 Okay, welcome everyone to the beginning of our second day of our 39th annual conference here at the Anthropology of Consciousness, our first fully virtual one. My name is Andy Gervich. I'm the president of the organization. And we are excited for a jam-packed second day, starting with this wonderful panel, The Shape of Change, Addressing Possibilities and Limitations to Transformation. I'm speaking to you today from Portland, Oregon. I want to do a land acknowledgement to start us off. We have an arrest on the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, the Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapua, Malala, and many other tribes and bands as the original caretakers of this land. We wish to begin our time together by acknowledging their presence, their dignity, and their continued struggle for respect, restoration, and reparations. We wouldn't be here today if they weren't here first. We wouldn't be here today if they weren't displaced after having been here first. And so our hope as an organization is to do our part to help reconcile that. A couple of things to point out. If you're attending and presenting, please have the chat window open. We will be dropping lots of things into the chat throughout the day, starting here pretty quickly about future sessions, all manner of information, what to do with questions, what to do if you have a question about the conference, upcoming events. And so make sure you have that chat window open. A webinar format that we are in, which means the presenters have their cameras and their microphones on, but you attendees do not. And so if you want to interact with us, the best way to do it is in the chat feature, you can interact with us and with the panelists and with each other through that. And then if you have a question for the panelists, I would appreciate it if you would roll it into the Q&A. If you roll your cursor over the bottom of your Zoom screen, you should have a series of options there. And on the far right, almost to the far right, you have a Q&A option. Please put your questions there because we can then get the panelists will be able to see them and we can gather them and ask them at the time. We also have a few other options. If you end up dropping a question in the chat, especially towards the end, we can see it there as well. And if you really feel the need that you'd like to speak directly to the participants, you can use the raised hand option and then we can turn your audio and maybe even video on if we need to as well. Two other things and then we'll hand the session over to Mark Flanagan to introduce our panelists. We have live captioning option for you. And so if you look across the bottom of your screen right next to that Q&A function, there's something that says CC live transcript. You can click on that and turn on captioning. It's only in English, I believe, but you might be able to change it actually by going down to subtitle settings. So I take that back. If you click on it, you'll turn it on. And then if you click on subtitle settings, you can adjust those to make the language bigger and I think you can change the language. And lastly, if you are so moved, we would offer a soft ask for you to go up to your name in the panelists section. If you click on participants, so not panelists, excuse me, if you click on participants, you'll see a list of everyone who's participating and you can see your name. And if you click on next to it, you'll be able to change it. And I would ask two things that you have your name match either exactly, Mark would prefer exactly or as close to exactly to the name that you're registered in the conference under. So we know who you are. We're not trying to kick anybody out, but we just want to know who's here and what's going on so we can keep the session nice and secure. And then if you would like to, to help us make the session more inclusive and accessible, you can add your preferred pronouns like some folks have already done, but that's not a requirement, but we would love it if you would. OK, with that, I'm going to turn the session over to Dr. Mark Flanagan to introduce our panelists and welcome again, everyone. Thank you so much, Andy. Really appreciate it. So so great to see everyone. My name is Mark Flanagan. I am the program chair for this conference. Really grateful to have everyone here. This panel is really excited about that. This is our second collection of student presentations also from Florida. So yesterday we had University of Miami. So we've had some great Florida representation. Daniel is a mentor and a friend of mine. And we go back a little ways. So Daniel's organized this panel is no stranger to the online space as a blog on neuroanthropology.net. And we're excited to have this collection of papers and presentations about how transformation relates to local environments. So I'll let Daniel take it away from here. Once again, we're grateful to have everyone. If you have any questions, we'll be available in chat and have a great presentation. Welcome, everyone, to the Shape of Change panel. Thanks for coming out on a Saturday morning. Thanks to Mark as well for facilitating all the organizational efforts and to Andy as well. It's just I know it's a lot. We are all from the University of South Florida. And a bunch of doctoral students and myself and the University of South Florida Department of Anthropology has also come out with an acknowledgement statement, which I'm going to read right now. So the Department of Anthropology acknowledges that the University of South Florida resides in the traditional homelands and territories of the Seminole as well as other historical groups, including the Colusa and Tokabaga. Today the state of Florida is home to the Seminole, Mikosuki, Miskogi and Chakta. And to individuals of many other Natives groups. As a department, we recognize the historical and continuing impacts of colonization on indigenous communities, the resilience in the face of colonial and state-sponsored violence and fully support indigenous sovereignty. We will continue to work to be more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. Thank you. And so we're going to start off with Gabby Lehigh. Just a note is the presenters will hopefully have some time. We're planning about 15 minutes in a talk and then a little bit of short period for some Q&A. So feel free to raise your hand or to put a question in the Q&A. I'll let Mark facilitate the digital side of it. And I can just facilitate the, if I can see it, we'll figure that one out. But without further ado, here is Gabby with her presentation. Hello, everyone, and good morning. Thank you again for joining us and thank you for hosting this panel. I'm very excited to be on this panel. I haven't engaged much with the anthropology of consciousness. So this is my first time and I'm really excited to be here and be doing this with everyone. So as said, my name is Gabby or Gabrielle Lehigh. I'm a third year PhD candidate at USF. And I'm going to talk to you today about the unspeakable pleasures of psychedelics and healing and how recreational psychedelic use can reconfigure social and cultural landscapes. So many of us may know that we are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. We're seeing a plethora of research coming out about the various uses of psychedelics and treatment of a diversity of physical and mental ailments, along with this kind of uprising of various types of psychedelic research centers and institutions, along with that and engaging in that creation of knowledge. Just as a little refresher for those of you who may be a little unfamiliar or just need kind of a reminder, some of the things that are coming out in terms of research in the last decade on this topic include the use of psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, LSD, ketamine, DMT, and ayahuasca in the treatment of things like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, and obsessive compulsive disorder. And we're seeing new studies being promoted and talked about every day, including, I know they just came out with a new one the other day talking about the use of DMT for stroke victims. And I think it's really important that we talk about how the research surrounding the beneficial uses of psychedelics is important to not only combating the physical and the mental ailments that people suffer from, but it also helps to move forward in fighting against the social and the racial injustices that are inherently intertwined with drug use and drug policy. But I think it's also really important that we also acknowledge, and I'm sure many of us do, that there's several shortcomings with this pathological kind of or biomedical focus on the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. And one of the largest kind of shortcomings that I see is this divide between the biomedical model and the cultural models that of drug use of substance use and of psychedelic use. And so I want to acknowledge that it's no really, it's no longer productive to investigate these elusive phenomenon of psychedelic experiences from either of these kind of silos. And so what I want to do in this presentation is I want to discuss what I see as just one of the many possible ways to potentially bridge this divide. So I'm going to do this by talking about and presenting a series of ideas that I'm using in my own dissertation research called chemo ethnography. And I'll talk about how these ideas in my project, how I use them to study transformative psychedelic experiences at music festivals. And I won't discuss my whole project, but I'll discuss a very small portion of it that looks at a particular kind of experience, which is that experience of pleasure induced by psychedelic use in this particular setting. And I'll use that as an example of how I engage with chemo ethnography, and then talk about how that largely can kind of help us move forward to bridge this divide and this dichotomy between biomedical and cultural perspectives. So I bring up this idea or these ideas of chemo ethnography, what does that mean? Oddly enough, there isn't really a foundation of study, there isn't really a field or definition of chemo ethnography. It's really a makeshift kind of compilation of thoughts, ideas and practices for my diversity of fields that include biology, chemistry, ecology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and really any other field of study that you would be interested in bringing into it. But it ultimately uses those qualitative methods that we often engage in with anthropology, along with all these other types of fields of study that you can bring in. But even though we don't have a specific definition or foundation of what it means, Shapiro and Kirksky 2017 use chemo ethnography to ask the question of how are molecular frictions, catalytic dynamics, and forms of not life, and other than life, reconfiguring our conditions of knowing, being, and sociology. That's a little dense. So what does that really mean? So for me, that means studying the relationship and the interactions of people and chemicals. And what I mean by interaction is Kirksky's 2015 idea of interaction, or basically the symbiotic processes of merging people and chemicals, and how those interactions create new social identities. So basically, this looks like studying how chemical, biological, social, human, and non-human actors create and recreate ways of being and meaning between each other. It's a little bit of an abstract concept, but it's really cool because one of my favorite parts about it is as researchers, it gives us the freedom and the flexibility to shape and define and mold chemo ethnography in ways that we see fit our research interests best. So the big question kind of becomes how can we use chemo ethnography to merge the biological with the chemical? On one hand, we have kind of the biological or even the pharmacological. These are these are the chemicals that people come in contact with and they engage with and looking at how these chemicals interact with people. So for example, how they interact within the brain or within the biology of the body. So for me, this looks like studying the chemical interactions of psychedelics within the body. And I'll talk a little bit more of a more specific example of that in a minute here. Then there's also the cultural perspective, which considers how people interact with people and things. So for my study, that means looking at how people engage with things in their environment or how they socialize with other people in ways that create meaningful experience and that create different types of psychedelic experiences. So bringing these two ideas together, chemo ethnography for me essentially asks how do sociocultural context and biological interactions with chemicals merge to create an