![]() ![]() A graver accusation, and probably one of more general application, is that anthropologists are involved in a work of cultural and intellectual expropriation, plundering the knowledge of societies they study, but attempting to "preserve" indigenous peoples by insulating them from the ability to criticize or benefit from Western knowledge. Narby's (prudent) decision to frame his book as a narrative of personal discovery creates an apparent kinship with the "thick description" ethnography of Geertz, but one of his indictments of the anthropological field is that its texts (particularly those of the structuralists) tend to be arcane and tedious. All three authors ultimately reject to varying degrees the mechanistic materialism that is the principal intellectual heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries. Like Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, he turns vigorously against the intellectual status quo, challenging the implicit doctrines of anthropology in the way that Koestler does for psychology. Narby, like Bateson, is an anthropologist by primary academic training. All of these books are generalist studies that apply the latest (1960s for the earlier ones, and 1990s for Narby) scientific information about biology and evolution to problems that include the nature of consciousness and the alienation of humanity. ![]() I read Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent in a sequence that I began with Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity and continued with Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. ![]()
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