Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Julian Jaynes Society
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Self as Interiorized Social Relations

Applying a Jaynesian Approach

to Problems of Agency and Volition

BRIAN J. MCVEIGH

A Personal Preface

For two and a half years I conducted fieldwork among members of a Japanese religious organization called Sûkyô Mahikari.1 My research centered on the group’s practice of spirit possession, but I was frustrated by the lack of any comprehensive theory that accounted for possession. Most researchers merely labeled it (together with hypnosis) as “trance,” a term that seemed to me particularly unhelpful and non-explanatory. When I informed my dissertation committee members in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University that I intended to employ Julian Jaynes’s theories to account for possession behavior, they dismissed his ideas as loony. What surprised me about their reaction was how they criticized Jaynes as a sort of “biological reductionist.” There was great irony here; my dissertation committee members loudly proclaimed themselves as “cultural constructionist,” and yet they refused to take seriously a psychologist’s assertion that the most basic experience of being human — subjective conscious interiority — was culturally constructed. Though supportive in many ways, my advisors attempted to dissuade me from examining what I witnessed as a phenomenon in its own right (i.e., “possession-in-itself” or the “what” of possession). Rather, I was strongly advised by researchers who prided themselves on being inter-disciplinary, theoretically cutting-edge, and open-minded to ignore any cross-cultural, “universal” implications of what I observed and told to focus on the social uses of possession (i.e., “possession-in-society” or the “why” of possession”).2 I still have a letter from Professor Gananath Obeyesekere who described my attempts at accounting for possession-in-itself as full of “hocus-pocus”: “I am also surprised that your conclusion relies on such a dubious and ethnocentric work as Julian Jaynes’s.”3

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