, to include the Holy – arguably embraces a wider range of personal experiences than does the term mana.

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Shamanism

eye to eye by Drew Brayshaw

Shamanism

The practice and anthropological study of the shaman.

Some say the word shamanism is an academic construct and a sort of umbrella term applying to a wide range of phenomena.

It’s clear that different people use the term for distinct ideas and purposes.

In her forward to Shamanism, Jean Houston, for example, hopes that

[the book's] scope and depth…will cause us to rethink our tendency to label and pathologize that which may be one of the most valuable and courageous forms of our human condition (Shirley Nicholson ed., Shamanism, Wheaton, Il.: A Quest Book, 1988, p. xiii).

Meanwhile, Michael Harner, who at his web site now emphasizes the healing and creative aspects of shamanism, didn’t always do so. In the 1970′s Harner defined the shaman as

A man or woman who is in direct contact with the spirit world through a trance state and has one or more spirits at his command to carry out his bidding for good or evil (Michael Harner, Hallicinogens and Shamanism, 1973, cited in Michael C. Howard, Contemporary Cultural Anthropology, 2^nd ed., Toronto: Little, Brown and Co. , 1986, p. 448).

Terrence McKenna says that shamanic cosmologies surpass current scientific models which, like any hegemonic idea, almost dogmatically influence our culture and ways of thinking.

An excerpt from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna - originally uploaded by oceandesetoiles

The word shamanism, however, extends beyond the worlds of academia and book publishing.

Jim Morrison from the 1960s to early 70s rock group The Doors was interested in shamanism, at times envisioning himself as a kind of flower power shaman. The group wrote successful songs like “Shaman’s Blues,” “Break on Through” and “Celebration of the Lizard” that pointed to shamanic ideas.

Meanwhile, artists such as the Canadian Norval Morrisseau use the word shaman to describe themselves and promote their work.

And graphic artist Heidi Reyes puts an interesting twist on the idea of shamanism with her work “Me at The Shamanism Centre.”

Me at The Shamanism Centre by Heidi Reyes

This image (pictured right) seems to imply that shamanism can live in virtual reality without having to be grounded within any specific earthly location.

At Earthpages.org

• Shaman Elder Maggie Wahls’ 50th Anniversary Teaching
• Why Study Shamanism
• Alchemy, Egypt, and Shamanism
• Spirit Guides & Totems
• The Shaman’s Journey: Impeccability
• The Shaman’s Journey: Intent
• The Shaman’s Journey: The Value of Emotional Control

» Animism, Controlled Dreaming, Eliade (Mircea), Evil, Fasting, Soul Loss, Spiritual Attack, Witch

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