Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness

Collaging Consciousness: Art as a Method to Encounter Heterogeneity and Ecological Consciousness with Melinda Kiefer
2022-06-03 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Zoom, United States
Collaging Consciousness: Art as a Method to Encounter Heterogeneity and Ecological Consciousness,” with Melinda Kiefer
Talk description: Artist/Educator Melinda Kiefer discusses her studio practice which incorporates painting, sculpture, and collage of natural and recycled materials to challenge dominant cultural systems and offer radical possibilities of alternate consciousnesses such as ecological consciousness through art. By working with a variety of materials, Kiefer explores how experience is rooted in materiality rather than ideologically separated, an illusion which has been intensified by daily mediated experience. Kiefer also touches upon her practice as an arts educator to disband colonial systems of knowledge dominating the body and the imagination.
Registration is required.
Registration closes on the Thursday before the event at 5:00 Pacific Time.
Please register for these events at aocgeneral@gmail.com

Singing, Dreaming and Resistance Among the Water Guardians of Cajamarca, Peru with Chris Santiago, Board Member
2022-05-06 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Vancouver) | Zoom, United States
Singing, Dreaming and Resistance Among the Water Guardians of Cajamarca, Peru,” with Chris Santiago, Board Member.
Registration is required.
Registration closes on the Thursday before the event at 5:00 Pacific Time.
Please register for these events at aocgeneral@gmail.com
This video presentation is based on Santiago’s fieldwork with the peasants of Cajamarca (2012-2014) and their struggle against the Conga gold mining mega-project. The presentation focuses on dreaming and singing as native arts of resistance that proved crucial in the fight for water and life, specifically the dreams and songs of Señora Máxima Acuña Atalaya de Chaupe and Señora Santos, and reflects on the power of cultural resistance.
Christopher Santiago (PhD, Columbia University, 2017);
Positions Held: Substitute Lecturer (2019-2020) College of Staten Island (CUNY); Adjunct Professor (2018-2019 & 2020-2021) College of Staten Island; Adjunct Professor (2018) New York City College of Technology (CUNY); Adjunct Professor (2016) York College (CUNY); Interests and/or Activities: phantasm, social & environmental justice, participated in Q&A for the film “Máxima” with director Claudia Sparrow at NYU (2020); Significant Publications: “Hystorize from the Self: D.H. Lawrence and ‘The Lovely Lady’”, The Psychoanalytic Review, 2019. “Twilight States: Comparing Case Studies of Hysteria and Spirit Possession”, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021. “Blood Magic In The Age of Psychopathy, Mass Shootings and Ecological Catastrophe”, C. Santiago and M. Melmed, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2022.
Based on years of fieldwork in Cajamarca, Peru, my research focuses on the theory and practice of cultural resistance in the form of dreams, songs, stories, and jokes which I call the shamanic aspects of the struggle against industrial extraction. The campesinos of Cajamarca say the lagoons and mountains lead the fight. Facing the death of the Earth, the resurgence of Pacha Mama consciousness in South America is a contemporary manifestation of Andean messianism. In our age of global meltdown, what is the ‘dreamweapon’ that would allow the voices of nature to speak once again? What is the potential of cultural forms widely considered false, fictitious, and counter to truth? Critiquing Western rationality, I call for the reenchantment of inner and outer nature. I seek to reverse the historical trauma that dissociates us from our imaginations and our bodies through the realization that, as the premodern West knew, there is no thought without a phantasm. Abolishing the reactive idealism which separates phantasy and reality, I revalue experience as mythological revolt, in an eruption of spirits. How was magic separated from history? How has the imagination been dominated and domesticated? How does this give rise to different temporalities of hysteria?