experience of meaning for people. So I'll take kind of the rest of my time to specifically talk about how I use chemo ethnography and how it can look in what it can look like in practice by focusing on this very specific portion of my research. One of the things that I'm really interested in looking at is the specific experience of pleasure that comes from psychedelic use. And I'm interested in pleasure because it has the potential to generate a sense of healing for some people. And so it can add value to understanding the healing potential of psychedelic experiences from a recreational perspective, which is often something that is very elusive in the literature and really pleasures often talked about in these very moralistic ways of it being something that's uncontrollable or sinful in a way. So it kind of redefines what pleasure can mean to people in a very understudied setting, which is the recreational setting, and taking these experiences and then being able to apply them to other settings like the clinical models. So one way to view the pleasure of psychedelic experiences is again through this biological perspective, which we often see already. So for example, we see how chemical molecules such as MDMA function within the brain and create feelings and sensations of pleasure. So we know that the MDMA molecule attaches to various 5HT receptors within the brain, and it can create different type of physiological effects within the body. And some of those effects can be just enhanced pleasurable sensations through touch. And then there's also other sensations like increasing feelings of happiness, peace, ecstasy, euphoria, bliss, and unity. And so that's kind of what creates this sensation of pleasure in terms of the biological or pharmacological effects of using psychedelics. There's also the sociocultural context. And one example that we can pull from is it actually comes from the drug studies literature or substance use literature of how people use social groups to mediate substance use. So people use their social groups to learn and gain knowledge on how to responsibly use substances, including psychedelics. And so they learned how to take a substance, what substances to take, what substances they can combine or they should avoid combining, when to take them and what activities and things to do while on these substances in order to heighten various types of aspects of the experience. So for instance, one of those activities is with MDMA and particularly Recreational Music Festival settings is the active dancing and socializing with people within that setting. And that can create pleasure for people. So again, we come back to the question of how do I merge these things together, the biological and the sociocultural. I think one way to do this is to use the chemoethanographic approach to study these practices of use within context and find these very particular instances where the boundaries between the biomedical or the pharmacological merge or get kind of squishy with the sociocultural context. So for instance, people get pleasure, I'd mentioned people get pleasure out of dancing while on MDMA. And I think this is a really interesting example of how pleasure is kind of created through the pharmacological and the sociocultural. So when we look at, because it transverses these boundaries, it brings them together. So we know that physical movement of the body, we know that working out, we know that dancing creates physiological effects in the body that create sensations of pleasure. But we also know that the active dancing is placed within a sociocultural construction of what I call bodies in motion really, or bodies in context. So it's more than just watching what people do in practice, it's more than just going to a festival and just watching people dance around on drugs. Chemoethanography really allows us to build a framework where we can identify and examine the very instances of interaction in the very moments that they happen. So it's this kind of process of hunting for these moments where the pharmacological effects of a substance like MDMA and the social mediation of substance use along with the physiological enhancements of dance and movement and social interaction, they all kind of come together in these very collective moments of experience and meaning making. So like I said, it's not just looking at what people are doing, but really specifically looking and searching out for these moments where these boundaries dissolve and saying these are the moments of interaction and asking what exactly is going on here. And I think this is something that just taking the biological or the cultural studies in their respective kind of perspectives, they don't allow us to be able to see these moments. But chemoethanography provides us one set of ideas and a direction in order to be able to do this. So what does this mean for addressing the shortcomings of the biomedical model essentially of understanding psychedelic therapy and psychedelic benefits? I would argue that first it presents these novel ways of theoretically framing research. Instead of just studying the biological effects of a substance on the body, a chemoethanographic application begs researchers to search for these pushy, messy interactions between the biological and the sociocultural context of substance use. And I would kind of further argue that it begs us to also push for more interdisciplinary research on these topics in order to merge them. Second, it requires clinical researchers to consider how clinical studies are conducted. It begs researchers to ask questions about how to incorporate sociocultural context into clinical research designs and question what aspects of sociocultural context already exist in clinical practices that are contributing to patient experiential outcomes, but may be overlooked by that strictly clinical or biomedical model. And then finally, the chemoethanographic approach really gives insights to all researchers across the board to ask new questions that can change clinical practices and clinical studies. Questions like how do structural factors like identity characteristics influence clinical experiences of psychedelic psychotherapy? How does social connectedness within clinical psychedelic therapy enable a diversity of experiences for patients? What forms of self-expression like dance and art can be incorporated into clinical practice to enhance feelings of pleasure and promote healing? And what do people do in practice that can also be incorporated into clinical designs or therapy and healing? These are just kind of a few considerations that I think of when I think of chemoethanography and what it can do within our field of research and our kind of interests. And I really encourage everyone to dive into chemoethanography and embrace its freedom and its flexibility to form to the needs of your research and use that as a way to engage and blur boundaries between the biomedical and sociocultural and in freeze communication and academic inquiry into these kind of two constructs and figure out kind of and contribute to the over idea of what it needs to be human and what it means to make meaning out of that. So that's all I have. Thank you and I'm open to any questions or discussion on that. Thanks Gabby. You do have a few minutes left and just FYI for the other panels. I will put my video on sort of at 15 minutes and we're planning about 20 minutes. So that's just a signal that you're right up in your time. But you hit 14. So there's a Q&A question from Micah which says, thanks for very interesting talk. I'm wondering what chemoethanography looks and feels like in practice as a methodology. Yeah, absolutely. That's a really great question. Thanks for bringing that up. It's tough because we only get so much time to talk. Otherwise I totally would have loved to include that, but I'm glad you brought it up that way. I do get a chance to talk about it. So I mentioned like qualitative methods. Some of the things that I propose in my dissertation is using narrative interviews, but specifically using things like, I'm trying to, the term escapes me at the moment. Near experience interviewing techniques. So narrative interviews essentially asked an individual in my research, it would be asking an individual, give me the timeline of events of a very specific transformative experience for you. Start at the beginning and go to the end. And then I use these near experience interviewing techniques to get to more of the in-depth things. What did you feel within this moment? What kind of lines of thought did you have going through your head? What physical sensations did you have in the body? When you looked at this particular piece of art, how did it make you feel? Were there any particular emotions that arose for you? Kind of getting at these, asking these very sensorial kind of questions, which kind of get to what does chemotherapy look and feel like in practice. But that's just one of many ways. And that's one particular method that I'm using. And I'm sure there's other, but that's just one example. I had a follow up question, Gabby. So you mentioned your talk, you know, really trying to get at what's going on in conjunction, sort of where things get blurry. But you can't study everything that's going on. So what are the factors that you think are sort of most important in that interaction moment to really look at? Okay. Yeah, again, another great question. As much as we would love to be able to look at every individual thing that might play into a particular experience, there's not enough time or lifetimes to be able to address that. So I would say, you know, pulling from Zimberg's classic drug set and setting, those are three really big factors, what, you know, what drugs or people, what substances are people using, how much are they taking, you know, the set, where are they at physically, the physical environment that they may be in, how they interact with that physical environment, or sorry, that setting, and then set also kind of that mental kind of space that they're into. But I would also kind of push push that a little bit further. I mean, we're talking Zimberg's back from like the mid 80s. And so quite quite a bit has happened since then, too. So we can also kind of incorporate other kind of factors in that, too. And something that I mentioned in conclusion there is talking about structural factors, how do identity characteristics also play into that experience. So in my study, I'm also interested in asking participants about their spiritual and religious background and understanding how that may play a role into the particular experience that they may have while on these substances, even their political background, you know, different things about their upbringings and family structure might play a role in it, too. And I bring in the political side of things because, you know, the, you know, the, the, you know, the history of the war on drugs has very much, I know for me, it's very much integrated in my life, this idea of just say no, just say no to drugs, and that can really influence someone's experiences. So understanding someone's kind of political history and how their ideas have changed politically over time can lead to understanding how specific experiences are created over time as well. So kind of those are kind of the big factors that I'm looking at. I'm sure there's other things that I'll end up learning along the way, but those are kind of just some of the big ones that come to mind right now. Time for probably one more question if there's someone who wants to ask one. All right. Well, I would I encourage you, Gabby, to look at the comments. There's some good comments and some recommendations there. So I know you're more focused right on presenting. So check out the comments once, once you're off and we are going to now pivot to Brie Casper. Come on down. Hi. Hi. So you are going to present on your research and I'll let you introduce it on your own. So that's it. