Weston La Barre | |
|---|---|
 La Barre in 1954 | |
| Born | 13 December 1911 Uniontown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | 13 March 1996 (aged 84) |
Raoul Weston La Barre (1911-1996) was an American anthropologist, best known for his work in ethnobotany, particularly with regard to Native-American religion, and for his application of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories to ethnography.
La Barre was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a banker. After graduating from Princeton University in 1933 he began field work with the Yale Institute of Human Relations. During this period, La Barre worked with one of his lifelong academic associates, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University. Travelling and sleeping in Schultes' old car, they traveled extensively throughout Oklahoma on their quest to study the peyote cult of the Plains Indians. La Barre received his doctorate from Yale in 1937 with a thesis on peyote religion. In a 1961 article, La Barre wrote that "It was [La Barre's teacher at Yale] Edward Sapir, more than any other person, who first effectively imported psychoanalysis into the body of American anthropology...At a time when the official anthropological journals were systematically ignoring psychoanalysis and the prevailing climate of opinion was chilly if not hostile, Sapir was giving his students as required reading the works of Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and other classic writers." In the 1970s, La Barre taught those same classic psychoanalytic works to Duke medical students.
In 1937 La Barre was made a Sterling Fellow at Yale, and conducted field work in South America with the Aymara of Lake Titicaca region and the Uros of the Rio Desaguadero.
In 1938 his first book, The Peyote Cult , was published, and was immediately hailed as a classic, on the cutting edge of psychological anthropology. He was enabled by a Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship to go to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas in order to be trained in psychoanalysis, and from 1938 to 1939 he continued his research into the psychological depths of indigenous cultures at the clinic.
La Barre married Maurine Boie in 1939; she was a social worker and the editor of the social-work journal Family. She went on to teach at the Duke University Medical Center. The couple had three children together.
From 1939 until 1943 La Barre taught anthropology at Rutgers University. World War II intervened, and he served as a Community Analyst for the War Relocation Authority based in Topaz, Utah. Through his military connections, he was able to conduct field research in China and India during the closing years of the war. He served on the staff of Field Marshal Montgomery, which he described in later years as "glorious". During the war years, he was able to travel on official business, and he made the first of three crossings of Africa.
In 1946, La Barre was appointed professor at Duke University, which was to become his academic home for the rest of his career.
In 1954, [1] he published The Human Animal , a study of the psychoanalytical approach to psychology and culture. The book became a global bestseller.
He published The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau and They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-handling Cult, which are regarded as landmark studies of indigenous peoples in the Amazon and the extremist culture of Christian fundamentalism lurking in the urban and rural landscapes of contemporary America.
During the 1950s and 1960s, La Barre became absorbed in the study of altered states of consciousness precipitated by the ingestion of shamanistic plants from peyote and ayahuasca to magic mushrooms. Collaborating with Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson, La Barre conducted profoundly original investigations into the anthropology and archeology of altered states of consciousness. Convinced that the shamanism of Siberia was equivalent to the shamanic practices he had observed in the Americas, La Barre established a global theory of shamanism that supplanted that of Mircea Eliade.
In 1970, La Barre was honoured with an endowed chair, the James B. Duke Professorship of Anthropology, and he published the book that he considered to be his magnum opus, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, a psychoanalytic account of the birth of religion through the lens of his treatment of the ghost dance religion of native America.
His later books include: Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion and Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality.
Throughout his academic career, La Barre received a host of honours, awards, and titles.
He died in 1996 at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Large collections of his papers are deposited at Duke University and the National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Institution.
Edward Sapir was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the practice from his theoretical model of personality organization and development, psychoanalytic theory. Freud's work stems partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with what they believe to be a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world for the purpose of healing, divination, or to aid human beings in some other way.
Entheogens are psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior for the purposes of engendering spiritual development or otherwise in sacred contexts. Anthropological study has established that entheogens are used for religious, magical, shamanic, or spiritual purposes in many parts of the world. Entheogens have traditionally been used to supplement many diverse practices geared towards achieving transcendence, including divination, meditation, yoga, sensory deprivation, asceticism, prayer, trance, rituals, chanting, imitation of sounds, hymns like peyote songs, drumming, and ecstatic dance. The psychedelic experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such as those experienced in meditation, near-death experiences, and mystical experiences. Ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.
