Anthropology of Consciousness
June 1, 1996
Kirsten Bonde
In northern Peru, curanderos (healers) blend sorcery and shamanism to treat clients, using rituals, psychoactive plants, and spiritual cleansing. The book examines the social roles of these healers, their relationships with clients, and the cultural logic behind their practices. It argues that curanderismo addresses physical and psychological ailments by mediating between the human and spirit worlds, reflecting broader Andean beliefs. Case studies show how healing sessions reinforce community ties and personal identity.
Anthropology of Consciousness
December 1, 1994
Antonia Mills
This book examines the role of shamanic healing and ritual drama within Native North American religious traditions, exploring how these practices intersect with health and medicine. The author analyzes various indigenous healing ceremonies, their symbolic meanings, and their functions in maintaining community well-being. The work argues that these traditions offer a distinct understanding of health that integrates spiritual, social, and physical dimensions, contrasting with Western biomedical models. By drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, the text provides a comprehensive overview of the diversity and complexity of Native American healing practices, emphasizing their continued relevance and resilience.
Anthropology of Consciousness
June 1, 1994
Helmut Wautischer
This edited volume brings together multiple perspectives on the self and consciousness, exploring how these concepts are understood across different disciplines. The book presents a collection of chapters that examine theoretical and empirical approaches to selfhood and conscious experience, drawing on psychology, philosophy, and related fields. It aims to provide a broad, integrative view of the nature of self and consciousness, highlighting the diversity of thought on these topics.
Anthropology of Consciousness
December 1, 1993
Marilyn Walker
This book examines the concept of shamanism in eighteenth-century European thought, tracing how writers, philosophers, and artists engaged with reports of shamans from Siberia and other regions. Flaherty argues that shamanism served as a provocative model for debates about imagination, religion, and the origins of culture, influencing figures from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The work shows how European intellectuals alternately dismissed shamans as charlatans or idealized them as primitive geniuses, reflecting broader tensions between reason and mysticism.
Anthropology of Consciousness
December 1, 1993
William S. Lyon
This book examines healing practices across cultures, tracing the role of spirituality from Native American shamanism to modern health care. The authors argue that spiritual dimensions are integral to healing, offering a cross-cultural perspective on how rituals, beliefs, and altered states of consciousness contribute to therapeutic outcomes. They discuss shamanic traditions, the placebo effect, and the integration of spiritual approaches in contemporary medicine, suggesting that acknowledging these dimensions can enhance patient care.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1993
Michael Ripinsky‐naxon
This edited volume collects Soviet scholarship on shamanism in Siberia and Central Asia, examining traditional religious practices through the lens of Marxist and ethnographic analysis. The essays explore shamanic rituals, cosmology, and social roles, reflecting both the descriptive richness of Soviet fieldwork and the ideological frameworks that shaped it. The collection provides a window into how state-sponsored researchers documented and interpreted indigenous belief systems, often emphasizing their historical evolution and materialist underpinnings. The book serves as a resource for understanding the intersection of Soviet academic traditions and the study of shamanic traditions in these regions.
