Bøker av Roger Bartra

A profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices In this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence. Charting the extensive history of the placebo effect through medieval healing, shamanism, and early psychoanalytic practices, Bartra posits that consciousness is not simply the province of the mind but something equally shaped by external systems and objects. He finds evidence of this "exocerebrum"--the extension of our brains outside the body--in the shamanistic concept of the placebo, in which external objects heal our bodies, and in modern technical devices like prostheses or robots, whose development of a mechanical consciousness would have to mimic, and in turn elucidate, the processes involved in the creation of consciousness in humans. Through this radical concept, he analyzes digital media's relationship to the functions of the human brain and probes the possibility of artificial consciousness. Both a look at the human body's potential to restore itself and a profound reflection on the curative power of symbolic structures, Shamans and Robots explores how our technologies increasingly serve as extensions of our cognitive selves.

In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system. He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness. Placing culture at the centre of his analysis, Bartra brings together findings from anthropology and cognitive science and offers an original vision of the continuity between the brain and its symbolic environment. The book is essential reading for neurologists, cognitive scientists and anthropologists alike.

This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures.

Bartra offers commentary on connections between popular culture, national ideology, and the state, assessing socio-cultural events and processes in Mexico and analyzing Mexico's cultural and political relationship to the US.

Focuses on the subject of 'melancholy madness' in Spain. This work demonstrates that the subject of melancholy in the Spanish Golden Age is an indispensable link in a chain which may help us to understand the appearance of sadness and malcontent in Europe at the dawn of modernity.