How important is story to to human understanding?  

Today we take a step away from science per se, to look at the role of story in the formation of our world views, for generations our only method alongside direct experience of understanding the world, as opposed the more modern method of hard data from scientific research that we tend to examine on Chasing Consciousness. So we’re continuing the all important job of our first series: to establish the limits of what science can know. And today we’re going to start understanding how some of the story like information found in the psyche, and perhaps in the way our lives unfold, can give us clues to the nature of human reality and so support our scientific research in psychology.   

So who better to help us navigate this troublesome academic area than award winning social anthropologist Dr Carla Stang! Carla earned her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.  She has held the position of Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and Associate Researcher at the University of Sydney, and was awarded the Frank Bell Memorial Prize for Anthropology from Cambridge. Based on her fieldwork with the Mehinaku, Carla wrote a book called “A Walk to the River in Amazonia” which we’ll be talking about in a bit. She writes for the Dark Mountain collective which advocates ‘uncivilisation’, and has created a mysterious new project ‘Imaginal Futures’. Most recently she co-created the first Masters of Philosophy at Schumacher College, and is currently at work on a new book, an ecological, cross-disciplinary and collaborative project.

What we discuss in this episode: 

Part 1 

00:00 Tarzan of Greystoke

10:00 How much of a problem is our propensity for narrative over fact? 

14:00 Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey or Monomyth examined

24:00 Critiquing the destructive power and domination of others presented in the mono myth

40:00 The uninitiated: we’re a society of children

49:00 The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdoch and healing the wounded feminine

55:00 Different types of ‘events of consciousness’ and mythos

Part 2 

1:05:30 The importance of interdisciplinary research to get big picture understanding

1:17:00 What’s quotidian Amazonian life like; ‘A Walk to the River in Amazonia’ Carla’s 2011 book

1:53:00 Imagining the stories of the future we want, we can form the world

References:  

Carla Stang ‘A Walk to the River in Amazonia’ 

Imaginal Futures created by Carla Stang,  Rachel Flemming and Emma George  

William James quote, ‘Live life to the fullest’   

Ben Okri quote ‘We are story beings’ 

Eugène (Eugeniusz) Minkowski 'Vers une cosmologie. Fragments philosophiques'

Joseph Campbell quote ‘follow your bliss’ 

Sonu Shamdasani Historian and Redbook publisher 'Lament of the Dead'

James Hillman Jung scholar and founder of the field of 'Archetypal Psychology'

Freddy’s ‘Rites of Passage’ podcast show  

Maureen Murdoch 'The Heroines Journey' 

Henri Corbin - 'Mundis Imaginalis' 

Sean Kane - a place telling a tale through human beings