ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

by C. Jason Throop & Charles D. Laughlin

		

From the standpoint of human evolution, then, both a social matrix of conduct and the expansion of the cortex are among the necessary conditions for the emergence of a human mind or a human personality structure.  Just as bodily evolution and mental evolution cannot be separated, neither can psychological structuralization and the social evolution of mankind.  To behave humanly as an adult the individual must become psychologically organized in a socialization process.  His biological equipment is only one of the conditions necessary for this.  Social or sensory isolation is a fatal handicap.  Hence, it seems reasonable to suppose that the emergence of culture as a prime attribute of human societies must be somehow connected with a novel psychological structure rooted in the social behavior of the gregarious primate that gave rise to man.  It is at this point that organic evolution, behavioral evolution, and the old problem of mental evolution come to a common focus.

					A. Irving Hallowell, Culture and Experience (1955)

INTRODUCTION
	Anthropology is the study of humanity from the broadest possible scope across time and space.  Anthropologists study our species, Homo sapiens, throughout its millions of years of evolution to the present and beyond.  Anthropological research investigates the variety of sociocultural forms from a cross-cultural perspective, utilizing data from hundreds of the estimated 4,000-plus societies living either during the present or in the not-so-distant past.  Hence the range of  perspectives within the discipline encompasses both biological and cultural concerns.  Moreover, the anthropological study of living peoples tends to be naturalistic – that is, anthropologists live with people for extended periods of time, observing and learning from them in the context of everyday interaction, and with but rare exceptions seldom rely upon experimentation.  Rather, anthropologists are interested in recording the way of life of a people going about their normal daily activities.
	Examining consciousness through the broad lens of anthropology offers at least three major advantages to consciousness studies.  First, by combining evidence from both the evolutionary/biological and the adaptational/cultural points of view, we are able to eliminate the pernicious effects of mind-body dualism that infest much of social scientific thinking.  Second, by maximizing our picture of the range of states and contents of consciousness occurring cross-culturally, we are able to counter our own ethnocentrism – that is, our natural tendency to experience and think about things from our own cultural point of view.  And third, by considering consciousness within its natural and local context, we are better able to evaluate how states and contents of consciousness dynamically relate to social interaction and environmental adaptation.
	In this chapter we will discuss the history of anthropological studies of consciousness since the mid-nineteenth century.  We will cover the vision of an anthropology of consciousness apparent in the writings of some of the discipline’s forefathers, before turning to examine the history of thought among anthropologists living during various eras up to and including the present.  Most of our coverage will be of American anthropologists who, more than any of the other schools of anthropology, considered consciousness-related issues important.  We will show how these early practical and theoretical ruminations centered on questions of the evolution of human consciousness, the putative differences between primitive vs. civilized mentalities, and the role of the group in establishing collective states of consciousness.  We will track the development of consciousness studies through mid- to late-twentieth century structuralism, practice theory, neuroanthropology, and the symbolic-interpretationist approaches.  We will show how these developments have culminated in contemporary consciousness-related approaches, including cognitive anthropology, cultural psychology, evolutionary psychological anthropology, phenomenological anthropology, the anthropology of the senses, and cultural neurophenomenology.  We will conclude by listing the major findings pertaining to consciousness provided by anthropological research and understanding to date.
	In the early sections of this paper we have chosen to dwell upon the leading lights in both theory and methods.  This is easily done, for the number of practicing anthropologists was relatively small during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, and most fieldworkers followed the theories and methods of their mentors.  Margaret Mead used to say that in pre_World War II meetings of the American Anthropological Association everyone would fit into two buses when they would go on excursions, and had the busses fallen off a bridge, there would have been no American anthropology left.  But the discipline has grown rapidly during the last half century and theoretical and methodological issues have become much more diverse.  For this reason, the latter portions of the paper focus less upon influential individual thinkers and more upon general approaches to the study of consciousness.
What Do We Mean By “Consciousness?”
	Before we proceed any further, however, it is necessary to examine just what the term “consciousness” means.  For western scholars without the broader cross-cultural perspective embraced in anthropology, this is not such a problem.  Cognitive scientists and philosophers today generally define “consciousness” in terms of such concepts as “intentionality,” “qualia,” and such like.  Yet even within western oriented consciousness studies, defining “consciousness” is very difficult (see Hunt 1995: Chapter 1).  The central problem is that such definitions are extremely ethnocentric, and very few non-western cultures would view the matter in the way that western consciousness researchers might conceive of it.  From the anthropological perspective, the term “consciousness” presents difficulties as an empirical term in science. This is because it is difficult to operationalize in cross-cultural research (see Peacock, 1975, p. 6; Laughlin, McManus & d’Aquili, 1990, pp. 76-82 and Winkelman 2000, pp. 9-15 for the problems confronted in cross-culturally operationalizing “consciousness”).  Few anthropologists before the latter twentieth century would undergo fieldwork intending to research “consciousness” per se.  Why?  Because few peoples on the planet would explicitly recognize the concept as it has been developed in the context of Western philosophy and science, and their languages would have no words that neatly gloss with the English term.  Even among Indo-European languages the term does not translate perfectly.  For instance, the Spanish word consciencia connotes both awareness and what we would call “conscience” or “social consciousness,” while in German there are at least two words, Bewusstsein and Erkenntnis that cover the semantic field covered by the English term.  And depending upon how we define consciousness, many of the world’s non-Indo-European languages would have either no word at all, or a term or terms that would have to be transposed in order to make them fit.  Put another way, it is far easier to find a gloss for awareness, sensory or moral aspects of “consciousness” than it would be to find an exact gloss for, say, “intentionality” -- which in both Western philosophy and science is such a critical component -- or for “consciousness” defined either as a  complex system of psychophysical functions (e.g., Baars, 1997), or as implying self-awareness as a necessary condition (Donald 1991, p. 144).  
	It is fair to say then that most anthropological research pertaining to consciousness focuses upon those contents and properties of consciousness commonly encountered in the field – including aspects such as sensation (Howes, 1991; Classen, 1997; Stoller, 1989), time perception (Adam, 1994; Gell, 1992; Munn 1992), perception of space (Pinxton, Van Dooren & Harvey, 1983), emotion (Hinton, 1999; Lutz and White 1985), cognition (D’Andrade 1995; Geertz, 1983), apperception (Hallowell, 1955), memory (Garro 2000, 2001; Antze and Lambek 1996) and symbolization and meaning (Foster, 1994; Foster & Botscharow, 1990), as well as questions of picture and illusion perception (Segall, Campbell & Herscovits, 1966), reason (Garro 1998; Hamill 1990, Tambia 1990), creative imagination (Dissanayake, 1992), sense of the self (Heelas & Lock, 1981;  Morris, 1994; White and Kirkpatrick 1986), cultural influence on experience (Jackson, 1989; Throop 2003a, 2003b; Turner & Bruner, 1986), dream states (Lincoln, 1935; O’Nell, 1976) and other alternative states of consciousness (visions, hallucinations, drug induced alternative states of consciousness [(or ASC), etc.; Winkelman, 2000; Laughlin, McManus & d’Aquili, 1990].  More esoteric Western scientific and philosophical notions such as “stream of consciousness,” “qualia,” “sphere of consciousness,” “intentional field,” and the like are far less operationalizable cross-culturally, and hence direct evidence about them is rare in the ethnopsychologies and ethnophilosophies of other peoples, save for those societies with religions that specialize in one form of phenomenology or another (e.g., certain Buddhist and Hindu societies).	
	 That said, keeping the problem of ethnocentricity squarely in mind, and focusing our attention on those attributes of “consciousness” that are in fact represented in the reports of peoples in widely disparate parts of the world, we may say that the question of consciousness has in one way or another been central to the anthropological enterprise from its inception as a discipline.  The domain of consciousness has been the focus of both temporal (historical or evolutionary) and spatial (cross-cultural) concerns for over a century and a half.  We may say with surety that anthropologists have had much to say about how observed differences and similarities in the contents of consciousness cross-culturally should inform theorizing about the structures and processes of consciousness as they are conceived in the social and physical sciences today.
A Brief Note on Methodology in Anthropology
	Anthropological research on consciousness has traditionally been broadly qualitative and descriptive, often relying on structured and semi-structured interviewing, observing (and more recently video-taping) real-time social interaction, and participant observation. To this end, anthropologists have tended to rely upon a variety of methodologies that integrate third-person (i.e., observing), second-person (i.e., interviewing), and first-person (i.e., participant observation) perspectives.   Of all of these methodologies, participant observation is the perhaps the most uniquely anthropological.  Participant observation is based on the assumption that through participating in the day-to-day activities of a particular culture or social group, a researcher will be able to glean insights from the effects of such participation on her own subjective states, while also being granted access to observing social actors from the perspective of a co-actor who is herself enmeshed in the field of social action as it unfolds.  
	Through participating in the everyday activities of actors who are at times drawing from significantly different assumptions about self, intersubjectivity, and reality, anthropologists are thus often forced to confront directly many of the assumptions that they otherwise take for granted as “natural” attributes of human mentation, behavior, and social life.   In addition to its function in highlighting the contours for what Edmund Husserl would have termed the anthropologist’s “natural attitude,” this methodology further allows anthropologists to explore how human consciousness is manifest in the context of everyday interaction.
	While a great deal of anthropological research has been grounded primarily upon this qualitative/descriptive foundation, cognitive anthropologists, psychological anthropologists, and evolutionary psychological anthropologists have also, at times, incorporated standardized psychological testing (e.g., Rorschach, TAT), systematic data collection (e.g., triad testing, free-listing, paired comparisons, etc.), and in some rare cases experimental designs, in the context of their investigations into the structures and contents of consciousness cross-culturally.
STRUCTURE AND CONTENT I:
A HISTORY OF EARLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT AND RESEARCH
	Anthropology has been concerned with both the structural underpinnings and content variation in consciousness since at least the mid-19th century.  The linchpin idea that permeated much of 19th century thinking about the origins of human culture and consciousness was the “cultural idealist” (idealism from Latin idealis, “idea;” belief that knowledge about, and experience about the world derives from certain inherent structures of mind) notion of the psychic unity of mankind.  This was the presumption that there exists a single, overarching human nature that permeates all peoples in all places on the planet, regardless of the particularities of their socio-cultural organization.  All people everywhere are born with the same mental and physical potentialities which will cause them, when presented with similar problems, to create similar solutions to those problems.  However, because peoples are faced with quite unique circumstances by their locality and their history, their societies and cultures will diverge in time and appear, at least on the surface, to be quite different one from another.  As we will see in the context of the following section, the interplay of similarity and difference that is inherent in the 19th century understanding of psychic unity was itself, however, quite differently articulated in the context of the writings of those early anthropologists whose writings most explicitly explored both the structure and content of consciousness cross-culturally.   
Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and the psychic unity of mankind
	Adolph Bastian was one of the leading proponents of this view in ethnology during the mid- to late-19th century.  This was a period when Germany was a major player in science, and Bastian was Germany’s leading social anthropologist (Koepping, 1983; see also Lowie, 1937:Chapter 4).  Bastian is now credited with having developed the notion of the “psychic unity of mankind.”  Moreover, he proposed a straightforward project for the long-term development of a science of human culture and consciousness based upon this notion.  He argued that the mental acts of all people are the products of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species (what today we might term the genetic loading on the organization and functioning of the neuroendocrine system).  Every human mind inherits a complement of species-specific “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken), and hence the minds of all people, regardless of their race or culture, operate in the same way.  It is the contingencies of geographic location and historical background that we have to thank for the different elaborations of these elementary ideas, the different sociocultural traditions, and the various levels of sociocultural complexity.  According to Bastian, there also exists a lawful “genetic principle” by which societies develop over the course of their history from exhibiting simple sociocultural institutions to becoming increasingly complex in their organization.
