Over the past 10 years Daily Grail Publishing has been privileged to work with Professor Charles D. Laughlin – a respected academic with a long history of research and writing on the anthropology, neurobiology, and the science of consciousness, meditation and dreams, who is willing to explore paranormal ideas – to publish his writings on these topics. Some of his previous books that we’ve released include Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain, The Power of Ritual, and The Contemplative Brain: Meditation, Phenomenology and Self-Discovery from a Neuroanthropological Point of View.
(Note that these books are not ‘pop’ reads with simplistic ideas – they are academic works that get right into the nuts and bolts of anthropology and neurobiology and the ways in which the brain actually works during meditation, dreams and ritual. So these are definitely only for people who want to dive deep on the inner workings of your mind (somewhat like a mechanical manual for the brain).)
I’m happy to now announce our release of his latest book, Return to the Things: Husserlian Neurophenomenology and the Scientific Anthropology of the Senses. Here’s the blurb and book cover:
Anthropology has long resisted becoming a nomothetic science, thus repeatedly missing opportunities to build upon empirical theoretical constructs, choosing instead to back away into a kind of natural history of sociocultural differences. What is required are methods that focus the ethnographic gaze upon the essential structures of perception as well as sociocultural commonalities and differences. The anthropology of experience and the senses is a recent movement that may be amenable to including a partnership between Husserlian phenomenology and neuroscience to build a framework for studying the essential structures of consciousness, and the neurobiological processes that have evolved to present the world of experience as adaptively real. The author shows how the amalgamation of essences (sensory objects, relations, horizons, and associated intuitions) and the quest for neural correlates of consciousness can be combined to augment traditional ethnographic research, and thereby nullify the “it’s culture all the way down” fallacy of constructivism.
You can grab a copy of Return to the Things from Amazon.com, or your favourite other online bookseller.