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and share a PowerPoint that I have. Okay. I'm also going to start my timer so I can keep my time. But this is my project on ontology and substance use triggers, understanding change through recovery. And I think in a lot of ways really follows up really well to what Gabby was talking about in understanding how biology and the brain and things like that come together with the environment in a very neuro anthropological perspective. But kind of on the other side. So I'm looking at substance use recovery and all the things that come with that. So can I not? There we go. Okay. So we have to first start at substance use cues. So substance use cues are stimuli related to past use. And so essentially what a substance use cue would be is something that is related to use in the past. So for instance, for somebody who might drink a lot of alcohol or have struggled with problems related to alcohol, it would be something like a bottle of beer or liquor bottle or something like that. But it's not as bounded as that. So it might be an environment. So a bar or a particular outside place where you used to meet your dealer or something like that. So it's just these remnants of past use that remind you of use. And it's based on the principles of incentive salience, which basically proposes the role of dopamine and substance use. I know Gabby is talking a lot about pleasure. And for a long time, and though pleasure definitely exists in substance use, particularly with psychedelics and other drugs, there was also a lot of theories of addiction that were based on pleasure that people just kept using because it was pleasurable, and that was the role of dopamine. And over time, that's evolved to understand actually dopamine in our brain is actually reacting to cues in the environment, or it's a context related neurotransmitter. So it tells us when we're near something that we need to pay attention to. In an evolutionary perspective, that would be things like food and things necessary to survival. But in the drug use context that kind of gets taken over as a way to understand what to pay attention to in order to kind of get that reward. And so the key reactivity theory is that cues lead to reactivity. And there's kind of three domains of reactivity. So there's drug craving, which is this intense wanting. There's physiological responses, so like sweat, increased heart rate. And then there's actual drug seeking. And this can kind of happen in two ways. So drug seeking as having a drug. So for instance, I listened to the podcast armchair expert with Dak Shepard. And a lot of times he's a person who experienced addiction. And he talks about his journey through recovery and, you know, his drug of choice was really cocaine. But when he would drink alcohol, that would kind of trigger him to really want the cocaine and go seek out the cocaine, right? So it was that alcohol is the stimulus to go then seek the other drug. And so there's drug seeking there. But then there's also drug seeking is the act of actually going to get a drug in the first place. And so key reactivity largely is created and tested in laboratory environments, employing principles of Pablo being conditioning. So we see this in studies of rats, of course. And then, but really, key reactivity is a theory created in a lab in psychology labs. And it's, you can get people to respond to these cues, right? We can measure that in a bunch of ways. But it really substantiates the variables of interest related to what the researcher is interested in, right? And so there's that kind of like breaking down empirical research as inherently biased in its in its own sense. And so the really the big takeaway is this has been remarkably unhelpful and substance use treatment, like you would think like, okay, if we can understand cues, we can get understand what makes people want to use and help them stop, right? Should they want to stop? But it's not really been all that helpful. And so that's where I kind of kind of come to understand substance use triggers. And so in triggers are very plainly the way people who are in recovery institutions, so rehabilitation counselors and things like that. And people who use drugs talk about cues, right? So these things that are created in the laboratory, this is like the real life substantiation of them. And they're really, as Dennis 2016 points out, there are things, people's memory situations that move them substance users often in sudden and unwelcome ways towards drug use. And so there's these, there are these environmental contextual factors that really move people towards use. But I think they're experientially different than cues, right? Because cues are bound to the laboratory environment and triggers are this kind of like concept that's created in concert with recovery institutions, right? They talk about this and rehabilitation and 12 step programs and stuff like that, like recognizing your triggers and what do you do when you confront a trigger and what happens then? Like, it's, it's substantiated in such a different way that has to do with institutions, but also the actual experiential level of it. Because you're kind of in your own context, right? It's easy to stay away from drugs when you're in an isolated environment. It's very hard when you go back home. And so the challenge here is to really understand substance use triggers. So psychology has an ontological problem, right? They say the ontology of cues equals the ontology of triggers. And I don't think that's true. And ontology and anthropology very, very briefly, very large literature. But to be very brief is in anthropology and science and technology studies, fixate on how individuals describe their relationships to nature and culture, taking seriously the individual's approach to biology, even if it's well outside the realm of like, quote, unquote, science. And so this is where lechors, modern versus nonmodern arguments come from, right? Modern is like this very scientific versus everybody else. So the West versus everybody else. And then Cohn has his book, How Forest Think. And so arguing that the way people view forests and the interaction between the people in the forest is really like a different approach to nature that the Western view of medicine, biomedicine and science don't really capture. And so it's really looking at alterity and the way that we understand culture and biology and the separation between them and instead pushes us to blend those or to expand our understanding of nature and culture, instead of taking them as for granted, right? That nature is the same everywhere. And culture is the thing that differs. The problem with this is in some sense, while people, while people really take their own nature seriously, depending on where they are, it ignores biology, right? So while there is this kind of alterity and things like that, an antibiotic, to quote Harrison Robb really, an antibiotic works in every context, right? Doesn't matter how you view nature. And really the action of the antibiotic, you might view it differently or where it comes from or things like that, but like it works. And we know that. And so there's got to be room for ontology and biology. And so I proposed using this multiple ontologies framework that Harrison Robb proposed in conjunction with neuroanthropology. And so in neuroanthropology for at least the last couple of years, we've been talking about, at least in this little group, triangulation. And so that's using this kind of mind, culture, and brain triangle, or if you want to say psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to kind of get at phenomena that kind of happened in the middle of all those things. So in this research project, I'm using key reactivity, this multiple ontologies perspective and incentive sampling to really understand how the brain, culture, context are all interacting in really interesting ways to form this trigger, trigger experience and then how that is implicated in substance use recovery. So very briefly, my preliminary research questions are both what are triggers, right? What does that real life thing look like? And that's the ethnographic component of my research. And then what are cues? And that will come through a really descriptive study of discourse in cue related research and really drawing that distinction between cues and triggers. And then how do triggers inform ontological experiences of the body or bodies in recovery? And so it's understanding the multiple bodies of recovering subjects and how they're formed interaction with interaction with triggers structures of power and local environments. And instead of following, while obviously the study takes place with individuals as an ethnography, it's focusing the lens on triggers rather than individuals. So how do triggers kind of flow through these different institutions and how can we follow triggers to understand that development? And what can we understand through humans about human through looking at triggers? And the point of this is to kind of build this like local neurology of substance use triggers and what is local is kind of different. You can talk about kind of this local biologies and then what is local on questioning that, but this local neurology is here, there's two ways to look at it, number one outside of the lab and number two, looking at it as like what happens in their actual context in everyday lives. So I'm going to really briefly talk about my methods, just I'm using ecological momentary assessment, which is in like in the environment way to assess what people are going through moment to moment. And so it's a psychological method. Essentially people have an app on their phone. Every time they experience a trigger, they'll basically log on to this app and then go through a quick survey about what they're experiencing, what they're feeling and then also engage in thick description. So I'd like to train people, the best I can on doing thick description in a way that doesn't burden them, but in a way that they can really write about what they're experiencing in that moment because I can't be there all the time. So it's kind of employing the participants as researchers to really describe these cues or these triggers in the moment. And then obviously interviews and observations both with participants and rehabilitation facilities and things like that. So there's some critical elements I've been thinking about as I've been going through this and some I've talked about, but the synthesis of ontology and biology and bringing those together to really understand the multiple ways our bodies are enacted in different contexts and in different ways and what becomes reality, but in multiple different ways outside of just understanding of nature or culture as a dichotomy. So as Gabby said, kind of really blending those lines. Structures matter. So again, referencing Gabby's thing, you've talked about identity politics. And the same thing is like these ontopolytics. So recovery in the United States is a practice, right? Something people go through, but also an institution. And that undoubtedly shapes what triggers are, right? And so a lot of researchers, several ethnographers talked about our linguistics and recovery in the way language using recovery shapes the process of quote unquote recovery. And so I'd like to do the same and kind of take a page out of that book and understand how language shapes practice and triggers and things like that. Time is an element that I'm not sure what to do with yet, if I'm being honest. Maybe it'll trigger some interesting conversation here, but triggers are at once an encounter with the past, present and future. So in this sense, when you're encountering a trigger, you're encountering something from the past, right? It's a memory or something like that that triggers you at a certain time and place that is apparently important, right? It's also you're encountering it in real time, right? And then whatever decision you make there is an encounter with the future, right? So what's going to happen? Right? Am I going to use? Am I not going to use? How is it going to influence the way I go forward? And so in this sense, time is no longer linear. It's kind of all at once. It's all happening at once. And I think that's a really interesting theme. And I hope to really dive into that as I understand, as I go through my dissertation. There's also obviously the question of consciousness. So subjective cues are really craving, right? So that's that feeling of craving that people get and can describe. There's also physiological cues. And at least studies in the laboratory indicate that those two things don't necessarily happen at the same time. And physiological cues can be really compelling. And research indicates that physiological cues can correlate more to rates of relapse and subjective experiences of cues. And so it brings to the surface this question of consciousness and what people are experiencing physiologically and how that interacts with what they're conscious of. And then the continued drug seeking. So drug seeking is really compelling, right? I know Daniel and his chapter on the encultured brain talks about a person, I believe, riding on a bus and then getting off the bus without even realizing it, like seeing a sign or something like that. And then without even realizing it, getting off the bus and just seeking. And it just seemed so magnetic. And so I think there's something to be understood there about what people are feeling and thinking about and what they're physiologically experiencing. There's also the question of change. So recovery capital, which is social, human, cultural