Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness [Issue 4, 1995]

Ethnomedicine is the study of other cultures' medical concepts (cosmology, etiology), behavior (rituals), and products (drugs, amulets). The study of consciousness is the study of our own mind. In both disciplines, our own consciousness provides the actual instrument for research. This involves a type of self-examination and self-knowledge on many levels. The better we understand that which is foreign, the better we can know about ourselves. This Yearbook is concerned with the reciprocal stimulation of the two fields. Both ethnomedicine and the study of consciousness form an interdisciplinary field of study for anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, art historians, geomancers, chaos researchers, ethnopharmacologists, ethnobotanists, pharmacists, botanists, chemists, physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists. The aspects of ethnomedical systems which are primarily related with human consciousness and its various states, known as altered states of consciousness, constitute the subject of this book. It consciously encompasses different approaches from the philosophy of science, cognitive anthropology, social anthropology, ethnomycology, mycology, phenomenology, medicine, psychoanalysis, and ethnopharmacology. With this yearbook, we hope to provide a forum for the interdisciplinary study of consciousness in the light of ethnomedicine. It is intended to be open for many intellectual approaches and stimulate interdisciplinary research. It will also present contributions relevant to current discussions in both the scientific and the political domains.