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- Convenor:
-
Tanya Luhrmann
(Stanford University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Long Abstract:
A number of people have begun to use the term “Anthropology of Mind” to describe work that focuses on culturally different representations of what English speakers call the mind—the domain of thought, feeling, imagination, the mental. The term captures emerging interests in theory of mind, in attention, in differences in subjectivity which have emerged through historical change, social contact, and religious engagement. The anthropology of mind raises fundamental questions. How is the quality of our present consciousness shaped by the way we have come to imagine thoughts, feelings, mind? Are minds always imagined in the first instance as private? When and where is thought considered to be a thing? How are these differences engaged in producing inequalities? To date there have been work focused on “opacity,” the idea that one person should not or cannot not draw inferences about another person’s intentions and ideas. There has also been work focused on “porosity,” the idea that thought can cross over a permeable mind/world boundary and act supernaturally in the world. Psychologists sometimes assume that these differences in representation are superficial in human experience; those anthropologists who work in this area believe that different conceptions of mind profoundly shape social life, in health and also in illness. The goal of this panel is to take stock of where the discussion is at the moment: what the important questions should be, what are the most interesting findings, and where should research and discussion go from here?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Culturally variable models of mind suggest that healthy minds are constituted to various degrees through the influence of others. In Thailand these orientations extend past the human. Here I draw on locally-salient cosmological views to point to some of the more-than-human aspects of mental health.
Paper long abstract:
In Buddhist communities of Thailand the mind is understood to be prone to fly off and become scattered when one is unwell, with rituals offered to bring it back and restore the person to health. These moments of discord are sometimes seen as less than fully human: they are reflections of a state of mentality more akin to that of ghosts or animals than to that of a healthy and fully ‘mindful’ human being. Based on 15 years of ethnographic research on religion and wellness in a small Northern Thai community, I argue that these local conceptions of the mind influence understandings of what it means to be healthy, and inspire projects of self-development that are oriented to them. Through this attention to models of the mind and their implications for wellbeing in Thailand I suggest new perspectives for psychological anthropology, ones that reach beyond the human to speak to the wide spectrum of consciousnesses encountered in anthropological fieldwork.
Paper short abstract:
God's hug is one way that charismatic habits of attention seems to link metaphor to the body as love and care manifests in sensory experience—practice gets under the skin. This paper explores the forms of attention, sense of surprise and novelty, and sensations that occur when speaking in tongues.
Paper long abstract:
The experience of being hugged by God is one example of the ways that charismatic habits of attention seems to link metaphor to the body as ideas of love and care manifest in people’s sensory experience—practice gets under the skin. A hug from God was described across multiple interviews, yet with a variety of meanings. Charismatic worship engenders a range of warm cuddly somatic experiences. Many are connected to a sense of being deeply loved and lovable. Some begin the cross the line from a sense of being loved to physically experienced warmth in the chest and even to a very distinct sense of being embraced.
Speaking in tongues could be described s Christian meditation with a touch of psychedelia: its phenomenology is closely akin to microdosing of psychedelics. The effects of mindfulness and other forms of mediation may be as a result of their specific forms of attention. Psychedelics seem effective because engender a particularly plastic brain state especially open to novelty. novelty and new thinking. Taken together, the blend of attention and novelty might tell us something about how explain why speaking i tongues is often accompanied by hallucinations, like God’s hugs, and also why the sense of me other and concreteness seems to vary with practice. This paper explores the forms of attention, sense of surprise and novelty and sensations that occur when speaking in tongues.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reviews the anthropological and psychological literature on Theory of Mind (ToM) and autism spectrum disorders, posing questions about whether ToM is a Western "folk" category, and whether it exists on a continuum among both neurodiverse and neurotypical communities.
