Weston La Barre

Raoul Weston La Barre (born December 13, 1911 in Uniontown , † March 13, 1996 in Chapel Hill ) was an American anthropologist who was best known for his work in ethnobotany , which in part also referred to the religion of the American Indians As well as for its application of psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories to ethnology .

Education and first academic successes

La Barre was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a banker. After graduating from Princeton University in 1933, he began field studies for the Yale Institute for Human Relationships . During this phase, La Barre worked with one of his academic colleagues Richard Evans Schultes from Harvard University , who would be with him for life. The two young scientists slept and traveled all over Oklahoma in Schulte's old car to study the peyote cult of the Midwestern Indians. La Barre got his PhD from Yale University in 1937 , his dissertation topic was the peyote religion.

In 1937, La Barre became a Sterling Fellow at Yale and led the research with the Aymara from Lake Titicaca and the Uros from the Río Desaguadero in South America .

His first work of 1938 on the peyote cult was enthusiastically received, The Peyote Cult expanded the possibilities of psychological anthropology. The Social Science Research Council granted him a scholarship to do postdoctoral psychoanalytical training at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka , Kansas . From 1938 to 1939 he continued his studies of the psychological depths of indigenous cultures in the clinic.

La Barre married Maurine Boie in 1939, she was a social worker and editor of the journal Family Social Work . She later taught at the Duke University Medical Center . The couple had three children together.

From 1939 to 1943, La Barre taught anthropology at Rutgers University . When World War II broke out, he served in community analysis with the War Relocation Authority in Topaz , Utah , responsible for the forced relocation of the Japanese in America. Through his military connections, he was able to conduct field studies in China and India in the final years of the war . He served on the staff of General Bernard Montgomery , whom he later described as "glorious". During the war years, La Barre was able to travel on an official mission and he made his first of three trips to Africa .

Development after the Second World War

In 1946, La Barre was given a professorship at Duke University, which was to remain his academic home until the end of his career.

In 1950 he published The Human Animal , a study of psychoanalytic attitudes towards psychology and culture. The book becomes an international bestseller.

He published The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau (English for: The Aymara Indians of the Titicaca plateau) and They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-handling Cult (English for: They will pick up snakes: Psychology of the snake cult in the southern states), which are considered to be milestones in the research of the indigenous population in the Amazon basin and the extremist culture of Christian fundamentalism in America (using the example of the ritual of snake-grabbing ).

During the 1950s and 1960s, La Barre was completely preoccupied with studying the changing states of consciousness caused by the ingestion of shamanic plants ranging from peyote and ayahuasca to hallucinogenic mushrooms . Together with Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson , La Barre led extensive first-time studies in the anthropological and archaeological field of altered states of consciousness. Convinced that Siberian shamanism was identical to that which he had observed in America, he developed a global theory of shamanism that superseded the theory of Mircea Eliade .

In 1970 La Barre was given an endowed chair, the James B. Duke Chair in Anthropology, and he published the book, which he himself describes as his most important work, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (English for: The Spirit Dance: Origins of Religion), a psychoanalytic treatise on the birth of a religion, from the perspective of his treatise on the religion of spirit dance in primitive America.

He later publications include the books: Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion (English for:. Shadows of childhood: neoteny and the biology of religion) and Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality (English for:. Muelos: A Stone Age superstition about sexuality).

During his entire academic career, La Barre received a number of honors, prizes and titles.

He died in 1996 at his home in Chapel Hill , North Carolina .

His texts are kept in large collections at Duke University and the National Anthroposophical Archive at the Smithsonian Institute .

He was the editor of Landmarks in Anthropology .

plant

• Human Animal , University Chicago Press, 1954, ISBN 0-226-46705-8
• The Peyote Cult , Shoe String Press, 1976, ISBN 0-208-01456-X
• Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality , Columbia University Press, 1984, ISBN 0-231-05961-2
• Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion , Waveland Press, 1990, ISBN 0-88133-561-4
• Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion , University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8061-2328-1
• They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult , Waveland Press, 1992, ISBN 0-88133-663-7

literature

• Atwood D. Gaines, Paul E. Farmer: Weston La Barre , In: Encyclopedia of Anthropology SAGE Publications (2006), ISBN 0-7619-3029-9