Email to Linda!
Linda, Thanks so much for last night. I hope I didn't rattle on too much but I have spent so many years looking at these issues and get so few opportunities to chew the cud with someone over them. I think what you are doing is absolutely wonderful and am excited by the nature of the course. I am jealous not to be there doing it myself.
Here is the wiki link for Campbell's potted biography, it is well worth two minutes it takes to read.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Here is some material on The Selfish Gene, a theory often misunderstood and deliberately misinterpreted but the implications of which bear centrally to our own nature and therefore to anthropology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/57062/Richard_Dawkins_s_The_God_Delu...
I would like to ask you some questions about the role of magic and how it differs from land based spiritual beliefs that are the mythological realm of the indigenous peoples.
There is a guru in India called Sai Baba and what is interesting to me about him is that he "manifests" objects of jewelry out of "thin air" and gives them to his followers. There are videos of him doing this.
Now either he is bending the laws of the physical universe or he is a simple stage magician.
In fact this is a very interesting avenue because some people actually believe what stage magicians do is for real. An example of this is David Blain and his levitation trick. Some viewers have actually said "I say him levitate, I watched him rise up off the ground, it is unbelievable." A large proportion of humanity are open to believing not just the unbelievable but to also accept the physically impossible without questioning it.
Either the laws of physics are not the same for Sai Baba and David Blain, something improbable beyond reasonable calculation, or they are practicing a deception either maliciously or otherwise.
This is magic!
http://skepdic.com/saibaba.html
Now the birthplace of magic is in the role of the shaman, the conduit between the spirit world and the human in indigenous societies. All shaman have a stock of tricks, demonstrations that they are not bound by the physical, demonstrations that they have powers, powers to be feared, powers to be respected.
So the questions are these:
If the human animal is a pack predator that has evolved thought process as an evolutionary strategy rather than rely on physical mutation, what is the evolutionary benefit of magic to the magician?
How does the development of magic, which we have evidence of going back of 50,000 years,
effect change, if in fact it does, in the social goup's power structures?
When considering Shamanism, the performance of magic and the development, begun with the establishment of cities in Sumeria 4300 B.C.E., of structured religions run by full time staff, which gender dominates the roles?
Is it possible that the behavours of pack predators have been transformed into thought forms, Dawkin's Menes, and that what we see from our own subjective viewpoint as mythologies in which the sub set of religion occurs, could be seen by the objective alien looking down from space as the behavioural patterns of sexual power struggles transformed from ruffs feathers and dance into metaphysical displays?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prehistory-Sex-Million-Sexual-Culture/dp/1857025...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_b/026-9219972-9487652?url=search-ali...
Jarred Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee!
If we also consider that most psychologists of any repute hold that the majority of people live their lives in repetitive behavour patterns and actually, from day to day, use conscious thought very sparingly, then how much does the human animal really differ from other mammals?
http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Sapir/Sapir_1927_a.html
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Yq6xeupNStMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR12&d...
The purpose of the scientific method is to test a hypothesis, a belief about how things are, via repeatable experimental observations which can contradict the hypothesis so as to fight this observer bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
Lots of Love
Jama251.