and physical capital, is in more contemporary ideas of recovery is how we understand how people change, right? So the more you build of this recovery capital, the easier it is to change. And so I'm wondering how triggers and recovery capital interact. So do people building recovery capital, is it easier when they encounter these triggers? Because they can depend and pull on that capital in moments of need. In my thesis research, I dove into this a little bit and found that it seems likely, but I'd like to explore that more. And I think this is a good way to explore that in this project. And then finally, why care about this, right? And so I think the first reason why to care is disabling, destabilizing the narrative of cues in the lab and triggers in recovery, right? So distinguishing between those two experiences, which are inherently different in different ways because of other factors. And then also the methodological and applied implications of using ecological momentary assessment, particularly not using ecological momentary assessment itself, but particularly using it the way I'm trying to employ it, which is in a really descriptive ethnographic way rather than just trying to survey people really quickly. And then an awful approach to ontology. I'm a neuroanthropologist, right? I'm not an ontologist or though I've tried to become an expert on ontology, I'm really a neuroanthropologist at heart. So for some, you know, bringing biology into conversation with ontology might be not a great way to do it. But for me, I'm really interested in bridging that gap between biology and ontology. And I think it's fascinating. So that's kind of all I have for you. I'm at 15 minutes and 20 seconds on my watch. So I'll stop there. And I'm happy to answer any questions. Let me stop sharing. Thanks, Brie. There's a couple questions in the Q&A. So from Hillary, wondering if in all this there's any discussion about how the non-conscious parts of the mind make decisions prior to the conscious impulse, say to pick up a pen or a beer, where my trigger's cues fall in this case? Yeah, I have the exact same question. And that's kind of what I talked about a little bit at the end there. But yeah, like because there's these physiological reactions that apparently according to these laboratory studies are really meaningful and can really draw people in. How do we get it in those moments? And how do we break that down? I'm hoping though, through my observations and through my interviews and things like that, we can kind of break that down. But obviously, if it's not conscious, it's hard for people to talk about. There are EMA technologies that people can employ. So there's like basically like Fitbits and heart rate monitors people can wear that hook up to these apps, these ecological momentary assessment apps. And so, you know, for instance, if a participant's heart rate is just off the charts, you can kind of send them a questionnaire and say, what are you doing right now? Are you climbing the stairs? Is that why your heart rate is off the charts? Or did you maybe just encounter something? And there's like that way to get it. The barrier there is funding for research. So that's kind of the biggest barrier for me at least is having the access to those kind of technologies. So I think that would probably be the best way at least at this point to try to get at that in context, right? In laboratories, there's different ways to get at that. But in context, for my purposes, I think that would be the best way. Right. And the other one is sort of a lot of collaborative ontology from Micah. Do you work with any individuals who are involved in either Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous? If so, what roles do you see sponsors play in regards to what you're talking about here? My father, who was a longtime member of AA, often relied on his sponsor in his early days, often by meeting with a phone call and often called upon in similar ways by his sponsors at present when they feel these triggers you're referring to. Yeah, I think that's an incredibly important part of this. And actually, so I was able to do some preliminary data collection this summer. And a lot of people I talked to were involved in these 12 step programs. And I know like the sponsor and things like that, like when I would ask them, what do you do when you encounter a trigger? They would talk about reach out to the sponsor, they would say, call somebody, get up and move, do something, these mantras that are much echoed in AA. And I think that's why I'm interested in also understanding the structures that are built around recovery in the US, particularly because those matter, right? Those matter in those Q encounters, because those shape the way people move through those encounters. And so I think that's absolutely a critical, a critical part of the whole thing. And that's why for many in ontology, they don't really study, they don't really study kind of the structures that surround everything. They're more interested in kind of more small level interactions and breaking down the distinguish, be distinguishing between nature and culture. And instead I'm interested in doing that, but also adding in those structures and how those influence the way people experience triggers. And we have one final question, the Q&A. And it sort of builds on what I was having about what you're describing means cues are always relational or interpreted. But David asks, are you making a temporal distinction between cues and triggers, e.g., before, after 300 milliseconds, after stimulus, onset? Oh, that's a good question. So a distinction between the time that triggers happen, is that the question I'm saying? In a sense that, so if a cue might just be something that has a certain time frame and then the, which might be not recognized by a person, David, if you're on, we're happy to take you, if you want to clarify in person. Oh, I think you have to unmute them. So just be your best guess and then maybe it can be a follow-up. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting, at least the first connection I'm making there is the idea of consciousness, right? So yeah, maybe a cue is kind of that like first, that first really interaction and action right after and then the trigger is this kind of like more drawn out sociocultural process that's imbued with a lot more meaning and things like that. But hopefully in the Q&A, David, we'll have a chance to to talk about this more when it's more free flowing because Bree's right already over her time limit. And I'll put this final Q&A question in the comment just so it's there, so everyone can see it. All right. And that's from Tina Fields. Thanks, Bree. All right. So we are moving on to, I actually can't remember if it's John or Kayleigh who's supposed to go next. I don't have the schedule in front of me. So I'm assuming they know better than me. Hi, my name is Kayleigh White. I am with the Department of Anthropology at USF. I'm a PhD student and sort of working out dissertation ideas at the moment. So bear with me. I'm presenting some of what I'm sort of considering as a dissertation project at the intersection of neuroanthropology and studies in cultural heritage. So I'm going to be explaining this and kind of framing some of these ideas in the context of the African-American burial ground project. It's a project that is going on right now on between Tampa and St. Pete. And I'll be discussing a lot of these ideas through that kind of lens in relation to the project. So the title of my talk is meaningful connections. I know it's really, really big. It's very broad. But I think it's useful to kind of consider critically what is it that makes a connection meaningful? What is a meaningful connection? When we say these kinds of things are important or meaningful, what are we actually talking about? And so in thinking about this a little bit deeper, I came up with a couple ideas as to what I think a meaningful connection is. And you can see them on the screen there. The first one being an intimate form of engagement between people, place, and proximity to the unknown. And also the product of salient storytelling, an intimate story making that connect our consciousness to our shared humanity. So just broad base, the importance of meaningful connections is sort of going to be a common thread through my research I know in one way, shape, or form. And a lot of it will have to do with kind of, you know, creativities that people use to express these meaningful connections and tie these, you know, both our brains, the environments that we live in our own kind of an habitat and the stories sort of within them into a form that's meaningful to us and resonates. So salient stories, stories that resonate with us for some reason or another. And also stories that work at high frequencies sort of to influence consciousness behavior and systems of meaning making both in and of ourselves and also, you know, up through and including community societies, neighborhoods, countries, et cetera. So tying together this idea of cultural heritage, you can see Louis Armstrong to the right, playing at Manhattan Casino in St. Pete. This is part of an area called the Gas Plant District, which is where the research is actually currently taking place for the African American Burial Ground Project. So cultural heritage, the way that I'm going to link sort of the brain and the brain heritage and systems of meaning making is that heritage is a dynamic network of connections, pathways and moments that shape who we are and where we're going. So in other words, it's dynamic heritage is not a static thing. It's this sort of series of interactions and networks that become very entangled in one another are highly contextualized, just like all anthropologists know culture works. So it is but it's also a series of choices to what we bring to the fore, what we choose to incorporate into our identities, what we choose to bring from the past into the present. And so considering both sides of that through the lens of meaningful connections, but also what becomes meaningful to our brains, I think is kind of a significant, has potential to provide some significant insights into how things become meaningful to people and how the kinds of things that move us. So again, heritage underscores humanity and context by bringing together past, present and future in ways that can be shared, felt and imagined. So heritage is a dynamic engagement. Thinking through the project, really what we're attempting to do is identify a story within the place, within the project, as well as combine art and abstraction. And then using these two to move it forward, move these stories forward, bring a shed some light onto the histories of the people that were at the Oakland site. And I'll get into this and at the next slide, but really bringing these ideas together, combining art and abstraction to then again, make things meaningful to people. So the African American burial ground project, it's a USF study, focus on the erasure of historic black cemeteries in the Tampa Bay area. So starting with Zion Cemetery in Tampa, it's a cemetery that was found located under Robles Park. Housing complex and in St. Pete Oakland Cemetery is actually located, you'll see in the first photo up there, located under the VIP lot one of Tropicana Fields, just where the Tampa Bay Rays play. It was an area that was in the Gas Plant District and the Gas Plant District was basically a site in historic St. Pete that had two very large gas cylinders on it, hence the gas plant district, but it was a bustling, vibrant African American community that due to a series of developments, redlining and all sorts of really sort of poor decision making on the part of lawmakers, split a community, dissociated neighborhoods, one to the other, prevented these stories from being sort of shared and also led to eventually become the redevelopment project of the Tropicana Field site on the former Gas Plant District area. So the importance of sense of place is significant to the project of course, because you can see at the bottom right, the interstate sort of comes over the site of both Oakland Cemetery, Evergreen Cemetery and Moffitt Cemetery. We're now finding out. This was due to a redevelopment plan that was done, you can see at the bottom that's the 76 or 78 redevelopment plan for the TROP to basically be placed directly on top of where the Gas Plant District was previously located and to pave the area where these cemeteries were. It's important to note too that the interstate went in prior to the Tropicana Field. So the stories embedded in the landscape are really one to highlight for this project, just due to the fact that they do shed a whole a lot of light on the kinds of injustices that the Black Lives Matter movement addresses and