Anthropology News • March 2007

52

S E C T I O N N E W S

exactly are human and civil rights, and whose definition it is.

Something to say? Please send your comments, questions, suggestions and contributions to Melinda Bernardo at melinda.bernardo@gmail.com.

Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges

LLOYD MILLER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

SACC’s New WebsiteOur shiny new website is up and running. Its URL is http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/sacc, and it’s really cool! If you’ve already visited it, you’re a member of the choir, but if you haven’t, I really encourage you to do so.

Deborah Shepherd of Anoka-Ramsey CC (Coon Rapids, MN) is our webmeister and her college has generously consented to host the site. Deborah has worked tirelessly to design, create and maintain the site since its inception at the Merida meetings last March. Ann Kaupp, chair of the web task force that SACC President Chuck Ellenbaum formed in Merida, has also worked continuously to help formulate ideas and oversee editing of content for the site. She has been a most effective leader in getting more of us to write and submit material. Both Deborah and Ann deserve our thanks, praise and appreciation.

The site is attractive, elegantly simple and user-friendly. It contains a description of what SACC is and how to join, a brief history of SACC and the names and contact information of board members. It also contains tables of contents for the current and recent issues of our biannual publication, Teaching Anthropology: SACC Notes, and up-to-date information on our conferences. But that’s not all. The site also features profiles of members and lists of their publications as well as research updates in anthropological subfields. So far, Bob Muckle and Phil Stein have con-tributed updates for archaeology and physical anthropology, respectively. Bob has also pro-vided a comprehensive list of teaching resources for archaeology.

Most important, the website is intended to be an ever-evolving work in progress. We look forward to adding more member profiles. Some members have included photos and Deborah assures us that there’s plenty of space for them. Members with their own websites may include the URL links with their profiles. Also, we need contributions to the Research Update and Teaching Resources sections for cultural, linguis-tic and applied subfields. Additional ideas under discussion are to have photo collages of past meetings and other subjects of interest to SACC members, and maybe present academic papers, articles or commentaries, thus offering another publication venue.

I think that as it catches on, SACC’s website will become increasingly our cyberspace home away from home. Together with SACC-L, our

listserv, it will be a comfortable place where we can hang out and keep in touch between confer-ences and generally throughout the year.

Send communications and contributions to Lloyd Miller, lloyd.miller@mchsi.com.

Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness

LAWRENCE MCBRIDE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Turner SAC/AAA Distinguished Lecture

By Mark A Schroll

Edith Turner’s 2006 Distinguished SAC/AAA lecture “New Advances in the Study of Spiritual Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads”

in San José, CA, was a historical tour de force of consciousness studies’ emergence throughout the last 100 years. Among the pioneers that have assisted anthropology and related disciplines with mapping the farther reaches of cog-nition, Turner cited her late husband Victor Turner, pointing out that his quest to make the invisible vis-

ible was the result of an epiphany at age 12, when he experienced in a dream the passing of his first mentor.

Nevertheless, Vic sought to be “brilliantly orthodox” as his budding career in anthropol-ogy began to unfold years later, mindful of the fact he had a wife and children to support and jobs were scarce. Still Vic’s quest to understand the mysterium tremendum was reawakened when he read Henri Junod’s Life of a South African Tribe (1912/1962) whose framework of analysis uses van Gennep references to liminality. Influenced by their personal experience and fieldwork, Vic and Edith expanded liminality’s conceptual understanding into what they have called com-munitas. This felt commonality of transpersonal-ity exceeded the conceptual limits of Durkheim’s understanding of religion and was received with puzzlement regarding its anthropological sig-nificance by their colleagues, including Max Gluckman, Vic’s old professor. Offering us this insight, that the Turners—without intending to be agents of change—were among the first to advance a new understanding of what it means to be human.

Meanwhile several other like-minded anthro-pological explorations were taking place here in the US; the Turners found themselves to be in alliance with these several years later after their immigration from England. These advances began with Eliade’s inquiries into shamanism, followed by Harner’s fieldwork with the Jivaro (who insisted the only way Harner could com-

prehend their religion was to ingest ayahuasca). Harner’s insights were closely paralleled by Castaneda’s controversial claims about a separate reality that further challenged the methodologi-cal divisions between nomothetic vs idiographic methods of inquiry.

Douglas Price-Williams recently wrote about his relationship with Carlos (AoC 16 (1) 2005), agreeing with Stanley Krippner that Castaneda’s books are not important anthropological docu-ments, yet played an important role in further-ing anthropology’s investigation of shamanism. These stirrings coincided with SAC’s early meet-ings initiated by Joseph Long that sought to usher in the scientific investigation of paranor-mal phenomena into anthropology. But when SAC applied for AAA membership it was decided that naming its focus of inquiry consciousness studies reflected a linguistic referent that better fit the paradigmatic criteria necessary to gain acceptance (AoC 16 (1) 2005).

This point reflects the essence of Turner’s central thesis—that our inquiry of psi/spirit, liminality, communitas and our experiences of transpersonality are only acceptable if we keep quiet about them, or translate them into recognizable phenomena that fit the concep-tual limits of EuroAmerican science. This kind of ethnocentric bigotry calls into question the very nature of anthropological inquiry, whereas Turner counters it will not keep new generations of anthropologists from encountering instances of psi/spirit during their field research, even though a smug postmodern countenance con-tinues to dominate mainstream conversations.

Defiantly, Turner asks: “What right has anthro-pology to tell us that psi/spirit does not exist?” Turner cites Dan Moonhawk Alford’s linguistic insights into Native American languages; equally courageous is the memory of Alford telling us at the 2001 spring SAC meeting in Seattle about his paper “The Origin of Speech and the Deep Structure of Psi.” We now also have, quoting Turner, “Marjorie Balzer, Claire Farrer, Antonia Mills and Bilinda Straight, all writing ethnogra-phies that take the battle into the enemy’s camp, and give the positivists classical, scholarly and above all human pictures of life where people live naturally in the milieu of spirituality.”

Toward the end of her lecture, summing up her thesis that we need a new kind of science, Turner asked rhetorically, “what then is psi, and do we have to prove it exists?” telling us, “nobody plans or constructs a spiritual healing; it is given to the healers.” The point being that unlike our EuroAmerican scientific orientation, indigenous healers are not at all concerned with proving the existence of psi/spirit or understanding its modus operandi because knowing this would contribute little or nothing to their ability to heal. Turner’s thesis deserves priority concern as SAC defines it role in the 21st century.

Mark A Schroll may be contacted at rockphd4@yahoo.com.

Send SAC news to Lawrence B McBride, UNC Chapel Hill, lmcbride@email.unc.edu.

Edith Turner