29
Ibid. p. 109.
30 Ibid. p. 109.
31 Ibid. p. 38.
32
Ibid. p. 361.
33
Littleton has an understanding of liminality and the primitive mind, but his openness to them seems to have been accompanied by some dubious judgement. He was friendly with Carlos Castaneda and endorsed his work (“An Emic Account of Sorcery: Carlos Castaneda and the Rise of a New Anthropology” by C. Scott Littleton, 1976). Even in his 1985 introduction to How Natives Think Littleton did not seem convinced that Castaneda’s work was a hoax and only noted that it “has been called into serious question” (p. xlvii). More recently Litttl-ton suggested that Castaneda may have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens and that Don Juan Matus was perhaps an ET alien. Littleton cited the work of John Mack, David Jacobs, and Budd Hopkins in support of the idea (Letter, The Excluded Middle, No. 7, 1997, p. 6). Littleton’s deficient judgement is compelling evidence of the dangers of the liminal that face academics. Contact with liminality can make it difficult for one to distinguish fantasy from reality, making one an easy victim of hoaxes.
34
Translator’s Preface To The Second Edition by John W. Harvey (1949), see Otto, 1917/1975, p. xvi.
35
Otto, 1917/1975, p. 100.
36 Ibid. pp. 14-15.
37
Freud, 1913/1961, p. 26.
38
Ibid. pp. 26-27.
Durkheim, 1912/1965, pp. 359-360.
Ibid. p. 360.
Ibid. p. 358.
Ibid. p. 358.
Otto, 1917/1975, p. 4.
44 Ibid. p. 64.
45
The date for Weber’s Economy and Society is for the original manuscript. See Ephraim Fischoff s appendix in Weber’s The Sociology of Religion, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1964, p. 277. (Original work published 1922, after Weber’s death).
46
For a discussion of some of the interpretive controversies, see Structure and Infrastructure in Primitive Society: Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown by Neville Dyson-Hudson in Macksey and Donato, 1970/1972, pp. 218-246.
47
Macksey & Donato, 1970/1972.
48
Howard Gardner, 1973/1981, p. 135.
49
Totemism, p. 98.
50 Some of the very same issues are addressed in mystical theology. See for instance Ewert Cousins’ Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (1978).
51 Gardner, 1973/1981, p. 113.
52
Ashley, 1988, p. 105.
53
Leach, The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, 1967, p. xvii.
54
In his discussion of bricolage in The Savage Mind (1962/1966, p. 17), Levi-Strauss gave four brief examples, one involved Georges Melies and another Charles Dickens. Both were magic performers, a fact probably unknown to Levi-Strauss.
Leach, Claude Levi-Strauss, 1970, p. 28.
56 One cannot divorce the ideas from the man, and Levi-Strauss’ comments on his own personality give insight into his theories. He admitted that “I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’” (1978/1979, p. 3-4). He also acknowledged that “I don’t have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me” (1978/1979, p. 3). These statements are a bit reminiscent of mediumship. His comparisons and metaphors often require reflection but are frequently fruitful. The opening sentence of his book Totemism is intriguing: “Totemism is like hysteria …”
Comparing the ideas of the two men is a difficult task, Ron Messer (1986), who has written on the trickster, has made an attempt to do so, with perhaps only limited success.
58 James Boon, in an appendix appropriately entitled Trickstering in his book Other Tribes, Other Scribes (1982), remarks on these three anthropologists’ interest in marginality and the supernatural.
Chapter 23—Literary Criticism, Meaning, and the Trickster
1 King James Version
2
For an idea of the range of structuralism, see Macksey and Donato (1970/1972), a collection of papers presented at a 1966 symposium at Johns Hopkins University.
3
As mentioned in the chapter on reflexivity, ethnomethodology used the same strategy to accommodate itself to the establishment.
