Wiley-Online-Library: Anthropology of Consciousness: Table of Contents

What It Was Like, What Happened, What It Is Like Now: Liminal Spaces and the Pedagogy of Recovery

Patrick L. Pellett — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:25:43 -0700

ABSTRACT

Addiction recovery is frequently interpreted through biomedical or punitive frameworks that overlook its cultural, ritual, and pedagogical dimensions. This article offers a theoretical and interpretive analysis of peer-led, meeting-based recovery communities in North America, particularly those organized around mutual-aid traditions such as Alcoholics Anonymous and related social-model practices. It argues that these settings function as ritual pedagogies, patterned systems of learning and moral practice through which participants reconstruct identity over time. Drawing on anthropological theories of ritual and liminality alongside perspectives from adult learning, recovery meetings are examined as environments of recurring liminality rather than singular rites of passage. While the familiar narrative sequence of what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now parallels classic tripartite models, recovery does not reliably culminate in stable incorporation. Instead, participants often move through cycles of instability, relapse and return. Within this framework, testimony, understood as structured first-person narrative sharing, functions as a central practice; sponsorship operates through relational mentorship; and shared texts and meeting formats serve as portable curricula that stabilize participation across time and space. These processes are sustained through a structural ethics of care that enables repeated reentry and ongoing transformation.

Mediumship in the Free State of Florida

Sarah Porch‐Lee — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:16:07 -0700

ABSTRACT

As the state of Florida continues to foster its reputation as a conservative political bastion, questions arise about women's experiences in the state—especially in spiritual, religious, and consciousness contexts. Drawing from both feminist anthropology and the anthropology of consciousness frameworks, “Mediumship in the Free State of Florida” discusses women's experiences in the practice of mediumship. This paper examines how the mediumship experience is interpreted by feminist perspectives, if women's mediumship experiences and work differ from men's, and discusses factors in central Florida that influence the work and experience of female mediums. These issues were addressed in surveys and interviews with mediums throughout Florida, and several areas of interest to the feminist study of consciousness were revealed. This paper discusses how Florida is beneficial to mediums and how mediumship highlights key feminist themes in religious and spiritual experiences for women.

Every Breath Brings Me Closer to Home—Auto‐Ethnographic Reflections About the Meaning of Somatic and Creative Practices in Facing Challenging Life Events

Sigrid Stjernswärd — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:59:11 -0700

ABSTRACT

Death is the prerequisite of life, life the prerequisite of death, just like chaos and order, light and shadow, joy and despair, love and grief, are each other's premises. When life breaks into pieces, despair may ensue, but darkness offers possibilities to tap into the light. The use of experiential somatic practices and creative expressions can reach deep and help illuminate conscious and unconscious processes, shedding light onto deeply rooted beliefs, emotions, and longings. This paper argues for the potential of exploring experiential somatic and creative work and expressions using arts-based research methods, facilitating the exploration of the complexities of experiential intra- and inter-subjective embodied spaces and processes in healing. Through an auto-ethnographic and a/r/tographic approach, the current exploration delves into the meaning of experiential somatic work and creative expressions, combined with witnessing, for dealing with challenging life events. It tentatively explores the potential of such work to bring hope where there is despair and life where there is death, which can be befriended. Such work can help move through suppression and closedness towards expansion and openness, promoting the appreciation of every breath and what it means to be in a physical body, with its human messiness and divine perfection. This paper shows that innovative research approaches can provide insight into complex experiential dimensions of somatic and creative work in supporting wellbeing.

The Vicissitudes of the Nafs: Madness, Paralysis, and the Work of Transgression in Sufi Ethics

Muhammad Osama Imran — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:48:19 -0700

ABSTRACT

How should we theorize Sufi ethics when the practice of zikr (remembrance) that leads to spiritual enlightenment (tazkiyya) might also bring one to the brink of majzubiyat (madness)? What forms of regulation or restraint are imagined or enacted by practitioners to prevent spiritual boundlessness from perverting into its underside of paralysis (faalij)? Drawing on three ethnographic scenes among practitioners of the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan, I examine zikr as a practice that cultivates states of divine awareness and consciousness while simultaneously exposing practitioners to the risk of ethical and experiential breakdown. I show how the disciplinary techniques meant to refine the nafs (base soul) are also feared to interrupt the embodied, relational, and ethical capacities through which practitioners sustain presence in social and moral life. This tension unsettles an ethical horizon of “perfectibility”, understood as cumulative refinement through discipline, and instead foregrounds a creative and at times transgressive labor of modulating devotional intensity so that movement toward God does not pervert into estrangement from both God and the world. I argue that through this labor ethical life comes to be organized by the improvisational and oscillatory temporality of protective interruptions that attend to the vicissitudes of the nafs, rather than by the temporality of habituation and incremental refinement.

