A Field Guide to a New Meta-field: Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide

by Barbara Maria Stafford

Overview

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.

Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226770543
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Barbara Maria Stafford is the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago and Distinguished Visiting University Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the author of numerous previous books, including Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION
Barbara Maria Stafford
Crystal and Smoke
Putting Image Back in Mind

ONE
Thomas Habinek
Tentacular Mind
Stoicism, Neuroscience, and the Configurations of Physical Reality

TWO
Suzanne Küchler
The Extended Mind
An Anthropological Perspective on Mind, Agency and “Smart” Materials

THREE
Naoum P. Issa and Ari Rosenberg
Tartini’s Devil
Peripheral Mechanisms That Underlie Sensory Illusions

FOUR
Philip J. Ethington
Sociovisual Perspective
Vision and the Forms of the Human Past

FIVE
Frank Echenhofer
Ayahuasca Shamanic Visions
Integrating Neuroscience, Psychotherapy, and Spiritual Perspectives

SIX
Anne C. Benvenuti and Elizabeth J. L. Davenport
The New Archaic
A Neurophenomenological Approach to Religious Ways of Knowing

SEVEN
David Michael Bashwiner
Lifting the Foot
The Neural Underpinnings of the “Pathological” Response to Music

EIGHT
Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Alvar Aalto’s Astonishing Rationalism

NINE
Nicholas Tresilian
Semantic Reciprocity
Toward a Neuroscience of Cultural Change

Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Any book that helps demolish the stubbornly ingrained gospel of Cartesian bifurcation is, indeed, welcome. This book is a fairly major contribution to this deconstruction project not only in exposing Cartesian fallacies, but also suggesting positive, practical ways of putting ‘Humpty Dumpty back together again.’ . . . The essays in this book will challenge many ‘hide-bound’ academics’ stale and outmoded paradigms, and certainly make most readers sit up and think very seriously about the future direction of their research.”

Leonardo

“Any book that helps demolish the stubbornly ingrained gospel of Cartesian bifurcation is, indeed, welcome. This book is a fairly major contribution to this deconstruction project not only in exposing Cartesian fallacies, but also suggesting positive, practical ways of putting ‘Humpty Dumpty back together again.’ . . . The essays in this book will challenge many ‘hide-bound’ academics’ stale and outmoded paradigms, and certainly make most readers sit up and think very seriously about the future direction of their research.”

Leonardo