4
For biographical material on Leach, see An Interview with Edmund Leach by Adam Kuper, Current Anthropology, Vol. 27, 1986, pp. 375-382; Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology by Edmund Leach, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13, 1984, pp. 1-23 (see pp. 9-10 for comments on the engineering influence). See also Edmund Leach: A Bibliography, London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper no. 42, 1990.
5 Lane, 1970, p. 14.
6 Ibid. p. 17.
7 Saussure, 1916/1959, p. 113.
8 Saussure, 1916/1959, pp. 111-112.
9
Saussure, 1916/1959, p. 112.
10 Ibid. p. 113.
11 Leach, 1964, p. 34.
12
Ibid. p. 35.
13 Ibid. p. 37.
14
With semiotics being raised, a short digression on Charles Sanders Peirce is warranted because of his connections with psychical research. Peirce’s father taught mathematics at Harvard, and Charles received a degree in chemistry from that university but worked as a physicist for 30 years for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Peirce was an anti-structural character in many ways. He held few and brief academic positions. He did not ingratiate himself to administrators, colleagues, or students, often refusing to keep appointments. Peirce inherited a bit of money that allowed him to purchase a house, but he did not have enough for an easy existence, and he complained that he could not afford books. He died poor and forgotten in 1914, and Edward Moore tells us that “Only William James did what he could to make Peirce’s final years easier.” (See American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey by Edward C. Moore, 1961, pp. 21-22.)
Peirce published only one book in his lifetime, and that was on astronomical observations, but his many papers were collected years after his death and released in a series of eight volumes (1931—1958). The Charles S. Peirce Society is now devoted to his work, and it has published a professional journal since 1965. Peirce was far ahead of his time, and he understood that academic bureaucracy is conducive to neither scientific creativity nor inventiveness. He commented that “Wherever there is a large class of academic professors who are provided with good incomes and looked up to as gentlemen, scientific inquiry must languish.” (See Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume 1: Principles of Philosophy edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931, p. 22.) Peirce recognized something about the anti-structure required for innovation, and sociologist C. Wright Mills and others have since made similar observations (see Mills, 1959/1967, pp. 103-106.).
Peirce is most famous for the philosophical school of pragmatism, which he founded along with William James. Pragmatists had some impact on psychical research. In England, F. C. S. Schiller was pragmatism’s leading proponent, and both James and Schiller served as president of the Society for Psychical Research. Peirce contributed skeptical pieces to the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research and his brother, Harvard professor and dean, James M. Peirce, was a member of the ASPR committee on thought-transference. (See Criticism on ‘Phantasms of the Living.’: An Examination of an Argument of Messrs. Gurney, Myers, and Podmore by C. S. Peirce, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1887, pp. 150-157; Mr. Peirce’s Rejoinder, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1887, pp. 180215. The reports of the ASPR committee on thought-transference, which J. M. Peirce signed, are found in Proceedings of th
e American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1885, pp. 6-9, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1886, pp. 106-112.)
This was Saussure’s and Barthes’ usage which is not shared by everyone in semiotics, a field with some confusion in its terminology.
16 Eco, 1967/1976/1979, p. 7.
Eco’s Limits of Interpretation opens with a discussion of John Wilkins’ Mercury; or, The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641) which was one of the very first to discuss mentalist methods (though this was not mentioned by Eco); Wilkins also favorably discussed communication with angels and spirits. He was no marginal figure but rather one of the original members of the British Royal Society.
18 De Man, 1971/1983, p. 11.
19
Barthes, 1967/1970, p. 410.
20
Smith, 1990, p. 279.
21
For a brief discussion of some of the scandals, see Postmodernism, Theory, and the End of the Humanities by E. Christian Kopff, Chronicles, January 1996,
pp. 16-19.
22
Lehman, 1991, p. 187.
23
Telepathy by Jacques Derrida, translated by Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 10, Nos. 1-2, 1988, pp. 3-41.
24 Royle, 1991, p. 10.
25
5 Ibid. p. 11.
26 Derrida, 1993/1994, p. 11.
27
Royle, 1991, p. 15.
