In this thesis, I examine how dividual and individual modes of personhood enable neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia to reconfigure cultural ideals and everyday ethical practices. My ethnographic fieldwork allowed me to trace social conventions of drinking ayahuasca, participants’ techniques of the ecstatic body and senses, and narrative styles of codifying ecstatic trance, to determine...
This thesis is comprised of two distinct but related components; a novel-length work of magical/shamanic realist fiction entitled The Naked Vine, and a critical exegesis entitled Return to the Theophanic Theatre: Shamanism, Magical Realism and the Ontology of the Imaginal Realm. Set in a contemporary Australian environment, the major component of my dissertation, The Naked Vine, explores issues...
One of the defining characteristics of mystical experience posited by the psychologist and pragmatist philosopher William James in 1902 is that of ineffability, or indescribability. In this thesis my aim is to inquire into this notion of ineffability, indeed to problematize its understanding, by relating it to concepts of art and aesthetics. It is a preliminary attempt to apply the terminology...