#Psychological anthropology

[sysmedsaresexist]

[a-study-in-darkness]

And how far back it goes too like...

Over 100,000 years ago, some very early ancestor picked up a shell on the beach and thought it was pretty and always wanted that beauty with them wherever they went so they tied it on something that has long since degraded and hung it on their body somewhere. And maybe others saw it and thought "fuck yeah that's cool hey I have this bone shard that has a shape I like maybe I'll wear that."

Or even earlier than that, some distant ancestor maybe saw a particularly pretty flower or a nice feather and thought "ooooo I'm gonna put this somewhere on me... oh my hair will hold if nicely!"

I just like thinking about what that first moment in our genetic history looked like. When we first started to not only appreciate beauty (which is something many animals do) but to think to add it to our own beauty.

Found this while I did like three minutes of research on the topic before just word vomiting if interested:

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/behavior/art-music/jewelry

I think its such a cute little human thing for people to want to decorate their bodies with pretty pieces of metal and shiny stones.

[mindblowingscience]

The childcare system of a contemporary hunter-gatherer community suggests a major pitfall of the nuclear family, and it could hint at why so many parents in wealthy, Western nations feel burned out. A team of researchers, led by evolutionary anthropologist Nikhil Chaudhary from the University of Cambridge, argues that children may be "evolutionarily primed" to expect more attention and care than just two parents can provide. Investigating the culture of Mbendjele hunter-gatherers, who live in the northern rainforests of the Republic of Congo and subsist on hunting, fishing, gathering, and honey collecting, researchers found a widespread caregiving network. Among 18 infants and toddlers in this community, researchers noticed that each child receives, on average, nine hours of attentive care and physical contact each day, usually from around 10 individuals, but sometimes from more than 20.

Continue Reading.

[communistkenobi]

I know all social sciences have the ability to produce some real horseshit but truly what has psychology ever done for this world. IQ? Freudian psychoanalysis? The DSM and ICD? Jordan Peterson? like what are we even doing here

[ravings-of-a-mad-scientist]

Psychologist: How come evil scientists in movies are always biologists, physicists, chemists, and engineers?

Military Scientist: Yeah! Where’s all the evil mad military scientists!? Do you have any idea how many people I’ve killed using science? How many people that other people have killed thanks to my military theories and formulas?

Astronomer: Uh… yeah. Well, a mad astronomer could make first contact with aliens and convince them to take over the world? That would be a pretty cool villain idea. Of course it is pretty unlikely we'll ever get to meet aliens but y'know...

Meteorologist: Or a mad meteorologist could… like… predict the weather incorrectly. And minorly inconvenience a bunch of people!

Psychologist: Oh, so like you!

Meteorologist: shut up

Geologist: An evil geologist could discover some evil rocks! And add them to his private rock collection so no one else gets to see them! That's just so EVIL!

Anthropologist: Oh, or a mad anthropologist could make real life have regionally and historically inaccurate language, clothing, and architecture, just like in a movie! It’d be completely immersion breaking!

Ornithologist: *gasps* THEY COULD RELEASE LOONS EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND ANNOY PEOPLE WITH REGIONALLY INACCURATE BIRD CALLS!

Psychologist: You know what? I was actually an evil mad psychologist this whole time and was trying to manipulate you guys into turning evil, but you all just kinda suck. I don't know if I even want you on my side anymore. 

Military Scientist: *whispers into radio* She said I suck, start the bombardment

[boymanmaletheshequel]

