The content of this site is based on three decades of clinical anthropological (ethnographic) fieldwork in three synchronic processes of knowledge production:
a) ten years clinical psychiatry and youth care among (troubled/troubling) young men/families.
b) educational settings to transfer/test/validate the concepts/insights/models developed from these clinical practices
c) four decades of deep literature research looking for concepts fitted to re-present the processes/patterns of young men, their families, communities and other systems (schools/asylums/juvenile prisons.
Ethnography & Thick Description are two major shibboleths in contemporary anthropology. In hundreds of publications we tried to solve riddles of sphinxs which seem to be only fascinating to ourselves as anthropologists. We are not nearly widely read as e.g. …
Beyond Ethnography lies Thick Rhyzomatic Thinking Read more »
What we, anthropologists and urbanized people, call humanization and progress has a dark side. Only very recently, 10.000 years, we started living in cities while our ‘aboriginal’ (indigenous people’s) past lasted about 2,5 millions years. The ‘urbanizing era’ lasted only …
Aboriginal rituals synchronize us with ‘how nature works’ Read more »
Science intends to look for and offer understanding/options for at least man-made, if not natural, human suffering. However we (westernized) social scientists do have, looking closely at our (public) time/money investments the last hundred years, a bad track record. We …
The Lack of and Craving for Deep-Safe-Spaces in Modernity Read more »
In western philosophy and social sciences there seems to persist a conceptual fallacy for more than a millennium on small-scale (monocultural) societies and urbanized (multicultural) societies. Ancient Greek states were in fact city-states and ancient Greek Athens’ population consisted for …
Until recently I struggled with some missing link in my three decades of clinical fieldwork research among and lecturing/writing about young men in trouble. Their disordering communication patterns (deviancy) had some important meaning. It signaled something vital for the context …
Young Men’s Deviance as Feedback to System Error Read more »
A massive modern human misbelieve (doxa) is that words and concepts are reality. Already Alfred Whitehead warned in 1908 for the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. One of Gregory Bateson’s most quoted aphorisms is: ‘The Map is not the territory’. He …
(Dis)claimer If this site becomes of any serious value to you, leave it, and do not visit again. Language, certainly written texts, does not lead to wisdom. The Tao text of Lao Tzu starts with the sentences: The Ineffable, about …
