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In a Stirling-award winning article, Ralph Bolton offered a psychophysiological explanation for the notorious levels of aggression among the "Qolla" (Quechua and Aymara) Indians of the Peruvian altiplano. The long-standing anthropological characterization of these peasants as pathologically aggressive was supported by Bolton's finding that the community of Incawatana had one of the highest murder rates on record. He hypothesized that mild hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is the primary cause of such aggression. When a glucose tolerance test was given to 66 Incawatana subjects 55.5% were diagnosed as hypoglycemic, and there was indeed a statistically significant correlation between aggression, as measured by informant ratings, and a drop in blood glucose below fasting level of 10 to 25 mg per 100 ml of whole blood. However, studies by recent researchers strongly suggest that the characterization of the Qolla as highly aggressive is merely a pseudo-scientific stereotype; homicide rates for other Qolla communi...

An examination of Maya art from southern Mesoamerica shows the following art motifs appearing with some regularity throughout the archaeological record, from Pre-Classic to Post-Conquest times: (a) mushroom stones and mushroom pottery, (b) the frog/toad motif, and (c) the water lily motif. The thesis of this papers is that these flora and fauna represented in art are related to and influenced by the psychotropic properties of the mushroom, toad, and water lily. It is hypothesized that such properties were known to the Maya shaman, priest, and artist as well as being generally diffused at a folk level in Pre-Classic times. The paper examines certain Maya religious beliefs and practices believed to be influenced by and possibly derived from such psychotropic use.

The main purpose of the paper is to refute the rigid psychoanalytic determinism which holds that we cannot help attributing an exclusively male or female meaning to certain sexual symbols. Simultaneously it attempts to show that symbols are not as context-bound as structuralists are inclined to think, since the reversals of meanings discussed mostly refer to the individual symbol without affecting the context. A series of iconographic symbols and paradoxical associations of Hindu gods and goddesses derived from ritual and legend is adduced to demonstrate that the "highway" of symbolic thought corresponding to Freudian theory does not prevent us from occasionally taking a "scenic opposite route." Contrary to the linguistic near universal and the cultural universal of the greater importance of the male category, in Hinduism not only may the predominantly male symbol be extended to include a female meaning, but also the predominantly female symbol may receive a male association. A margin of arbitrariness in ...

Vera Rubin, ed. Cannabis and Culture. The Hague and London: Mouton Publishers, 1975. A volume in the World Anthropology Series, Sol Tax, general editor. Distributed in North America by Aldine Publishing Co. vii + 589 pp. Tables, illustrations, biographical notes, and indexes. $24.95.

Virtually everything that man is and does is associated with space. Man's sense of space is a synthesis of many sensory inputs: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and thermal. Not only does each of these constitute a complex system (as for example, the dozen or more different ways of experiencing depth visually), but each is molded and patterned by culture. Hence people reared in different cultures live in different sensory worlds. What is more, they are generally unaware of the degree to which the worlds may differ. From the study of culture we learn that the patterning of perceptual worlds is a function not only of the specific culture but of the relationship, activity, and emotions present in a given situation. Therefore, when two people of different cultures interact, each uses different criteria to interpret the other's behavior, and each may easily misinterpret the relationship, the activity, or the emotions involved. The study of culture in the proxemic sense is the study of peoples' use of ...

PEYOTE (from the Aztec peyotl) is a small, spineless, carrot-shaped cactus, Lophophora williamsii Lemaire, which grows wild in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. It is mostly subterranean, a,nd only the grayishgreen pincushion-like top appears above ground, with spiral radial grooves dividing the puffy prominences which bear linearly-spaced tufts of fine gray-white flocculence, somewhat like artists' camels-hair paintbrushes. Cut off horizontally about ground level, and dried into a hard woody disc, this top becomes the so-called "peyote button"-often called "mescal button," confusingly since it does not come from the non-cactus succulent, the mescal proper, from whose fermented sap, pulque, the brandy mescal is distilled; also, erroneously, called "mescal bean" which is the Red Bean, Sophora secundiflora (ortega) Lag. ex DC; and, further, once quite mistakenly identified with the Aztec narcotic mushroom teonanacatl, a Basidiomycete, a true member of the Fungi. Nine psychotropic alkaloids, an unusual number even for a cactus, are contained in natural pan-peyotl; some of these are strychnine-like pharmacodynamically, others (notably mescaline) hallucinogenic. For this reason the psychotomimetic mescaline has been experimentally investigated in recent psychiatric research, along with its fellow-indoles such as lysergic acid; and for this reason, its hallucinogenic qualities, American Indians have used pan-peyotl in native "doctoring," witchcraft, and religious rituals. As a religious cult, peyotism is pre-Columbian in Mexico. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, peyotism spread, via Texan tribes and Athapaskans of the Southwest, to the Indians of the United States, mostly following the subsidence of the Ghost Dance, for which it largely substituted, now as a peaceful intertribal nativistic religion, in places somewhat acculturated to Christianity. It is now the major religious cult of most Indians of the United States between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi (including the remnants of eastern Algonkin tribes and the Siouan Winnebago), and additionally in parts of southern Canada, the Great Basin, and eastcentral California. The appeal of peyote is based upon the visions it induces, viz. its "medicine power," and its availability therefore in native doctoring is culturallv based upon the aboriginal vision quest and the religious and ideological premises of this quest. Peyote is generally agreed by experts to be non-habit-forming; it is non-soporific and not, therefore, technically a "narcotic."

