Florinda Donner | |
---|---|
Born | Regine Margarita Thal 1944 |
Disappeared | 1998 |
Nationality | American |
Other names | Florinda Donner-Grau |
Occupation | writer |
Notable work | Shabono; The Witch's Dream; Being-in-Dreaming |
Florinda Donner (originally Regine Margarita Thal, later Florinda Donner-Grau) is an American writer and anthropologist known as one of Carlos Castaneda's "witches" (the term for three women who were friends of Castaneda).
Donner was born Regine Margarita Thal in Amberg, Bavaria in Germany on February 15, 1944[ citation needed ] to parents Rudolf Thal and Katarina Claussnitzer who in 1946 migrated to Venezuela when Donner was a child.[ citation needed ]
She studied anthropology gaining a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1972, and a master's degree in 1972. She did not complete her post-graduate degree, letting her graduate studies lapse in 1977, after having advanced to doctoral candidacy. [1] While studying she met Castaneda and worked with him on developing his thinking.[ citation needed ]
In addition to working on Castaneda's books, she wrote several books about indigenous healing, sorcery and lucid dreaming.[ citation needed ]
In 1982 Florinda Donner published a book, Shabono: A Visit to a Remote and Magical World in the South American Rain Forest, a narrative of living among the Yanomami Indians in the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest. The title is the Yanomami word for shelter, shabono.
Though the book was initially praised as a compelling account of Yanomami culture, in 1983 controversy broke out when an article in American Anthropologist [2] accused the book of not being based on original ethnographic work, but instead being a patchwork made of previously published ethnographic accounts. Rebecca De Holmes, the author of the critique, stated that it was unlikely that Donner had spent any amount of time among the Yanomami. Particularly she criticized Donner for having plagiarized the biographical account of the Brazilian woman Helena Valero, who grew up as a captive among the Yanomami, without acknowledging having borrowed large parts of her life story. Another critical review, by Dr. Debra Picchi, argues that the book was invalid as social science because of the author's autobiographical focus on her personal development and experience, rather than on describing the Yanomami people. [3] One critic suspected that Donner had worked from the many ethnographic movies about the Yanomami and argued that in that case her book could be considered an interpretive study of the visual documentary data. [4]
The validity of De Holmes' critique was largely accepted by the anthropological community. Even though Donner did not anywhere claim that her book was based on having actually lived among the Yanomami, she was roundly criticized for having used the ethnographic writing genre without her work in fact being based on anthropological methods. Eventually her former doctoral committee at UCLA published a letter in the Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, in which they expressed their disbelief in Donner's account, stating that she was present in Los Angeles during the period in which she supposedly lived among the Yanomami. When the book was published they were not aware that the author was their former student, as she had changed her name in the meantime. [1]
Some scholars later wondered why her book was criticized for being unscientific, even though it never made any explicit claims to scientific authority. [5] Combined with the controversy generated by the writings of Carlos Castañeda, the controversy about Donner's book contributed to sparking the ethnography "crisis of representation" of the 1980s, represented by the "Writing Culture" movement. The book is now generally considered "anthropologically-inspired fiction". [6]
After the death of her mentor Carlos Castaneda in 1998, Florinda and four other women who followed Castaneda disappeared from Los Angeles, California. One of the women's bodies, Patricia Lee Partin, was discovered in Death Valley in 2003, but the location of the rest remains a mystery. The last time Florinda was seen was the day after Castaneda's death. [7]
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Carlos Castañeda was an American writer. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe a training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the training he described is now generally considered to be fictional.
Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon is a polemical book written by author Patrick Tierney in 2000, in which the author accuses geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of conducting human research without regard for their subjects' well-being while conducting long-term ethnographic field work among the indigenous Yanomamo, in the Amazon basin between Venezuela and Brazil. He also wrote that the researchers had exacerbated a measles epidemic among the Native Americans, and that Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good committed acts of sexual impropriety with Yanomamo.
Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation is a 1928 book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Taʻū in American Samoa. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians is a biography of Helena Valero, a mixed-race mestizo woman who was captured in the 1930s as a girl by the Kohorochiwetari, a tribe of the Yanomami indigenous people, living in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. She lived with the Yanomami for about two decades. While living with the Yanoama, Valero married twice and gave birth to four children. She escaped in 1956 to what she refers to as "the white man" in the country of her birth. After rejection by her family and living in poverty at a mission, Valero chose to return to life with the Yanomami.
Taisha Abelar, born Maryann Simko, was an American writer and anthropologist who was an associate of Carlos Castaneda.
The Yanomami, also spelled Yąnomamö or Yanomama, are a group of approximately 35,000 indigenous people who live in some 200–250 villages in the Amazon rainforest on the border between Venezuela and Brazil.
The Yanomami people are an indigenous group who live in the Amazon Rainforest along the borders of Venezuela and Brazil. There are estimated to be only approximately 35,000 indigenous people remaining. They are interfluvial Indians who live in small villages along the Mavaca and Orinoco Rivers, with each village consisting of a single shabono, or communal dwelling. Largely uncontacted by the outside world, the Yanomami have been affected by illnesses introduced by gold miners since the 1980s. Anthropological studies have emphasized that the Yanomami are a violent people, and although this can be true, the women of the Yanomami culture generally abstain from violence and warfare. Although males dominate the Yanomami culture, Yanomami women play an important role in sustaining their lifestyle.
Kenneth Good is an anthropologist most noted for his work among the Yanomami and his account of his experiences with them: Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami. While researching and living with the group in Venezuela, Good married a Yanomami woman named Yarima, who emigrated to the United States with Good when he returned home. Their three children were raised in the United States, but Yarima, finding adapting to life in the United States too difficult, returned to her village when the children were young.
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is a folkloric and anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist and folklorist Sabina Magliocco of California State University, Northridge and first published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books titled 'Contemporary Ethnography', edited by the anthropologists Kirin Narayan of the University of Wisconsin and Paul Stoller of West Chester University.
Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revisited is an anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist Loretta Orion and published by Waveland Press in 1995.
Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization is an anthropological and philosophical study of the altered states of consciousness found in shamanism and European witchcraft written by German anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr. First published in 1978 by Syndikat Autoren-und Verlagsgesellschaft under the German title of Traumzeit: Über die Grenze zwischen Wildnis und Zivilisation, it was translated into English by the Hungarian-American anthropologist Felicitas Goodman and published by Basil Blackwell in 1985.
Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology is an anthropological study of contemporary Pagan and ceremonial magic groups that practiced magic in London, England, during the 1990s. It was written by English anthropologist Susan Greenwood based upon her doctoral research undertaken at Goldsmiths' College, a part of the University of London, and first published in 2000 by Berg Publishers.
Karen B. Strier is a primatologist. She is a Vilas Research Professor and Irven DeVore professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and co-editor of Annual Review of Anthropology. The main subject of her research is the Northern Muriqui, a type of spider monkey found in Brazil.
Margery Wolf was an American anthropologist, writer, scholar, and feminist activist. She published numerous ethnographic works on feminism, Taiwan and China.
Jacques Lizot is a French anthropologist and linguist. He lived among the Yanomami people in Venezuela for over 20 years, documenting their culture and language. Among his writings are the 1976 book The Yanomami in the Face of Ethnocide, the 1985 book Tales of the Yanomami: Daily Life in the Venezuelan Forest and the 2004 Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Yanomami Language. The 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado and the 2010 documentary film Secrets of the Tribe included allegations that Lizot had traded goods for sexual favours from young boys. Lizot denied the allegations.
Yanomamö: The Fierce People is a 1968 book by American cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. It is an ethnographic study of the Yanomami people of the Amazon.