Richard Evans Schultes was an American biologist. He may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He worked on entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants, particularly in Mexico and the Amazon, involving lifelong collaborations with chemists. He had charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University; several of his students and colleagues went on to write popular books and assume influential positions in museums, botanical gardens, and popular culture.
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist.
Robert Louis Moore was an American Jungian analyst and consultant in private practice in Chicago, Illinois. He was the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary; a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago; and director of research for the Institute for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and editor of numerous books in psychology and spirituality, he lectured internationally on his formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was working on Structural Psychoanalysis and Integrative Psychotherapy: A Neo-Jungian Paradigm at the time of his death. Beginning in 2014 he suffered a series of mini strokes and was suffering from vascular dementia, a disease that can cause confusion, extreme aggression, combative behavior, and memory loss. He murdered his wife, Margaret Shanahan, and then took his own life in a 2016 murder-suicide. His niece, Marina Moore Weems, in an 2022 interview disputed this, pointing to the forensic report which, she said, found no compelling evidence of a gun fired by himself.
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi is an Israeli professor of psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel. In 1970 Beit-Hallahmi received a PhD in clinical psychology from Michigan State University.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, or Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author applies his work to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood".
Melford Elliot Spiro was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology. He is known for his critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory—wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and virtually limitless cultural diversity—and for his emphasis on the theoretical importance of unconscious desires and beliefs in the study of stability and change in social and cultural systems, particularly in respect to the family, politics, and religion. Explicated in numerous theoretical publications, they are empirically exemplified in monographs based on his fieldwork in Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia, an Israeli kibbutz, and a village in Burma.
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.
Alice Beck Kehoe is a feminist anthropologist and archaeologist. She has done considerable field research among Native American peoples in the upper plains of the US and Canada, and has authored research volumes on Native American archaeology and Native American history. She is also the author of several general anthropology and archaeology textbooks.
Sudhir Kakar is an Indian psychoanalyst, novelist and author in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion.
Paul James Bohannan was an American anthropologist known for his research on the Tiv people of Nigeria, spheres of exchange and divorce in the United States.
The Human Animal is a 1954 book by the anthropologist Weston La Barre, in which the author discusses the psychoanalytical approach to psychology and culture. The classicist Norman O. Brown described the book as the most significant attempt at creating a "general theory of language" through a synthesis of psychoanalysis with other disciplines.
Cimora is a Peruvian term used to describe a brew with hallucinogenic properties made from the “San Pedro” cacti in South America, used traditionally for shamanic purposes and healing in Peru and Bolivia. The name is also used to describe a number of both hallucinogenic and non-hallucinogenic plants in the region, some of which are used in traditional medicines. Which plants go by the name Cimora is an ethnobotanical problem that has been debated at great length by ethnobotanists in many different journals. The term Cimora is said to refer to “algo malo”, meaning something bad. San Pedro goes by many names including Pachanoi, Aguacolla, El Remedio, Gigantón, and Cactus of the Four Winds. The ritualistic use of the brew is similar to Ayahuasca, which is a South American used as a traditional spirit medicine in Brazil, although while the active ingredient in Ayahuasca is DMT, the active ingredient in Cimora is mescaline. The use of Cimora and the rituals involved have evolved throughout history due to the influence of those who controlled Peru at different stages, although it has almost always involved the use of the San Pedro cactus and its mescaline content.
Dema Deity is a concept introduced by Adolf Ellegard Jensen following his research on religious sacrifice. Jensen was a German ethnologist who furthered the theory of Cultural Morphology founded by Leo Frobenius.
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation is a 1965 book about Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, written by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur. In Freud and Philosophy, Ricœur interprets Freud's work in terms of hermeneutics, the theory of the rules that govern the interpretation of a particular text, and discusses phenomenology, a school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl. He addresses questions such as the nature of interpretation in psychoanalysis, the understanding of human nature and the relationship between Freud's interpretation of culture and other interpretations. The book was first published in France by Éditions du Seuil, and in the United States by Yale University Press.
Michael D. Robbins is an American author, psychoanalyst, and former professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco. His psychoanalytic research has focused on how the mind works in western and non-western cultures, particularly with regard to schizophrenia and other psychoses, language, creativity, conscious and unconscious mental processes.
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