	These elementary, inherited psychological processes can be studied in a systematic, objective and comparative way, Bastian taught, and the more one studies various peoples, the more one sees that the historical influences on the culture are of secondary importance compared with the elementary psychological structures that mediate culture.  Through the accumulation of ethnographic data, we can study the psychological laws of mental development as they reveal themselves in diverse regions and under differing conditions.  Although one is speaking with individual informants, Bastian held that the object of research is not the study of the individual per se, but rather the “collective mind” of a people.  In other words, the ethnographer is after the “folk ideas” (Volkergedanken) of a particular people.  The individual is like the cell in an organism, a social animal whose mind is influenced by its social background.  The “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanken) are the ground from which the “folk ideas” develop.  From this perspective, the social group has a kind of group mind, a social “soul” (Gesellschaftsseele) if you will,  in which the individual mind is embedded.
	Bastian believed that the elementary ideas are to be scientifically reconstructed from folk ideas as varying forms of collective representations (Gesellschaftsgedanken).  Because one cannot observe the collective representations per se, Bastian felt that the ethnographic project had to proceed through a series of five analytical steps (see Koepping, 1983):
1.  Fieldwork:  Empirical description of cross-cultural data (as opposed to armchair philosophy; Bastian himself spent much of his adult life among non-European peoples).
2.  Deduction of collective representations:  From cross-cultural data we describe the collective representations in a given society.
3.  Analysis of folk ideas:  Collective representations are broken down into constituent folk ideas.  Geographical regions often exhibit similar patterns of folk ideas – he called these “idea circles” which described the collective representations of particular regions.
4.  Deduction of elementary ideas:  Resemblances between folk ideas and patterns of folk ideas across regions indicate underlying elementary ideas.  					
5.  Application of a scientific psychology:  Study of elementary ideas define the psychic unity of mankind, which is due to the underlying psychophysiological structure of the species – this study is to be accomplished by a truly scientific psychology.
	What Bastian argued for was nothing less than what today we might call a psychobiologically grounded, cross-cultural social psychology.  The key to developing this firm science of human consciousness was to collect as much ethnographic data as possible from all over the world before folk cultures became too “tainted” by contact with European imperialist powers.   Through ethnographic research, he wrote, we can study the psychological laws of mental development as they reveal themselves in diverse geographical settings. Thus in modern day parlance, our different sociocultural forms are due both to trans-culturally shared (i.e., archetypal) processes inherent in our very distinct human psychophysiology -- much of it operating at an non-conscious level -- and to our development (or enculturation) within a particular environment. 
Franz Boas (1858-1942) and the anthropology of sensory impressions
	While the investigation of consciousness per se may not have been an explicit object of attention for many anthropologists in the context of their ethnographic research, practically since its inception as an organized field of study anthropology has been vitally interested in questions concerning the cultural patterning of sensory impressions.  Indeed, a careful reading of the history of the discipline reveals that much of modern anthropology was founded upon an active interest in the relationship between culture and the differential organization of various modes of sensory experience.  
	Beginning with Franz Boas, whose dissertation in physics at the University of Kiel was focused on problems concerning the color of sea water and who later spent time with Wilhelm Wundt at his laboratory in Leipzig studying the laws that account for the emergence, combination, and organization of elementary sensations in consciousness (Harkness 1992:193; LCHC 1983:297), we find an early and influential interest in investigating the relationship between culture and sensation.  In fact, it was a growing dissatisfaction with the psychophysical approach of Wundt’s laboratory that eventually led Boas to come “away convinced that ‘even elementary sensations were influenced by their contexts of occurrence’” (Harkness 1992:103).  This focus on the cultural patterning of sensory experience also importantly fueled Boas’ long standing dialogue with the psychic unity question -- a dialogue that may very well have originated in the context of  Boas’s correspondences with Bastian during the early 1880s and his later studies under him in Berlin during 1886-87 at the Royal Ethnographic Museum.   
	A key article highlighting some of Boas’s views on culture and sensation is his “On Alternating Sounds” (1974 [1889]).  In this article, Boas set out to demonstrate that most forms of sensory perception are forms of culturally mediated apperception -- that is, perception informed by some classificatory framework.  Using the examples of “sound blindness” and color perception, Boas attempted to demonstrate the effects of  linguistically mediated cultural categories on the patterning of auditory and visual sensations. The phenomena of “sound blindness” – a condition noted by the phonologists of the day wherein the sounds uttered by a speaker are either not perceived at all, or are mis_perceived by a hearer – provided the means for Boas to lay the groundwork for a model of the cultural patterning of auditory sensations through a suggestion that the probability that two resembling sounds will be perceived as identical for any one given hearer is tied directly to the extent to which the two sounds correspond to a pre_given classificatory frame (Boas, 1974:73).  
	In the case of color perception, Boas noted the growing evidence for variability in color terminology cross-culturally and points to the fact that in languages where there are no terms for “green,”the colors that fall within the spectrum of “green” become classified according to the two closest sensory frames; namely “blue” and “yellow.”   In the case of “sound_blindness,” Boas focused upon how our culturally mediated apperceptive frames serve to selectively filter out differences between discrete instances of auditory sense impressions, while in the case of color perception, he noted how similar apperceptive frames work to selectively code for differences between sense impressions that would otherwise display a significant amount of perceptual similarity.  To this extent, then, for “Boas, as [Ruth] Benedict put it, the seeing eye was the organ of tradition” (Sahlins, 2000:152).
	Franz Boas is generally considered the father of cultural anthropology.  His name and the methods he espoused are commonly associated with relativist notions of human nature – that is, with the idea that in some way our species transcended biological conditioning when it became fully cultural in its patterns of adaptation.  The naive assumption here is that there was some kind of saltative leap from “nature” to “nurture” during the evolution of humanity.  But Boas himself was neither so naive, nor was he completely comfortable with an extreme relativist (or constructivist) view of human consciousness.  One need only consider Boas’ discussion of psychic unity in his book The Mind of Primitive Man (1938 [1910]) in which he wrestled with the tension between his conviction that all people everywhere are born with the same mind, and yet some cultures appear to be more “advanced” in terms of technological and social adaptation than others.  His overwhelming concern methodologically was with recording the narratives of traditional peoples verbatim, and in using these texts as data upon which to eventually ground a solid science of human nature and consciousness – a research strategy he in fact shared with Bastian.
The Torres Straits Expedition of 1898
	Boas was not alone in his interest in exploring the relationship between culture and sensation during this period.  Indeed, a year prior to the publication of Boas’s pioneering discussion of the influence of culture on auditory and visual sensory modalities, the famous Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits (between Australia and New Guinea) set out to explore how culture effects “acuity for each of the basic senses” (Haddon, 1901; see also Cole, 1996:41; Richards, 1998; Kuklick, 1992:144-46).  Here Boas’s nascent interest in color perception and audition was extended to general visual acuity, spatial perception, auditory acuity, olfaction, taste, tactile sensitivity, pain threshold, weight discrimination, and perceptual illusions tied to abilities to perceive differences in the relationship between size and weight.  With W.H.R. Rivers in charge of the experiments on vision, C.S. Myers focusing on audition, olfaction, and gustation, and William McDougall investigating the haptic senses and sensitivity to pain, the team sought to test ongoing debates over Herbert Spencer’s hypothesis regarding differences in the sensory acuity of “primitive” and “civilized” cultures (see Cole 1996:41; Richards 1998:137).  As Richards notes, Spencer’s hypothesis was “that ‘primitives’ surpassed ‘civilized’ people in psychophysical performance because more energy remained devoted to this level in the former instead of being diverted to ‘higher functions’, a central tenet of late Victorian ‘scientific racism’” (1998:137).  
	The orientation of these researchers was based upon the assumption, articulated by Myers, that “the mode of life led by primitive peoples and their general mental status combine to make them more aware of and attentive to the majority of external stimuli than we ourselves are...A faint odor may be simultaneously perceptible to the civilized and to the uncivilized individual. To the latter it will be full of meaning and so will at once engage his attention; for the opposite reason it is apt to escape the notice of the former” (cited in Titchener 1916:210).  
	In line with this thesis, McDougall asserted that the people of Torres Strait showed greater sensitivity to the external impingement of two points applied to the skin, while demonstrating a much greater insensitivity to the internal impingement of pain sensation than their European counterparts.  Finding that subjects were not fooled by a variety of optical illusions, Rivers argued that the islanders had greater visual acuity than Europeans.  He also asserted that the islanders demonstrated a greater sensitivity to the color red and a slight insensitivity to the color blue, which was marked in terms of the discernable prevalence or lack of lexical items used to designate these particular ranges in the color spectrum.  Myers found that while there was some observational data suggesting that islanders had a greater ability to identify faint, imperceptible sounds, none of his tests on audition or olfaction proved conclusive in this regard.  In fact, as Cole notes, Myers “found that auditory sensitivity was somewhat greater for European samples while there was no apparent difference in sensitivity to odors” (1996:43).  
	While it seems that the expedition was able to garner some evidence supporting the extent to which culture might serve to pattern sensory experience, a number of critical questions concerning the accuracy and validity of the methods and  findings of the expedition where raised in an article by Titchener (1916; see also Cole 1996).  In this paper Titchener critically evaluated the psychometric work on vision and tactility. He pointed out that McDougall’s experiment designed to assess the distance at which an individual can perceive a sensation as perceptibly different from a single point, was fundamentally flawed due to the possibility that English and Torres Straits subjects had differing interpretations of what was asked of them (1916:208).  Turning to Rivers work on color vision, Titchener argued that the differences observed in color perception may only reflect differences in attending to a “supraliminal flush” associated with the functioning Lovibond’s tintometer.  As he explains, “the possibility is rather that the Murray men tended to overlook the flush, [while] the Englishmen report it as blue” (1916:217). 	
	It is interesting to note that prior to the Torres Strait expedition W.H.R.Rivers, currently held to be an influential pioneering figure in both psychological and medical anthropology,  had taught the physiology of the senses at the University of Cambridge from 1893-1897 (Richards, 1998:150).  His interest in the relationship between culture and color perception was also furthered in a number of studies conducted after the expedition that spanned from Egypt (1901a) to British New Guinea (1901b) to the Inuit of Labrador (1902) to India (1903; 1905).  His longstanding interest in sensation is further revealed in his later work with Henry Head (Rivers and Head, 1908) where experiments on the regeneration of nerve function after intentional severing lead to a proposed distinction between “protopathic” (non-local, all-or-nothing) and “epicritic” (localized and discriminated according to intensity and quality) varieties of sensibility (see Young, 1995:46).
Emile Durkheim (1858-1918) and the elementary forms of consciousness
	 The concern for the invariant properties of consciousness, which was first explicated in Bastian’s project, continued through the history of the discipline.  Although the overly simplistic, evolutionist notion of the “psychic unity of mankind” came into serious question in the early 20th century, researchers were still interested in pan-human regularities in socio-cultural phenomena, as well as the variation in sensory experience influenced by culture.  Emile Durkheim (1858-1918), one of the most renown fathers of contemporary social theory, argued that socially derived collective representations play an important role in patterning the individual’s various sensory modalities.  At the same time, he emphasized that there exist universal properties of experience – so-called “categories of understanding.”  All people come to know the world filtered through the same empirically derived categories: time, space, number, cause, class, person, and totality. Emile Durkheim and his student, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) worked on the relationship between classificatory schemes, social organization, and spatial perception, an effort that can also be viewed as an early attempt at establishing the parameters for an anthropology of consciousness.  In Primitive Classification (1963 [1903]), they suggested that it is forms of social organization that serve to shape the categorical schemes mediating an individual’s perception of space.  
