tracing the network’s resolution
NeuroAnthropology rounded up a discussion on the Medical Anthropology listserve that collected suggestions about examples of trance states in ethnographic film. Some captivating links came out of it:
“Holy Ghost People” by Peter Adair, which shows folks in Appalachia (in what very much looks like trance-like states) handling snakes. You can also get this documentary in a series of six YouTube clips starting here
Thaipusam Ritual: Pain & Trance.
Next nature featured one of those discoveries to emerge out of archeology that cannot help but give one a smile of pause and a thought that this too, indeed, will pass.
Doggerland is the name of a vast plain that joined Britain to Europe for nearly 12,000 years, until sea levels began rising dramatically after the last Ice Age. Taking its name from a prominent shipping hazard—Dogger Bank—this immense landbridge vanished beneath the North Sea around 6000 B.C.
Like all landbridges, Doggerland seems to have been a pretty busy thoroughfare for ancient hunters and gatherers. But archaeologists hardly gave it a thought until 2002, when a small group of British researchers laid hands on seismic survey data collected by the petroleum industry in the North Sea.
It is thought that the sea level rose no faster than about one or two meters per century, and that the land would have disappeared in a series of punctuated inundations. According to marine archaeologist Nic Flemming, a research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre of University of Southampton, UK. “It was perfectly noticeable in a generation, but nobody had to run for the hills.”
Although hunter-gatherers usually have any sense of ownership, land would have become an increasingly precious resource as the sea rose, which according researchers Clive Waddington & Nicky Miller might have led directly to the development of sedentism and territoriality.