The Shape of Change: Addressing Possibilities and Limits to Transformation
Channel: Anthropology of Consciousness
Date: 2021-09-09

This panel addresses what shapes change using a holistic, interdisciplinary approach
grounded in anthropology. A central question this panel addresses is how humans relate to their environments – ecological, cultural, ontological – in ways that mutually impact the person and the place. These person-environment interactions both potentiate and limit change. To better understand these interactions, the papers embrace holistic approaches that integrate multiple types of scholarship, drawing diversely on cognitive science, evolution, psychology, narrative theory, and philosophy in conjunction with anthropology. This type of approach falls broadly under the rubric of neuroanthropology, which emphasizes both field-based research as a way to understand human variation and considering how brains and cultures come together to shape human phenomena.
Each paper tackles a different part of how we relate to local environments: stories,
ontologies, landscapes, hallucinogens, institutions, and cultural constraints. Papers also look more closely at why we continue to treat ourselves and our environments in the same ways, without taking into consideration the information and evidence of climate change and environmental destruction all around us. Finally, the papers also consider how forms of collective engagement and consciousness can better address the wave of social and environmental changes happening today, with a particular focus on the sociocultural landscapes in and around the Tampa Bay area.