	Expanding on some of these ideas in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]), Durkheim further argued that socially derived collective representations play an important role in patterning the individual’s various sensory modalities (see also Throop 2003c).  As he put it, collective representations “turn upon sensation a beam that lights, penetrates, and transforms it” (1995:437).  Moreover, Durkheim demonstrated that collective representations are re-enforced through rituals that pair the society’s knowledge with certain altered states of consciousness – or what he called, “collective effervescence.”     This strain of thinking in Durkheim influenced the fundamental structuralist notions perpetuated by Mauss, and later Mauss’ own pupil, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908- ), founder of modern day structuralism (see below).
	Indeed, in his now famous essay Les techniques du corps (1950), Mauss importantly extended some of these basic ideas regarding the relationship between culture and consciousness to questions concerning the ways in which culture influences body posture, balance, motility, and the kinesthetic sense.  Using the term “habitus” to account for the acquired practical nexus that informs an individual’s habitual use and perception of the body, Mauss viewed reproduction, consumption, care, movement, rest, and sleep as significant fields for investigating the various ways that culture can pattern techniques of somatic perception and action.
Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) on multiple modes of consciousness
	Building upon Durkheim’s earlier writings on collective representations, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, both an influential and controversial figure in the history of the discipline, set out to further Durkheim’s initial insight that “[d]ifferent mentalities will correspond to different social types” (1926:27) by detailing what he argued to be the fundamental differences between “primitive” and “modern” mentalities (see Throop 2003c).  Where the latter were held to be organized according to “logical” modes of thought that were primarily grounded in cognitive functioning, the former were thought to be fundamentally “prelogical” and infused with imagination and emotional currents which often served to “distort” the stability and coherence of the world as first given to the senses.  Careful not to follow Edward Tylor (1958 [1871]) and Herbert Spencer’s (1886) view of  “primitive mentality” as an antecedent stage to “modern  mentality,” Lévy-Bruhl argued that both forms of “mentality”, while differentially organized, were to be understood as equally valued (1926:78).  
	In terms of the cultural patterning of conscious experience, in How Natives Think (1926) Lévy-Bruhl asserted that while for the “modern mind” mental representations are cognitive phenomena that are precise and well differentiated, for “primitive mentality,” mental representations are far more complex, undifferentiated, and infused with emotion, feeling, and “passion” (1926:36).  Furthermore, Lévy-Bruhl held that in addition to being suffused with such emotional and “motor” currents, “primitive mentality” is almost exclusively directed by culturally constituted collective representations and as such is “bound up with preperceptions, preconceptions, preconnections, and we might almost say with prejudgments” which serve to alter the functioning of such mental capacities as reason, logic and inference (1926:108). 
	Driven by an alternative kind of logic, Lévy-Bruhl believed that “primitive mentality” operated such that an individual would confront a “world” constituted by collective representations which were largely “impervious to experience.”  As he put it, “[p]rimitives see with eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds.  We might almost say that their perceptions are made up of a nucleus surrounded by a layer of varying density of representations which are social in their origin” (1926:44).  For Lévy-Bruhl, it was precisely this collectively generated representational saturation that accounted for the differential functioning of “primitive” logic that operated without regard to the “law of contradiction.”  Because a “primitive’s” collective representations served to direct his/her perception beyond immediate sensory data to the occult forces and the “imperceptible elements” thought to operate beyond the purview of our various sensory modalities, the “primitive mind” was understood by Lévy-Bruhl to be driven to see connections between otherwise “logically” disparate phenomena (e.g. between a man and his totem animal).  In Lévy-Bruhl’s estimation, therefore, categorical thought and instances of mutual exclusivity which were the putative hallmark of “logical thought” were abandoned in “primitive mentality” which holds instead to a “law of participation” whereby  the mind is not merely “presented” with an object, but, “communes with it and participates in it, not only in the ideological, but also in the physical and mystic sense of the word” (1926:362).
	While his perspective on putative differences between these differing mentalities was quite rightfully criticized by his peers and successors, in all fairness to Lévy-Bruhl, we should note that later on in his career he came to understand that all people, be they “primitive” or “civilized,” operate on both logical thought and the “participation mystique,” depending upon social context (see Lévy-Bruhl, 1975).  In other words, Lévy-Bruhl’s description of “primitive mentality” can be understood as an accurate description of all “mentalities” where cognitive, affective and conative elements are ever-present and often interfused.   Much of human experience is conditioned to a great extent by “preperceptions,” “preconceptions,” “preconnections” and “prejudgments.”
Language, consciousness and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
	One of Boas’ students, Edward Sapir (1884-1939), and one of Sapir’s students, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), are famous both within and beyond the discipline of anthropology for revisiting Boas’ concern for cultural variation in consciousness.  Each in their own way, they explored  the effects of culture and language on the patterning of contents of consciousness.  Throughout their careers, they attempted to highlight the various ways that cultural and linguistic systems serve to selectively direct individuals attention to linguistically salient elements in the perceptual field.  While there is still much controversy over the extent to which Sapir would have supported versions of linguistic relativity postulating any simple correspondence between the structures of language, the structures of thought, and the patterning of sensation and perception, he did argue, however, that even “comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of social patterns called words than we might suppose....We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation” [emphasis in original] (1958 [1929]:69).
	Following Boas and Sapir’s lead, Benjamin Lee Whorf also examined the relationship between language, thought, and experience.  Indeed, in an exploration of how punctual and segmentative aspects of Hopi verbs come to characterize phenomena according to “pulsative” and “vibrative” characteristics, Whorf pointed out that while we tend to view language in terms of its expressive function, “language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world_order, a certain segment of the world that is easily expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs” (1956:55; emphasis ours).  According to Whorf, whether we are talking about visual perception, audition, or the temporal sense of “ever becoming later,” streams of sensory input are organized or patterned by habitual language usage and the often covert grammatical forms --“cryptotypes”– that serve to give structure to that usage.  Indeed, Whorf argued that the punctual and segmentative aspects of Hopi verbs actually supply Hopi speakers with a grammatical system that is “better equipped” to describe vibratile phenomena than the terminology we find in modern day physics (ibid).  In this respect, he argued that this “Hopi aspect_contrast which we have observed, being obligatory upon their verb forms, practically forces the Hopi to notice and observe vibratory phenomena, and furthermore encourages them to find names for and to classify such phenomena” (1956:56; emphasis ours).
	The combined efforts of Sapir and Whorf to understanding the influence of language upon experience came to be known as the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.”  The tradition in anthropology has been to speak of a hard and a soft version of the Hypothesis.  The hard version would read something like: Language categories determine the organization of experience.  Virtually all of the empirical evidence over the last half century garnered in both anthropology and psychology appears to disconfirm this version of the Hypothesis.  Moreover, neither Sapir, nor Whorf ever advocated such a simplistic and deterministic relationship between language and consciousness.  What they did do however was hold fast to the notion, common in their day, that the structure of language provides researchers with significant insight into an underlying cultural ontology for reality.  Consider one of Sapir’s statements: “The ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group” (1931:580).  Whorf took this a step further when he suggested that, “The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face.  On the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be organized in our minds.  This means, largely, by the linguistic system in our minds” (1956:128).  While it still much debated as to the extent to which either thinker would have supported the “hard” version of the Hypotheis, it is safe to assume that both Sapir and Whorf would each have definitely supported a softer version, which might go something like:  The way people learn to speak about things influences how they are conditioned to think about things (see Lucy, 1985; Rumsey, 1990).  The weight of the evidence over the last half century would support some form of this view (Kay & Kempton, 1984; Lucy, 1992).
Irving Hallowell (1892-1974) and the “behavioral environment”
	Irving Hallowell is another important pioneering figure in anthropology’s long-standing interest in the cultural patterning of sensation and consciousness.  Much like Sapir and Whorf before him, Hallowell’s approach to consciousness can be understood as an extension of the Boasian tradition. This is not surprising since Hallowell was a student of Boas’s student Frank Speck at the University of Pennsylvania, and also participated regularly in Boas’s weekly seminars at Columbia (Bock 1999).  Moreover, while never officially a student of Sapir’s, Hallowell was also clearly influenced by his writings, so much so that he ended up serving as one of three editors for a volume of essays honoring Sapir after his untimely death in 1939, entitled Language, Culture and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir (1941). 
	In his article “The Rorschach Test in Personality and Culture Studies” (1955), Hallowell argued that much of what individuals take to be “direct perception” is in fact informed by personally and culturally constituted “nonsensory” symbolic forms.  Citing Jerome Bruner’s claim that perception must be understood as the expression of the entire personality structure and Francis Bartlett’s (1932) view that the mind’s perceptual processes are organized according to an “effort after meaning,” Hallowell explained that much of what we understand to be the transparent perception of an external world is guided by the psychophysical structure of the nervous system which has developed in each individual member of society according to that individual’s personal psychology and the influence of the culture in which she has been raised (1955:40).    	
	This understanding of the effects of culture on perceptual processes – particularly those perceptual processes subserving vision – further informs what is perhaps Hallowell’s most famous contribution to anthropological theory; namely, the concept of the “behavioral environment.”  Borrowing the term from the Gestalt psychology of Koffka, Hallowell explained that the “behavioral environment” is not merely the generalized physical or geographical environment, but, that culturally ordered environment that is experienced by an individual social actor. That is, according to Hallowell, the behavioral environment consists of an ordered world of “objects,” “persons,” and “relations,” that is experienced by a social actor whose perceptual capacities effectively suffuse those “objects,” “persons,” and “relations” with personally and culturally constituted meanings, values, feelings, and motivations.  
	That said, in accord with what we have seen to be the ongoing dialogue in anthropology between the interplay of similarity and difference in the structure and content of consciousness cross-culturally, Hallowell also argued that it is possible to determine a number of basic orientations that provide the structural underpinnings for the constitution of an individual’s world of experience, regardless of the historical, cultural and/or personal factors that do serve to importantly shape each of these orientations in a multitude of  ways.  Outlining orientations for “self,” “objects,” “space_time,” “motivation,” and “norms,” Hallowell demonstrated how each orientation can be construed as a universal and necessary structure of human consciousness that is also importantly patterned according to unique cultural, social and personal dictates.  For instance, he pointed out that while for all cultures it is necessary to classify and discriminate between  “objects” in relation to a culturally constituted understanding of the “self,” the ways in which “objects” are conceived varies tremendously between different cultural systems.  Hallowell explored this complex blend of psychophysical, personal and cultural influences upon perception through the use traditional anthropological methods as well as by administering Rorschach tests to subjects from Ojibwa and other societies (1955: 32-74).
STRUCTURE AND CONTENT II:
MODERN STRUCTURALISM, PRACTICE THEORY, HERMENEUTICS, 
AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE,	
	Many of the themes and orientations present in the early development of the anthropology of consciousness continue to be developed during the mid- to late twentieth century.  However, research techniques eventually became more sophisticated and there were many more ethnographers collecting data from among the myriad peoples on the planet.  Among other things, the tension between universalist (orientation toward the ways peoples are alike) and relativist (orientation toward the ways people are different) perspectives became intensified.  As we shall see, part of the problem is ideological, but part is also methodological – i.e., it is next to impossible to perceive the structures subserving human activity in the kind of naturalistic setting encountered by most ethnographers in the field.  We will return to this point in the conclusion of the paper.  
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - ) and structuralism
	An important contribution to anthropological approaches to consciousness is found in the work of the famous French structuralist, Claude Lévi_Strauss.  What was novel about Lévi-Strauss’s approach to consciousness was that he set out to ground the generative source of particularistic cultural givens in the universal structures of the human brain (see Scholte 1973; Throop 2003c).  He held that it was unconscious mental structures that gave rise to the experiential vicissitudes of culturally mediated consciousness.  It was thus a movement from empirical and experiential diversity to conceptual and intellectual simplicity that guided much of Lévi_Strauss’s structuralist vision.  In this paradigm, cultural products were therefore understood to be constrained by the limits imposed by the structural underpinnings of the human mind.  These products were held to be expressions of the mind that generates them and were intelligible on that accord.
