Weston La Barre
Encyclopedia
Raoul Weston La Barre was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, best known for his work in ethnobotany
Ethnobotany
Ethnobotany is the scientific study of the relationships that exist between people and plants....

, particularly with regard to Native-American religion
Native American mythology
Native American mythology is the body of traditional narratives associated with Native American religion from a mythographical perspective. Native American belief systems include many sacred narratives. Such spiritual stories are deeply based in Nature and are rich with the symbolism of seasons,...

, and for his application of psychiatric
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

 and psychoanalytic
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 theories to ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

.

Education and early career

La Barre was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania
Uniontown, Pennsylvania
Uniontown is a city in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh and part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. Population in 1900, 7,344; in 1910, 13,344; in 1920, 15,692; and in 1940, 21,819. The population was 10,372 at the 2010 census...

, the son of a banker. After matriculating
Matriculation
Matriculation, in the broadest sense, means to be registered or added to a list, from the Latin matricula – little list. In Scottish heraldry, for instance, a matriculation is a registration of armorial bearings...

 from Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 in 1933 he began field work with the Yale Institute of Human Relations. During this period, La Barre worked with one of his lifelong academic associates, Richard Evans Schultes
Richard Evans Schultes
Richard Evans Schultes may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany, for his studies of indigenous peoples' uses of plants, including especially entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants , for his lifelong collaborations with chemists, and...

 of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. Travelling and sleeping in Schultes' old car, the they traveled extensively throughout Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

 on their quest to study the peyote cult of the Plains Indians
Plains Indians
The Plains Indians are the Indigenous peoples who live on the plains and rolling hills of the Great Plains of North America. Their colorful equestrian culture and resistance to White domination have made the Plains Indians an archetype in literature and art for American Indians everywhere.Plains...

. La Barre received his doctorate
Doctorate
A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder to teach in a specific field, A doctorate is an academic degree or professional degree that in most countries refers to a class of degrees which qualify the holder...

 from Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1937 with a thesis on peyote
Peyote
Lophophora williamsii , better known by its common name Peyote , is a small, spineless cactus with psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline.It is native to southwestern Texas and Mexico...

 religion. In a 1961 article, La Barre wrote that "It was [La Barre's teacher at Yale] Edward Sapir, more than any other person, who first effectively imported psychoanalysis into the body of American anthropology...At a time when the official anthropological journals were systematically ignoring psychoanalysis and the prevailing climate of opinion was chilly if not hostile, Sapir was giving his students as required reading the works of Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and other classic writers." In the 1970s, La Barre taught those same classic psychoanalytic works to Duke medical students.

In 1937 La Barre was made a Sterling Fellow at Yale, and conducted field work in South America with the Aymara of Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca is a lake located on the border of Peru and Bolivia. It sits 3,811 m above sea level, making it the highest commercially navigable lake in the world...

 region and the Uros
Uros
The Uros are a pre-Incan people who live on forty-two self-fashioned floating islands in Lake Titicaca Puno, Peru and Bolivia. They form three main groups: Uru-Chipayas, Uru-Muratos and the Uru-Iruitos...

 of the Rio Desaguadero.

In 1938 his first book, The Peyote Cult, was published, and was immediately hailed as a classic, on the cutting edge of psychological anthropology. He was enabled by a Social Science Research Council
Social Science Research Council
The Social Science Research Council is a U.S.-based independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines...

 Postdoctoral Fellowship to go to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas
Topeka, Kansas
Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...

 in order to be trained in psychoanalysis, and from 1938 to 1939 he continued his research into the psychological depths of indigenous cultures at the clinic.

La Barre married Maurine Boie in 1939; she was a social work
Social work
Social Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...

er and the editor of the social-work journal Family. She went on to teach at the Duke University Medical Center. The couple had three children together.