how we can now move forward and sort of addressing these in the redevelopment that's being presented in 2021. So this is what hidden stories look like. These are the gas cylinders you can see in the back. This was the entire community that was basically erased to make room for the TROP Field site, what they were calling an industrial park. The images that you see on the left are the before and after for the now redevelopment plan in 2021. St. Petersburg is facing a series of decisions now that will determine what it is that this field site is going to become and so those proposals are in and we are doing what we can to become part of that conversation and have a seat at the table when it comes time to decide what to do on the sites of both Oakland Evergreen and Moffitt cemeteries. You know, it is what stories sound like but what they felt like for me, I was backed by how quickly people were moving by this area. All of a sudden standing there in that moment, it was sort of overwhelming, but things resonate. There's likelihood that we won't necessarily be motivated to change. So curating engagement through creativity, I think this is a lot of how this kind of work can be done is engaging the creative, engage with the process of kind of conscious improvising and it can take a variety of forms. If something is going to be individually meaningful, then it has to be expressed in an infinite number of ways. So there's been a couple of ways that have been done already and I'll already shout out to John for the video that he came up with with a poet, Walter Jennings. This is one of the ways that the project is sort of tapping into curating meaningful connections and building community and building sort of heritage moments just within the project team itself by having the arts really be part of the forefront of how we present findings and how we engage with the community members who are directly impacted by the destruction of the gas plant district and the erasure of these histories and these stories. If the peace of the deceased is disturbed, can there ever really be rest for the living? When children are haunted by the ghost of coffins, who will sound the trumpet and zion? What lullabies or lies are sung to soothe their superstitions? How long is the distance between time to mourn and time to move on? Between progression and reverence, shorter than a school bell, longer than a military exercise? Do black lives matter even in depth? When respect is denied amongst the land of the living, then building the future on their bones only requires removing a headstone, obtaining a permit, certain navigating a state law, Oakland, Ridgewood, Evergreen, Moffitt, St. Matthew chapter 7 verse 12, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Truth never stays buried. Hope will find its voice no matter how faint. Love is resilient, always smart enough to leave a witness, a testimony, stories that were not lost or forgotten but rather ignored and disregarded, clues to unlocking the mystery of its existence. Distant memories have become today's conscience, so ask yourself, are you really ready to be woke? What if everything that you know of was built on the deception and deceit of others? What if we are ignoring amber alerts from the dirt? What if your giving tree was birthed by seeds that looked like me? What if directly under your feet there were whole communities silenced in an effort to the need of another painful chapter in America's complicated history? The past speaks. Are you listening? I also don't. Am I okay on time? I'm not sure. One minute. So there's a couple different ways. These hybrid forms of engagement are I think really useful for translating academic research, passion projects, anything that we're involved in really in anthropology it all boils down to the human and being able to connect and disseminate those findings and call community in as part of that process is important. But it requires a hybrid form of one of the directions that my dissertation might play with a little bit is the use of virtual reality in coming up with reimagine kinds of stories and histories that may not be able to be reflected in the landscape itself but can be built in a virtual world and sort of playing around with some ideas about how you might go about bringing together the brain and heritage and reflecting that and built landscapes or imagined landscapes in virtual reality. So we'll see how that goes. But that is one of the forms that I've considered doing. And this is my last line for a very specific kind of reason. I think we talk a lot about bias and anthropology and transparency and how where we're coming from and how that impacts where we're going and what the kinds of findings that we present. And I show the picture of the redevelopment project and says from 78. And upon looking back at this document I did look at it's a 300 page document. It's really wordy. But I don't know maybe my 25th look came across the last page of this. Corinne Freeman, the mayor there, my dad's from St. Pete. So just as a personal kind of meaningful connection, I never met my grandmother. I knew that I know a lot about her. I've never met her. And when I came up to this City Council page, Corinne Freeman was actually the woman that read my grandmother's eulogy. So it was just brought everything full circle to me. So the project is significant in more ways than one. And I think the more the better and the more ways that we can represent that and explore it I think is really where anthropology is headed is more humanized approach. So I'll stop there. Thanks Kaylee. I don't see any questions in the Q&A at this point. There is a comment in the chat about a from Cassandra about a very similar story in Georgia paved over graves in DeKalb County. So I have a question. Why do you think the tell us a little bit more about the virtual reality, how that adds an important dimension that we can't access otherwise? Well, certain things have been built. I mean, just we'll start there. So there's different. So in urban environments, there are certain parts of the landscape that have been developed that are currently being used or occupied by all sorts of tenants and things. And they are they sort of have histories and histories in and of themselves. And so the the ability to recreate something based on based on stories based on context from people who previously lived in the gas plant district and whose houses were taken by eminent domain. All of that, I think it's it could offer a really useful tool for understanding people's relationships to their environments and relationships to those stories. One place back into their own context. And so building building an environment based on based on those stories is I think could shed light on a lot of the relation the kinds of like relationalities between people environment and and those kinds of meaning making systems. That's fascinating. Yeah, because it's a lie for them in their memories or the stories they share with their local friends and family, but that doesn't have a way for other people to access because it's just the gone it's just gone it's been paved. So that's that's powerful. All right, we are at time with you Kaylee. So thank you. And again just to remind everyone we will have time at the end for a general Q&A of John next and I'll go and then a general Q&A at the end. Also just want to highlight thank you everyone for coming this morning. I know actually have a couple international participants. So that is wonderful to have people coming as far away as let me see where we're we're some of these from Brazil and from France I hear so really an international experience on a on a Saturday for all of us. So without further ado I'll get to I'll let John talk and I will jump back. Okay, it's really glad to be following Kaylee because she and I are in classes together. We're in the gas plant project together. We are we are like-minded about a lot of these a lot of these topics. So we're going to we're going to dovetail really nicely. So I'm going to put forward definitions of heritage and stories as master narratives and you know as this and discuss this space the intersection between them. And I'd like to open up a workshop discussion with you all about they about how they intersect and look really looking forward to your thoughts. We had two really nice moments that I think fell into this. First was the acknowledgement of First Nations that opened this. That was a way of navigating erased history in the present that fits into the first definition of heritage. And we also had Walter's video which was a present moment acknowledgement of erased history in a constructive way in the present. So my definition of heritage and we'll get into this in the slides is that heritage is about continually defining the past and the present. Whose past is privileged, whose is erased, and towards what future present are we working? And which comes the title of my title slide the past we step into was from the Amanda Gorman inauguration poem. And I remember it's one of those you remember where you were when you heard something moments. My spouse daughter and I were sitting around the kitchen watching on live stream. And when she said those words I got goosebumps. And I didn't even really know why. And you know, this class, the heritage studies with Dr. Jackson at USF that and the gas plant project that Kelly and I are participating in actually helped me clarify mentally and be able to verbalize why I got goosebumps. And hopefully this will dive into that a little bit too. So and then for storytelling and narratives I'd like to look at how specifically storytelling and media are used as tools to define heritage in the present. Tools we used really well at the beginning and acknowledging First Nations and I think Walter's video, but also ways that are used in cable news, social media, and politics in the present that are equally intentional. And I think, you know, potentially dangerous. So we'll start with the definition of heritage and we'll do a definition of storytelling and then we'll just talk about where they intersect. I will go back. And so this space right here, I don't get into theory, but there's a lot of practice theory in here. That's kind of how media scholars for a while have been approaching it. Or there's a lot of work. There's a lot of habitus in there. There's a lot of docs in there. There's a lot of us using stories for our own benefit and for our own survival, to survive and thrive. There's also a lot of docs, a lot of what comes without saying what goes without saying goes without saying because it came without saying a lot of things that we just accept. And so I won't accept in the discussion on how it comes up. I won't dig into theory specifically, but that's how a lot of this is approached. So my definition of heritage or a definition of heritage that we've been exploring is how it is the past defined continually in the present. And so I threw out these two quotes, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us are consciously controlled by it. History is literally present in all we do. That's James Baldwin. And this is the part of the poem from Amanda Gorman because being American is more than a pride. We inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. I'm actually starting to get teased in our heritage class because I won't let go of Amanda Gorman's quote. I drop it a lot. So maybe this will be the last time. I'm not sure. So in defining heritage, I pulled these quotes out. Heritage is history processed in mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas, or just plain marketing into a commodity. I think that that is done with story structures in particular that I'm very interested in and would like to hear from other people about. And by story structures, I mean beginning, middle and story arcs, the 15 emotional terms that script writers are taught to use, the turning point to their use in reality television that became political television, and these kind of things. So if information does not correspond with the way we perceive the world, it will be neglected, changed, ignored or not perceived at all. And I think that speaks to how groups build their own heritage in the present at the exclusion of others. And I think that's done intentionally and unintentionally, but when I read that, I stopped and bought for a good while about it. Interpretation is the art that makes history real. Artists, especially painters, have known this for ages. To God stated, as a painter, you have to transfer the idea of truth by means of the untrue. Picasso put it even more precisely. Art is a lie that convinces us of the truth. And I didn't include in here, but Dr. Lindy had sent me a New York Times article that pointed out that more people are trying to lie to us now than at any point