	In this light, Lévi_Strauss argued that phenomenological appeals to lived experience in the context of anthropological explorations into the structures of consciousness are in and of themselves always inadequate, since he held that this necessarily biases researchers to focusing exclusively on the particular, contingent, individual and often inexpressible affective and sensorial realm.  He payed little attention to this “superficial,” “idiosyncratic” realm of individual consciousness, however, for while “ideas resulting from hazy and unelaborated attitudes...have an experiential character for each of us....[t]hese experiences, however, remain intellectually diffuse and emotionally intolerable unless they incorporate one or another of the patterns present in the group’s culture.  The assimilation of such patterns is the only means of objectivizing subjective states, of formulating inexpressible feelings, and of integrating inarticulated experiences into a system” (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958], pp.171_72).
	In his analysis of myth Lévi-Strauss attempted to show how underlying their seemingly non-linear, mystical and irrational exposition, myths are governed by a logical structure of binary oppositions, mediators and the reconciliation of the very logical contradictions (e.g. between nature and culture) which Lévy-Bruhl claimed to go unnoticed by thinkers immersed in a participatory consciousness.  For Levi-Strauss these seemingly irrational and culturally specific narratives are actually viewed to be one of the best means to access the invariant structures of the human mind.  Most simply put, Lévi-Strauss’ project is predicated upon a model of consciousness and culture that is rooted in externalization..  It is important to realize that Levi-Strauss was not interested in personal externalization (i.e., creativity), but rather a view which takes externalization to be tied primarily to the projection of the universal and invariant structures of the human mind into the tangible medium of cultural forms; in this case mythological texts (and elsewhere kinship systems).. 
	Levi-Strauss’ approach to consciousness has been faulted for failing to recognize the significance of emotion and motivation in all forms of mentality, and for over-emphasizing the importance of  “externalization” in the patterning of cultural products such as myth. In addition, many critical assessments of Levi-Strauss’ work are grounded in the contention that he never systematically outlined a methodology for how he went about discovering binary oppositions, mediators, etc., in the context of his textual analysis of the underlying structural elements of myth.  While having important roots in Bastian’s and Boas’ research paradigms, Levi-Strauss’ almost exclusive methodological reliance on texts to the exclusion of other research methodologies, fueled many of the most trenchant critiques of structuralist approaches to consciousness in the discipline as a whole.
Clifford Geertz (1923 - ) and the interpretivist/hermeneutic approach
	In his now famous appropriation of philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s (1900-1976) notion of the “thick description”of the behaviors that reputedly evidence the workings of “internal/mental” acts (Ryle, 1949), Clifford Geertz’ approach to consciousness was clearly rooted his position that an “I-am-a-camera, ‘phenomenalistic’” approach to anthropology is necessarily insufficient for any attempts at uncovering the “structures of signification” that serve to give meaning to all observed phenomena (1973:7; see Throop 2003a).  According to Geertz, “think description” as a methodology is predicated on anthropologists turning their attention to a detailed description of ongoing expressive behavior and the social context within which that behavior arises.  This description of expressive behavior in the context of its occurrence is thus understood to serve as the foundation from which researchers are later able to build an understanding of the interpretive frameworks that actors use to give meaning to their action.
	Following Max Weber (1864-1920), Geertz asserted that his vision of an “interpretive science,” whose purpose is to explore  the “webs of significance” that serve to constitute culture, is founded on the idea that culture is a public, ideational and yet non-mentalistic system of “construable signs.”  Again paraphrasing Ryle, Geertz held that it is precisely the inherently public nature of culture that makes problematic the notion that cultural symbols exist “in someone’s head” – i.e., as operating within human consciousness.   Indeed, he strongly criticized the work of Ward Goodenough and other “ethnoscientists,” who have construed culture to be “composed of psychological structures by means of which individuals or groups of individuals guide their behavior” (1973:11).  
	In fact, Geertz believed with Ryle, that “mind” is a term that most accurately denotes, not some privately accessible “ghost in the machine,” but a publically accessible “class of skills, propensities, capacities, tendencies and habits...[in short] an organized system of dispositions which finds its manifestation in some actions and some things” (1973:58).  He argued that it is these “external” (i.e., public) symbolic manifestations of complexes of skills and habits that ultimately underlie all reflective modes of consciousness.   Indeed, what many scholars assume to be “mental” processes are, according to Geertz, more accurately construed to be processes of “matching ...states and processes of [public] symbolic models against [equally public] states and processes of the wider world” (1973:78).   
	Geertz also followed Ryle’s lead in arguing that it is only by viewing symbols to be “material vehicles of thought” which allow individuals to impress meaning upon objects in experience, that we can ever hope to legitimize the anthropological study of consciousness.  Geertz believed that it is only this public view of symbol that can serve to ensure the possibility that anthropologists may eventually discover properties of cultural and personal systems through systematic empirical analysis (1973:362).  In Geertz’s view then, his perspective provides anthropology with a way in which to uncover “what is given, what the conceptual structure embodied in the symbolic forms through which persons are perceived actually is” (1973:364).  It was his opinion, that this potential “method of describing and analyzing the meaningful structure of experience” can therefore  provide anthropology with the basis for establishing a valid “scientific phenomenology of culture” (1973:364).
 	Building on Ryle, as well as George Herbert Mead, Geertz’s argued that the assumption that culture is both public and social leads inevitably to the insight that cultural processes do not “happen in the head” but consists in contrast, with a traffic of significant symbols that serve to “impose meaning upon experience” (1973:45; emphasis ours).  In short,  Geertz’ view is that conscious experience is a cultural artifact.  Without the medium of culturally infused significant symbols Geertz asserted that conscious experience would be relegated to incoherent and impenetrable behaviors and sensations.  For Geertz then, the imposition of meaning on an otherwise chaotic stream of stimuli and responses is one of the key defining components of human existence as cultural beings.  It is this externalized, socially infused understanding of culture as a coherent system of symbols serving to inform all moments of conscious experience that allows Geertz to later establish his memorable metaphor of “culture as text” (1973: 448-449).  Drawing also from the work of philosopher and novelist Walker Percy, Geertz asserted that “[e]very conscious perception is...an act of recognition, a pairing in which an object (or an event, or an act, an emotion) is identified by placing it against the background of an appropriate symbol” (1973:215).  Again, symbolic systems are “extrinsic sources of information in terms of which human life can be patterned – extrapersonal mechanisms for the perception, understanding, judgement, and manipulation of the world (1973:216; emphasis ours). 
Pierre Bourdieu and practice theory
	Taking a significant step away from both Lévi-Straussian structuralism and Geertzian semiotics, Pierre Bourdieu may be credited with turning anthropologists (as well as philosophers and other social scientists) attention to the significance of exploring non-conceptual, embodied aspects of human consciousness (see Throop and Murphy 2002).  His perspective, which has inspired a long line of scholars interested in exploring consciousness from a practice theoretical approach, pivots on the concept of “habitus.”  According to Bourdieu, habitus is a durable set of culturally and socially inculcated proclivities to act, perceive, feel, appreciate, and generally inhabit the world.  He argued that the concept of habitus enables him “to break away from the structuralist paradigm [see Levi-Strauss above] without falling back into the old philosophy of the subject or of consciousness” (Bourdieu, 1985:13). 
	Bourdieu understanding of habitus is based on the assumption that “agents are possessed by their habitus more than they possess it” (1977: 18). It is thus not through conscious attention to pre-determined “roles”, “rules” or “models” that agents negotiate their interactions with the social world, but through the unintentional triggering of strategic patterns of thought and action produced by habitus in its mutually informing relation to structure (ibid.: 73). Here lies what Bourdieu labeled the “fallacy of the rule,” which is based on the putatively false belief that agents are conscious of how their practice is “objectively governed.”  Instead, Bourdieu argued that agents always lack explicit cognizance of the “mechanisms producing this conformity in the absence of intention to conform” (ibid.: 29). According to Bourdieu, rules are only ever functional if they serve to “awaken ...the schemes of perception and appreciation deposited, in their incorporated state, in every member of the group” (ibid.: 17). Rules are thus only ever intended to deal with “the collective enterprise of inculcation tending to produce habitus” (ibid.: 17).
	Connected to the “fallacy of the rule,” and also crucial to understanding his perspective on consciousness, is what Bourdieu terms the “finalist illusion.” In Bourdieu’s opinion, practices are produced by habitus, which serves as a generative principle allowing individuals to adjust and respond to ever-changing situations. He suggested that it is a mistake, however, to believe that these strategies are determined in accord with some future orientation that is explicitly accessible in conscious experience. Instead, he argued that habitus is “always tending to reproduce the objective structures of which they are a product, [as] they are determined by the past conditions which have produced the principle of their production” (ibid.: 72).  In this light, habitus “is that presence of the past in the present which makes possible the presence in the present of the forth-coming” (2000: 210). Bourdieu therefore stressed the conservative nature of habitus and the unconscious basis for the patterning of human behavior, for he asserted that habitus is predisposed to defend its integrity, resisting change by avoiding or rejecting information that serves to contradict or question its previously acquired presuppositions (ibid.: 60-61). As he puts it, “habitus tends to favor experiences likely to reinforce it…[protecting] itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible” (1990: 61).  In this light, Bourdieu explained that the process of the naturalization of the conventional is such that “[s]chemes of thought and perception can produce the objectivity that they produce only by producing misrecognition of the limits of the cognition that they make possible, thereby founding immediate adherence, in doxic mode, to the world of tradition experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted” (1977: 164). 
	Bourdieu occasionally acknowledged, however, that we cannot in fact dispense completely with all forms of explicitness in consciousness, precisely because within the dialectical interaction of structure and disposition, the inscription of structure in habitus is seldom, if ever, a perfect match.  Even with these occasional cautions he was not, however, consistent in this regard. There are, in fact, a number of instances where we find Bourdieu defining habitus as a set of mental, perceptual, cognitive and behavioral dispositions that are inscribed in agents’ individual bodies early in their lifespans while being “constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group, that is to say, from the aggregate of individuals endowed with the same dispositions, to whom each is linked by his dispositions and interests” (1977: 15; emphasis ours]).  Bourdieu also stated that the unconscious patterning of perceptual, evaluative and behavioral schemes functions in such a way that conscious “quasi theoretical reflection” in practice merely serves to conceal “the true nature of practical mastery” (1977: 19). Here we again find some inconsistencies in his position, however, for he also explained that pedagogy can be seen as a process of explication which entails the necessary distancing from the “natural” feel of practical mastery in the attempt to transfer skills from master to student (ibid.: 19). If it is indeed the case that the transmission of skills from an adept to a novice is often associated with direct explicit representation in consciousness that is thus distanced from the experience of “practical mastery,” the question that may be asked of Bourdieu is why he devotes so little attention to exploring the relationship between representional and non-representational aspects of consciousness, and why it is that he focused so much attention to the unconscious acquisition of habitus?
Victor Turner (1920-1983) and the anthropology of experience
		Held as one of the key figures in the development of both symbolic anthropology and the anthropology of experience, Victor Turner’s approach to consciousness has also importantly influenced many current approaches to the topic in the discipline (Peacock, 1975; Throop 2002, 2003a).  In his earliest works, Victor Turner’s understanding of consciousness attempted to integrate symbolic, physiological, bodily, sensory and emotional dimensions of human existence.  His distinction between the ideological/normative and sensory/orectic poles of meaning serves as a good case in point.  In Turner’s framework, ritual symbols are understood to be conventionalized, multivocal (i.e., multi_referential) signs that instigate action and which share three basic properties: (1) the condensation of multiple percepts, thought objects, and actions within a “single formation;” (2) the unification of disparate significata by means of “analogous qualities or by association in fact or thought;”and (3)the polarization of meaning into ideological (i.e., structurally normative) and sensory (i.e., physiological) referents (1967:28).  As Turner put it, “At one pole cluster a set of referents of a grossly physiological character, relating to general human experience of an emotional kind.  At the other pole cluster a set of referents to moral norms and principles governing social structure....Here we have an intimate union of the moral and material” (1967:54; emphasis ours).  
