Prerequisites

There are no specific prerequisites. However, prior knowledge of basic anthropological theories and methods is recommended, as it will facilitate understanding of the topics discussed.

Content (Syllabus outline)

Anthropological enquiries have always been motivated by the question of how do we know ourselves? How do we conceive and articulate our experiences and knowledge of others, and of the world? What is at the core of human experience and our embodied existence? What happens inside us when we become aware of our presence in the world? How can we, as researchers and individuals, develop a closer connection with our fellow human beings and the communities we study?

In order to answer these questions, anthropologists study various ways in which people think about and engage with the world around them. We explore:

• human relationships with other people, animals, plants and other living and non-living beings, including emerging relationship with artificial intelligence.
• we study habits, everyday practices and situational behaviours, as well as ritual realities;
• the ways in which individuals and communities deal with their bodies, minds and thoughts;
• the relationships they cultivate towards themselves as part of nature and with nature.
• we also study how people create the world with and through language;
• relationship to reproduction, illness, health, birth and death;
• the need to create and find meaning;
• political stances; economic beliefs;
• a sense of the sacred and religion;
• relationship to laws and justice; how people create and live by taboos, morals and ethics;
• kinship and transgenerational bonds;
• the physical and infrastructural environment;
• memory, sensory and emotional capacities;
• different temporalities and histories;
• the ways how aesthetic sense is developed;
• the visible and invisible;
• relationship to dreams;
• personal and socially conditioned understanding of the self and community; and so on.

We follow all these existential modalities in such a way that we try to avoid further reification or personification of the observed through mere description or naming. Fundamental anthropological teachings tell us that we cannot understand the world if we experience it exclusively from our own perspective and that, despite their efforts, a person can never think about the world holistically.

Therefore, the quality of anthropological practice depends entirely on the researcher’s ability to empathise — to hear, feel, think and internalise the attitudes and processes of others, which are often radically different.

The overall aim of the course Anthropology of Consciousness: On Practices of Understanding Self, Others, and the World is to illuminate and analyze worldwide cultural and social practices, which posit that consciousness lies at the core of human being and the core of the human experience. This vein of thinking presupposes that consciousness is, so to speak, “the substrate within which all human experiences occur” (Blainey 2010: 118).

Readings

• Andreasen, N. C. 2001. Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Alberts, Thomas Karl. 2015. Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity. Ashgate Publishing.
• Bateson, Gregory. 1972. 2019. Ekologija idej: Zbrani eseji iz antropologije, psihiatrije, evolucije in epistemologije. Ljubljana: Knjižna zbirka Koda, Beletrina.
• Bateson, Gregory. 2002. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. New York: Hampton Press.
• Blainey, Marc. 2010. The Future of the Discipline. Considering the Ontological/Methodological Future of the Anthropology of Consciousness, Part II – Towards an Ethnometaphysics of Consciousness. Anthropology of Consciousness 21 (2): 113–138.
• Blackmore, Susan. 2007. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press
• Castillo, J. Richard. 1995. Culture, Trance, and the Mind-Brain. The Anthropology of Consciousness 2 (3-4): 17–34.
• Clifford, James. 1986. New Translations of Michel Leiris. Sulfur 15: 4–125.
• Chalmers, David J. 1997. The Conscious Mind. In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
• Descola, Philipe. 2012. Beyond nature and culture: The traffic of souls. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(1), 473–500. doi:14318/hau2.1.021
• Dumit, Joseph. 2012. Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health. Duke University Press.
• Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1977. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2016. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Hollan, Douglas W. 2022. Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology, 51: 155-171.
• Lakoff, Andrew. 2005. Pharmaceutical reason: knowledge and value in global psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Laughlin, Charles D. 2011. Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain. Brisbane: Daily Grail.
• Luhrmann, Tanya. 2001. Of Two Minds. An Anthropology Looks at American Psychiatry. London: Vintage.
• Luhrmann, M. Tanya. 2011. Hallucinations and sensory overrides. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 71–85.
• Luhrmann, M. Tanya in Rachel Morgain. 2012. Prayer as inner sense cultivation. Ethos, 40(4): 359–389.
• Luhrmann, M. Tanya. 2020. Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit. JRAI, 26(S1): 9-27.
• Mittermaier, Amira. 2011. Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Pandolfo, Stefania. 2018. Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. University of Chicago Press.
• Petrović-Šteger, Maja. 2013.’Parasecurity and Paratime in Serbia: Neocortical Defence and National Consciousness. Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future. Pedersen Morten Axel in Holbraad Martin (ur.), 141-162. London: Routledge.
• Price-Williams Douglass in Dureen Hughes. 1994. Shamanism and Altered State of Consciousness. Anthropology of Consciousness, 5(2): 1–15.
• Rodd H. Robin. 2006. Piaroa Sorcery and the Navigation of Negative Affect: To Be Aware, to Turn Away. Anthropology of Consciousness, 17 (1): 35–64.
• Rose, Nikolas in Joelle M. Abi-Rached. 2013. Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Revonsuo, Anitti. 2006. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Safran, D. Jeremy. 2003. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: An Unfolding Dialogue. Somerville: Widsom Publications.
• Stewart, Charles. 2012. Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Harvard University Press.
• Swancutt, Katherine. 2024. Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes. Annual Review of Anthropology, 53:111-126.
• Thobeka Wreford, Jo. 2008. Working with Spirit. Experiencing Izangoma in Contemporary South Africa. New York: Berghahn.
• Thompson, Evan. 2015. Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Throop, C. Jason. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Tononi, Giulio in Gerald M. Edelman. 1998. Consciousness and Complexity. Science 282: 1846–1853.
• Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469–488.
• Winkelman, Michael. 2010. Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger.
• Windt, Jennifer M. 2015. Dreaming: A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Objectives and competences

