– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) The ways in which the neuroscientist turns to hermeneutical and semiotic terms is quite remarkable here. Not only is this a “translation hypothesis,” but…
Category: Florilegium
Jeffrey Kripal on the translation model
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Edward Kelly has highlighted another problem inherent in the transmission metaphor: it can imply a more or less perfect one-to-one communication, as in a…
Jeffrey Kripal (& Bertrand Méheust) on actual historical data
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) In order to demonstrate his own point, Méheust invokes Alison Winter’s historical study of the effective use of magnetic anesthesia during surgical operations in…
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Jeffrey Kripal on group dynamics
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) In the light of such impossible potentialities and possible actualizations, human nature begins to be seen as fundamentally contextual and unconditioned, that is, as…
Jeffrey Kripal (& Bertrand Méheust) on the guardians of the threshold, concepts butoirs, cultural shock zones, etc.
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Historians of psychology generally acknowledge Puységur’s role in “the discovery of the unconscious,” but they usually relegate this role to a subordinate one, to…
Jeffrey Kripal (& Bertrand Méheust) on la chose innommable & indetermination
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Moreover, and more bizarrely still, they [UFOs. – P.] are mischievously omnipotent in their ability to show themselves to us in quite outrageous ways,…
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Jeffrey Kripal (& Aimé Michel) on the uncanniness of science
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Aimé Michel also had a fascinating take on modern science. He eventually came to the conclusion that physics and science as a whole are…
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Jeffrey Kripal on Jacque Vallée & gnosticism
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Vallee’s method here is quite interesting. He begins with the hypothesis that the absurd is meaningful, that the dilemma signals new thought, that we…
Eric Gable on becoming an insider
– Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau (2010) Several months later I shared another, far more momentous, meal. I was attending an initiation ritual for blacksmiths. Among Manjaco, as in much of…
Tanya Luhrmann on laboratary psychiatry & grants
– Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry (2001) In the summer of 1994, I called Randy Gollub because a senior psychiatrist had described her to me as a star. (Unless otherwise indicated,…
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