		It is in the context of the polarization of meaning that Turner argued that these two basic poles become intimately interlinked through processes of ritual engagement with cultural symbols that serve to shape individual consciousness according to the dictates set by cultural and social ideals, morals, edicts, roles and rules.  In other words, in his earlier writings it is through a ritually mediated engagement with symbols that Turner grounded the canalization of an individual’s subjective, emotional and physiological experiences according to pre_given social and cultural structures.  Moreover, it is also through ritual that the imperceptible world of cultural representations are given coherence in reference to the perceptible world of the senses.  As he explains in his book The Ritual Process (1969) in reference to the Nbembu (dwelling in West Africa) cultural belief in “shades” (ghosts, ancestors), ritual “connects the known world of sensorily perceptible phenomena with the unknown and invisible realm” (p. 15).  In this respect, it can be said that every “symbolic item is related to some empirical item of experience,” whether that be “sensorily perceptible objects,” feeling states, desires, a sense of purposiveness, or emotions  (pp. 42_43).  In Turner’s early writings, we find that consciousness is most often characterized as having a psychobiological base that is shaped by both culturally patterned and universally structured properties that help to give definition to an individual’s subjective take on their physical, social and cultural worlds. 
		Turner’s later writings on consciousness were directly inspired by the writings of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911; see Throop, 2002, 2003a). In the context of his dialogue with Dilthey, Turner’s earlier understanding of consciousness was extended to encompass a trichotomy of cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions as they are directly “lived through” by individual actors.  It is in his book, From Ritual to Theater (1982), that we find Turner’s first published discussion of conscious experience from the perspective of Dilthey’s framework.  In its introduction, Turner pointed out that in contrast to Kant’s belief that it is only with the conceptual pattering of sensation that the “raw data” of experience are given definite form, Dilthey holds that every distinct “unit of experience” is given to an individual’s awareness with a certain structure that is not merely the result of the categorical impositions of the human mind.  Instead, “the data of experience are ‘instinct with form,’ and thought’s work is to draw out ‘the structural system’ implicit in every distinguishable Erlebnis or unit of experience” (1982:13). It is important to point out here that while focusing upon “structures of experience,” Turner was also quite familiar with Dilthey’s attempt to discuss different “moments of experience” which are understood to be integral components of the organization of any distinctive “structure of experience” (see Throop, 2002).  After outlining five such moments – namely, the perceptual core, the evocation of past images, the revival of associated feelings, the emergence of meaning and value, and the expression of experience – Turner went on to argue, however, that it is only really in the fifth moment of “expression” that the “structured unit of experience” can be said to reveal itself (1982:15).  
	Turner further recognized Dilthey’s important distinction between the immediate “living through of experience” as a sequence of events (Erleben), and the retrospective attribution of meaning tied to the structuring of “experience” as a particular coherent unit or form.  In this way, Turner argued that in the context of its expression “experience is both ‘living through’ and ‘thinking back’.....[and it] is also ‘willing or wishing forward’” (1982:18)  Turner further explores the multilayered structuring of “experience in terms of the temporal organization of “meaning,” “value,” and “ends” (see also Turner 1985:214-215; Throop 2003a). According to Turner’s reading of Dilthey, where “meaning” is essentially a cognitive structure oriented to the past, “value” is an affective structure tied to the vicissitudes of the present moment, while “ends” are volitional structures tied to goal directed behavior oriented toward an emerging future.  Again following Dilthey, he argued that there is little or no cognitive coherence in the “unarticulated quality of value.”  Instead, it is only with the interconnection of what are otherwise latent “tonal-affinities,” that disparate “values” are able to be organized into a coherent structure through the “ligatures” provided by personal and cultural forms of “meaning.”  In contrast to the transient sequentiality that is characteristic of value as it manifests in its immediate immersion in the “conscious present” –  “[m]eaning is apprehended by looking back over a temporal process”(1982:76; emphasis in original).  
	In his dialogue with Dilthey, Turner thus importantly highlighted for anthropologists the significance of exploring consciousness in terms of its temporal structure – e.g., retrospection, perception, and anticipation.  As is evident from Turner’s discussion of value, meaning, and ends, it seems that there may very well be significant  variations in relationship between culture and the contents of consciousness as they variously articulate with differing temporal orientations in the stream of consciousness as it unfolds moment by moment (see Throop 2003a)..    
CONTENT AND STRUCTURE III:
CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
	Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Geertz’ hermeneutics, Bourdieu’s practice theory, and Turner’s anthropology of experience have each importantly set the stage for many of  the contemporary approaches to consciousness in the discipline that have arisen during the past thirty years.  As we will see below, whether it be in terms of a critical reaction to, or an attempt to build upon, the insights of these earlier approaches to consciousness in the discipline, the themes, orientations and methodological and theoretical tensions found in the past century and a half of anthropology continue to develop in contemporary anthropology.  Meanwhile, new and intriguing approaches to consciousness  have developed, all within the basic naturalistic framework of ethnological research.  In this section, we will explore some of the major approaches to consciousness that have emerged in anthropology over the last thirty years.
Transpersonal anthropology and altered states of consciousness
	It is perhaps anthropologists’ documentation of evidence for alterations in states of consciousness cross-culturally that has garnered the most attention from researchers outside the discipline.  And indeed, it is true that anthropologists have encountered, recorded and thought about the importance of alternative states of consciousness since the latter part of the nineteenth century (e.g., see Andrew Lang (1894, 1897, 1898)).  Moreover,  these observations have served to challenge many of the taken for granted assumptions about consciousness that have appeared in the context of Western scientific approaches to the topic; including the prevalent “monophasic” bias – the tendency to focus almost exclusively on exploring the contents and structures of consciousness in normal waking states – apparent in much of this research..     	Such interest continued intermittently throughout the twentieth century in a variety of reports of ASC; e.g., Lincoln (1935) on dreams and culture, Barnouw (1946) on the paranormal cross-culturally, Aberle (1966) on the use of peyote in the Native American Church, Bourguignon (1973, 1976) on ASC generally cross-culturally, Bharati (1975) on tantric meditation practices, Furst (1976), Dobkin de Rios (1984), Dobkin de Rios & Winkelman (1989) on the use of hallucinogens and cultural practices, Halifax (1975),  Peters (1982), and Peters & Price-Williams (1980) on ASC related to shamanism, Long (1977) on extrasensory phenomena cross-culturally, Jilik (1982) on ASC and healing, and Rouget (1985) on music and trance states.  	However, it took developments in psychology to make ethnology more aware that extraordinary experiences where not only significant for challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of consciousness in North American and Wester Europe, but could also be of prime significance for doing ethnographic research.  Hot on the heals of the rise of transpersonal psychology in the latter 1960s and early 1970s(Sutich, 1968; Boucouvalas, 1980), a number of anthropologists began to realize that the experiences associated with some religious texts and ritual practices encountered by ethnographers are of an exceptional nature – are in fact ASC  – states not easily accessed by researchers using routine ethnographic field methods (see Laughlin, 1989, 1990, 1994a; Laughlin, McManus and Shearer, 1983; Lee, 1980:2; Long, 1976; MacDonald, 1981; Campbell & Staniford, 1978).  Moreover, it became clear that such experiences are both very common cross-culturally, and fundamental to most of the world’s traditional religious systems (Bourguignon, 1973, 1976).  At the same time, it also became clear that few ethnographers have personally experienced and reported on ASCs related to the peoples they were studying.  Methodological issues were part of the problem – it is very difficult to access ASC from “outside” as it were (Laughlin, 1989; Braud & Anderson, 1998).  Also, until the latter part of the 20th century, there had been an unwritten tradition in ethnology against first person narratives.  Only during the last few decades have such reports begun to surface; e.g., Grindal (1983) on a profound experience which occurred to him while attending a Sisala funeral in Ghana in 1967, Katz (1982:6ff) on experiences attendant to trance-dancing among the Bushmen, Laughlin (1994) on psychic energy ASC related to tantric Buddhist practices, Laughlin, McManus & Webber (1984) on experiences arising while meditating upon complex symbols in Tibetan tantric Buddhism, Lederman (1988:805-806) on ritually-driven ASC among Malay shamans, MacDonald et al. (1988) on experiments with the shaman’s mirror, Young-Laughlin and Laughlin (1988) and Webber, Stephens & Laughlin (1983) on the phenomenology and structure of masked performance, Coult (1977) on the ethnological significance of psychedelic experiences, Edith Turner (1996) on perceiving spirit entities, Harner (1973) on hallucinogens and religion, George (1995) on telepathic dreaming, Chagnon (1977:154ff) on an experiment with hallucinogenics, shamanic dance and chanting, and Young & Goulet (1994) for a variety of such reports.
Cognitive anthropology
	Cognitive anthropological approaches to consciousness have their roots in the ethnoscientific work of such scholars as Charles Frake, Ward Goodenough, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, among others.  These approaches arose, much like those of their psychological counterparts, in the context of what is now understood to have been a general backlash against behavorism in the social sciences occurring during the mid-nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies in the context of the “cognitive revolution” (see D’Andrade 1995).  Indeed, ethnoscientific approaches in anthropology sought to place consciousness back in the center of anthropological research through exploring how the conceptual categorization of experience in differing cultures could shed light on both the flexibility and limitations inherent in human cognitive capacities.  By the late seventies and early eighties, cognitive anthropological approaches to consciousness focused a great deal of attention to the significance of cultural “schemas” -- a term that can ultimately be traced back to Bartlett’s “schemata” (1932)  – in giving definition to the contents of human consciousness, and in many ways importantly contributed to the development of cognitive science as an independent field of study (see D’Andrade 1995).  Below we will discuss three recent, influential approaches to consciousness in cognitive anthropology.  Out of all the approaches to consciousness thus far discussed, cognitive anthropologists have perhaps been the most innovative in terms of developing methodologies for exploring the impact of culture on consciousness and the impact of consciousness on culture.  Indeed, from triad testing to paired comparisons to multidimentional scaling to cultural consensus measures, cognitive anthropologists have been at the forefront of working to ground anthropological research in systematic methods for data collection and analysis.
	Perhaps the single most influential figure in contemporary cognitive anthropology is Roy D’Andrade.  D’Adrande has addressed the relationship between culture and consciousness most explicitly through an exploration of a number of differences he notes between symbolically driven computer programs and human cognitive abilities (1981). According to D’Andrade, the most apparent difference seems to lie in the fact that where computer programs acquire information about the world through explicit symbolic encoding of the unambiguous linear ordering of step-by-step instructions, human children in most societies are seldom exposed to explicit instruction and acquire what is often context-specific knowledge and competencies through processes of observation, peripheral participation, modeling, and trial and error activity.  In terms of the relationship between culture and consciousness, D’Andrade notes that, not only do cultural processes serve to shape the contents and processes of human consciousness, but the innate capacities of human consciousness also serve to shape and constrain cultural processes; see e.g., George A. Miller’s (1956; Miller, Galanter & Pribram 1960) findings with regard to the limits of human memory.  D’Andrade attributes the co-existence of the “flexibility” and “sharedness” of cultural forms to the basic ways in which human’s acquire knowledge and competencies, which he characterizes as a “curious combination of self-initiated yet other dependent leaning” (D’Andrade 1981:188).   While D’Andrade is convinced that the computer analogy so prevalent in cognitive science often serves to shed light upon human mental functioning primarily by acting as a valuable contrast to that functioning, he has also played an important role in generating interest in anthropology concerning how computer models based on parallel distributed processing theory may serve to shed light on the relationship between culture and human mental processes (D’Andrade 1984,1987).