The course will introduce students to various approaches, modes of expression and theories that seek to enable and deepen understanding of consciousness, mind, self and various ideological, mental and behavioral attitudes. Lectures, based on deuterolearning (per G. Bateson), will be dedicated to reflection on the universality of human experience and the circular nature of the world and ideas.

The lectures will query and debate the above mentioned propositions by considering the following topics:

• Clinical and contemplative perspectives on consciousness: consciousness as a state of matter, as an entity, experience or process?
• Consciousness, practices of consciousness and ethnometaphysics;
• Consciousness, anthropology of self and intersubjectivity;
• On human cognition and cognitive anthropology;
• Cosmological/bio/psycho/political understandings of consciousness and practices of consciousness;
• Embodied consciousness/consciousness without a body
• Consciousness and neuroscience;
• Individual vs. collective consciousness;
• Ritual consciousness;
• Consciousness and mental health;
• Consciousness, trauma and memory;
• Consciousness and spiritual practices;
• Altered states of consciousness – trance, meditation, lucid dreaming, possession, illness;
• Understanding consciousness in ancestral, shamanic, neoshamanic and transpersonal practices;
• Epistemologies of healing;

The role of entheogens and psychoactive substances in altering consciousness.

Intended learning outcomes:

Students will learn to contextualize, describe, analyze, and communicate different anthropological perspectives and understandings of the ‘mind’, the world of ideas, and human consciousness. The condition for successful completion of the course is that students prepare a written scientific critical analysis of a selected topic or case study.

Learning and teaching methods:

Types of learning/teaching:

• Frontal teaching/Lectures
• Work in smaller groups or pair work
• Independent students work
• e-learning

Teaching methods:

• Explanation
• Conversation/discussion/debate/consultation
• Critical reading and analysis of selected texts and other material
• Case studies
• Different presentation
• Fieldwork and ethnographic excercises
• Involvement of guest lecturers

Assessment

• Long written assignment (60 %),
• Presentations (20 %),
• Final examination (written/oral) (20 %)

Lecturer’s references

• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja. 2025. ‘Visionaries in Hiding: Figuring and Prefiguring’. The Oracle: On Fantasy and Freedom. Edited by Chus Martinez and Ajda Ana Kocutar, 97-116. London: Sterenberg Press.
• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja, 2021. ‘The textures of touch: a study of a sensory journey into
• creativity, fashion, and entrepreneurship’. Studia ethnologica Croatica, 33: 121-145. ISSN
• 1330-3627. https://hrcak.srce.hr/268252, DOI: 10.17234/SEC.33.5.
• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja, 2020. On the side of predictable: Visioning the Future in Serbia / O onome što predvidljivo ne obuhvaća: Zamišljanje bodućnosti u Srbiji. Etnološka tribina: Godišnjak Hrvatskog etnološkog društva, 50 (43): 3-67.
• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja, 2019. ‘Pred-časnost in po-časnost znanstvenih vizij Gregoryja
• Batesona’. Bateson, Gregory. Ekologija idej: zbrani eseji iz antropologije, psihiatrije, evolucije in epistemologije, 537-551. Ljubljana: Beletrina, Knjižna zbirka Koda.
• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja, 2018. ‘O “odprtem pogledu” Miselne pokrajine in doživljanje časa družbenih podjetnikov in vizionarjev v današnji Srbiji’. Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva, 58 (3-4): 7-23.
• PETROVIĆ-ŠTEGER, Maja, 2013. ‘Parasecurity and Paratime in Serbia: Neocortical Defence and National Consciousness’. Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future. Edited by Pedersen Morten Axel in Holbraad Martin, 141-162. London: Routledge.