in human history. Oh, I did include in there. And we discussed that and I thought about it. I'm not sure, and this is where this works up. I'll try to leave time to get opinions on this. If humans are trying to lie to humans more than any time in human history, if we just have better tools and less rules around how we use them, sort of in the information apocalypse. So maybe note that if anybody has follow-up, that's an area that I would so love to hear from you guys. So stories, I say are, I guess can be, maybe that's a little too definitive, a power tool to define heritage in the present. So in my work on a book manuscript to actually have out, I really dug into master narratives. And without realizing how they were connected with these heritage studies that Dr. Jackson Kaylee and I are digging into now in such a seamless and interesting way. But Robert Fulford, who was a lifelong news editor turned to academics, said, a story that matters to us. It becomes a bundle into which we wrap truth, hope, and dread. Stories are how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves, and how we often do all three at once. They are the junks who are facts and feelings meet. And for those reasons, they are central to civilization. In fact, civilization takes form in our minds as a series of narratives. And in that, and this is a little tangent, I took a screenwriting class and what is drilled into us in that class was that what really motivates stories are emotions. And they need to be primal. And they're what turn the plot. And that's that junks who are facts and feelings meet that I think we're seeing more and more of. In an interview, Mike Fleiss, who created The Bachelor in Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, addressed Trump. And this is, you know, as he was emerging and all of this was sort of new. And we saw this, you know, reality television politics, said the future of the world and the safety of mankind and the health of the planet. I should have thought of that. I think that there, and I'll maybe go to the next slide so I might speak to it. Somebody who ran a reality show for 14 seasons had intentionality in how they constructed narratives, and particularly story structures. So, you know, the slogan make America great again. It's a campaign slogan. It could be a reality television title. It could be a log line, which is just the tightest way you communicate a narrative if you're going to try to sell a script and or master narrative. I think, and I love, again, this is what I really want to leave room for discussion, is that a heritage definition distilled into four words? Is it designed to navigate the past and the present for reasons of power, social control, personal gain, and to erase the heritage of others? So it'd be cool to dig into that as a phrase, which is sort of about story craft and story power, how people craft these stories to be used as power. Kleinman, whose first name I am embarrassingly forgetting right now, talked about narrative therapy and how narratives can be used to implot people into a more healing life space. And his point is that narratives apply structure to events, ordering chaos into the one damn thing after another into a meaningful trajectory. So as humans, we seem to need them, and they do have structure. They go back a long, long way. Michelle Scalise-Sujamaya studied old folk tales from hunter-gatherers and their social purpose and deconstructed narrative into these elements, setting, agent, goal, action, obstacle, solution, outcome. And I thought to myself, how much of that does MAGA accomplish? And I think it accomplishes a lot of them, especially when you put it with a common enemy. It's the the socialists are coming, the fake news are lying to you. I think you do end up with a setting, agent, goal, action, implied obstacle to overcome, and the solution, vote for Trump. And this could have been on the other page because Blake Snyder, who wrote a book Save the Cat that is used by screenwriters as sort of a blueprint to what a successful script can be, speaks to the importance of emotion back to the Fulford, that it's a mix of facts and emotions, maybe heavier on the emotions. But people who tell successful stories seek the most primal level of emotion. So I forgot to mention that I have worked with the Tampa Bay Times for 20-something years, 23, as a visual journalist, and I was working the photo desk. I think it was two weekends ago, and this picture came across of DeSantis at the CPAC, a political action committee in Orlando. And I looked at that America uncancelled staging. And I thought, you know, of course, the rhetoric coming out of that was, you know, the world culture is coming to cancel you. I mean, somebody actually said it like pretty much like that. I think DeSantis said some things on stage. Well, what struck me, and we had a discussion on whether or not to run this on the front page, is somebody went and used metal and made those words out of metal, and somebody designed it. Somebody sat, you know, with a piece of paper and said, this is where our stage is going to look like. And so to me, it's interesting. I mean, of course, and Kay, we spoke a lot of this, you know, there's red lining, there's interstates. There is an architecture to how heritage has been defined in the past to create new futures. But the intentionality of that, to me, was, we did in the end run it because it's out there. But to me, it felt eerie and possibly historic to have the governor sit under something that was so intentionally architected that had that I think has moved from doxa into habitus and practice. And that I think that stems from that intersection of storytelling and heritage that Kelly was talking about before. And I'm talking about now. So I don't even know where I am on time. So I guess I'd open it up for questions. What is the traditional questions that I'm really interested in? And I would hope to hear what you guys think. What is the traditional storytelling to navigate heritage culture identity and the past we step into? How is storytelling and the way we use it to navigate heritage changed into the change in the information apocalypse, which is a catchy phrase for we're just getting a lot more storytelling with a lot fewer sort of social boundaries and more in speaking to the theme of this conference. Is there untapped potential in that intersecting space, places where acknowledgment of the First Nations, where our universities sit and Walters poem. What we can do is institutions and individuals to more constructively intentionally navigate heritage in the present. And what can new technology which I think holistically has has caused more of a mess than it's been helpful in terms of a healthy society. How can we really start tapping into that to build safer, healthier communities and acknowledge erased inconvenience heritage as we go forward. So I guess I would wrap it up there and open it up. Thanks, John. So I'll just read one of the comments in the chat and then hopefully you can reflect on it. This is from Andy. As a mythologist, I've always seen narrative as an ancient technology for transforming consciousness and algorithm used to create and sustain deep level of connectivity, meaning and purpose for those who engage in it. So speak a little bit more about how you see that yourself. Well, I don't think I can see it any better than he just put it. That was really, I'm all like, okay. But there is some interesting literature that I've explored about the dawn of culture and the dawn of storytelling and how they kind of coincide. Now whether storytelling caused us to become kind of a nondescript, not particularly exceptional primate to being the most powerful animal on earth. I don't know, but they seem to have happened at the same time that, you know, Joseph Campbell and others have talked about the universality of storytelling. And it's really true. Some of these actual story shapes and arcs and seem to go back a long way. And so is that because they came from the dawn of civilization or a catalyst for forming the kind of cooperative groups that allowed us to be so successful? I kind of think so, but since nobody was there, I don't know if we can ever know that decisively. But I can't agree more and I can't put it maybe even better than that. But I think storytelling as a tool to form cooperative groups for mutual survival has a Darwinian aspect to it that it seems to me you could make a pretty strong case that that goes back 40,000 years to the dawn of culture. And then Mark is saying, I'm fascinated about the about the mediation that institutions have in the moment and the experience of moments they shape these moments and are simultaneously invisible to a large extents. So talk some more about how institutions are shaped by and shape intentionality. So by institutions, is this taken, I think, yeah, I mean social institutions, I suppose. You could be anthropological about it or you could be political about it. So I'll just be whatever that falls. I did do for I did a book, it's lost storytellers and ethnography of a dying newsroom about my about the experience that I had as somebody who entered the same newspaper two decades ago and has experienced, you know, when I entered the newsroom, there were 49 photographers and now we are six. And I think that that holds true. So it's just been this, you know, this shrinking reality. And some of the storytellers that I think local storytelling is very important to our communities. And there's just there's less of it not just here everywhere. That's just that's the trend. But speaking to the institution, in doing that, I looked into our own history and our own history is a very white male patriarchal and has not served the black community in St. Petersburg by anybody's sort of account. And so that is how our newspaper was the way it's been described to me by members of the black community here is that we covered the big things, we covered Selma, we covered, you know, the national breaking civil rights movement. But you know, we had there was the courageous 12 or 12 officers who sued for the right to patrol equally in the city. And during the civil rights movement, and they didn't even think about trying to get the times to cover that until a journalist came in, I think it was 2012. And covered the full story. And then now there's a monument to them in front of the police station and the story is told. But that was not sort of at the time. So these traditions of erasure are, you know, are evident in all our institutions, I think. And I just happen to have a personal knowledge of the one I work at because, you know, I took some time to read the history and then talk to people in the community about it. I think that answers it. Great. Well, that's pretty much your time, John. So at 1130, and I still got to talk and hopefully have a little time for Q&A. So it is now my turn. I could probably just open it for Q&A just because I think my graduate students have done such a great job of covering it. Definitely put a smile on my face to see how they're doing so much fascinating research. And in my talk, I'm going to go a little bit bigger picture. That's sort of how I set it up was very focused presentations and sort of widening the scope out. And mine ended up being even wider than I expected in some ways because I really wanted to present ideas about an approach to culture that I've been developing over the past few years. I presented on culture as constrained at the AAAs a few years ago and I'm returning now to developing those ideas as a much more sort of substantive theoretical approach. But I'm not going to actually do as much about that today because I was really thinking about or trying to clarify some of my own thoughts on constraint and and how it works through different aspects, I think of my own work, but also what my students are doing. And what I want to highlight is that I think we, anthropology has struggled a little bit to offer a cultural approach to climate change where it's often seen as something that's political economic or about reconnecting to nature. And precisely because we don't see how sort of a local view of culture, if we even use the concept of culture can sort of make meaningful connections that make a difference. And part of my point today would be that one of the issues with this is that we don't have a theory of culture that helps us get up to how to of culture enough. There's been lots of work on this. I could talk a whole talk about ritual and lots of stuff that's been done with consciousness or or what Andy said earlier about storytelling as technologies. But it's it's starting to push that to offer a framework for how you can start to put that together as a as an approach to culture that would have not just theoretical but applied aspects to it. And so when