Ample evidence from various quarters indicates that the perceptual-cognitive competence of the pre- and perinatal human being is significantly greater than was once thought. Some of the evidence of this emerging picture of early competence is reviewed, and its importance both as evidence of the biogenetic structural concept of “neurognosis” and for a theory of enculturation is discussed. The literature of pre- and perinatal psychology, especially that of developmental neuropsychology, psychobiology, and social psychophysiology, is incorporated, and some of the implications (...) of these data for a theory of enculturation are suggested. (shrink)

The author presents a biogenetic structural theory of the body image in human beings. The theory accounts for both the universal principles and the variance in body image cross‐culturally. All humans develop a neurocognitive model of their body which combines information about the body obtained via both the internal and external sensory systems. Their experience of themselves is mediated in part by this model. The initial model of the body is "hard‐wired" and already present and active in the cognitively and (...) perceptually competent pre‐ and perinatal human being, and develops as a consequence of both genetically imposed and socioculturally influenced processes of growth. The role of behavior in this process is shown to be the control of perception such that the body image experienced in perception approximates that anticipated by the cognized self. The theory accounts for the use of the body‐assymbol and the distortion of the body image for communicative purposes. The neurophysiology of imagery is reviewed and suggestions are made for possible clinical methods that might be used to effect therapeutic changes in pathological body imagery. (shrink)

As anthropology becomes more interested in consciousness and its numerous states, and with a slowly increasing appeal to neuroscience for insights and explanations of consciousness, there is an understandable interest in the components of consciousness and how they combine into alternative states in different sociocultural settings. One of those components should be the complexity of information processing producing the knowing aspect of consciousness. The author introduces an approach to this aspect in the form of conceptual systems theory, a neo-Piagetian model (...) of cognitive development, which has been used to good effect to explain information processing in social situations but heretofore neglected by anthropologists. The neuroanthropological underpinnings of CST are discussed, as is the range of potential applications to ethnological and ethnographic problems. (shrink)

Reprint, in paper covers, of the Columbia U. Press edition of 1990. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In the face of the external challenge of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the internal threat of spiritual, moral, and disciplinary corruption, two Catholic saints worked tirelessly to reform the Church in different but complementary ways. Philip Neri (1515–95) and Charles Borromeo (1538–84) led the Catholic Counter–Reformation during the middle–to–late sixteenth century, placing their distinctive gifts at the service of the Church. Philip Neri used his personal humility, intelligence, and charisma to attract the people of Rome to Christ, (...) while Charles Borromeo employed his gifts for administration and his experience as a top aide to the pope to promote needed institutional reform. Both men achieved great personal holiness and moved others to holiness of life. It is their response to and sharing of the ‘universal call to holiness’, then, that constitutes the core of both of their approaches to ecclesial reform. Their focus on holiness, expressed in an emphasis on either the ‘charismatic’ or ‘hierarchical’ dimensions of the Church’s life, also provides a model for today’s Church, scarred as she is by scandal and in need of a new movement of reform. (shrink)

There often appears to be a striking correspondence between mythic stories and aspects of reality. We will examine the processes of creative imagination within a neurobiological frame and suggest a theory that may explain the functions of myth in relation to the hidden aspects of reality. Myth is peppered with archetypal entities and interactions that operate to reveal hidden processes in reality that are relative to the human condition. The imagery in myths in a sense “sustains the true.” That is, (...) mythopoetic imagery keeps the interpretive process in experience closer to the actual nature of reality than the rational faculties operating alone are able to do. Indeed, whereas rationalizing can easily lead us awry, genuine myth rarely does. Explanations of events offered by cultures around the world are frequently couched in terms of mythic themes and events. An important function of myth is to provide a “field of tropes” that in‐forms the lived experience of people. This paper focuses especially on those aspects of myth that represent facets of the quantum universe and give us clues as to the relationship between consciousness, symbolism, and reality. (shrink)

Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, x + 207 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mechanisms of Violent Retribution in Chinese Hell Narratives Charles D. Orzech University ofNorth Carolina Greensboro Ai! The criminals in this hell have all had their eyes dug out and the fresh blood flows [from them], and each of them cries out, their two hands pressing their bloody eye-sockets—truly pitiful! To the left a middle-aged person is just having an eye pulled out by one of the shades; he (...) struggles unceasingly, screaming; his left eye has already been extracted... (56b) Ai-yah!... Each of the criminals is bound to a an iron pillar and the ox-headed demons are in the process of administering punishment—using iron or copper blades they peel the skin of the person's face, just as a butcher kills a pig and then flays it. Each of the criminal ghosts screams in pain... (59b) The criminal ghost's hands are bound about an iron pillar which is entirely red [with heat] and the criminal ghost's two hands are entirely cooked and it is unbearable... (126a) Record ofA Journey to Hell These passages are found, not in some medieval description of hell, nor in a work for sadists, but in a modern and quite popular Chinese "good book" (shan-shu) titled Record ofA Journey to Hell (Ti-yu yu-chi). Record ofA Journey to Hell is the most recent work of a genre which emerged in tenthcentury China and which may be found throughout Asia from Vietnam to Japan. This persistent fascination with gruesome scenes of torture stands in striking contrast to Michel Foucault's observations that by the first quarter of the nineteenth century "punishment had gradually ceased to be a spectacle" in Europe (9). In Record ofA Journey to Hell we are not faced with a seachange in the discourse and practice of a society. Rather, we must come to 112Charles D. Orzech grips with and seek to understand the persistence of images oftorture as well as actual torture and public execution in some modern Chinese societies. The Chinese hells—more properly purgatories, as punishment there is not eternal—are a product of cultural adaptation and interaction. Before the first century of our era we have evidence of only the most attenuated notions of the underworld, a "yellow springs" (huang-yiian) where "all, good and bad, huddled together in darkness being guarded jealously by the god of the Soil who ended by devouring them" (Thompson 29). The ruling elite avoided this fate through elaborate ancestral ritual indexed by the possession of a surname. Social status was, from the earliest times, "inscribed" on tablets which gave visible form to both social and cosmological hierarchies (Li 247-54). However, the rise of the Taoist Celestial Masters movement (T'ien-shih tao, second century) with its heavenly and infernal bureaucracies soon coupled with newly imported Indian Buddhist descriptions of the workings of karma and the hells. The result of this amalgam is the popular Chinese vision of the underworld as a vast bureaucracy centered on ten "courts," and headed by Yama, the South Asian lord of the dead (Seidel). At death the soul is summoned before the lords of hell who administer punishments appropriate to the misdeeds of the soul. After almost interminable periods of suffering, often in all of the hells in succession, the soul is reborn as a human, an animal, or even an insect, to start the whole process again. By the tenth century this distinctly Chinese version ofthe underworld had found wide dissemination and was the framework for worship and ritual directed to the recently dead.18 Unlike the South Asian prototypes, Chinese hells appear to be modeled on the imperial bureaucracy and administered by a hellish staff. The "court" layout often major and numerous subsidiary hells mimics Chinese palace and temple architecture and is quite distinct from the mandala-like layout found in "orthodox" Buddhist prototypes. Taoist priests, Buddhist monks and nuns, and a variety of folk practitioners and mediums act as intermediaries between this world and the other. They grease the wheels of the bureaucracy with their ritual knowledge and with community offerings to obtain release for imprisoned souls. Knowledge of the workings of the underworld is, according... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to move towards the comprehension of education policy processes and change in terms of an expanded sociology of education policy that studies policy networks and employs new perspectives on governance. It comments upon a perceptible conceptual convergence between education policy research and more general policy studies.

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, I wish to correct a systematic bias in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. This bias is in favor of intuition of essences of meaning and against the intuition of essences of sensation. This bias is explained as a product of Husserl's mind-body dualism. Second, I suggest the possibility of a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural point of view. This neurophenomenology merges the knowledge of essences derived from mature contemplation with knowledge of the structures of (...) experience derived from neuroanthropology. After addressing these two issues I proceed to describe the sensorium from a neurophenomenological perspective, and the constituent element of perception, the dot. I hypothesize fat experience arises in the dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, that experience is constituted within a field of sensorial dots that arise and dissolve in temporal frames. I conclude that Husserl's view of the phenomenology of time is essentially correct and is both in keeping with findings from current neurophysiology, and amenable to a modem scientific view of consciousness and to many of the religious traditions encountered by ethnographers. The implications of a neurophenomenology for the anthropological study of consciousness are suggested. (shrink)

The logic of Leviathan is formally made to derive commonwealth and the rights of sovereignty (the obligations of subjects, read the other way around) from an elaborate process beginning in the physiology of human perception and passions, through language and reason, into the state of nature (the war of all against all) and, finally, under the direction of the laws of nature, to a collective and formal resignation of all their natural rights to create an absolute sovereign. This process of (...) ‘instituting’ the sovereignty stamps the resulting sovereign with legitimacy. Early in the Second Part of Leviathan, however, Hobbes moves to attach all the rights and legitimacy of that instituted sovereignty onto what he calls ‘Despotical Dominion’, the power created when a conqueror exacts a promise from the conquered on pain of immediate death. The result is to translate all that Hobbes has said about sovereignty in general into a defence of the legitimacy of this crude force and violence. The whole of Leviathan's political argument is coloured, then, by this strategy and the best reading of it turns out to be the oldest one—that it is a defence of tyrannical power. (shrink)

Biogenetic structural theory takes an entrainment view of the nature of consciousness. Human consciousness is a function of the brain and is mediated by networks of living neural cells that develop from initial, neurognostic models of self and world. Models interact or "entrain" as a constantly changing field of experience. The entire population of neural models that may potentially entrain within the field of consciousness is called the "cognized environment.” The organization of the network of cells (the "conscious network") mediating (...) consciousness operates according to a circadian cycle. Recurrent phases of consciousness are cognized and labelled. Transformations between phases of consciousness are often ritually controlled by society in order to control experiences that are in turn interpreted in terms of the society's cosmology. Recent developments in the biogenetic structural study of consciousness are summarized, including studies of transpersonal experiences, the development of consciousness in early life, and the advantages of neurophenomenology. (shrink)

