One of the assumptions that impregnate academic discourse, even that of social scientists committed to the re-incorporation of their disciplines, is its extra-corporeal character. This article analyzes the scholastic construction of producing and perceiving oral, written or silent discourses as non-corporeal acts. First, it argues that there is a certain continuity between monastic rituals that build the spirit as something different from and higher than the body and academic rituals that train people to place the source of discourse in the (...) mind. Second, it explores how the separation of discourse from the discourse-producing body is currently built and reproduced through participation in university and academic rituals. It holds that such participation installs in the bodies of academics an identification with the habit of producing discourses. Finally, it suggests that the fact that attempts to re-incorporate body to social life are performed by academics who have been trained in disembodying their discourses conditions the results of such attempts. (shrink)

These meditations, which begin with Stephan Schwartz and Mark Schroll's contested and contesting histories of the lineage and founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (below), contribute to the imagining of what Bethe Hagens calls "the relatively new interdisciplinary field of anthropology of consciousness.” Ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork of anthropologists, as well as fieldwork of students studying that fieldwork, highlight the paradox of anthropology's secularism and invite the reader, through the reading and writing of the text itself, to (...) participate in the practices of consciousness described. Using Schwartz's metaphor of "boulders in the stream,” these practices, and the modes of consciousness they invoke, serve as boulders that readers must swim around, or hop from, secularist anthropology through cyborg anthropology to an anthropology of consciousness itself. (shrink)

This essay centers on a storyteller's performance of ritual in stories to draw associations between the life of the Biblical Mary with her son Jesus and the subjectivities and dispositions of people living in impoverished conditions. The storyteller explores these subjectivities and dispositions, characterizing the exploration as a journey. She also defines an ethical position where the self meets otherness—both sacred and cultural—to engender positive human relations. The essay combines the storyteller's performance with the author's to reproduce the effects, advance (...) the ethics, mitigate the politics of representation, and provide an understanding of the journey's end—a place called home. (shrink)