An article on the Western tendency to romanticise Amazonian shamanism. It draws on John Urry's concept of the 'tourist gaze' and the work of anthropologists Alice Beck Kehoe and Evgenia Fotiou, who examine issues with how Westerners view indigenous shamanic cultures.
An article on the link between hot weather and challenging psychedelic experiences.
An essay exploring the concept of 'psychedelic apophenia', where connections are made between unrelated things so that we see psychedelics' influence everywhere.
It looks at Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory, psychedelic theories of Christianity, and DMT-pineal gland theories.
An article on psychedelic horror, looking at films such as Midsommar, Mandy, Climax, and Altered States, how they depict bad trips and psychedelic cults, what other aspects of the psychedelic experience could be portrayed through the lens of horror, and if there's a risk that some of these films feed into stigma surrounding these substances.
DM if you're interested :)
DM if you're interested :)
An article on Arrival's connection to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, the ontological turn in anthropology, Terence McKenna's DMT-inspired view of reality, and the tension between premonition and free will.
Betty Birner, a professor of linguistics, talks about what the movie gets right and wrong about linguistics:
>At one point in the movie, the character Ian [Jeremy Renner] says, “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that if you immerse yourself in another language, you can rewire your brain.” And that made me laugh out loud, because Whorf never said anything about rewiring your brain. But since this wasn’t the linguist speaking, it’s fine that another character is misunderstanding the Sapir-Whorf.
An article on how we construct (or reconstruct) memories of psychedelic experiences.
An article on John Koenig's concept of anemoia (nostalgia for times one never lived through) and its relationship to identity, cognitive bias, cultural trends, and ideology.