I really want to say about the constraint approach is that as a broad view, it just works with what is at hand. So it's not an abstract definition of saying there's a system of symbols or a Gertzine approach, but rather it recognizes that their limitations inherent in any sort of task that we take on as humans. And then it focuses on how a task or problem can get solved and this can apply to art and creativity. And part of focusing on that task means taking account precisely what's available and how one effectively negotiates. So to use Andy's sort of metaphor about a technology of stories, that would be a very general definition, but it has to take a specific form and attending to that specific form is where the constraint approach comes in, whether you're trying to tell a story or understand how stories themselves work. And so in this approach, I really sort of see constraint working as a way to do triangulation around how to think about and use culture as an approach that that highlights some useful things. And most of my talk will be focused on the top part, but I'll just cover briefly our two pieces. Originally, I thought about just really, really going into culture as constraint, but I think the resonances are more important than what I just was working on as I thought about it this week. And so this image on the right here is really about when you start to think about the constraints, it brings into or helps us understand how some of the magnificent elaborations of culture happen and that it's precisely because of how meaningful connections get made that you can do it, but meaningful connections don't just happen, they're not a given. I think we need to attend to them in how they come into beam. So in this sense, it's a computation or a generative approach that is pretty common across a lot of sciences today. With this focus sort of coming from your anthropology and how culture works between brains, if you don't get it between brains, there's just simply no culture. But that part of doing that is sort of attending to those technological elements, as Andy put it, of what is both inside to use Bree's approach between people, sort of in the experiences, the intraactions as Gabby put it at the start, and then sort of with Kaylee to look at these interactive elements that can both silence and promote in some of the ways that John was talking about. And this narrow view of computational approach really is inspired by David Mars, groundbreaking work on vision, where he said, if you want to do good cognitive analysis, and this is a very general definition of cognitive analysis, you have to look at what's the task involved and don't just do a functional analysis, say, you know, this thing is for the such and such a purpose, but isolate constraints that are powerful enough to allow the process to be fine and thus come into being in a sense. And that this type of approach is one that, as I'll talk about in a second, has been successfully done with language over the past 10 years or so. On the other side of the triangle, though, is the design part. And I really just mean this as sort of a stand in for art design, heritage and technology, really this sort of bricolage approach where you're creating materials and means that connect with people. And the American Institute of Design, I think, has a nice primer on ethnography design, where they exactly talk about ethnography is open or generative. But then it has to come to concrete form when when you talk about design, and that's an iterative process. And that's really what I kind of get out with the triangulation approach. And then finally, the other is more a place marker for myself in many ways. I think in this group, one way to understand it might be as, you know, sort of a Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung sort of the other the shadow that the things we can attend to. But I think it can take many different forms. But it really works, I think, in the way that some of what Ria is talking about, that if the constraint approach applied to science and our approach brings the line spots to it and things you don't attend to. And anthropology, I think, has been wonderful about attending to how you bring in these other elements in ways that understand and help define what those constraints are. And John spoke about this with the stories that are silenced, or that can strain in such a way that they do not come into the moment. And I think that's a really important point is it doesn't make it into the moment then it ceases to exist in a sense for cultural stuff. And then it takes work as they're talking about to get it back there. So I'm going to turn back now to talking about the constraint approach as a more technical approach. And a lot of my thought here has been inspired by this Christian Sin and Chater article, the now or never bottleneck a fundamental constraint on language. And these theories, along with some of those theories are really trying to build up an approach to understanding grammar. That's a janitor approach. In other words, you can get grammar because of constraints. So it's not a chumps give you where grammar sort of just given in hardwired. But rather, if you really tend to how language has to happen between people in the moment in real time, then suddenly you can think about why it has to work in the way it does. And so in this sense, language processing is now or never linguistic information not processed rapidly. That information is lost for good. And so if you do this and then connect it to thinking about how the brain works suddenly in between people, then suddenly you can start to understand how grammar emerges as a way to share information effectively between people to make sure that enough information gets by in that moment for a mutual conversation to happen. And as I apply it to culture, and particularly in the context of this conference, I really want to highlight that from my approach. I really think of conscious and experience as a key constraint on culture. So if it doesn't make it into our ongoing experiences, then it's not existing, but our ongoing experience itself is a constraint where we can attend to everything. And thus, the sensory and behavioral aspects of the ongoing moment are really what happen to construct the meanings culture can and cannot have. And I'm happy to talk more about that in the Q&A, but that's where a lot of sort of my thinking needs to happen over the next few months. So I haven't necessarily worked that out. I have a lot of notes, but this is a moment in time for me. So what I want to return to is this idea for how a culture approach to climate change could work. And in many ways, climate change is just not culturally relevant to people. And a lot of the focus has been on trying to figure out how we can communicate science effectively to people and somehow magically that's supposed to make a difference. And as John is saying, the science-based or just getting a sort of a journalist approach we're going to give in the information is not necessarily going to be the stories that people remember that there are plenty of other people putting out stories that will work much more effectively, the technology will be much more powerful. And so we need to figure out how we can use a constraint approach to climate change that would make people connect to it in ways that are culturally relevant to them. So what does that mean? I want to end on this and then get on to the questions and comment is we can think about how to move from constraint into action. Part of this is really inspired by approaches that use constraint for design or that use constraint for therapy. And by constraining people's ability to engage in other activities while promoting even small levels of engagement in climate friendly activities, suddenly you're going to make culture happen to them in an immediate way or a now way that will then create more uptake. But to do that, you need to support that. It doesn't happen out of the blue. It's not just providing good information and somehow magically it will happen. And then to engage them themselves rather you telling them the story about the stories that they would want to tell and sometimes those will not be easy stories. They might have stories about how it's not a big deal, but we have to listen and recognize all those stories together because on the point if you do all that then they will also have to tend to other people's stories and recognize that there's a diversity there, not just their one narrative that they value. So that's a really, really quick overview of how to go from constraints to thinking about some culturally approaches to climate change and making it something relevant to people. I will stop there and take any questions that people have. Oh, I see a Q&A question. So I can do that myself. Whoops, I clicked the wrong thing. Okay, so Micah asks excellent points. This raises the important questions of what happens to particular culture when its storytelling traditions are co-opted by larger corporations such as Disney seeking profits and perpetuating ideologies of the person society that promotes the status quo. And I do, I agree, Micah. I think the issues is, and I was just reading something about Facebook and how they are before this panel and how they promote the most extreme versions because it drives engagement but creates polarization and loss of understanding. And so there are really large actors out there and that know how to do this really, really well. And you could say the same thing about addiction. They know the science of how to get you to pay attention to sugary foods. And I think part of it is you try to figure out how to combat that but also tend to how can you set up a situation where the other things that Disney isn't pushing say are also fostered and strengthened through engagement. So it's not enough to exclude Disney say you also have to strengthen the weaker parts would be one way to try to get at that. So, and I'm looking at a comment here about Joseph Campbell is a good person to reference who relied on Young's work on psyche and German anthropologist Bastion made this distinction out and trained folk ideas the way to understand this. So, so yeah, and I do think as people have highlighted attending to variation is one way when you can figure out exactly this and not just assume that Disney is always evil or that the ways that that the ways that we promote stories are always going to be positive but to go back to sort of Gabby's approach to look at both positive as negatives in how people are engaging with psychedelics. Any other questions. So I will now turn sort of a more general discussion we've got about 15 minutes left. And I do see one question here it's I guess attended to me and then we'll switch to general discussion so in the last 15 minutes or so if you do have just general questions put them in the Q&A and also put them or in the chat or raise your hand and speak and all panelists can answer. But this one is more directly about climate change since climate change isn't perhaps directly experienced or some yet in North America I'm like I'm making Southeast Asia. I wonder if you can speak a bit more about the role of imagination as well as storytelling. I think that's it is crucial and and I think one way that we've we've tried to do that is to imagine you know I hear about you know your carbon footprint or imagine the future for your children. And so from my point of view those are good but they're still from a very particular point of view and not thinking about how to engage them in an experience that would also ground their imagination in some of the ways that say Kaylee would talk about of how you might for example use virtual reality to augment people's experiential engagement. And there's a question here above. Okay here we go. Mark I so rapid cultural awareness that happened with the pandemic, Blacks Life Matters, election droiders on every minds, everyone's mind, everyone's engaged. Is that example, is that an example of constraint and can you draw parallels between those movement moments? And that's a really good question because you're really asking me about the positive examples and I think I think you're pushing me in a really good direction. I think it's for me at least it's easy to apply this to understand why there's so much conspiracy thinking going on, right? Because conspiracy thinking you have it's a cultural type of thinking and it makes perfect sense in the moment because you're drawing on available discourses, immediacy and all the sort of big science things that you might add are really abstract and don't make it into the moment. So I'm much more comfortable saying this type of approach could really work with to help explain conspiracy types of approaches and to really think about how it plays