Oxford University Press eBooks
July 10, 2014
Ted Honderich
Abstract There are reasons to look at two existing kinds of theories of consciousness, including the need to elicit criteria by which to judge any theory of consciousness. One kind is dualism, still persisting, and the other is functionalism, dominant in the sciences of mind and consciousness. They are treated differently, wrongly. Dualisms are taken to be to the effect that consciousness is...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
164 citations
This book discusses how Amerindian epistemology and ontology, related to certain indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon, spread to Western societies, and how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have dialogued with and transformed these forest traditions. Special attention is given to the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca. Chapters reflect on how displaced indigenous people and rubber...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Beatriz Caiuby Labate
16 citations
Abstract This chapter charts the expansion, diversification, and internationalization of Peruvian vegetalismo. Outsiders traveling to Peru in search of ayahuasca, gringos who themselves became curanderos, and Peruvian ayahuasqueros who travel to hold workshops for urban middle-class clients abroad are considered. The study identifies contours of transnational networks and the circuits that...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Evgenia Fotiou
16 citations
Abstract This chapter examines the cultural constructions of ayahuasca and shamanism, their manifestations in the Western imagination and experience, and their localized experience in the city of Iquitos, Peru, in the context of the phenomenon of shamanic tourism. The chapter argues that shamanic tourism is not an anomaly but is consistent with the nature of shamanism, which has historically...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Daniela M. Peluso
13 citations
This chapter provides an overview of the predicaments of ayahuasca tourism in Puerto Maldonado, a regional Amazonian capital (Peru) and its environs, as a contribution toward understanding how ayahuasca tourism affects the localities in which such encounters take place. Through an analysis of local and global narratives, the chapter engages with Amerindian epistemologies and perspectivism to...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Glenn H. Shepard
11 citations
Abstract The ayahuasca brew (Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis) was introduced very recently among the Matsigenka and Yora (Nahua) indigenous people of southern Peru. The Matsigenka used Banisteriopsis liana previously, however they did not learn to add the potent Psychotria admixture in preparing the brew until the 1950s. Introduction of ayahuasca to the Yora (Nahua) was even more...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Bernd Brabec de Mori
8 citations
Abstract The experience of indigenous people in their confrontation with the growing interest of people from northern countries in drinking ayahuasca has hitherto received little attention. First a brief historical summary is presented in order to show how the use of ayahuasca had already changed its meaning and value among Shipibo-Konibo around the 1960s. Observing that visitors' interests...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, Françoise Barbira Freedman
7 citations
Abstract The introduction provides an overview of the expansion of ayahuasca shamanism, and places it in the context of its interactions with Western therapies and the New Age movement. It also contemplates the role of shamanism as a mediator in contemporary indigenous ethnic relationships. The introduction reviews the existing field of research and offer a comment that gives context and...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
6 citations
Abstract This chapter looks at ritual spaces of ayahuasca shamanism in western Brazil, organized by indigenous people to be shared purposefully with other indigenous and non-indigenous participants. This usually occurs in the evenings of political and cultural meetings, training courses, and cultural festivals. They allow identifying people with whom to cooperate, exchange substances, and share...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Mariana Ciavatta Pantoja, Matthew Meyer
4 citations
Abstract The Kuntanawa are a tribe that belongs to the Pano linguistic branch, who, by the early decades of the twentieth century, were assumed to have been exterminated owing to the expansion of rubber production in the upper reaches of Amazonian tributaries, and in particular in the state of Acre in Brazil. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, descendants of a Kuntanawa woman, who had...
Oxford University Press eBooks
April 26, 2012
Jonardon Ganeri
Abstract There are two ways to account for the nature of phenomenologically presented ownership constitutive of the "immersed" self. One sees it as fundamentally a relationship of bodily ownership: the theory of a core self as bodily feeling of presence to oneself is a bodily account of immersion. Other accounts develop an analysis out of a more detailed study of the structure of...
