AbstractThis study investigates contemporary Mayan oral stories through the lens of Julian Jaynes's theory on the origin of consciousness, aiming to identify a potential connection between the literary elements of these narratives and traits of pre‐consciousness outlined by Jaynes. Jaynes's neuropsychological thesis argues that human consciousness emerged around 3000 years ago after a period of...
AbstractThe term near‐death experience (NDE) generally refers to a state of altered consciousness that can occur during real or presumed near‐death circumstances and/or life‐threatening incidents. The NDE usually includes the impression of being conscious while out of and/or away from the physical body, often accompanied by other specific features. Furthermore, when the experient has the...
Abstract The articles in this issue of the journal support the claim that consciousness is a circumstantially cultivated faculty of the self. This is contrary to a widespread assumption held by numerous scholars, researchers, and religious doctrines that consciousness is a self‐sustaining unoriginated faculty given to the subject and which at all times is subjectively experienced with...
Abstract The article delves into the need for an anthropological exploration of consciousness in the modern context. While anthropology's core focus has always been the study of the human subject, this study argues that consciousness has emerged as a fundamental aspect that underpins all human phenomena. The historical trajectory of anthropology, from its positivist leanings to contemporary...
This paper analyzes Dolores's case of collective spirit possession as a paroxysmic form of possession idiom, serving as a powerful and creative internal mechanism that both safeguards and revitalizes the core structure of ancestor worship. Drawing on my ethnographic research in North Honduras since 2009, my study reveals that rather than leading to the erosion of possession rituals, entropic...
Transcendental Meditation (TM) holds that the essence of reality is “pure consciousness.” This piece contrasts three interpretations of their meditative trance: (i) TM doctrine, and (ii) scientific physicalism, (iii) with my own meditative experience. Pure consciousness events, defined as wakeful contentless consciousness, are known to occur, but what ontological basis do they have? While...
Abstract Ayahuasca is a psychedelic beverage from the Amazon rainforest, used in spiritual and religious settings for medical purposes. Since the 1990s onwards, several religious and neo‐shamanic groups have been using it in Uruguay within the psychospiritual networks. Some participants go to rituals of ayahuasca looking for therapeutic alternatives to certain ailments, such as substance use...
Abstract In Jylkkä's ( Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience , Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2022) Mary on Acid: Experiences of unity and the epistemic gap, the author contends that psychedelic experience, by inducing unitary—nondual—experiences of subject–object dissolution, brings to light the epistemic gap between unitary knowledge, constituted by experience,...
Abstract 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,...
AbstractA recent Letter to the Editor inAnthropology 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...
AbstractThe 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...
AbstractA 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...
Abstract 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...
This paper is positioned within broader scholarly debates about ritual‐religious and psychological elements underlying the phenomenon of altered states of mind in Egyptian Muslim contexts. This research examines the intricate relationships between ritual, consciousness, and the unseen/unknowable world reflected in the imagination and practices of urban and rural communities belonging...
AbstractSpiritualist mediums are sought out from a variety of cultures for their advanced spirit communication healing techniques. Otherworldly spirits use mediums to create spirit art, which guides an individual to discover their authentic self and work through self‐limiting beliefs. To serve as a bridge for the spirit world, the medium develops an ability to enter an altered state of...
AbstractThe northern Mexican Ralámuli people consider plants to be their kin. First‐ and secondhand ethnographies bring forth fundamental issues that convey the possibility of communicating with plants. For example, the notion of an interconnected world has to do with roots, with threads, and with thought or nátali (consciousness, remembrance, ancestral memory), all of which embrace the life...
Ecofeminists, environmental activists, and ecologists are calling humans to change our relationships to other‐than‐humans and more‐than‐humans. Indigenous people and knowledge systems are often exemplified as ways for non‐Indigenous people to relate to these entities. While Indigenous people have historically participated in epistemologies and modes of perception that rendered them more able to...
In complexity theory, both the brain and consciousness are understood as trophic systems—they consume metabolic energy when they function. Complex systems are dynamic and nonlinear and comprise diverse entities that are interdependent and interconnected in such a way that information is shared and that entities adapt to one another. Some natural complex systems are complex adaptive systems...
My multidisciplinary art practice which includes collages, paintings, and sculptures (Figures 1-8) aim to illustrate the porous boundary of oneself with the living world. Materials range from paint to objects found in the woods alongside post-consumer detritus and photography. Through photograph collage and assemblage, I juxtapose perspectives to challenge the narrative of a singular identity...
My art (Figures 1-7) revolves around the theory and practice of cultural resistance, which I call the ‘dreamweapon’ or the shamanic aspect of the fight for social justice. Through repetitive patterns, highly saturated colours, stark black and white alteration and abstracted anthropomorphisms, these paintings unleash an excess of spirits, a profusion of phantasmata, pineal eyes in ecstatic...
AbstractOur species of hominin, Homo sapiens, is an extremely social animal. We are born with social brains. The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is a methodological approach to social consciousness that offers significant advantages in terms of uncovering and describing the essential structures of our social perceptions and actions. This is especially true in this period of post‐neuro‐turn...
AbstractIn Chinese body culture, the construct of qi 氣—literally translated as breath or energy—is at the heart of several programs of self‐cultivation, as well as other domains of bodily knowledge related to the subjective and inter‐subjective realm of everyday life. Also, among Chinese societies and communities, discourses on qi have assumed social significance in the milieus of politics,...
ABSTRACTAyahuasca has become a subject of great interest in recent years. Academics, spiritual seekers, communities, and curious individuals have all been intrigued by this topic through either writing about it or direct participation in the contemporary spiritual phenomenon that is ayahuasca, which holds promises of bestowing upon its users profound wisdom or healing. However, what...
The articles in this issue reflect an important paradox. The ethnographic research presented in these articles suggest that consciousness is formed socially and in interaction with environmental factors and, to some extent, is a learned attribute. In that sense, it would be fluid, malleable, and processual. On the other hand, there is evidence that it has some intrinsic boundaries, such that...