	Inspired by a number of D’Andrade’s insights, two other influential figures in the field, Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1998), have recently set out to outline a cognitive theory of cultural meaning that focuses squarely upon the relationship between culture and consciousness in the context of a discussion of internalization and the analysis of “intrapersonal culture.”  Arguing that philosophical and theoretical discussions of cultural meaning have all too often left unexamined the psychological mechanisms underpinning the “internalization” of cultural forms, Strauss and Quinn advocate a theory of signification in which “meaning” is understood to arise from the mutual interaction of intrapersonal and extrapersonal realms.  A central goal of their work is therefore to maintain that cultural forms must be understood in the context of those mental processes that where mostly excised from the anthropological purview with the pervasive and  uncritical acceptance of the Geertz’- Ryleian thesis that cultural processes are found primarily in “pubic symbols “ (see discussion above).
	Also like D’Andrade, Strauss and Quinn are interested in exploring how insights from connectionist theory - a theoretical orientation in cognitive science where the encoding of representation is thought to reside in the differential distribution of connection weights in a parallel distributed processing system that is organized according to levels of input, hidden and output units (see Way 1997) – can serve to shed light upon the psychological and neurophysiological processes which underlie the acquisition, transformation and transmission of cultural forms.  For Strauss and Quinn, an advantage to connectionist models is that they provide a view of encoding cultural schemas that are structurally coherent while still being sensitive to modification through experience.  Moreover, these approaches seem to provide a way to account for how schematic knowledge may be encoded, without the concomitant necessity of explicitly stated rules (1998:53; see also the discussion of Bourdieu above). According to Strauss and Quinn, these models are thus able to generate rule-like responses without the need for ever having been exposed to the “rule as such” (1998:75).  Due to this fact, they argue that connectionist models do not privilege language-based learning and that "[e]mbodied ideas can be represented as well as (and perhaps even more readily than) highly abstract ones" (1998:53). 	While ultimately endorsing connectionist approaches, Strauss and Quinn also utilize insights from anthropological research to point to some limits of  these models. First, they highlight the fact that these models are often overly dependent upon “supervised” learning.  That is, researchers are needed to guide the training sessions carefully for the proper patterning of weighted distributions to take effect.  As Strauss and Quinn make clear, this does not account for those numerous 'real-life' learning situations where there is seldom a teacher around to correct a novice's every mistake.  Second, they reveal that while these systems seem to be quite proficient for dealing with 'implicit' knowledge acquisition and 'procedural' learning, they do not seem to account for those forms of learning which do proceed through 'explicit' statements (77).  Third, these systems make no attempt to account for the role that emotion and affect play in learning and memory.  Finally, Strauss and Quinn recognize that connectionism is limited in terms of its tendency to posit too little innate knowledge (79).  Their solution is to argue that while it may be true that we need to postulate a small number of cognitive universals to account for the ability to acquire culturally specific forms, humans "probably do not need very detailed innate structures; just enough to give us a start in the right direction" (81).
	Using extensive ethnographic case studies, and revisiting Bastian’s notion of the psychic unity of mankind (see above), a further recent significant contribution to cognitive anthropological approaches to consciousness is found in Bradd Shore’s book Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (1996).  In this book, Shore has built a cognitive theory of culture that links the anthropologist's concern with social action and institutions with the psychologist's concept of mental models.  Grounding his discussion in both biogenetic structural theory (see above) and on the “neural Darwinism” of Jean-Pierre Changeux (see Changeux, 1985), Shore demonstrates that no simplistic essentialist, hard-wired brain approach will account for the psychic unity phenomenon.  Instead, what is required is a more complex developmental approach of the sort that the biogenetic structuralists, as well as Jean Piaget, Changeux, and others have taken.  Shore calls for conceiving of culture as a system of models --  “...as an extensive and heterogeneous collection of ‘models,’ models that exist both as public artifacts ‘in the world’ and as cognitive constructs ‘in the mind’ of members of the community” (1996, p. 44).   Public models and mental models are not the same thing.  Public models are analogous to knowledge and take on myriad forms such as dances, houses, paintings, songs, stories, clothing, pottery, tools – all of these being public models, as also are styles of moving, speech forms, patterns of social interaction, etc.  Mental models on the other hand are more like historically patterned, received schemas – the socially transmitted mental structure of knowledge in the heads of people.  A cultural model is like an internalized script that is both socially derived and dwells within the head of cultural participants.  
	The brain, of course, is the organ of mental models – more than that, the brain is a model generator.  There is no end to the variety of models the human brain can produce.  According to Shore, the modeling capacity of the brain has two aspects: the personal and the conventional.  We can develop our own models, but lots of our models are derived from our culture.  And socially shared models are generated under the distinct constraints of social interaction (see also Roy Rappaport 1979, 1999 on his notion of “cognized environment”).  This is a theme we have encountered earlier in the thinking of Durkheim (see above).  Consciousness then is informed from internalized models that are either generated by the person during their development, or inculcated through the process of enculturation.  Both kinds of models are present in any and all moments of consciousness.
Neuroanthropological approaches to consciousness
	As we have seen, the suggestion that both the variance and the structural commonality among peoples’ consciousness and cultures is due in some fashion to an underlying psychophysical basis has been an idea that has been bouncing around in anthropology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century.  And as we noted above, Lévi-Strauss importantly suggested that structural commonalities in expressive culture could be traced to the structure of the human brain.  That said, a full-blown neuroanthropology had to await the inspiration of Earl W. Count (1899-1996) in the mid-twentieth century (1958, 1973).  Count in his magnum opus, Being and Becoming Human (1973) argued that each and every species inherits the generalized pattern of adaptation of its “anlage;” that is, its precursor species.  The total package of species typical adaptation patterns Count called that species’ “biogram.”  The heritable architectonics (or structures) of the neuroendocrine system and the brain are very much a part of every species’ biogram.  Within each species biogram are the limits of possible organizations of consciousness, which then develop relative to the adaptational circumstances of the individual and the group.  Thus for Count it was appropriate to speak in terms of the human “brainmind” as inextricably a part of the human biogram, and as the one and only organ of human consciousness.  Indeed, he argued that only when anthropology reached the point where the brainmind became its central object of study could the discipline be considered a mature science (1990).
	Following in the footsteps of Earl Count, the pioneering work of the biogenetic structuralist group, founded by Charles D. Laughlin, Eugene G. D’Aquili and John McManus, constructed a culturally informed neuroanthropology of consciousness (d’Aquili, 1982, 1983; d’Aquili & Laughlin, 1975; d’Aquili, Laughlin & McManus, 1979; d’Aquili & Newberg, 1996; Laughlin, 1991, 1996a; Laughlin & Brady, 1978; Laughlin & d’Aquili, 1974; Laughlin & McManus 1995; Laughlin, McManus & d’Aquili 1990; Laughlin et al., 1986; Laughlin & Richardson, 1986).  This body of literature set out to recognize and explain the centrality of the brain in mediating cultural transmission, social action and subjective experience.  This perspective holds that any and all states, structures and contents of consciousness are mediated by systems of cells in the nervous system.  These systems of cells are termed “models” and are determined in their initial organization by the DNA – i.e., they are “neurognositic,” and in Count’s terms, very much a part of the human biogram. Neural models, being made up of living cells in communication with each other, continue to grow and elaborate, guided in their growth by inherent processes of development, by personal experiences and by culture (Laughlin, 1991).  What it means to “enculturate” (anthropology’s term for the process of instilling culture into the minds of children) a member of society is in fact to influence the organization of the neural systems mediating mental processing and action in any particular instance, or relative to any particular object.  
	Later research in biogenetic structuralism focused particularly upon the problem of how publically available symbolism has the power to evoke subjective states of consciousness, and to channel social understanding and action.  The group first considered the universal properties of ritual, and how rituals with their embedded techniques, neuroendocrine system “drivers” and symbolism operate to control experience in all cultures (d’Aquili, Laughlin & McManus 1979; Laughlin et al., 1986).  They defined what they call a culture’s “cycle of meaning” by which sociocultural practices operate to integrate the society’s worldview (primarily carried around in people’s head) and the consciousness of individual group members by expressing that worldview through symbolic texts and ritual activities in such a way that experiences arise that are then typically interpreted in terms of the worldview – producing a kind of feedback loop.  For example, ritually enacted aspects of a culture’s worldview are able to engender experiences in participants that in turn are interpreted by people as both verifying and enlivening the society’s collective representations – producing an effect that Durkheim (1995 [1912]) long before termed “collective effervescence” (see above).
	The influence of this group of theorists impacted some of Victor Turner’s later interest in exploring the interconnection of culture, mind and brain (see Turner 1983).  Other scholars making important contributions to a neuroanthropological approach to consciousness studies include Michael Winkelman (1986, 1994, 2000) on the anthropology of consciousness and the neurophenomenology of shamanism, Stephen Reyna (2002) on the brain, symbolism and hermeneutics, Dean Falk (1992) on the evolution of the brain and consciousness, Warren TenHouten (1978-79) on the brain and different modes of thought cross-culturally, work exploring biocultural approaches to the emotions (see Hinton 1999), as well as more recent fMRI studies exploring those regions of the brain mediating the perception of social relationships (Iacoboni et al., n.d.).
Cultural Psychology 
	Cultural psychological approaches to consciousness in anthropology largely emerged as a form of critique against the prevalent application of Piagetian research paradigms in cross-cultural psychology and psychological anthropology in the late sixties and early to mid-seventies.  In addition to seeking to question many of the universalist assumptions about the development of human consciousness from a Piagetian paradigm, cultural psychological approaches to consciousness in anthropology and psychology often also importantly draw (both explicitly and implicitly) from early 20th century soviet psychology and the writings of Lev Vygotsky and his students.  The focus of much of this research in cultural psychology  lies in exploring “activity-in-context” as the means to understanding the interpenetration of culture and consciousness (see Cole 1996).  

	While the popularizing of Vygotky’s writings in North American can largely be attributed to the influential writings and research of the such eminent psychologists as Michael Cole, James Wertsch, Carl Ratner, Jerome Bruner, and others, one of the most influential proponents of a cultural psychological approach to consciousness in anthropology is found in the writings of Richard Shweder (1984).  While not relying as explicitly upon soviet psychology as his peers in the discipline of psychology have done, Shweder has been a champion of a pluralistic contextualism in developing his understanding the intersection between culture, activity, and consciousness in human societies.  Moreover, like his psychological colleagues, he has been stanchly anti-Piagetian in the context of his critique of Kohlberg’s theories of moral development from a cross-cultural framework, and in terms of his culturally contextual approach to consciousness.  
	Shweder predicates his version of cultural psychology on an understanding of consciousness as organized according to a trichotomy of mental operations that is classified according to “rational,” “irrational,” and “nonrational” distinctions.  In line with a long history of debates in anthropology over putative differences between “modern” and “primitive mentalities” (see Levy-Bruhl above), Shweder importantly emphasizes that this trichotomy points to the co-equal integration of these three forms of consciousness in all cultures, regardless of their degree of “modernization.”  To this end, Shweder’s understanding of consciousness is representative of an important shift in anthropological thinking concerning the structure and function of “modern mentalities.”  According to this perspective, “modern” mentalities have come to be characterized as equally suffused with irrational and nonrational currents as “primitive” mentalities where once held to be.  Shweder’s discussion of the “romantic” contributions of “semantically induced memory drifts,” “paradigms,” “cultural frames,” and “performatives” all serve as effective means to illustrate this point.  Shweder is thus highly critical of what he characterizes to be Piaget’s exaggerated stress upon “self-constructed knowledge,” “personal invention” and “individual projection.”  Shweder maintains that, on the contrary, what cultural psychologists have discovered is the significance of “other-dependent learning,” social interaction, and the internalization of collective representations, expectations and constraints in understanding the patterning and functioning of consciousness in any given culture or social group.