Anthropology of Consciousness
July 1, 1992
John R. Baker
No Summary
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1991
William S. Lyon
Many traditional Native American cultures in North America socially sanction visionary experiences in individuals. The use of visionary experiences in these cultures, especially in shamanism, is discussed. The process of using induction techniques to acquire shamanic power may over time adversely affect the shaman's ability.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 2022
Matthew T Phillips
The paper argues that the sensory deprivation tank functions as a time machine by separating time from space, enabling an experience of what Henri Bergson called pure time. The tank also acts as a phenomenological epoché: by disabling the floater's sensory-motor schema, it suspends the person outside the world and forces a reconsideration of prior judgments about consciousness and time. The tank is linked to contemporary philosophical debates, particularly David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, which demands a radically new mode of thinking beyond materialism. The tank is presented as a literal black box that could contribute to rethinking consciousness.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2021
Tomáš Paul
Becoming a Taijiquan practitioner in the Czech Republic involves a gradual transformation of consciousness over years or decades, contrasting with the immediate shifts from ordinary to extraordinary states typically studied in the anthropology of consciousness. The analysis uses Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the arborescent and rhizomatic to depict consciousness as an ever-changing map, where the dissolution of boundaries (deterritorialization) is always balanced by their reinforcement (reterritorialization). This framework creates a space for dialogue between martial arts research and the anthropology of consciousness.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 2020
Charles D. Laughlin, Melanie Takahashi
Mystical experiences are altered states of consciousness opposite to everyday ego-centered awareness, and a key factor in them is what the authors term 'mystical love.' Humans appear to have a need to alter consciousness away from ordinary waking states. Ritual practices across cultures—such as ingesting psychotropic substances, daily activities that devalue ego-centeredness and promote love and selfless service, and meditation on loving kindness and compassion—are used to incubate intense feelings of non-romantic love, empathy, and compassion, preparing individuals for mystical experiences whose results are interpreted within each person's cycle of meaning.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2019
Abdulla Galadari
A comparison of the psychological states of Muhammad and Siddhartha examines how their mystical experiences occurred and how their presuppositions and personalities shaped interpretation. Muhammad's experience appeared based on an altered state of consciousness. Siddhartha's teachings, which include avoiding blind faith and remaining open to various truths, may reflect high openness to experience, potentially protecting him from delusion. Mystical experiences may have pathological overlaps and could be categorized similarly to psychological states, but mindful presuppositions and personality traits, especially openness to experience, make perceptions of these experiences diverse.
Anthropology of Consciousness
May 1, 2013
Nathan Porath
Anthropologists studying altered states of consciousness (ASC) have argued for using local terms instead of psychological concepts. Drawing on fieldwork with the Orang Sakai of Sumatra, this paper shows that practitioners who use ASC do recognize changes in awareness as necessary for spiritual or numinous encounters. The paper also critically examines the term "ASC" itself.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2010
Marc G Blainey
Anthropological research on consciousness, particularly that published in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness, has had limited impact on mainstream anthropology partly because contributors often overlook the discipline's historical roots. The subfield of ethnometaphysics, coined by anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, never gained traction like ethnobotany or ethnomusicology. By revisiting ethnometaphysics and using the example of Western debates over whether to call psychoactive substances hallucinogens or entheogens, the author argues that the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness can reframe its alternative perspective as less radical, thereby increasing its chances of influencing mainstream anthropology.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2007
Paul Devereux, Stanley Krippner, Robert Tartz et al.
Sleeping at sacred outdoor sites in England and Wales was associated with more aggressive dream content and less friendly, failure, striving, and success content compared with sleeping at home. Thirty-five volunteers spent one to five nights at one of four unfamiliar sacred sites and were awakened after rapid eye movement to report dreams; the same volunteers also kept dream diaries at home. Equal numbers of site and home dream reports were obtained from each volunteer. Analysis using the Hall-Van de Castle Scale revealed several differences, but no significant differences in bizarre or paranormal content were found between site and home dreams. The authors propose expectancy, suggestion, unfamiliar surroundings, or possible anomalous properties of the sites as explanations.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2006
Jörg Fachner
Cannabis changes auditory perception and music appreciation, as many musicians and listeners report. In an ethnographic pre/post study with four participants in a naturalistic setting, mobile EEG imaging measured spontaneous brain activity. Increased alpha-signal strength in the parietal association cortex and significant theta band changes in temporal areas, along with alpha changes in occipital areas, appeared to be a consistent brain correlate of temporarily intensified attention (a "high"). This altered music perception by hyperfocusing on acoustic space and broadening insight into the "space between the notes." THC measurably influences cerebral music processing and seems to temporarily enhance acoustic perception.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1999
Kira Lynn Casto, Stanley Krippner, Robert Tartz
A new scoring system, the Casto Spirituality Scoring System, can reliably identify spiritual content in dream reports. Two independent judges achieved high inter-rater reliability when scoring 280 dream reports from dream seminars in six countries and from individuals in spiritual development programs. Fifty-nine of the 280 reports contained spiritual content as defined by the system. The results are promising but further research is needed to fully demonstrate the system's usefulness.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1999
Lain Edgar
Personal identity and consciousness are shaped through the social and cultural contexts in which dreams are narrated and interpreted. An ethnographic study of dreamwork groups in the U.K. shows that dream symbolism, narration, and interpretation are culturally constructed, and that both dreamwork and guided fantasy allow individuals to represent and invent their sense of self through socially informed imaginative content.