Oxford University Press eBooks
December 23, 2011
Steven Sutcliffe
Abstract The “new age” has been both difficult to specify and tricky to theorize in the standard terms of the academic study of religion. This chapter begins by looking at how elements of the new age stack up with the limited model of a rationalized bureaucratic organization supplied by the “world religions” taxonomy. It further locates the new age in the discursive drift from mysticism to...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
Beginning with interview excerpts demonstrating the different ways in which respondents described their learning experiences, this chapter sets out a framework for understanding various types of learning. It briefly summarizes the learning domains of Bloom's taxonomy, showing how these domains and the learning tasks involved in each relate to learning in meditation classes. Respondents...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
This chapter describes the main introductory meditation classes offered at Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti Centre in detail. It breaks the classes down into their various elements—rites of entry, opening prayers, meditation practice, talks or lectures, and so on—and discusses each as formalized or experiential means of learning that are ritualized to one degree or another. Comparisons are...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
This chapter focuses on the specific ritual practices that meditation students learned and performed. Learning through devotional practices like chanting, prostrations and offerings is discussed, as is the example of one participant who decided to take on an offering rite without insisting on prior cognitive understanding. His experience of discovery through doing is a rare but illuminating...
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September 1, 2011
Robert Audi
In this chapter the character of religious experience is explored. Perceptual and non-perceptual kinds are distinguished, and both are shown to have possible confirmatory value for religious commitment. The chapter also explores how practical considerations may support a religious commitment that is not otherwise irrational. It concludes with a discussion of the extent to which religious...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 28, 2011
Tia DeNora
10 citations
This chapter examines the role in music in consciousness formation understood pragmatically. This pragmatic perspective focuses on consciousness as a form of creative work. It suggests that, in common with all creative work, it is a ‘systematic function’: it emerges from collaborative social and material-cultural settings. To develop this theme and set it in its proper context, the chapter...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 28, 2011
David Clarke, Tara Kini
7 citations
While the seemingly new Western discipline of consciousness studies wrestles with its problems of definition and methodology, it is salutary to note that consciousness has been a near continuous concern — in both theory and practice — in Eastern cultures for much of their history. This chapter argues that Indian classical music both emanates from and is able to instil deep states of...
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July 28, 2011
Ansuman Biswas
6 citations
A significant lacuna in academic and scientific studies of consciousness is a description of how it actually feels to be here. The study of consciousness has proved to be extremely elusive when using the traditional third-person methodology of science. Any description of qualia — by definition lived, subjective experience — seems to necessitate the admission of first-person data, which has...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 28, 2011
Benny Shanon
3 citations
Abstract This chapter examines the musical facets of the special state of mind induced by ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian psychoactive brew especially famous for the vivid hallucinations that it induces. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first presents background information concerning ayahuasca and its scientific study, and discusses the use of music in ayahuasca rituals. The second...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 18, 2011
Rüdiger Seesemann
This chapter introduces Ibrahim Niasse on the basis of hagiographical sources, offering insights into both scholarly and popular representations of Niasse's career. It focuses on the first three decades of his life, using accounts of his childhood and training to highlight the milieu in which he grew up. It then discusses the “emergence of the flood (fayda),” the pivotal moment that triggered...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 18, 2011
Rüdiger Seesemann
This chapter offers a micro-history of the early community in Senegal, drawing on letters by Ibrahim Niasse that give unique insights into the movement's formative years. The sources show how Niasse was forced to reign in the excesses of a few overzealous followers, whose flouting of the rules of the Sufi path invited much criticism from outsiders. The mounting tensions lead to the next...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 7, 2011
Leslie Stevenson
This essay examines various kinds of unity in our experience based on the idea that these forms of unity are produced by mental processes of synthesis. It suggests that Immanuel Kant was asking questions about the relation between preconceptual and conceptual levels of mental functioning that are still of fundamental importance in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. The...
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June 15, 2011
Georges Dicker
This chapter surveys, formulates, and evaluates Berkeley's main arguments for the foundational doctrine of his philosophy, namely that we perceive only our own ideas or, as he puts it, that sensible qualities are only ideas or sensations in the mind: the pleasure-pain argument, two subtly different versions of the argument from perceptual relativity (one of which invokes, in effect, the...
Oxford University Press eBooks
March 2, 2011
Derk Pereboom
Chapter 3 develops a response to David Chalmers’s conceivability argument against (ordinary) physicalism analogous to the objection to the knowledge argument set out in Chapter 1. The conceivability argument hinges on the claim that it is conceivable, in an appropriately sophisticated way, that a world that is (nothing but) an exact physical duplicate of the actual world feature no phenomenal...