28 Ibid. p. 25.
29
Babcock and Cox, 1994, p. 103.
30 Blaeser, 1996, p. 98.
31
3 Ibid. p. 155.
32
3 Ibid. p. 17.
33
33 Ibid. p. 146.
34
Kroeber, 1979, p. 76.
35
35 Ibid. p. 81.
36 Ibid. p. 79.
37
There are variant spellings, versions, and combinations of Eshu-Elegba. For consistency with earlier chapters, I will continue with the combination and
spelling here.
38
Gates cannot be considered an advocate of deconstructionism, but he understands and utilizes its ideas. Gates was not the only African American scholar to recognize the importance of liminality in relation to the trickster figure. He specifically thanked Houston A. Baker, Jr., author of Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) for his writings on that. Baker is one of few who appreciated Barbara Bab-cock’s work not only on liminality and the trickster, but also her writings on re-
flexivity.
39
Gates, 1988, p. 6.
40 Ibid. p. 21.
41
41 Ibid. p. 25.
42
Levi-Strauss, 1950/1987, pp. 55-56.
43
Kurzweil, 1980, p. 136.
44
Turkle studied with Victor Turner at the University of Chicago. For a profile of her, see An Ethnologist in Cyberspace by Marguerite Holloway, Scientific American, April 1998, pp. 29-30.
45
Schneiderman, 1983, p. 161.
46
Schneiderman, 1983, p. 14.
47
Roudinesco, 1993/1997, p. 211.
48
“Lacan died of postoperative complications after a tumor was removed from his intestines” (emphasis added, Schneiderman, 1983, p. 23). The connection of the trickster and intestines has been previously mentioned. In light of this ex
ample, one might recall that Harry Houdini, another trickster figure, died of appendicitis.
49
Roudinesco, 1993/1997, p. xv.
50 Ibid. p. 8.
51 Roudinesco, 1986/1990, pp. 104-105.
52
Schneiderman, 1983, p. 11.
53
53 Ibid. p. 119.
54
54 Turkle, 1978/1992, p. 99. Schneiderman, 1983, p. 109.
56 Schneiderman, 1983, p. 57. 5 Schneiderman, 1983, p. 76.
58 Ibid. pp. 60-61.
59
This might be extended with the ideas of Jungian psychologist Rafael Lo-pez-Pedraza (1977/1989, p. 61) who pointed out in Hermes and His Children that Hermes’ sacrifice was a true one whereas Prometheus’ was a fraud. Schneiderman, 1983, p. 58. 61 Kurzweil, 1980, p. 147.
Chapter 24—The Imagination
1 Galton, 1883/1973, p. 58, 59.
2
Singer, 1975, p. 61-63.
3
Mills, 1959/1967, p. 5.
4
4 Ibid. p. 14.
5 Macionis, 1989, p. 8.
6 Durkheim, 1912/1965, p. 490.
7 Macionis, 1989, p. 431.
On the Psychology of Parapsychology by James Hillman, In A Century of Psychical Research: The Continuing Doubts and Affirmations: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at Le Piol, St. Paul De Vence, France September 2, 3, 4, 1970. Edited by Allan Angoff and Betty Shapin, pp. 177-187, New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1971.
9
Hillman, 1985/1986.
10 E.g., see Sass, 1988/1992.
For further comparisons of Hillman and Lacan, see Adams (1985/1992).
12
Hillman, 1975, p. 2.
13 Hillman, 1975, p. 8.
14
Hillman, 1975, p. 17.
15 Stephen, 1989, p. 212.
16 Hillman, 1975, p. 12.
17 Ibid, p. 11.
See George and Krippner (1984) for a review article on imagery as a component of psychic experiences.
19 See Ring 1989, 1992.
20
Rojcewicz, 1989, 1991, 1993.