	Once again we see the tension between structuralist and relativist points of view at play in the anthropology of consciousness.  Shweder can be praised for doing what anthropologists have always done best – that is, insisting upon the cultural influence upon learning and behavior – a factor all too easily forgotten by experimental, cognitive and cross-cultural psychologists.  Unfortunately, typical of many relativistic approaches to culture and consciousness in anthropology and elsewhere, Shweder tends to overlook the very important distinction between structure (that is the complexity of organization of information) and content (the information being structured).  Moreover, Shweder downplays ethnographic evidence of social institutions designed with the developmental levels of maturation of structure in mind.  For instance, there are societies in which the telling of myths and other sacred narratives is done with sensitivity to the maturity of the audience (see Jorgensen 1980 on the Telefolmin of Papua New Guinea, Barth 1975 on the Baktaman of New Guinea, Peters 1982 for the Tamang shamans of Nepal,  Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971 on the Tukano of Amazonia, Griaule 1965 covering the Dogon of West Africa, and Beyer 1973 for the instruction of Tibetan lamas).
Psycho-cultural anthropology
	Another approach to consciousness in anthropology can be broadly termed “psycho-cultural.”  While cultural psychologists have focused much of their attention upon activity and social context as a means to understand the organization and functioning of consciousness cross-culturally, psycho-cultural approaches to consciousness in anthropology have generally emphasized not only the significance of expanding our understanding of the complexity of the social matrix in defining consciousness, but also how the multivariate nature of consciousness impacts social interaction and the internalization of cultural meaning (see Throop 2003b).   
	At the heart of many of these approaches, is an attempt to explore the articulation of personal and cultural processes in the crucible of consciousness, while also recognizing that those contents, processes and structures that scientists have glossed with the term consciousness actually consists of  multiple modalities, modalities that range from explicit conceptual content to non-conceptual feelings and images.   In viewing consciousness from the perspective of multiple modalities that may be co-present in any given moment in the stream of consciousness, the scholars approaching the problem of culture and consciousness from a psycho-cultural perspective have tended to also highlight the significance of discrepancies and conflicts that may arise between differing modes of consciousness, each of which may be in turn differentially impacted by cultural forms.
	Much of this work is explicitly or implicitly Freudian in its approach, in as much as it relies upon a view of the mind as structured according to nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious elements.  In some of the most recent psycho-cultural approaches to consciousness, however, theorists have drawn increasingly from insights formulated in object-relations and dissociation theory.  What all of these approaches share is the idea that culture can differentially impact nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious states, and that there may be important divergences between feeling, representation, emotion, and motivation at these differing “levels,” “strata,” “modes,” or “phases” of consciousness.  Methodologically, psycho-cultural approaches to consciousness in many instances also draw from psychoanalytic approaches to clinical interviewing, and as a result have often relied upon in-depth, open ended, “person-centered” interviewing strategies (see Levy and Hollan 1998). 
	Melford Spiro is one of the most influential figures in this tradition and his writings on the relationships between collective representations and mental representations within the context of a Freudian theory of mind have for decades been considered essential reading for anthropologists interested in the intersection of personal and cultural aspects of consciousness.  Spiro’s (1997; see also Spiro1994) most recent formulation of this approach is based on the assumption that one must take into account the interleaving of psychodynamic and cultural processes (e.g., the relationship between defense mechanisms and replication of anxiety provoking cultural ideologies), if one is going to adequately understand both the impact of culture on consciousness and the impact of consciousness on culture. He asserts that it is only in coming to understand the role of “precultural” (e.g., biological and social) contents and structures of consciousness that one can properly understand how proclivities, dispositions, motivations, and susceptibilities emerge for acquisition and “internalization” of specific kinds of knowledge 
	Spiro contends that theories of cultural reproduction that do not address the interrelationship between culture and consciousness in the context of psychological preadaptation are at a significant disadvantage in explaining why it is that empirically false and anxiety provoking cultural propositions are often still internalized by cultural participants.  For example, Spiro interprets the “Ideology of the Superior Male” and the “Ideology of the Dangerous Female” in Burma as cultural resources that may be utilized by social actors in the construction of  “culturally constituted defense mechanisms.”  As he notes, while these two ideologies are empirically false and anxiety provoking, they are still readily internalized by Burmese men.  According to Spiro, these ideologies are perpetuated in Burma, as well as in other cultures, because they are ultimately beneficial both to the individuals who internalize them and to the culture that constitutes them.  Individuals who internalize these belief systems are able to partially fulfill what would otherwise be frustrated unconscious wishes and desires.  At the same time, the culture of these individuals facilitate the reproduction of cultural forms by recruiting intrapsychic conflict in the service of cultural propositions, and in the process motivate the enactment of socially sanctioned roles.
	Robert Levy is another important figure in this tradition who has written much about culture’s role in differentially patterning the cognitive saliency of  various states and processes of consciousness (1973, 1984).  While exploring many different aspects of consciousness from rationality to sensation, Levy is most often referenced in anthropology with regard to his discussion of the cultural patterning of emotion.  He has coined the distinction between hyper- and hypo-cognized emotions which serves to draw attention to the role that culture plays in differentially articulating patterns of attention, conceptualization, and sensation in the structuring of emotional experience.  Hypercognized emotions are those that are culturally elaborated and thus highly salient,  and as a consequence tend to be centers of recurrent attentional focus for individual culture bearers.  In contrast, due to their lack of culturally infused conceptual elaboration, hypocognized emotions tend to resist or defy explicit forms of representation because of the fact that they tend not to evoke the same culturally attuned attentional focus.  Levy formulated these insights through conducting in-depth “person-centered” interviews with informants in Tahiti, where he discovered, for instance, that there seemed to be “no unambiguous terms which represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness....[In this light p]eople would name their condition, where I supposed that the context called for ‘sadness’ or ‘depression,’ as ‘feeling troubled.’..as ‘not feeling an inner push’ as ‘feeling heavy’ as ‘feeling fatigued’ and a variety of other terms all referring to a generally troubled or subdued body state” (1973:305).
	Building upon Spiro, Levy and others, Douglas Hollan (2000) has recently argued that any adequate theory of culture must thus be predicated upon an understanding of the relationship between cultural processes and “the fluidity and complexity of the psychological states that underlie” them.  In line with psycho-cultural approaches generally in anthropology, Hollan’s formulation pivots on the recognition of how both the fluctuating nature of social interaction (self -“not me”-object relations) and the transitional nature of consciousness (conscious-preconscious-unconscious relations) mutually impact those processes subserving the maintenance, transmission, and creation of cultural meaning.  Through developing a complex model of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of the mind, which he stresses are seldom organized into discrete or independent realms but instead are held to coexist in ever-shifting and fluid processes of interpenetration, Hollan suggests that researchers interested in understanding the relationship between culture and consciousness must turn to explore how these various  intrapsychic, interpsychic and extrapsycic processes contribute to both the standardization and “personalization of meaning.” 
Evolutionary psychological anthropology
	The field of evolutionary psychology is a loose blend of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.  Evolutionary psychologists hold that the structure of human consciousness today is informed by adaptive modular structures that mediated cognition during the long centuries of the Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age).  These modules are still part of our neurobiological makeup, and are thus universal to people everywhere, underlying our humor, sexual attitudes, mate selection, kinship relations, economic structures, politics and so on.  Evolutionary psychological anthropologists, on the other hand, while applauding the awareness of the evolutionary history of our species taken by these scholars, caution that human beings as culture bearers were capable of a range of adaptations even back to the time of our Ice Age ancestors (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992; see also Barkow 1989).  Paleolithic modular mental structures do continue to influence consciousness today, but in a much more flexible and plastic way than the more genetically deterministic, evolutionary psychologists would suggest.  Using the metaphor of the relationship between a “lock” and a “key,” they attempt to demonstrate how natural selection has shaped the human mind to complement the most stable features of the environment.  In their estimation, there is therefore an important mesh between the principles of the mind and the properties of the world.  
	Dan Sperber (1996, 2002) is another researcher who embraces something of this view of human consciousness.  He advocates a methodology in which anthropologists set out to establish an epidemiology of representations.  The cross-cultural notion is similar in some respects to Adolf Bastian’s vision (see above) and is founded upon the very abundant psychological and anthropological evidence that the human mind is susceptible to particular kinds of ideas, beliefs, and emotions.  According to Sperber, what makes ideas “contagious” is the fact that some ideas show innate resonances with the pre-given structure of the human mind.  These representations are thus easier to remember, learn, and transmit to others; thus ensuring that individuals will be more likely to attend to those behaviors, and to imitate those behaviors.
Anthropology of the senses
	Influenced by various semiotic and phenomenological traditions, the cultural patterning of olfactory, haptic, and auditory sensations took on a renewed significance during the mid-seventies and early eighties in the work of Alfred Gell (1977), Valentine Daniel (1991 [1983]), Steven Feld (1984), and Paul Stoller (1984).  Indeed, the wave of interest in non-visual sensation during this period can be tied to more general trends in anthropology concerning the exploration of culture in relation to non-conceptual modes of human existence.  Here we see that (1) Bourdieu’s writings on the concept of habitus as a culturally inculcated generative structure shaping fields of perception, motivation, judgment, and action, (2) a burgeoning interest in the anthropology of emotion that largely set out to question Cartesian-inspired distinctions between mind-body and thought-feeling, (3) critiques of visualist and representationlist biases in modern ethnography, and (4) a movement toward developing theories of practice in the discipline as a whole, can all be seen as arising out of the same general zietgiest of resistance to what a growing number of thinkers perceived to be the overly intellectualist orientations of Levi-Straussian structuralism and Geertzian textualism (see above).     
	The early anthropological writings on culture and sensation have played an important role in setting the stage for the great efflorescence of work on sensation that emerged in the discipline during the nineteen nineties.  Sensation has clearly emerged as a significant area of theorizing and research in the discipline as a whole, and now involves such questions as the relationship between various sensory modalities and the healing practices found in various cultures (Csordas 1994, Desjarlais 1992, Landerman and Roseman 1996), cultural variations in senses of space and place (Feld and Basso 1996), the influence of culture on ordering various “ratios of sense”(Howes 1991; Classen 1997; Synnott 1993), the cultural patterning of varying somatic modes of attention (Csordas 1993; Sobo 1996; Throop 2003a), the importance of recognizing differing sensory orders in the context of ethnographic research (Stoller 1989, 1997), the cultural elaboration of specific sensory modalities such as audition, olfaction, or taste (Chuengsatiansup 1999;  Rasmussen 1999), and the renewed interest in debates over culture and color perception (Goodwin 1997; Hardin and Maffi 1997).  While there is a great deal of important work that has emerged out of this tradition, there is little doubt that the work of the Concordia Group – consisting of David Howes, Constance Classen, and Anthony Synnott – has provided much of the impetus behind the renewed interest in culture and sensation.  In a series of books and articles, these three scholars have set out to argue for the historical rootedness of the senses.  Anthropologists are being forced to move away from the strictly physicalist assumptions of sensory psychology to a stance that not only explores the effect of cultural assumptions and values on the functioning of any one particular sensory modality, but also takes into consideration “inter-sensory relations.”
	According to Classen, the research of the Concordia Group has worked to challenge three prevalent assumptions in anthropological writing on sensation -- those assumptions being: first, that the senses in some way provide a transparent window upon the world and are thus in some way “precultural”(1997:402);  second, that all cultures organize their sensory orders in terms of a structure similar to that of the  “West” with its bias toward visualism; and third, the deeply ingrained “prejudice against smell, taste and touch as ‘animal senses’” (1997: 405) and the tendency to believe that there is little variation within sensory modes cross-culturally.  Instead, Classen and her colleagues hold that it is time for anthropologists to recognize that culture serves not only to pattern the relative value assigned to each sensory modality, but, that within each modality there are various experiential properties that can serve to fuel cultural elaboration.  For instance, the “vision which is deemed rational and analytic in the West...may be associated with irrationality in another society” (1997:404), or may very well be associated primarily with aesthetic values that have little to do with the acquisition of “objective” forms of knowledge about the external world.
