> A good example would be Bruno Latour, who spent a few years > studing in a biochemisty laboratory as an anthropologist. > He worked in the lab side by side with his subjects. He studied > them as a native tribe, and he derived a lot of insight.
After reading your post, I skipped over to Amazon.com to see if there
were any Bruno Latour titles on offer. I ordered "Conversations on
Science, Culture, and Time (Studies in Literature and Science)" by
Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Roxanne Lapidus. Check out the one
customer review posted on the details page for this title:
> As an analogy, you recently took a trip, right? Why? > What purpose does going to the foriegn land and sitting at the > feet of the shaman serve? Do you think someone should preach > about drugs and shamantic practice that hasn't ever participated > in the rituals?
As for my trip, I'd been reading about shamanism and the value of
altered states of consciousness and participating in discussions on
those topics for years prior to going to Peru. The authors of the books
I read were, for the most part, not Shamans themselves, but people whose
set of cultural concerns and assumptions and style of analysis and
reporting are much closer to my own than are those of indigineous
shamans; poeple like Wade Davis, Terrence McKenna, David Abram, Aldus
Huxley, and Stanislov Groff. What these non-shaman authors have to say
on the use of plant-teachers and the realms to which they grant access
was far more meaningful to me than what the Peruvian shamans I
encountered had to say. As I mentioned in a previous post, the shamans
tend to be a rather egoistic, competative and self-agrandizing bunch.I
respect their knowledge of plants and their uses, but they're agenda is
quite different from mine.
I'll let TheHermit answer that question with an excerpt from his fine
post of a couple of days ago:
TheHermit wrote:
There is nothing fundamentally wrong from postulating that the universe
is a
strange, unknown and unknowable environment except in our immediate
vicinity. We can then analyse the environment in our immediate vicinity
and
develop a rational system to describe our immediate environment. We can
then
make the inductive step that all of the universe works the same way as
our
localised model. As and when we discover phenomena which confute our
hypothesis, we simply modify our model of the localised universe to
bring it
into alignment with this new information. As anyone with a smattering of
exposure to science will recognise, this is the very basis of the
scientific
method. As anyone with a slight exposure to the philosophy of science
will
recognise, this is the basis of the philosophy of science.
To which I would add that the philosophy of science is primarily a
branch of epistemology which is the examination of the foundations of
knowledge.
You're exactly right. Philosophers of science write journal articals and
books which are primarily read by other philosophers of science and
their students. Instructing scientists in the business of scientific
research is not the business of the philosophy of science either in
practice or intent.