Martin Fortier - The Neuroanthropology of Hallucinogenic Experiences

Описание: “The Neuroanthropology of Hallucinogenic Experiences: Beyond nativism and culturalism” presented by Martin E. Fortier from the
Institut Jean Nicod, Department of Cognitive Studies, ENS, Paris & the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, EHESS, Paris.

When taken at high enough doses hallucinogens induce a large panoply of hallucinations. The content of these hallucinations can consist of people, animals, artefacts, elves, spirits, chimeras,
etc. Naturalistically minded scholars have tried to answer the lingering question of the origins of these hallucinatory contents in two ways. The first one, culturalism, maintains that the content of hallucinogenic experiences is determined by the stimuli one has been exposed to during one’s life (e.g., Lévi-Strauss, 1970; Brown, 1978). These experiences are nothing more than reconfigured bits of one’s environment. The second one, nativism, claims that the content of hallucinogenic experiences is determined by evolutionarily-inherited modules – that is by genetic factors (e.g., Laughlin, McManus, & d’Aquili, 1990; Watson, 2009; Winkelman, 2010, 2017). The latter view – which has been mainly championed by the proponents of “biogenetic structuralism” – echoes ideas from evolutionary psychology and Jungian psychoanalysis. Within this framework, the environment is said to play no role in the shaping of hallucinatory content; innate modules (or archetypes) are purported to be sufficient to account for the content of hallucinogenic experiences. I will show that culturalism and nativism are equally flawed and are proved wrong by our best neurobiological models of hallucinations, by the diversity of receptoromes, and by cross-cultural descriptions of hallucinogenic experiences. I will put forward a new model, constructivism, that integrates together findings from anthropology, biology, and neuropharmacology, and that acknowledges the critical role of non-genetic and non-cultural processes such as prenatal spontaneous activity (e.g., Katz & Shatz, 1996) and neural selection (e.g., Changeux et al., 1973; Edelman, 1993). It will be demonstrated that by moving beyond the hackneyed dichotomy of nature vs. nurture, the constructivist approach can shed new light on the origins of hallucinogenic contents.