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The founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) can only be understood within the cultural context of its heritage. This paper is an historical narrative tracing the intellectual lineage of the SAC. The immediate causes were a series of symposia in 1974, including several on the challenge to anthropology represented by Carlos Castaneda, who attacked the way a critical part of anthropology was conducted. The argument in his own narrative was that one could not understand the shamanic world view without becoming a shaman. No informant could ever convey this, because so much of it was experiential. It could not be properly known unless one entered with sincerity into the experience, as a participant not just an observer. Two insights central to this thesis are particularly relevant to SAC: an aspect of human consciousness exists independent of time and space susceptible to volitional control; and, there is an interconnection between all life forms, which must be understood if the universal impulse humans feel toward the spiritual component of their lives is to properly mature. The SAC can be seen in pure Kuhnian terms as one response to the reassessment that Castaneda forced on anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists tend to see G. H. Mead's conceptualization of self as fundamentally correct. In this paper, we develop a critique of Mead's notion of the self as constituted through social interactions. Our focus will be on Mead's categorial distinction between the socially constructed self and subjective experience, as well as on the tendency of post‐Meadian sociologists to push Mead's position in ever more radical directions. Drawing inspiration from a multifaceted understanding of selfhood that can be found in Husserlian phenomenology, we then propose that the most basic level of selfhood is anchored in irreducible subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:There have been many readings of Mead's work, and this paper proposes yet another: Mead, theorist of the social act. It is argued that Mead's core theory of the social act has been neglected, and that without this theory, the concept of taking the attitude of the other is inexplicable and the contemporary relevance of the concept of the significant symbol is obfuscated. The paper traces the development of the social act out of Dewey's theory of the act. According to Mead, Dewey's theory does not sufficiently account for consciousness. Grappling with this problematic leads Mead to several key ideas, which culminate in his theory of the social act. The social act and taking the attitude of the other are then illustrated by the analysis of a game of football. The interpretation presented has two novel aspects: first, symbolisation arises not simply through self taking the attitude of the other, but through the pairing of this attitude with the complementary attitude in self; second, self is able to take the attitude of the other to the extent that self has in actuality or in imagination previously been in the social position of the other. From this standpoint the key issue is how the attitude of self and other become integrated. New directions for empirical research, aimed at advancing this question are outlined. Finally, the paper shows how the social act can contribute to our contemporary concerns about the nature of the symbolic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social psychologist George Herbert Mead and the cognitive linguist Noam Chomsky both investigated the nature of language and mind during the 20th century. They approached the issues broadly, pursuing both philosophical and scientific lines of reasoning and evidence. This comparative analysis of Mead and Chomsky identifies fourteen questions that summarize their collective effort, and which animated much of the debate concerning language and mind in the 20th century. These questions continue to be relevant to 21st century inquiries. This paper identifies which questions have been resolved and which have not, and discusses each in the context of relevant literature. The net result is a set of questions that inform interdisciplinary-minded inquiries today into the nature of language and mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:In order to delimit the realm of social phenomena, sociologists refer implicitly or explicitly to a distinction between living human beings and other entities, that is, sociologists equate the social world with the world of living humans. This consensus has been questioned by only a few authors, such as Luckmann, and some scholars of science studies. According to these approaches, it would be ethnocentric to treat as self-evident the premise that only living human beings can be social actors. The methodological consequence of such critique is a radical deanthropologization of sociological research. It must be considered an open question whether or not only living human can be social actors. The paper starts with a discussion of the methodological problems posed by such an analysis of the borders of the social world, and presents the results of an empirical analysis of these borders in the fields of intensive care and neurological rehabilitation. Within these fields it must be determined whether a body is a living human body or a symbol using human body. The analysis of these elementary border phenomena challenges basic sociological concepts. The relevant contemporary sociological theories refer to a dyadic constellation as the systematic starting point of their concept of sociality. The complex relationship between at least two entities is understood as the basis of the development of a novel order that functions as a mediating structure between the involved parties. Based upon empirical data, I argue that it is necessary to change this foundational assumption. Not the dyad but the triad must be understood as the foundational constellation. This implies a new understanding of the third actor, which is distinct from the concepts developed by Simmel and Berger and Luckmann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the role played by the body in the work of George Herbert Mead. For Mead, the social emergence of mind depends on human physiology. This is revealed through a detailed exploration of three thematic domains in his work: the organism–environment dyad, perception, and the manipulatory stage of the act. From this, I argue that Mead saw the body as constitutive of cognition and central to the development of mind and self. Present‐day research supports this view and demonstrates Mead's relevance for understanding embodied cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand themselves as playing a social role, individuals must understand themselves to be contributing to a cooperative endeavor. Psychologically, the form of cooperation required is a specific type that only humans may possess, namely, one in which individuals form a joint or collective agency to pursue a common end. This begins ontogenetically not with the societal level but rather with more local collaboration between individuals. Participating in collaborative endeavors of this type leads young children, cognitively, to think in terms of different perspectives on a joint focus of attention ‐ including ultimately an objective perspective ‐ and to organize their experience in terms of a relational‐thematic‐narrative dimension. Socially, such participation leads young children to an understanding of self‐other equivalence with mutual respect among collaborative partners and, ultimately, to a normative (i.e. moral) stance toward "we" in the community within which one is forming a moral role or identity. The dual‐level structure of shared endeavors/realities with individual roles/perspectives is responsible for many aspects of the human species' most distinctive psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in cognitive science has provided broad empirical support for the model of cognition and self-development formulated by G.H. Mead. This is demonstrated specifically through three distinct cognitive mechanisms: basic-level categories, mirror neurons, and joint-attention schemes. These mechanisms illustrate a form of embodied sociality that underscores the intersubjective foundation of mind and self articulated by Mead. Research on basic-level categories, mirror neurons, and joint-attention schemes further extends Mead's relevance outside standard sociological and social psychological circles to the field of cognitive science and its emerging focus on sociality and social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reported research uses an extension of Bartlett's method of repeated reproduction to provide data on the sociocultural processes underlying reconstructive remembering. Twenty participants worked in pairs to remember the War of the Ghosts story 15 min and 1 week after presentation. The observed transformations were comparable to previous research with individuals. Going beyond previous research, we analyse participants' discourse to provide a window on the processes underlying these transformations. Textual excerpts demonstrate how imagery, narrative coherence, deduction, repetition, gesture, questioning and deferring contribute to the transformation and conventionalization of the material. These diverse sociocultural mediators are integrated into a partially coherent recollection by participants self-reflecting, or as Bartlett termed it, turning around upon their schemas. We demonstrate that this self-reflection is both a social and a psychological process, occurring because participants are responding to their own utterances in the same way that they respond to the utterances of other people. These empirical findings are used to make a case for using discursive data to look not only at discursive processes but also at socially situated and scaffolded psychological processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]