Word: castaneda
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...Atkins' Diet Revolution, Atkins (1) 2-The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam (2) 3-The Joy of Sex, Comfort (4) 4-Harry S. Truman, Truman (3) 5-I'm O.K., You're O.K., Harris (5) 6-Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda (7) 7-All Creatures Great and Small, Herriot (8) 8-"Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,&#quot;O'Donnell, Powers, McCarthy (6) 9-The Manipulated Man, Vilar (10) 10-Soldier, Lieut. Colonel Anthony B. Herbert, U.S.A. (ret.) with James T. Wooten
...visits to the Southwest and the Mexican desert gradually became the spine of Castaneda's life. Impressed by his work, the U.C.L.A. staff offered him encouragement. Recalls Professor Meighan: "Carlos was the type of student a teacher waits for." Sociology Professor Harold Garfinkel, one of the fathers of ethnomethodology, gave Castaneda constant stimulus and harsh criticism. After his first peyote experience (August 1961), Castaneda presented Garfinkel with a long "analysis" of his visions. "Garfinkel said, 'Don't explain to me. You are a nobody. Just give it to me straight and in detail, the way it happened. The richness...
Like the various versions of Castaneda's life, the books are an invitation to consider contradictory kinds of truth. At the core of his books and Don Juan's method is, of course, the assumption that reality is not an absolute. It comes to each of us culturally determined, packaged in advance. "The world has been rendered coherent by our description of it," Castaneda argues, echoing Don Juan. "From the moment of birth, this world has been described for us. What we see is just a description...
...take as reality, as well as their notions of the world's rational possibilities, is determined by consensus, in effect by a social contract that varies from culture to culture. Through history, the road has been hard for any person who questions its fine print?especially if, like Castaneda, he tries to persuade others to accept his vision...
Anthropology by its nature deals with different descriptions, and hence literally with separate realities, within different cultures. As Castaneda's colleague Edmund Carpenter of Adelphi College notes, "Native people have many separate realities. They believe in a multiverse, or a biverse, but not a universe as we do." Yet even this much scholarly relativism is indigestible for many people who like to reassure themselves that there is only one world and that the "validity" of a culture's interpretations can and should be measured only against this norm. Any myth, they would say, can conveniently be seen as an embryonic...