	Central to the methodology proposed by Howes and Classen (1991) is a phenomenologically grounded effort to penetrate our taken-for-granted sensory attunements toward the world in an attempt to better approximate the sensory orders most valued in a particular culture under study.   In order to discover the various ways that a particular culture sets out to differentially “emphasize or repress” different varieties of sensory experience, Howes and Classen suggest that it is first necessary for the researcher to work to “overcome, to the extent possible, his or her own sensory biases” (1991:260).  This begins with working to evaluate and discover one’s own sensory predispositions.  For this Howes and Classen suggest following an exercise devised by Galton which entails describing a past event in one’s life and noting which sensory modalities are most heavily relied upon in recounting the details of that event.  The second step in this methodology consists of “training oneself to be sensitive to a multiplicity of sensory expressions” (1991:260).  Here the authors suggest following a basic phenomenological principle that is based on  “disengaging one’s attention from the object itself so as to focus on how each of the sensory properties would impinge on one’s consciousness were they not filtered in any way” (1991:260).  This is then finally complimented with cultivating the ability to be “of two sensoria about things,” that is to be “able to operate with complete awareness in two perceptual systems or sensory orders simultaneously (the sensory order of one’s own culture and that of the culture studied,” and constantly comparing notes (1991:260).
	Having worked to effectively bracket one’s “natural sensory attitude,” Howes and Classen then suggest that there are a number of different avenues to explore in attempting to outline the sensory order of any given culture.  Using language, they advise researchers to begin by exploring the existing words for the different senses, to explore which of the various sensory modalities have the largest vocabulary allotted to them, as well as exploring how it is that the various senses are used in metaphor and other forms of expressive speech.  This can be complimented by an investigation into cultural aesthetics and the realm of material artefacts.  Here cultural ideas regarding beauty can be evaluated in terms of the relative contribution of each of the senses.  Moreover, an investigator can turn to examine how various cultural artifacts are used to represent or evoke the senses of the creator/user/admirer.  For instance, they argue that a “Tsimshian ‘wraparound’ representation of Bear corresponds to the experience of sound, which also envelops and surrounds one....[in other words the] ‘ear-minded’ Tsimshian would thus seem to transpose visual imagery into auditory imagery in their visual art” (1991:265).  In addition to these two strategies, Howes and Classen point out that the decoration and alteration of the form of the body can further serve as an effective means to explore a culture’s sensory order.  For example, which of the sense organs are highlighted by decoration?   Sensory orders may also be explored through close examination of child-rearing practices where careful attention is paid to which senses are stressed and or utilized by parents when raising their children.  This can also be augmented by investigations that look at the now the natural and built environment, rituals, mythology, cosmology and communication media serve to potentiate or dispotentiate the various senses.
Phenomenological and Neurophenomenological Approaches
	As evident in the methodological orientation of sensorial anthropology outlined above, anthropology has in recent years discovered the significance of phenomenology, and has blended methods derived from various phenomenological approaches into the ethnographic fieldwork “toolkit.”  The work of Michael Jackson (1989) in linking the empirical and the experiential by way of a Jamesian “radical empiricism” is particularly noteworthy.  He shows that the primary effect of culture is in influencing the individual’s “lifeworld” – Edmund Husserl’s (1970 [1954]) term for the individual’s world of direct everyday experience.  Inherent within the lifeworld is the awareness of the Other as a special object – the individual inherently knows the Other to be a conscious being as well.  How the relationship between the individual and the Other is structured is a matter of cultural conditioning.  
	Methodologically, a phenomenological ethnography requires that the researcher focus on the experiences of individual actors immersed in social interaction.   The shift is thus toward examining the world of everyday experience, and how individuals in their everyday interactions are themselves conscious of their own lifeworlds.  In this approach, the stories and experiences of individual social actors in the context of everydayness becomes the field of investigation for the researcher.  This marks, of course, at least a partial return to the fieldwork strategy of Franz Boas (see above).
	Reasoning along similar lines, Thomas Csordas (1990, 1993, 1994) argues that anthropologists embrace a full embodiment of consciousness.  Csordas explains that he does not support the textual bias of some semioticians who argue against the possibility of accessing any form of non-linguistic experience through linguistic or narrative data.  As he states, this “position presumes an unbridgeable gulf between language and experience, and is predicated on the notion that language can only be about itself....On the contrary, language is not only a form of observable behavior but a medium of intersubjectivity, so that it is fair to say that language gives us authentic access to experience” (1994::xii).  This assertion is based on Csordas’ assumption, following the phenomenology of the body of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and the practice theory of Bourdieu (see above), that another person’s intentions, emotions, thoughts, and desires are manifest pre-objectively as an intersubjectively accessible “co-presence” that can be immediately grasped “insofar as we share the same habitus.”  By relying upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which serves to explain how it is that perceptual, affective, motivational, and evaluative orientations can become shared by individuals whose respective consciousnesses have been conditioned in similar social, economic, and cultural environments, Csordas believes that he is able to account for a dispositional resonance between actors that both precedes and informs the structure and use of language. 
	Also arguing for an embodied understanding of consciousness, the authors of this chapter have incorporated the earlier work of the biogenetic structuralist group (see above) in developing a phenomenology that is grounded in both the neurosciences and cultural anthropology – what they term a “cultural neurophenomenology.”  Our approach is one that seeks to wed the application of a trained phenomenology that controls for cultural variation in perception and interpretation, and is yet still attentive to the personal and cultural influences on everyday experience, with information from the neurosciences about how the organ of experience – the brain – is structured and functions. In previous writings we have suggested that the influence of culture on consciousness is differentially articulated with differing strata of the human nervous system, we have argued that the phenomenological and neurophysiological structures underlying many apparently diverse cultural institutions – institutions such as ceremonial ritual, cosmological worldviews, myth and the almost ubiquitous drive among the world’s peoples to alter their states of consciousness – operate to “true-up” the lifeworld of individual members of society in relation to an extra-mental reality within which each person and group must adapt (Throop, 2000, 2002, 2003; Throop & Laughlin, 2002; Laughlin & Throop, 1999, 2001).  We incorporate the biogenetic structuralist notion of a “cycle of meaning” (see above), and show that a culture’s myth and ritual purvey a given culture’s worldview in such a powerful way that they are able to engender experiences in individuals that in turn verify and enliven the society’s collective representations – what Durkheim once termed “collective effervescence.”  This myth-ritual complex is so powerful precisely because enactments entail symbols and techniques that “drive” the individual nervous system such that socially intended and predictable imagery, emotions, intuitions, and identifications arise within the sphere of the individual’s consciousness.
CONCLUSION
	Anthropological approaches to consciousness have traditionally been based in the fact that anthropologists, like all human beings on the planet, have been inclined by the very structure of their own consciousness and it’s intentional nature to focus their attention toward objects: thought objects, perceptual objects, sensory objects, physical objects, cultural objects, etc.  In the act of focusing on these objects -- the contents of consciousness -- other processes and structures available for scrutiny within the stream of consciousness are necessarily occluded. Thus anthropologists have played an important role in highlighting the striking variation that is apparent both cross-culturally and interpersonally in terms of the constitution and organization of comparable objects.  While it is true that some scholars, like Levi-Strauss, have examined how cultural objects (i.e., texts, artifacts, behaviors, symbols) may evidence patterns that resonate across cultures, thus working back from cultural product to the shared structures of human consciousness, the overall tendency in anthropology has been to focus on content in terms of its variation and fluctuation.  And indeed, this tendency has served anthropology well in as much as it has frequently forced scientists in other disciplines who are interested in exploring invariant aspects of consciousness to take notice of cross-cultural variation, and thus to inject some humility into their otherwise sweeping statements concerning the universality of these structures; a universality that all too often has arisen from the reification of unscrutinized cultural assumptions about the nature of consciousness held by a particular thinker whole cloth onto all of  humanity.   
	That said,  anthropology has also demonstrated an equally long history of awareness and concern for the similarity, psychic unity, and shared aspects of consciousness across cultural boundaries.  Accordingly, one of the most important points to take away from this review of anthropological approaches to consciousness is that it seems far too simplistic to assume a unidirectional flow of causation from the external organization of socio-economically determined activity patterns and cultural symbols to the formation of contents and structures of consciousness – just as it is too simplistic to assume that social and cultural forms are merely the externalization of pre-given structures of consciousness.  The truth of matter, seems to lie somewhere between these two long-standing polar perspectives concerning the relationship between culture and consciousness.  Indeed, the truth would appear to lie in attempting to develop perspectives within an anthropological frame that focus equally on exploring content and structure, object and process, or what Edmund Husserl termed noema (act) and noesis (content; see Ströker 1993: 95). 
	A second significant insight that readers should take away from this discussion is the fact that anthropologists have long sought to highlight in their research how culture serves to pattern the responses that social scientists receive from their informants.  Here the questions that anthropologists have asked concern the cultural frames of reference that are embedded in what scientists perceive to be “culture free” standardized tests used to gain insight into the structure and content of consciousness. For instance, in the context of cross-cultural research exploring the cultural patterning of cognitive abilities, anthropological research points to the importance of asking whether a refusal to answer a syllogism, which informants may attribute to an “unfamiliarity” with the topic at hand, indicates differences in cognitive functioning or differences in communicative practices .  For example, in their important work on language socialization, Ochs and Schieffelin (1984) point out that while Schieffelin’s Kaluli informants often refused to speculate about another individual’s thoughts, intentions and feelings, this observation should not simply be interpreted as an indication that the Kaluli have no theory of mind.  Quite the contrary,  “Kaluli obviously interpret and assess one another’s available behaviors and internal states, these interpretations are [just] not acceptable as topics of talk” (1984:290).  
	There are a number of other key insights that have arisen from the anthropological study of consciousness. These include: (1) the abundant evidence in the ethnographic record for the interdependent and dynamic relationship between collective (cultural) knowledge, enculturation, individual subjectivity, and trans-culturally shared somatic structures in the constitution of consciousness; (2) the suggestion that the drive to alter individual states of consciousness by socially prescribed means is fundamental to both healing/health and in producing a worldview that better accords with reality; (3) the contents of consciousness are both structured by the inherent organization of the body, and plastic and adaptively responsive to environmental, personal and cultural influences; (4) that qualitative research devoted to the study of consciousness as it is manifest in the context of everyday social interaction is crucial to developing a more accurate understanding of the structures and contents of human consciousness cross-culturally; and  (5) that there still remains in contemporary scientific and philosophical theorizing a number of unexamined, taken-for-granted assumptions about consciousness that can be traced to particularized cultural orientations to the relationship between mind and body.  
	Considering consciousness from an anthropological point of view has the advantage of grounding consciousness research in the naturalistic everydayness of human experience, a perspective all too easily lost in the laboratory.  We are often reminded of the story told by the great comparative psychologist, Emil Menzel (1967), who spent years working with olive baboons in the laboratory, and had pretty much concluded they were a dull and unintelligent species of primate.  They chance took him to Kenya where he took a safari out among olive baboon troops in their natural environment.  He suddenly realized that his very erroneous picture of baboon intelligence was based upon experimental questions that had little to do with the natural environment in which they evolved.  Ever after Menzel argued very elegantly for the necessity of blending experimental with naturalistic research.  Much the same situation confronts consciousness research today, and the main role of anthropology is to broaden our collective perspective by bringing the naturalistic framework back into our scope of inquiry.

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