From 1939 until 1943 La Barre taught anthropology at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 intervened, and he served as a Community Analyst for the War Relocation Authority based in Topaz, Utah. Through his military connections, he was able to conduct field research in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 and India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 during the closing years of the war. He served on the staff of Field Marshal Montgomery, which he described in later years as "glorious". During the war years, he was able to travel on official business, and he made the first of three crossings of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

.

After World War II

In 1946, La Barre was appointed professor at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, which was to become his academic home for the rest of his career.

In 1950, he published The Human Animal, a study of the psychoanalytical approach to psychology and culture. The book became a global bestseller.

He published The Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau and They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-handling Cult, which are regarded as landmark studies of indigenous peoples in the Amazon
Amazon Basin
The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries that drains an area of about , or roughly 40 percent of South America. The basin is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela...

 and the extremist culture of Christian fundamentalism lurking in the urban and rural landscapes of contemporary America.

During the 1950s and 1960s, La Barre became absorbed in the study of altered states of consciousness precipitated by the ingestion of shamanistic plants from peyote and ayahuasca
Ayahuasca
Ayahuasca is any of various psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the Banisteriopsis spp. vine, usually mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine-containing species of shrubs from the Psychotria genus...

 to magic mushrooms. Collaborating with Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson, La Barre conducted profoundly original investigations into the anthropology and archeology of altered states of consciousness. Convinced that the shamanism of Siberia was equivalent to the shamanic practices he had observed in the Americas, La Barre established a global theory of shamanism that supplanted that of Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...

.

In 1970, La Barre was honoured with an endowed chair, the James B. Duke Professorship of Anthropology, and he published the book that he considered to be his magnum opus, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, a psychoanalytic account of the birth of religion through the lens of his treatment of the ghost dance
Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance was a new religious movement which was incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. The traditional ritual used in the Ghost Dance, the circle dance, has been used by many Native Americans since prehistoric times...

 religion of native America.

His later books include: Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion and Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality.

Throughout his academic career, La Barre received a host of honours, awards, and titles.

He died in 1996 at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care...

.

Large collections of his papers are deposited at Duke University and the National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

.

Literature

  • Atwood D. Gaines, Paul E. Farmer, "Weston La Barre", in Encyclopedia of Anthropology SAGE Publications (2006), ISBN 0-7619-3029-9
  • Weston La Barre: Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality, Columbia University Press, 1984, ISBN 0231059612
  • Weston La Barre: Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, ISBN 0806123281
  • Weston La Barre: The Peyote Cult, Shoe String Press, 1976, ISBN 020801456X [1st edition, 1938]
  • Weston La Barre: Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion, Waveland Press, 1990, ISBN 0881335614 [1970]
  • Weston La Barre: They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult, Waveland Press, 1992, ISBN 0881336637 [1st edition, 1962]
  • Weston La Barre: The Human Animal, Chicago, 1954 (on Japanese snake phallisms, among other things).
  • Weston La Barre, Culture in Context, Selected Writings of Weston La Barre, Duke UP, Durham, NC, 1990.
  • Weston La Barre, Psychoanalysis in Anthropology, in Science and Psychoanalysis vol. 4, Jules Masserman, ed., New York: Grune and Stratton, 1961.

External links


Sources

  • Atwood D. Gaines & Paul E. Farmer, "Weston La Barre", in Encyclopedia of Anthropology
    Encyclopedia of Anthropology
    The Encyclopedia of Anthropology is an encyclopedia of anthropology edited by H. James Birx of Canisius College and SUNY Geneseo.The encyclopedia, published in 2006 by SAGE Publications, is in five volumes, and contains over 1,200 articles by more than 300 contributors...

    ed. H. James Birx
    H. James Birx
    H. James Birx is an American anthropologist.Birx received his M.A. in anthropology and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, and is now professor of anthropology at Canisius College, as well as Distinguished research Scholar in the SUNY Geneseo's...

    (2006, SAGE Publications; ISBN 0-7619-3029-9)
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