Brain research is becoming so suggestive and dramatic that it is like reading science fiction. Neurology is more and more transparent so that we can nearly see thought -- not just what “lights up” in the machinery but also even what the thought is about. As the electrochemical sensitivity increases, there are also developments in understanding structure, like the recent discovery of little “vessels” (think blood vessels) that lead directly from the brain down into immune systems like lymph nodes in the neck.
Relate that to the discovery that while a person sleeps, the brain cells shrink their actual size to allow more fluid to wash between them, like a city cleaning its streets by flooding them. The fluid must then drain out through the vessels to be filtered, cleansed, then released into the body system.
We know that HIV attacks directly only brain cells, damaging the rest of the body by infecting the cells that provide protection so that all systems are vulnerable to attack. We don't know how the virus gets into the brain but we suspect it forms a reservoir there, from whence it can re-invade. People whose blood doesn't show ANY of the virus, will explode with it again if treatment is stopped.
Sustiva
We know that the only HIV drug that can get into the brain, Sustiva, causes wild dreaming. Is it doing something in the night-wash between the brain cells? Brain function mixes the actual neurons and their electrical charges with the molecules that change the way the tissue operates. When I think of the boys, I can’t avoid the mental image of a Paris street filled with water as though it were Venice, sparking and jumping with strange creatures. They need a LOT of sleep.
The most important and helpful professor at U of Chicago that I never met was Victor Turner. I’ve often written about his work and how I interpret it. He must have been ill when I graduated in 1982, since he died the next year. He's the one who spoke of the three steps of liminality: going over the threshold, being in liminal space, returning back. I have found this as valuable as Eliade's "The Sacred and the Profane", which is saying a lot. I've left most of the wiki-links in this bio.
“Turner spent his career exploring rituals. As a professor at the University of Chicago, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes.
Turner explored Arnold van Gennep's threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas.
You can see from this description how helpful it is in understanding the Cinematheque group of boys and young men: they are LIMINAL. I recognized this right off, but I knew nothing about Victor Turner’s son until a day or so ago. I was stunned to read his Wikipedia entry because it was such a direct connection from the idea of the liminal to the action of water diffusion in the brain. It seems clear to me that there is a specific connectome for liminal experience. Robert Turner can show us.
Robert Turner is among a group of pioneering physicists who helped create magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which today is the most widely used method of brain mapping. . . .From 1988 until 1993 he worked as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Working with Denis le Bihan, a French neuroradiologist, he initially showed that EPI could be used to provide high quality maps of water diffusion in brain tissue, a discovery (known as Diffusion MRI) which has led to the widespread clinical use of MRI in stroke, where water diffusion in the affected brain tissue drops very rapidly after the ischemic event.[8] The technique also lies at the heart of diffusion tensor imaging, a method for non-invasive study of connecting pathways within the brain’s white matter.[9]
In 1991, still at NIH, he was the first to show that EPI could be used to monitor the time course of oxygenation changes in animal brain resulting from changes in the breathing gas . . . These findings led to an explosion of interest in fMRI, which depends almost entirely on the use of EPI to investigate human brain function, and the subsequent development of what has come to be known as Imaging Neuroscience.
In 1993 he returned to the United Kingdom as a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow to become head of MRI at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, a position he held from 1993 to 2003. In 1994 he was awarded a professorship by University College London. Since 2006, he has been director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig . . . He also plays a role in the development of Neuroanthropology, which brings together insights from the study of culture and the study of the brain.
No one has been more vital than Victor Turner in my struggle to separate nonverbal intense near-epiphanies from prescribed institutional rituals, but the MRI studies have come to me more as journalistic interpretation, never linking Robert to Victor Turner.
Clifford Geertz is the anthro most associated to culture and literature. I never met him either and no one there explained who he was. He had left U of C in 1970, which explains it, but he showed up when I combed the shelves of the Co-op Seminary Bookstore, where I’m still a member.
“At the University of Chicago, Geertz became a champion of symbolic anthropology, a framework which gives prime attention to the role of symbols in constructing public meaning. In his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz outlined culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."
“He was one of the earliest scholars to see that the insights provided by common language, philosophy and literary analysis could have major explanatory force in the social sciences. Geertz aimed to provide the social sciences with an understanding and appreciation of “thick description.” Geertz applied thick description to anthropological studies (specifically his own 'interpretive anthropology') while producing theory that had implications for other social sciences. For example Geertz asserted that culture was essentially semiotic in nature and this theory has implications for comparative political sciences.
Max Weber and his interpretative social science are strongly present in Geertz’s work. Geertz himself argues for a “semiotic” concept of culture: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," he states “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.”
Geertz argues that to interpret a culture’s web of symbols, scholars must first isolate its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize the whole system, in some general way, according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based. It was his view that culture is public because “meaning is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture because they are the collective property of a particular people. We cannot discover the culture’s import or understand its systems of meaning when, as Wittgenstein noted, “We cannot find our feet with them. Geertz wants society to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves; they speak to larger issues, and vice versa, because “they are made to.”
Anthropology as we used to think of it.
I’m reading “Ritual, Performance and the Senses," a collection of essays on this level, including one by Robert Turner. In fact, that’s why this post is full of quotes -- I need time to think and the book is Interlibrary Loan -- it has to go back ASAP. So many books, so little time.
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