_Vortex/t _undertakes a hermeneutical exploration of symbolic turbulence in many canonical works of literature and philosophy. Charles Minahen's approach is diachronic to the degree that manifestations of the symbol are addressed chronologically, but his aim is not to establish a historical linking of cause and effect, even if such connections do appear. Rather, a synchrony of the symbol is reconstructed that places each discrete example of it in a vibrant intertext of patent and latent meanings. Symbolic turbulence first emerges (...) in ancient "whirls" that display a spiral, spiro-helical, or vertical configuration and usually have cosmic or religious significance. The first significant textual examples of vertical symbolism occur in the Boulak Papyrus, the Bible, and _The Odyssey_, where the destructive connotations of the symbol stand out. For the philosophers and poets of the ancient classical period, including certain Pre-Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, and Lucretius, the vortex is a universal structuring principle, although the underlying causes vary. For Dante, the emphasis is no longer on the dynamic cosmogonic role of the whirl, but on the gradations inherent in the vertical structure itself. Descartes and Blake associated the symbol with the transcendence of a mystical vision, which involves, for the latter, an epiphanal breakthrough. In Poe, the maelstrom excites conflicting feelings of horror in the face of death and curiosity about the "novel" beyond. Rimbaud develops Blake's and Poe's fascination with a transcendent vision, but for Mallarme, the vortex-symbol is Poesque in the more negative way. Not only is it a threatening destructive force, it is the specter of death itself, relentlessly drawing the shipwrecked mariner to ultimate extinction and nonentity. By analyzing, comparing, and contrasting these salient examples of vertical symbolism, _Vortex/t _attempts to uncover and explore the dynamics of emerging and receding meanings that constitute the paradigm's complexity. (shrink)

The moral importance of the ‘intention–foresight’ distinction has long been a matter of philosophical controversy, particularly in the context of end-of-life care. Previous empirical research in Australia has suggested that general physicians and surgeons may use analgesic or sedative infusions with ambiguous intentions, their actions sometimes approximating ‘slow euthanasia’. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study of 18 Australian palliative care medical specialists, using in-depth interviews to address the use of sedation at the end of life. The (...) majority of subjects were agnostic or atheistic. In contrast to their colleagues in acute medical practice, these Australian palliative care specialists were almost unanimously committed to distinguishing their actions from euthanasia. This commitment appeared to arise principally from the need to maintain a clear professional role, and not obviously from an ideological opposition to euthanasia. While some respondents acknowledged that there are difficult cases that require considered reflection upon one's intention, and where there may be some ‘mental gymnastics,’ the nearly unanimous view was that it is important, even in these difficult cases, to cultivate an intention that focuses exclusively on the relief of symptoms. We present four narratives of ‘terminal’ sedation – cases where sedation was administered in significant doses just before death, and may well have hastened death. Considerable ambiguities of intention were evident in some instances, but the discussion around these clearly exceptional cases illustrates the importance of intention to palliative care specialists in maintaining their professional roles. (shrink)

Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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 (CAS), which are sensitive to change in relation to their environments and are often chaotic. Consciousness and the neural systems mediating consciousness may be (...) modeled as CAS and, more specifically, as intelligent complex adaptive systems (ICAS), where intelligence means that a nervous system can solve problems successfully by intervening between sensory input and behavioral output. Evolution of any ICAS will result in emergent properties, particularly advanced brains. Two processes are involved in integrating experience and knowledge: the effort after meaning and the effort after truth. These efforts are mediated by the predominance given to direct experience presented to the brain's sensorium and modeling processes mediated by higher cognitive functions. Understanding consciousness as an ICAS has profound repercussions in how anthropology conceives of culture. (shrink)

The majority of the world’s cultures encourage or require members to enter alternative states of consciousness while involved in religious rituals. The question is, why? This paper suggests an explanation for the culturally prescribed ASC from the view of Fisher information. It argues from the position, first put forward by Emile Durkheim in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that all religions are grounded in reality. It suggests that many of the structural elements of cultural cosmologies (...) are similar and that the ritual induction of ASC may help to bring individual experience into greater accord with a pan-human eidetic cosmology, and thus with certain invariant attributes of reality. The necessity of this process is demonstrated by recourse to Fisher information. The paper shows how experiences generated during alternative states of consciousness may help to maintain a minimal level of realism in the interests of adaptation to what is in other respects a transcendental reality. (shrink)

Most of us would agree that the world of our experience is different than the extramental reality of which we are a part. Indeed, the evidence pertaining to cultural cosmologies around the globe suggests that virtually all peoples recognize this distinction—hence the focus upon the "hidden" forces behind everyday events. That said, the struggle to comprehend the relationship between our consciousness and reality, even the reality of ourselves, has led to controversy and debate for centuries in Western philosophy. In this (...) article, we address this problem from an anthropological perspective and argue that the generative route to a solution of the experience–reality "gap" is by way of an anthropologically informed cultural neurophenomenology . By this we mean a perspective and methodology that applies a phenomenology that controls for cultural variation in perception and interpretation, coupled with the latest information from the neurosciences about how the organ of experience—the brain—is structured. (shrink)