into into it. One of the things that I think I've learned from the activist is the importance of keeping that activism alive and that Black Lives Matter is not something that happened out of a blue but was something that had multiple, multiple occurrences over time and represents a long heritage or trajectory in the United States. And that if all that work hadn't happened then it wouldn't have been been prepared to like sort of burst into a broader consciousness because there wasn't a grounding for it. So what I would highlight is sort of the continual work that people are putting in to make it make it come alive. The same with the voting in Georgia. The extraordinary amounts of effort. One of my nieces after doing work in California is actually in Georgia going door to door helping to register people to vote. So this approach recognizes that it takes effort to make things get into that moment to sort of beat the constraints. I think that's how I'd answer it but that's that's an excellent question. All right there is a an open question here. All the speakers addressed or used meaning. So I think I've spoken enough so we'll let one of my fellow students try to answer this. What do you all mean by meaning? So I guess meaning I think that's a good question I hadn't really really thought of in depth but definitely a probing question. I think meaning in my project is definitely thinking about physiological meaning what is physiological meaningful and then how does that manifest in in day-to-day life but then also how does ontological meaning kind of feedback into that physiological those physiological experiences. So I think meaning is kind of enacted in that relationship in in some way but yeah something definitely to think about I appreciate that question. Does anyone else want to go or I'll chime in? Why don't you go Gabby and then we'll move to Andy has a question for John which we'll have to share a screen. So we'll have one more answer in the meeting one and then I'll keep it brief. I think it's this is a really great question too. Meaning in the terms of my project of studying transformative psychedelic experiences there's a lot of layers of meaning you know what does a transformative experience mean what is meaning making you know how does that you know what does that mean in that aspect what does meaning of a pleasurable experience for someone using psychedelics mean and so I think from a little bit different from Bree's project meaning for me is very much not even defined by me so I literally almost can't even answer that question meaning is very much in in my perspective and in my project defined by the participants and what is transformative or pleasurable or meaningful for them so kind of a different perspective there. So and now question was asked by Daniel Moriman I just recommend to both you to look at his book meaning medicine and the placebo effect so Andy I'll let you share your screen. Yeah hi everyone fabulous fabulous panel so far I just gonna I'm going to quickly share my screen because it's a visual question and then I'll stop sharing and get the answer. If you have a look at these three images something John said really captivated me about the use of language and political discourse to shape narratives of identification and response to the other and this this is an image from the recent CPAC convention just from like a week or so ago and if you notice the shape of the stage it's it's designed with no practical there's no stairs or anything here it's no practical application and folks have made their connection that it's actually the use of this Odol ruin that's had been used historically as a sign of Scandinavian how am I trying to say it ethnic identification in what they believe to be their own occupied space and so I was wondering the question and I'll stop sharing the question has to do with the use of visuals because you've all talked so much about narrative and storytelling in the healing modality and then also in shaping other aspects of individual and collective consciousness but maybe if you can speak a little bit to the use of visual and auditory cues or triggers to to to move people into those spaces as well thank you. I hadn't seen that stage I mean I was this early I mean I'm just going about my business when I see that the governor in front of this crafted stage and then you just took it to another level I cannot realize that you know if you had looked from above you would have seen you know the intentionality of that that that is visual heritage making architecture and you know it was the the flyceman he kind of broke down it's you know myth symbols I mean archetypes can come in you know so many different ways that you know the red hat you know MAGA is not I mean it's four letters but you see it graffitied and it becomes sort of not an acronym but a symbol and so I guess to to your point and just to to reinforce it first that that stage is shocking thank you for sharing it that was sort of makes me feel like my my hunch about the creepiness of that stages was probably well founded but to answer it yeah yeah absolutely the you know archetypes are not necessarily rural traditions or written tradition I think they come in all kinds of forms what do you guys think I can sort of jump off of that too John and talking about symbolism and language and narrative obviously drives a lot but there's this very like shoot now I'm forgetting symbolic tradition of understanding symbols and in ontology right and I think that's what first drew me to understanding triggers through this ontological perspective is this idea of like the symbolic nature of things right it's not just um language that we're looking at but what is language symbolize and then the communication between things as symbols and as actors to individuals and how that impresses us and and uh facilitates change or action in some way um on these like kind of equal actors that's around us humans and non-humans um so yeah I think that's a fascinating dimension of all this as well all right so uh so we have a question at chat but I think if we just get Tina to come on she has an interest in time and and asking something about uh Kaley so hopefully Tina you can ask a question about time for yeah hi can you hear can you hear me yes we can so yeah um when you brought up the idea of time I was thinking that what you were talking about there was was the idea of eternal or fixed time you know when you were saying that the experiences encompassed the now of course but also the past and also future that was that you Kaley or have I got the person wrong shoot I'm on a you believe it relates to kind of uh the heritage conversations as well okay okay thank you um it was you that um well the idea is that there's more than one form of time you know in the west we're so used to just thinking about time as linear and as particularly an arrow that goes from the past to the future which wasn't always the case even even so but um the Australian Aboriginal people for example and the Hopi both have a view of time that is a lot more uh vast the idea that everything that ever was and ever will be also exists in the now right now and is accessible and this is the place of course where folks can do shamanic work with ancestors because the ancestors are each in the eternal now and so are the future beings and the Hopi for example have have this concept as I understand it of coming into being that everything is in different stages of manifestation so what we think of is real right now has come into full physical manifestation but for example it all began in the realm of thoughts or dreams and those are just as real but they're just not quite as come into current manifestation and so there's more possibility there I think it also releases some of the tension around well this is not real or what is real or what's possible you know and how we can access these different areas of our experience collective and individual you know there's a lot of potential there I think if we just release the idea of the particular linear arrow of time going into the future so I'll be quiet now and open it to thoughts and I did I did link an article I wrote which links to Wallace's excellent article in the references if you want to look further so Kaylee why don't you come on and and give us some thoughts about that yeah so there's been I know that John touched on it there's been a lot of conversations in our in our class with Dr. Jackson about how we connect the the past to the to the present but being open to how these kinds of these kinds of concepts of time and and history is brought into the future is is in and of itself a reimagined history and where to go about finding these stories and presenting them in a way that is both has an element of truth to it for sure and represents the the communities that we're talking about and they'll work with the gas plant district in a way that that respects their history as well so I think the the time part is is actually becomes less significant in our conversations about heritage and bringing those different elements to the fore I don't know if John would agree with that but but it has been interesting um I don't know John if you want to like hop in final thought John yeah I'm looking yeah absolutely I mean it's it's uh I just want to give you an opportunity to drop that Amanda Gorman quote again right exactly it's a can I do it one more time I'm not a groupie yes I am um but yeah that that uh that has has been and I know this is a preaching to the choir moment but but that um the power of that navigation the past in the present and the tools we do it with um is and both a daunting and exciting exploration right now and and like you're all just a couple of comments here have already sent me into wonderful directions and just thank you guys so we are at noon so thank you everyone for coming and with a great panel I will let Andy and Mark uh do what they need to do before we sign off but personally just yeah thank you to everyone who came thank you all very much what a what a fascinating panel on so many levels and great interaction in the chat I'll have to say this is the most interaction we've had in the chat of any of the panels so far so you all really sparked some wonderful interaction and conversation thank you for that this video will be available uh in the coming weeks on the anthropology of consciousness youtube page which doesn't exist yet so don't look forward but it will be up for you to revisit um I want to throw it over to Mark because we are at time to make a couple of announcements but thank you all so much for being here please have a look at the program for future sessions we have a break coming that Mark's going to talk about and then another session and and then our keynote event for for the day which is a screening of the film gather which is a documentary about indigenous food sovereignty which is wonderful and we hope many of you can join us for that so Mark over to you and thank you again panelists and Daniel you ran us seamless seamless panel was wonderful y'all we're pro uh I just want to echo um Andy's comments thank you so much for for showing up this morning and um wonderful content wonderful uh interaction so that's that's the exactly what we're trying to promote here so um just a reminder we'll have a 45 minute lunch break and then we'll be getting into a really great panel called uh resistance and reclamation indigenous peoples responses to the changing ecology which will feed in nicely to our screening of gather um which is about indigenous food systems and um kind of ways to combat some neoliberal ideas of eating and and our industrial food complex as a reminder so we also have we'll be having a twitch presence for the rest of of the panel or the rest of the conference if you have any friends or colleagues who'd like to view um they won't be able to come into the session or they won't be able to come into the direct conference which is reserved for the folks who have registered but if anyone's interested in kind of viewing that content simultaneously that's something we're doing to try to expand some of our reach um as well as um preserving some of these recordings um those links will be posted on our website and also in the chat um but our twitch channel is anthropology consciousness if you go to twitch.tv backslash anthropology consciousness you can check that out there but once again thank you so much for everyone's participation and we really look forward to the remaining sessions if you have any questions or concerns uh you can email uh conference sac at gmail.com we'll be actively monitoring that throughout and um don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns and we'll see you back here in about 45 minutes so thank you everyone again for your participation we'll see you soon