21
Ring, Rojcewicz, and Stillings were all involved with the New York Fortean Society (NYFS), which was organized by John Keel. Wolf acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Rojcewicz and Michael Grosso, another member of
the NYFS.
22
In passing, it should be mentioned that Corbin’s ideas have been adopted by a few in psychology. Notable is the book Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues (1986/1990) by Mary Watkins. Mary Gergen, another psychologist, presented a paper at the 1987 American Psychological Convention entitled “Social Ghosts: Opening Inquiry on Imaginal Relationships.” Mary Gergen is wife of Kenneth J. Gergen, author of The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (BasicBooks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991), which is one of the best books discussing postmodernity. Religious scholar Daniel C. Noel has also utilized the concept of the imaginal in his The Soul of Shamanism (1997).
23
Hansen, 1992b.
24
For a discussion of some imaginal creatures, in a couple of relatively reputable looking books, the reader may wish to examine Hilary Evans’ Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors (1984) and Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians (1987).
25 Ring, 1992, p. 239.
For some comments on Ring’s The Omega Project, see the review by Karlis Osis, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 88, 1994, pp. 71—76.
27
Literature has the capacity to address matters that science cannot yet reach. Among others, this point was made by psychologist Lawrence LeShan in his The Dilemma of Psychology (1990). He frankly admitted that he found more insight
into people in great literature than in professional psychology.
28 ,
Clements, 1987, p. 39.
29
King, 1981, p. 40.
30
This is also sometimes cited to explain the enjoyment of magic tricks, and
there too it is of little value.
31
Noel Carroll, 1990, p. 74.
32 Ibid. p. 81.
33 Fundraising letter from CSICOP entitled “Your Generous Help is Vitally Needed!” February 23, 1996. For articles see Paranormal and Paranoia Intermingle on Fox TV’s ‘X-Files’ by C. Eugene Emery, Jr., Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 1995, pp. 18-19; The X-Files Meets the
Skeptics, Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 1997, pp. 24-30.
34
Mitchell, 1993, p. 73.
35
Mitchell, 1993, p. 82.
See Mitchell, 1993, which cited A Group of Young Chimpanzees in a One-Acre Field by E. W. Menzel, Jr., In Behavior of Nonhuman Primates: Modern Research Trends edited by Allan M. Schrier and Fred Stollnitz, New York: Academic Press, 1974, pp. 83-153, see pp. 133-135.
37
Mitchell, 1993, p. 72.
38 Ibid. p. 83.
39
Mitchell’s work on primates led him to address the broader issues of representation, simulation, communication, and the development of self-awareness. For some of Mitchell’s other work see Deception: Perspectives on Human and Nonhuman Deceit in 1986 (edited by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) and Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals in 1997 (edited by Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, and H. Lyn Miles, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). The academic establishment has long denigrated anthropomorphism, but it is slowly regaining some respectability.
Chapter 25—Paranoia
1 Derived from a conversation reported in Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, p. 238.
2
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1985, p. 854.
3
For a discussion of aggression and nightmares, see Nightmares & Human Conflict by John E. Mack, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974 (Originally published 1970).
4
Babcock-Abrahams, 1975a, pp. 177-178. Babcock-Abrahams’ wording in quotes is slightly different than Radin, 1956/1972, p. 134.
5 Berman, 1981/1984, p. 301.
6 Lacan, 1948/1977, p. 15.
7 Hartmann, 1991, p. 101.
8 Douglas, 1963, p. 141.
9 Kottmeyer’s article emphasized pathological aspects and used some weak case material. Nevertheless, Kottmeyer deserves credit for recognizing a fundamental aspect of the UFO phenomenon. He understood that status loss was an important factor.
10 Jung’s opinion about UFOs has been a source of speculation among ufolo-gists. For a discussion of the controversies see “What Did Carl Gustav Jung Believe About Flying Saucers?” by Dennis Stillings, in Stillings, 1989 (pp. 33-49).
11 Epstein, 1989, p. 92.
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