Distinguished Lecture: Sacred Wisdom: The Path to Hope, Balance, and Resilience Dr. Tommy K. Begay
2021-11-19 20:00 - 21:30 (America/New_York)
Friday, November 19, 2021: 8:00 PM – 9:30 PM Eastern
Room: Virtual Room 1
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness invite you to attend our Distinguished Lecturer Event.
Many thanks to the Association for Indigenous Anthropologists and The Society for Psychological Anthropology for co-sponsoring this event.
As a result of the impact of historical trauma and other cultural- historical forces, Indigenous people of North America are more susceptible to a constellation of psychosocial, behavioral, and physiological risk factors that have contributed, in contemporary times, to a higher rate of morbidity across psychological, cardiometabolic, and functional domains. Prior to these traumatic episodes, Indigenous people were guided by a worldview grounded in a sacred epistemology of ritual and spiritual practices that defined inner identity with a Sacred Wisdom that provided a sense of wholeness, balance, harmony, hope, positive health, and healing.
This presentation will focus on the utilization of Sacred Wisdom as a psychology to promote general wellness and resilience. It is founded upon an understanding of the Diné (Navajo) epistemology of Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon, the pathway to a life of Hózhó, the Diné sense of internal beauty, harmony, and balance with the natural and social environments. The Beauty Way and Protection Way form the core for this balanced life and universal harmony. From this perspective, all parts of the Earth are powerfully charged and alive, as the Holy Wind provides the life force for all elements. Disease and dysfunction grow from an imbalance of universal harmony. As we gradually move out of a global pandemic and look to face the challenges of climate change, Sacred Wisdom provides a guide for a future full of hope, balance, and resilience.
About our Guest: Dr. Tommy K. Begay is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Arizona.
Event Organizer: Dr. Christina Callicott: christina.callicott@gmail.com
Register for the AAA Annual Meeting at their website.

Reflections on How We Think About, Classify, and Treat Disorders of Consciousness and Awareness
2021-11-17 13:30 - 15:15 (America/Vancouver)
Oral Presentation (Baltimore, In-Person)
Time: 1:30-3:15 Pacific/4:30 PM – 6:15 PM Eastern
Presenters: Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Barbara Mainguy, Patrick McFarlane, and Albert Marshall

AAC Business Meeting
2021-11-13 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Vancouver)
Location: Virtual Zoom (look for the Zoom link in the AAA Communities Section on Friday, November 12th)
Time: 1:00-2:00 pm, Pacific/4:00-5:00 Eastern
Join us for an informal, Happy Hour style business meeting. Topics will include:

Year-in-Review
Truth and Responsibility within the context of our section interests
Board Recruitment – we need your perspectives and participation!
Fundraising for Student Prizes
Student Needs – Students – bring your ideas and wish lists!

The Mythology and Depth Psychology of Octavia Butler – Dr. Ayana Jamieson
2021-10-02 10:00 - 12:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, United States
The tone of collective discourse has rapidly degenerated, damaging the forms and rituals that give coherence to our lives, cultures and professional disciplines contributing to a sense of communal and global unrest. In this intimate Saturday morning seminar, our desire is to nourish a spirit of reflection rather than repeating the sounds of panic and alarm or pretend hopes. Stepping back from the present situation, we will reflect on the current moment through trans-disciplinary lenses including philosophy, theology, history, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and anthropology. Together we will seek new perspectives that may help us move into an open future.
While award-winning speculative and science fiction author, Octavia E. Butler, passed away nearly fifteen years ago, 2020 has been a big year in her career. Her novel Parable of the Sower, written in 1993, just hit the New York Times Best Seller’s list for the first time in September 2020, while Ava Duverney, Viola Davis, and others continue to work to bring her works to the small screen, adapting her novels Dawn, Wild Seed and Kindred for television. Over the last several decades, Butler’s prescience in Parable of the Sower has not gone unnoticed. Set in the 2020s in Los Angeles, this novel references a nation beset by climate change, widespread illness, economic collapse, scarcity of necessities, and yes, a zealot politician running on the platform to “Make America Great Again.”
In this session with Depth Psychologist and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, Ayana Jamieson, we’ll explore the mythology and meaning of Octavia E. Butler’s empathetic and remarkable science fiction. In addition to her role as founder of the Legacy Network, Ayana is also an expert on Butler’s life and work, the Butler archives at the Butler’s life and work serve as a case study for moving toward psychological wholeness, surviving trauma and developing resilient narratives in unprecedented times.
Saturday, October 2, 2021, from 10:00 AM to 12:15 PM Pacific time– via Zoom