Psychic Aggression: How Culture Deals With the Whammy

Richard Reichbart — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:33:17 -0700

ABSTRACT

If we are to accept the data from the field of parapsychology that telepathically a person, particularly unconsciously, may communicate with another person and that psychokinesis exists, we are confronted with the possibility that a person may aggressively hurt another through psychic means. This possibility has been anathema in the field of parapsychology, despite the fact that some parapsychologists have suggested it, and despite the fact that it may explain the resistance to accepting parapsychological data in the scientific community. Anthropologists are more than familiar with this idea as it is so often an intrinsic part of indigenous psychology and yet anthropologists too have been reluctant to accept that there may be a kernel of truth to the belief that one person can through psychological rather than physical means administer a “whammy” on another. The author explores this concept, noting how often the idea is associated with oral aggression in indigenous culture and how this too may reveal why we are so reluctant to entertain the concept.

On 3‐MMC: A Cathinone I Have Come to Know and Love

Carmen Ostrander — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:26:52 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to complicate the mythology of a compound in a state of becoming. I will trace lightly its origins as a cultural disruptor and how I am implicated in this imperative. Introducing you to 3-MMC will require multiple modes of storytelling and taking of liberties, drawing on literature reviews, practice-based research, prose, patent documents, hearsay and Facebook posts. Connecting dots from powder to plant and back, I will describe how I am situated as a provider of substance-assisted therapies, within the chaotic landscape of the “Psychedelic Renaissance,” where a methodology has emerged through ongoing co-research partnerships, exploring the therapeutic possibilities of this molecule. What follows is a prismatic telling of the story of the cathinone 3-MMC (methylmethcathinone). I offer some pieces of the story that are known to me, and some that exist formally. There is always more to the story, of course, and much sandwiched between the lines.

(Un)threading Rhythms: On Affect and Vibe in a Rave

Tatiana Yunadi — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:23:59 -0700

ABSTRACT

In Toronto, raves arise across large nightclubs, DIY venues and outdoors, despite changing regulations that have further arranged and narrowed their possibility in the past 4 years. Following a rave in Toronto, this work explores ways that potentialities and affects emerge in a single night, through my entry of taking part in dancing and tearing down materials. In recent anthropological works on raves, authors tend to highlight altered states and how transformative experiences are intentionally prepared. Yet there is space to discuss surprises and improvization throughout a night, questioning intention and transformation as a given. Informed by a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, I suggest that raves can create affects in indeterminate ways while still attending to excess or incoherency. In this vein, I conceptualize affects in relation to chaos: as intensities in indeterminate becomings, capable of taking on their own rhythms and cutting across bodies and sensations. Drawing from journal notes of the rave, I write through points of gaps, awkwardness, and incoherencies that follow along stories of coming together and coming undone in broader rhythms. Tactile and sonorous experiences of attaching cables or swaying my neck to metallic snares come up against moments I acknowledge are ineffable, or that I cannot be attentive to. A sound may resonate with a rise in intensity, or be unnoticed, or change entirely in timbre. In exploring indeterminacy, I recall moments of catching a breath in the crowd, or when the dancefloor and music seem to exhale passingly into step or chaotic stupor. Through my positioning in equipment disassembly and dancing in a night, this work hopes to offer an unsettling approach.

Unconscious Causation and Control of Human Behavior During Dissociation

Robert A. King — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:20:11 -0700

ABSTRACT

Modern research has suggested that almost all human behavior occurs with an interaction between conscious and unconscious processes. However, the exact degree and specifics of that association are still a matter of debate. This article draws attention to an additional domain of consciousness related to that particular conversation that might be beneficial in resolving some of the disagreements that exist. Salient implications can be derived from examining cases of observed somatic continuance, referring to perceived out-of-body experiences in which the dissociated, consciously aware ego has the impression of watching as an observer while the physical body simultaneously continues to seemingly function on its own in amazing ways. A discussion concerning such cases suggests that the unconscious might be powerful enough to function in normalcy without conscious input in the moment. That conscious awareness has the sufficient power to alter and control some aspects of unconscious causation of behavior when not dissociated, and that the unconscious can take over control of human behavior during threats to life or social standing that are associated with various forms of dissociation. These insights can have important ramifications for consciousness studies while possibly helping us better understand the relevance of the unconscious in regard to human behavior.

Erratum to “Cogumelos do gênero Psilocybe nas Américas e no Brasil: Sua história com a humanidade, seus diversos usos e sua cosmopolítica”

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:39:56 -0700

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

When Urgency Drops: Temporal Consciousness and the Choreography of Dying

Louise Chartrand — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:56:08 -0700

ABSTRACT

In the hospital, the transition from fighting for life to preparing for death involves not only a shift in medical repertoires but also a profound transformation in temporal experience. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a Canadian intensive care unit, this article examines how the tempo of care, its rhythms, urgencies, and pauses shapes consciousness at the threshold of death. I follow Suzanne, a patient whose cardiac arrhythmia brought her care team to an urgent crossroads, where the frantic pace of acute care collapsed into the slower movements of palliative preparation. Building on previous work identifying the legal, curing, and care repertoires guiding end-of-life decisions, I argue that tempo functions as a fourth dimension modulating how these repertoires are deployed and experienced. When urgency drops, time becomes palpable: thickening around bodies, words, and gestures revealing dying as not merely a biological event but a choreographed, intersubjective accomplishment collectively sensed, negotiated, and enacted.

Violence Against Consciousness Creates Spectral Presences That Warp Perception

Christian Frenopoulo — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:07:23 -0700