Boulders in the Stream: The Lineage and Founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Conscriousness

By Stephan A. Schwartz
ABSTRACT

The founding of what has become the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) can only be understood properly in the cultural context of its heritage, and the world in which it came to life. The author is the last living founder from the an original group that included himself, Professor J. Norman Emerson, and Professor Joseph K. Long at the core, with a somewhat larger group advising. The roots of SAC began during the 1974 annual meetings of the American Anthropology Association in Mexico City, where the idea of the society that became SAC was conceived. {Who was in the original group besides you & Joe?}. This paper is an historical narrative tracing the intellectual lineage of the this effort SAC and how it came to be.up to the time of SAC’s affiliation with the AAA in 1990. It focuses particularly on seminal events at the 1974 annual meetings of the American Anthropology Association in Mexico City. It describes the conflicts, schisms, and often wrenching disputes that occurred as the organization struggled to define itself and the balance it wanted between the experiential and the intellectual. At The paper also places these events in a larger anthropological context, explaining that a world view which had evolved over decades was breaking down in the 1970s, and describing how painful this process was. The academic birth of SAC, the 1974 Rhine-Swanton Symposium on Parapsychology and Anthropology, AAA Session 703, was only one manifestation of this shift. those meetings a paradigm within anthropology begun decades before was shaken, and the process was painful. The immediate causeAn were was a series of symposia: The Rhine Swanton Symposium on Parapsychology and Anthropology, Session 703, and several even larger vortex of symposia onstruggle centered on the challenge to anthropology represented by Carlos Castaneda and his writings. Through a series of best selling books, including the publication of his dissertation for the anthropology department of UCLA, Castaneda, had attacked the way a critical part of anthropology was conducted. The argument in his own narrative was that one could not understand the s Shamanic world view, without becoming a shaman. No informant could ever convey this, because so much of it was experiential. And it could not be properly known unless one entered with sincerity into the experience, as a participant, not just as an observer. Implicit in this was the worldview that non-technological cultures can be as insightful as their technological counterparts; albeit in different areas of human functioning. Two insights central to this thesis are were particularly relevant to SAC: There is an aspect of human consciousness that exists independent of time and space that is susceptible to volitional control; and, there is an interconnection between all life forms which must be understood if the universal impulse humans feel towards the spiritual component of their lives is to properly mature. The SAC can be seen in pure Kuhnian terms as one response to the reassessment that Castaneda forced on anthropology.