Violence, Trauma And The Making Of Racial Identity – Dr. Sheldon George
2021-05-22 10:00 - 12:15 (America/Los_Angeles)
The tone of collective discourse has rapidly degenerated, damaging the forms and rituals that give coherence to our lives, cultures and professional disciplines contributing to a sense of communal and global unrest. In these intimate Saturday morning seminars our desire is to nourish a spirit of reflection rather than repeating the sounds of panic and alarm, or pretend hopes. Stepping back from the present situation, we will reflect on the current moment through trans-disciplinary lenses including philosophy, theology, history, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and anthropology. Together we will seek new perspectives that may help us move into an open future.
In a historical moment when the news media has repeatedly displayed the wanton killing of black men and women, the connection between African American identity and trauma seems especially salient. This talk will work through Lacanian psychoanalytic notions of subjectivity to ground an understanding of African American identity as mediated by social trauma. It will address, in particular, the 2012 Florida shooting of 17-year-old Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn, a white male whose excessive response to the loud rap music played by Davis and his friends demonstrates a Lacanian understanding of jouissance, or the other’s mode of enjoyment, as a root-source of notions of racial alterity. Moving through a series of Lacanian concepts relevant to race and racism (from hainamoration, to aggressivity, invidia and Atè), the talk will discuss how this jouissance, bound to fantasies of race, often structures both racism and racial identity around acts of violence and trauma, inducing African Americans to embrace willfully the very racial identities against which this violence is directed.

Sheldon George is Professor of English and Chair of the English department at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. His scholarship centers most directly on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and applies cultural and literary theory to analyses of American and African-American literature and culture. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity and co-editor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. He is currently completing a collection, co-edited with Derek Hook for Routledge press, that is titled Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory.
Continuing education credits will be provided.
2 CEU hours provided for Licensed Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, and Social Workers
CEU Learning Objectives (2 CEUs offered – including ethics):

To increase critical thinking skills in order to apply interdisciplinary knowledge into clinical work and practice.
To increase understanding of the dynamics of historical foundations behind racialized thinking and current forms of political violence.
To better understand how we as clinicians can identify how race and racism may serve as tools that produce psychic pleasure for clients and how that function relates to contemporary manifestations of discontent, social suffering, and ethical dilemmas.

For more information and registration, please visit:
Violence, Trauma and the Making of Racial Identity – Dr. Sheldon George

Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Approaches to Healing Trauma – Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy
2021-03-27 10:00 - 12:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
“Two-eyed seeing” is a concept that was originated by Elder Albert Marshall of Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton University to give indigenous epistemology and knowledge equal status with mainstream scientific perspectives and knowledge. In M’iqmaq, the word is Etuaptmunk. In English, it means the idea of explanatory pluralism. Within most indigenous cultures, the mind is not considered separately from body, community, and spirituality, unlike the silos created in the dominant culture.
Healing must involve the body, the community, and the spirits. In this lecture, we are going to introduce the two-eyed seeing concept to explore how to work with trauma from both an indigenous perspective and contemporary neuroscience and psychological research. We are especially interested in the role that trauma plays in addictions and in the so-called “severe mental illnesses,” and how our approach to people in distress must also be trauma-informed.
This introductory lecture is designed for practitioners who provide counselling in indigenous communities. It is also open to those providing counseling in other communities who want to see how indigenous practices could enrich their work, as well as to others who are just curious about Indigenous cultures and mental health.
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD is the author of “Coyote Medicine”, “Coyote Healing”, and “Coyote Wisdom”, focusing on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. He has also written “Narrative Medicine”; “Healing the Mind through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry”; and his most recent book, with Barbara Mainguy, “Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story”. He graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed his residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He has been on the faculties of several medical schools, most recently as associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England.
Barbara Mainguy, LICSW studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto and received her master’s degree in Creative Arts Psychotherapy at Concordia University in Montreal. She has co-written Remapping Your Mind: the Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story with Lewis Mehl-Madrona. Currently, she is completing her MFA in documentary filmmaking at York University, Toronto, and working with Lewis in Orono, Maine. She is the Director of Education for the Coyote Institute in Orono.

