Liberal Arts

Animistic perspectives, which hold the cosmos as “a being to whom prayers and offerings are made, who is endowed with understanding, agency and sentience, and responds to the actions of humans” (Apffel-Marglin, forthcoming) are often dismissed as primitive, even as “incompatible with an impersonal regard of objective reality” (Gonzalez-Crussi, 2007). Yet this account of a healing of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (the consequence of severe rattlesnake envenomation), within the shamanic traditions of the Native American Church and the vegetalistas of the Peruvian Amazon, reminds us of how profound healing can be when it arises from indigenous perception of a sentient, living cosmos. It also demonstrates the diagnostic and healing capacities of shamanic traditions utilizing psychoactive plants, sometimes beyond the reach of Western science.

This article is an autobiographical account of the author’s childhood struggle to survive in Stanford’s Learning House, a behaviorist program in the 1970s designed to help delinquents change. “The Minotaur of the Behaviorist Maze ” offers an insider’s perspective on the consequences of treating a child as a stimulus–response organism in need of modification rather than as a human being in search of restoration of his or her innate wholeness.

This paper contains a description of the use of Concept Maps for facilitated brainstorming sessions. Concept Maps were originally used to assess the conceptual knowledge of school children. It has since been realized that the creation of Concept Maps can be useful for knowledge elicitation and representation, including for brainstorming. This paper describes basic issues pertaining to the facilitation of brainstorming sessions with Concept Maps and presents a case study of a brainstorming workshop on alternate scenarios for Mars exploration carried out by participants from NASA Ames Research Center and researchers at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, FL.