"One of the most long-lived and successful social and cultural systems in South America is that of the Warao Indians of the Venezuelan Orinoco Delta. In Mystic Endowment Johannes Wilbert details the Warao's ecology of mind as well as their understanding of the surrounding world. Throughout centuries of occupancy in the Orinoco Delta, the Warao have successfully adapted themselves to this hostile econiche, converting a seemingly chaotic refuge area into a homeland for successive generations. They accomplished this conversion by familiarizing (...) themselves with the region's microenvironments and natural resources and then encoding this vital information in their mythology. The resulting corpus of lore reveals how the Warao have endowed their habitat with profound existential meaning. The transmission of this mystic endowment ensured the Indians' physical and spiritual survival." "In the ten essays comprising Mystic Endowment, Johannes Wilbert illumines revealing particulars of Warao religious ethnology. He guides the reader through often bizarre and chaotic imagery to an appreciation of the cosmic order established by the myth-making mind of this aboriginal society. The cosmology and cosmogony of the Warao describe the different places of destiny of the human soul; the various artifactual and musical worlds; the houses that situate them in the religious universe; and the interaction between heaven and earth. Shamanic lore is particularly well developed in Warao culture, and Wilbert stresses the crucial role shamanistic ideology plays in the preservation of the community's social and psychic equilibrium."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul.

On the 20th anniversary of its publication, this classic manifesto is updated with an important new preface by the author. Freire reflects on the impact his book has had, and on many of the issues it raises for readers in the 1990s. These include the fundamental question of liberation and inclusive language as it relates to Freire's own insights and approaches.

Scientists and engineers lack the equivalent of an ethics committee to which their colleagues in the medical profession may turn when ethical dilemmas arise. In the US workers in aerospace industry have campaigned for a Technology Bill of Rights. In the UK there has been a vigorous movement around the concept of socially useful and environmentally desirable technology. The organisation Scientists for Social Responsibility has set up a panel of scientists who can advise younger colleagues on issues of ethical responsibility.

In the paper, three propositions are put forward. First, that intellectual structures of wide scope commonly lead to conclusions which are ethically unacceptable; secondly that the ethically unacceptable consequences of science arise from one particular presupposition which it adopts, namely that of causality; thirdly, that causality is no essential part of science.