Since the pioneering work of James Mooney on the Ghost Dance and F. E. Williams on the Vailala Madness, the study of crisis cults, in a native world undergoing massive acculturation, has become a major preoccupation of modern fieldwork. Notable theorists have been Ralph Linton and A. F. C. Wallace; areal monographs and compendia have multiplied; and the taxonomy of crisis cults has become highly developed. Theories of causality have suffered from the "tunnel vision" of confinement usually to a single preferred academic discipline, and the necessity of a holistic approach is demonstrated.

SUMMARY The Aymara Indians, of the Lake Titicaca plateau in Bolivia, have perhaps the largest materia medica ever reported from any native tribe. Their doctors or «Collawayus» from Charazani (Munecas Province) are famous all over South America, even as far as Ecuador and Argentina; and even middleclass townspeople commonly consult them for cures. The botanical specimens here reported were collected by the ethnologist Professor Dr. Weston LA BARRE (now of Duke University) as Sterling Fellow of Yale University, and identified by the botanist Dr. Richard E. SCIIULTES, Curator of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University. Admittedly, empirical medicines are probably not all effective scientifically; and yet this list of plants must be expected to yield a higher percentage of valid drugs than a random sample of the flora of the country. For these people discovered and used quinine for malaria in pre-Colombian times; seaweed, for the cure of goitre; a mercury-pomade in llama-fat, for syphilis; ipecacuana as an...

(1945). Some Observations on Character Structure in the Orient. Psychiatry: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 319-342.

The original says "are said to," "Havard, quoting one Bellanger, says," and "according to Dr. Rothroek’s informant." It points out that "in any case, a rupture of the hard, leathery coat of the bean would be required for the release of the alkaloid in the bean-flesh" – an important consideration, since any number of whole beans might be swallowed with impunity if the hard covering should remain intact.

As early as 1963, Richard Evans Schultes wrote (1): "It is of interest that the New World is very much richer in narcotic plants than the Old and that the New World boasts at least 40 species of hallucinogenic or phantastica narcotics (2) as opposed to half a dozen species native to the Old World." The reason for this marked discrepancy is by no means immediately apparent. In point of fact, one might reasonably suppose that the reverse would be the case. That is, the Old World has a far greater land mass than the New and certainly as varied climates, and hence the apparent possibility of a greater number and variety of plants. Furthermore, men and proto-men who might have discovered the properties of those plants that are narcotic have existed for an incomparably longer period (from the Australopithecines and Homo habilis onward) in the Old World than in the New (only from the Late Paleolithic and Mesolithic onward). Thus, on geographicecological and botanical and also on anthropological grounds, the Old World prima facie should hold more psychotropic plant species than the New-which is quite contrary to the apparent facts. On returning to the problem in 1966, Schultes (3) cited the statistics again but cautioned: ". . . the foregoing statistics relate merely to those plants the narcotic properties of which man has discovered in his trial and error experimentation during human history. Is there any reason to presume that man in a primitive state of culture possesses any peculiar intuition enabling him to uncover more efficiently than his more civilized counterpart those plants that Nature has endowed with physiologically active principles?" There is, I think, an answer in this. But

With no absolute model of adulthood in our society, alienation tends to become complete, identity a crisis, and freedom a burden

Although conservative opinion would consider the contended aboriginality of New World distilled liquors as yet undemonstrated, there is ample evidence of the wide distribution both in North and in South America of native undistilled alcoholic liquors, or beers and wines. Since the plant-substances of which these are made vary considerably, and since the usage of terms has sometimes been rather loose, we define these terms before discussing the distribution of the liquors themselves.