One facet of Hellenistic and Roman, /Greco Roman paganism that I’ve always found extremely interesting to me, is how inherently human and relatable it’s gods, and their correlating counterparts are, especially when compared to deities in other ancient religions. They are divine, of course, this is made clear enough, but they all have aspects and traits to them that are inherently human. Rage, lust, joy, love, conflict. They represent, if nothing else, key elements of humanity and the human condition, which is something that no other ancient religion I’ve studied quite compares to in the same way. And not only that, but their relationship to people and humans as gods is clearly very symbiotic. They rely on their subjects for their fulfillment, interact with them directly on a regular basis, and often times even respect and revere them as not necessarily always equals, but as at the very least, creatures worthy of their consideration and respect, sometimes even falling in love with, and baring children with them. This is something that doesn’t really happen in any other ancient religion I’ve seen, sure, there are aspects of it in them, but not nearly are they portrayed as objectively or centrally as they are in Hellenism and Roman paganism. Each god represents some aspect of humanity in ways that are inherently non-Devine, Aphrodite is a lover, sometimes desperate to a vulnerable degree you wouldn’t expect a god to be. Dionysus is regularly consumed by madness as a result of his addiction and mental illness, and falls into spirals of depravity that are hauntingly ungodly. Artemis hunts even though she doesn’t need to, she respects her body as a goddess woman just as much as any human woman would, and fights back just as violently as well. Apollo finds much of his joy and happiness through the humans he falls in love with, and faces much of his suffering and sadness through them as well. Persephone fucking dies. maybe not literally in the sense of human, medical death, but absolutely metaphorically, and the grief her mother Demeter experiences is so inherently human, and so shockingly, gut wrenchingly tragic, that it is pretty obvious that this is what her story is meant to represent: a divine allegory for death and grief, an element that so many religions completely separate from their deities. Even Zeus, the primary deity, is a father figure who’s connection and relativity to fatherhood as seen in human men is almost identical. and if it weren’t for the pre-established lore and status of him as a an extremely powerful deity, there are moments in his Mythos where you might even forget that he’s a god, an all powerful, all divine, objectively non human god to begin with. I think it’s what makes Hellenism so emotional and so drawing to me, and to many other pagans, it’s a relationship that is mutual, and relatable, which is an element that is lacking in so many religions, even the major ones like Christianity and Islam. Yes, there are still elements of this in those religions, but it always feels like the stories constantly hammer in the fact that they are divine, so divine, so utterly unrelatable, so inherently disconnected from their subjects and their plights as a superior enitity, that there’s a limit to how connected one can feel to them. In hellenismos, this limit doesn’t seem to exist, and that’s something that makes it so much more personal and fascinating to me than any other religion I’ve studied. The gods are us, and we are the gods. At the end of the day, I think that’s what all religions should be about, and ultimately, are about, wether we realize it or not.

[kafkasapartment]

Ancient Babylonian Tablets: Recently deciphered tablets dating back 4,000 years. The tablets contain predictions based on lunar eclipses. Omens often foretold disasters like famine, chaos and enemy destruction. Since individual lives are destined for some hardship, some misery and tragedies, it’s always a safe prediction that humanity as a whole will suffer a similar fate.

[sophieinwonderland]

List of things other than the DSM and "generalized psychology" (for lack of a better term), that the plural community would benefit studying:

Psychonautics

Transcendent psychology

Anthropology

Phenomenology

Philosophy of self

What constitutes the area of psychology

Feel free to add more, there are more things that study plurality than just what is treated as the supreme field of the mind, which is a soft science.

I'm not saying you have to study those, but I think we should use all of these areas, I think it would benefit discussions.

If they don't accept psychology studies, then we should bring even more things to the table and connect all of these things to create an area of study for plurality as a spectrum, as an experience, as a state of being. - Nightmare Sans

Absolutely! Actually, the Stanford Tulpa Study is probably only happening because tulpamancers reached out to Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist, to talk about similarities between tulpas and the "God" evangelicals talk to in her book, When God Talks Back.

That really set the dominoes in motion that led to her teaming up with Michael Lifshitz and others for the neuroimaging study.

If someone from tulpa community hadn't read that anthropology book, there's a good possibility that this current study wouldn't be happening today.

Looking to different fields is extremely important in developing our understanding of plurality.

[eelhound]

"The transition from [the barter system to currency] is hard to understand; how can human cravings be fetishized into pieces of metal? The answer is elegant because it reveals not only the origin of money, but its character even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: 'It has long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings.' The first coins were minted and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with the image of their god and embodying his protective power. Containing such manna, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but vice-versa: since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.

The consequence of this was that 'now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace.' This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, 'who based the value of his life — and so of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins.' A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. 'Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world.'

If we replace 'immortality' with 'becoming real,' the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that [the ego does] not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.

The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves."

- David Loy, from "Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today." Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: An International Symposium, edited by Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Sandra A. Wawrytko, 1991.

[magnetothemagnificent]

Just saw someone say that RAMCOA "isn't real and is an antisemitic conspiracy theory" which... I don't know. I think that's dismissive of the pervasiveness of Xian abuse and the actual context of RAMCOA. A lot of Xians are involved in organized cults and traffic/abuse people through various means. At the very least I think there is nuance here. I'd like to hear your take though

For those who don't know the acronym, it stands for Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Organized Abuse, and was coined by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), and organization with a history of past and present abuse and corruption.