AOC 2021 Conference Program
2021-03-12 09:00 - 2021-03-14 21:00 (America/New_York)
PLEASE NOTE: ALL TIMES ARE EASTERN STANDARD TIME. AND ALSO, WE HAVE A DAYLIGHT SAVINGS EVENT ON SATURDAY EVENING.
Hello everyone,
Please download the full conference program here. Any last minute changes will be made on the conference Communities page itself. This program will inform you as to the times and content of each session, as well as other goings on with the conference and the organization itself. Presenters will be sent special Zoom links for their specific sessions directly by email, and attendees will join sessions through the links posted in the Communities page the day of each session. PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THESE LINKS WITH ANYONE so we can keep the conference safe and secure.
AoC 2021 Conference Program
Registration Instructions
Please go to the following link and follow the registration instructions there:
https://secure.americananthro.org/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AAAWeb&WebKey=e63ef3e6-a61c-4508-9b61-084b2ac9bb98&RegPath=EventRegFees&REg_evt_key=a7232bf8-7fed-48b1-b0a5-29bc4838436e
(NOTE: You will be asked to create a username and password for the AAA system, if you do not already have one, before you can register. No payment is required to do this. You do not need to be a member of the AAA to attend this conference.)
Participants will receive further information and secure links to the online conference once registered. In order to be officially registered, all attendees will need to create a user account and register on the AAA website: (http://www.americananthro.org), after which they can select their registration type and check out. You will them get an email with access to the Communities page with all up to date announcements, links, and the conference program.
Please send an email to conferencesac@gmail.com to be considered for a free registration grant. If selected, we will send you a unique code to enter when registering that will zero your payment for the entire conference. Please do not share this link with anyone as it will only work for the individual we have given it to.
Please also direct any questions to:
conferencesac@gmail.com
——————————
Andrew Gurevich,
He/Him/His
President, Anthropology of Consciousness
Professor of Literature, Mythology, & World Religion
Mt. Hood Community College
Portland OR
https://sac.americananthro.org
https://www.jcf.org/people/andrew-gurevich/

AC 2021 Section Meeting: Sea Change: Consciousness, Lifeworlds & Ecological Upheaval
2021-03-12 08:00 - 2021-03-14 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sea Change: Lifeworlds & Ecological Upheaval
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness
39TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
March 12th – 14th, 2021 (Online)
“How do people imagine the landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imagination of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?”
–Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
The Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness invites you to join us online over three days to investigate how we engage with communities around ongoing concerns of ecological change. The title “Sea Change” points to the context and social climate in which we currently live: a time in which drastic social, political, and environmental change is occurring. During these times of chaos and ecological upheaval, conflict and despair inevitably arise as responses to the ongoing precarity and uncertainty. As anthropologists and consciousness researchers, there are many ways to interpret and understand these changes. “Sea Change” also acknowledges that we live in a time in which all forms of life are experiencing radical changes on the planet (such as rising sea levels), and with such changes, suffering and conflict increases. Therefore, we invite presenters and attendees to reflect and engage with subjects related to change, embodied transformation, and ecological disruption.
We consider this conference an opportunity to build networks for collective engagement, restorative practices, healing, and reconciliation. We will be highlighting projects which explore indigenous and/or plant-based practices that might provide transformational learning and opportunities for collective action. It is our goal to elevate oppressed voices and wisdom that honor those communities and challenge the power dynamics of colonization. We also welcome members, collaborators, and those new to the conference to engage in discussions related to exploring consciousness in all lived experiences, both human and non-human consciousness.
Join us over the weekend of March 12-14, 2021 to explore these issues through live streamed Zoom sessions with academics, activists, and specialists; a pre-recorded asynchronous media gallery with a curated selection of podcasts, short films, and other media; and some interactive workshops and meditation sessions to help facilitate mind/body learning and individual and communal transformations. Stop by for the afterparty each night on our Zoom Happy Hours and Twitch sessions if you dare! Registration information below.
Instructions
Please go to the following link and follow the registration instructions there:
https://secure.americananthro.org/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=AAAWeb&WebKey=e63ef3e6-a61c-4508-9b61-084b2ac9bb98&RegPath=EventRegFees&REg_evt_key=a7232bf8-7fed-48b1-b0a5-29bc4838436e
(NOTE: You will be asked to create a username and password for the AAA system, if you do not already have one, before you can register. No payment is required to do this. You do not need to be a member of the AAA to attend this conference.)
Please send an email to conferencesac@gmail.com to be considered for a free registration grant. If selected, we will send you a unique code to enter when registering that will zero your payment for the entire conference. Please do not share this link with anyone as it will only work for the individual we have given it to.
Participants will receive further information and secure links to the online conference once registered. In order to be officially registered, all attendees will need to create a user account and register on the AAA website: (http://www.americananthro.org), after which they can select their registration type and check out. You will them get an email with access to the Communities page with all up to date announcements, links, and the conference program.
For more information, please contact:
conferencesac@gmail.com
or
Mark Flanagan, Program Chair — markwflanagan1@gmail.com
Andy Gurevich, President — agingprophet@gmail.com