Anthropology of Consciousness
March 1, 1997
E. Richard Sorenson
This paper describes a type of consciousness characteristic of a preconquest era, which survives today only in isolated enclaves. This consciousness focuses liminally on direct sensory experience, producing a continuous, non-discrete cognition that cannot be managed by syntax and logic. It generates a way of life that is simultaneously individualistic and collective, and a spontaneous group rapport alien to modern beings. The authors argue that this type of consciousness collapses when seized by hostile or domineering cultures. They pose questions about the reconcilability of truth across eras and whether today's type of consciousness reflects a positive or negative turning in mental evolution. The paper also addresses the contradictory accounts of "untouched" peoples by early explorers versus their conquerors.
Anthropology of Consciousness
December 1, 1995
Wallace W. Zane
Anthropological studies of spirit possession are confused because researchers struggle to distinguish culture-specific categories of altered consciousness from analytical ones. Theories either describe local contexts without reference to outside theories, making comparison impossible, or apply externally derived categories that lack local relevance. To enable cross-cultural comparison while respecting cultural beliefs, the author proposes focusing on "ritual states of consciousness" rather than simply altered states, which may or may not be spirit possession by different criteria. This approach is tested by analyzing the Spiritual Baptists of St. Vincent and other Caribbean religions.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 1994
Stanley Krippner
Anomalous dreams that challenge Western philosophical assumptions are often dismissed by mainstream philosophers and scientists, yet parapsychological research offers evidence that some of these dreams have consensual validation and real-world effects. Shamanic models of reality, which align with parapsychological findings, provide anecdotal support for such dreams and deserve reconsideration by Western academic institutions because they account for anomalous dream phenomena and offer provocative data.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 1994
Ruth‐Inge Heinze
Different states of consciousness have distinct qualities that, when recognized, can enhance self-knowledge, balance behavior, and guide action. Workshops in the United States, Russia, Lithuania, and Estonia illustrate the type of material retrieved during these states. Techniques for accessing different states of consciousness are evaluated and shown to be applicable to everyday life.
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 1993
Michael Winkelman
Transpersonal psychology proposes that human consciousness evolves through fixed linear stages, with altered states considered more advanced than ordinary waking consciousness, contrasting with traditional Western psychology's view of such states as pathological. This paper critically examines these theories against anthropological perspectives of cultural relativism and ecological adaptation. It argues that transpersonal models claiming certain states (e.g., those of Eastern contemplative traditions) as inherently superior to others (e.g., shamanic states) conflict with anthropological findings that no single adaptation is superior in all circumstances. The paper calls for incorporating cultural relativism into theories of consciousness evolution and suggests meaning as a potential basis for evolutionary stages.
Anthropology of Consciousness
July 1, 1992
Roland Fischer
A theory of consciousness is proposed that integrates knowledge about the evolution and functioning of the human brain. The organism constructs its world of experience as an adaptation to the problem of moving in the world. The relationship between the observed and unobserved world is discussed. A cartography of state-bound meaning links the continuum of arousal states to different states of consciousness. The inevitable ambiguity of perception is addressed, and the evolutionary and developmental importance of self-awareness is emphasized. These ideas are related to poststructuralist formulations.