It's not real. It's a conspiracy that began in the 1980s and 1990s with the Satanic Panic. Some corrupt psychologists practiced "repressed memory recovery", where they convinced their patients that they were ritually abused by satanic cults as children, but forgot about it due to trauma. In reality, it's actually very easy to convince someone that they remember something, even when it didn't actually happen. There is no nuance. While cults absolutely do exist, there is no underground network of cults (Christian or otherwise) engaging in occult ritual sacrifices and abuses. To assert that there is leans deeply into antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that certain dissociative disorders aren't real. They've existed before the Satanic Panic and before the epidemic of false memory implanting by psychologists. However, people with trauma disorders are very susceptible to manipulation, especially by mental healthcare professionals. Someone can genuinely believe they were kidnapped by a network of occultists, that doesn't mean it actually happened to them. It also doesn't mean that they're malicious liars- false memories can feel very real, and as we've learned, it's quite easy to convince someone of a memory that didn't happen. People who believe they were victims of these things deserve our compassion- the bad-faith actors are the doctors and therapists who manipulated them, not the people suffering from mental illness.

More reading:

Evidence Against Dr. Colin A. Ross

Dangerous Therapy: The Story of Patricia Burgus and Multiple Personality Disorder

Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend

Martha Ann Tyo v Ross

Satanic Cults, Ritual Abuse, and Moral Panic: Deconstructing a Modern Witch-Hunt

Dutch Investigators Find No Evidence Of Ritual Child Abuse

Supernatural Support Groups: Who Are the UFO Abductees and Ritual-Abuse Survivors?

[jo-snicket]

Is there a magazine or something similar that shares cool and quirky scientific studies? Like the kind of studies that do numbers on tumblr? Tagging some of the sciences that might have such studies.

Basically I really miss Mental Floss magazine and I want a similar, physical magazine subscription.

[aardvaark]

every time brennan says psychology is a "soft science" i’m like. bestie. beloved. i’m so sorry but i have to tell you something about anthropology

[seasidewanderers]

also I get that it's a cool gotcha to try and go "well the DSM-V or ICD-11 or whatever diagnostic tool for mental illnesses recognises plurality outside of the diagnosis of mental illnesses" but you really Don't Have To. the DSM-V and ICD-11 are just tools for classification and diagnosis of disorders. nothing more, nothing less. they contain useful resources that professionals could use, such as quick tests and charts for inclusion/exclusion (differential diagnosis) of disorders, but.

by default. they do not "recognise" anything that it's not a disorder. if you really want plurality to be viewed as non-pathological, you first have to de-pathologise it. read this sentence twice. the "the symptoms are not part of a broadly accepted phenomenon, culture, etc etc" criterion is just to say, that if it's not disordered it's not a disorder. it's not a disorder if It's Just How It Is, Really (for example, the occasional anxiety attack, the human experience of grieving, the horrors of being alive in a historical period)

it doesn't necessarily mean that if it's not a disorder it's "real" or whatever, because nothing really is and everything is. just that literally it can't be a disorder if it's not disordered. it doesn't prove endogenic plurality because it can't do that. that's pretty straightforward in my opinion.

[waspgrave]

Have my second to last medical exam today and I am so afraid! I’ve been staring at the esophagus and rectum for days.

[travelingtwentysomething]

🎼Trauma Dump🎶

I can't sleep because I'm remembering how, on the verge of a panic attack and hiding in the corner of the big family reunion/thanksgiving I didn't want to go to but was forced to be at this year, one of my cousins who is 7 years younger than me and came from more privilege and is definitely on a high rung of the class ladder than me infiltrated my corner where I was just starting to settle into a semi-comfortable conversation with their younger sister (neither of which I've seen in a few years and very briefly at another large and overwhelming family event, my brother's wedding) to insert herself into the conversation with "how are you doing?"

(with her bland white bread boyfriend, who earlier in the day I'd accidentally said "Hi, Calvin" -her older brother who was not attending the reunion- and then immediately said, "sorry you're not Calvin, my bad," and then ran away from as fast as I could from sheer embarrassment, standing right next to her staring at me with an uncomfortable smile and an awkward glance up and down my fat stomach)

and when I did the socially acceptable, "I'm doing alright" code for 'I'm not doing that great but we're not talking about me right now', giving them an out for their shallower/polite interest because we haven't ever really connected much because they lived on the other side of the country our whole lives and were nearly a decade younger so we never developed a relationship outside of sporadic, bi/tri-ish-ennial family functions, and she pushed on with the (what my intuition was screaming wasn't quite genuine, or was at the very least condescending as clearly she'd made the ...correct... assumption the answer was a negative)

*"But are you thriving?"*

And I laughed one big "HA!" And said, "No, more like just surviving, but we're keeping it moving." And of all the half formed thoughts of what I should have said to her, one blares the loudest-

"HA! In this economy!?"

Can't help but feel I should have slightly antagonistically trauma dumped all over her for the absolute gall to ask that question to a clearly NOT THRIVING mentally-ill person who already tried to shut down that avenue of conversation politely, to give her a taste of the real world consequences of disingenuously asking that to someone who's genuine answer to that could only be handled by a licensed professional.