Paper long abstract:
In the mid-1980s, Simon Baron-Cohen hypothesized that children with autism lack Theory of Mind (ToM) or the capacity to perceive what other people think, feel and believe. Concomitant with this “mindblindness,” Baron-Cohen argued that autistic individuals are unable to experience empathy, which he identified as a quintessential characteristic of being fully human. Autistic self-advocates reject Baron-Cohen’s claims, and researchers have documented individuals diagnosed with autism who demonstrate the ability to empathize with or take the perspective of others. Nonetheless, the association between autism and absence of ToM remains influential: in 2020, the trial of a mass-murderer in Toronto hinged on the defense’s claim that due to autism, he was unable emotionally to recognize the harm his actions caused and hence should not be held criminally responsible. This paper analyses the discourse of the defense, and the critiques levelled at it by the autistic community. The paper also takes stock of the contemporary anthropological and psychological research on ToM as it relates to autism, and poses these questions:
• Is ToM a Western idea or product of Western “folk psychology” rather than a universal human conception, as Baron-Cohen has suggested?
• Does ToM exist on a continuum such that both individuals diagnosed with autism and those without a diagnosis might demonstrate “giftedness” and/or challenges with respect to their capacity for taking the perspective of others?
• If ToM exists on a continuum, what are the implications for blurring the boundaries between diagnostic categories, and between classifications of neurodiverse and neurotypical?
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers dreaming, bewitchment, and transnational Pentecostal Christianity as practiced in Tanzania, in order to ask how attention to dreams may offer new insights into the relationship between culture and the porosity and relationality of the mind.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary Tanzania, dreams are often understood to be ongoing experiences of the world, populated by various actors, rather than merely expressions of what—in a Western context—we would call the “mind”. Thus, the power of dreams’ content often comes from elsewhere—from witches, jinn, the divine, ancestors. While there is a long history of such understandings in Africa—particularly in relation to witchcraft experience (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1937), contemporary experiences of dreaming are also in dynamic dialogue with transnational religious networks. To demonstrate this, I focus on one case of bewitchment which has plagued my interlocuters in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania for years. For this family, the mother’s dreams offered opportunities to fight the powers of darkness in “another dimension”, which resulted in the death of a bewitcher in waking life. This practice was informed by the family’s participation in Cornerstone Church—a Pentecostal megachurch based in Texas, which produces sermons that are translated into Swahili by the family’s local pastor. Thinking with this case, I attempt a “controlled equivocation” between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ (Bonelli 2012, Viveiros de Castro 2004), while asking how transnational religious practice is reconfiguring the quality and texture of dreams in Tanzania today (Dulin 2020) and what significance the phenomenology of dreaming might have for conceptions of the mind (and soul) in waking life (Cassaniti & Luhrmann 2014). I conclude that attention to culturally-embedded practices of dreaming can offer new insights into the relationship between culture and the porosity and relationality of the mind.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the use of structured methods to explore the anthropology mind. It argues that ethnographically parochial scales can capture both heterogeneity and common cultural patterns, without losing sight of intuitions about mind shared across cultural contexts.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the use of structured methods to explore the anthropology of mind. In particular, it describes a scale that I took a major hand in developing which turned out to be remarkably helpful in evaluating what we understood as “porosity”—the idea that the boundary between mind and world is permeable. The porosity scale was designed to learn the salience and distribution of cultural concepts of mental porosity in five ethnographic contexts, China, Vanuatu, North America, Ghana, and Thailand. Exploratory ethnographic work in Ghana inspired most of the scale items, however, the scale showed a high degree of inter-item reliability in the five regions in which it was administered. I discuss the implications of the data gathered on mental porosity using this type of scale. First, it provides insights on interregional and intraregional distinctions in cultural theories of mind that complement the insights of ethnographic research. For example, we see that some statements of our Ghanaian interlocutors are minority views, while others have more large-scale acceptance. Second, we find that some statements that one might otherwise assume to be uniquely Ghanaian have surprising resonance across contexts. Ethnographically parochial scales may, then, provide a way to capture salient patterns in local theories of mind while also capturing heterogeneity. It also enables one to understand interregional variations without essentializing differences and losing sight of intuitions about mind shared across cultural contexts.