Fire and brimstone, bellowing prophets, and a good dose of old-fashioned sermonizing—these are the images the Bible brings to mind for many of us. But this assortment of sacred writings, in particular the Old Testament, is more than a collection of colorful allegories or miracles-and-morals mythology. Though written in the first millennium BCE, these holy writings are a nostalgic recounting of a lost “super-religious” mentality that characterized the Bronze Age. The Old Testament provides perspective into the tumultuous transition from an earlier mentality to a new socioneurological paradigm of interiorized psychology and introspective religiosity that came to characterize the first millennium BCE. By exploring the Old Testament’s historical background and theopolitical context, utilizing linguistic analysis, and applying systems and communication theory, this book interprets biblical passages through a new lens. It analyzes divine voices, visions, and appearances of heavenly messengers—angel and prophets—as neurocultural phenomena and explains why they were so common. This book also answers why definitions of God changed so radically, illuminates the divinatory role of idols and other oracular aids (e.g., the Ark of the Covenant), provides a framework for appreciating why “wisdom literature” became so significant, and clarifies the linkages among music, poetry, and inspiration. This work offers revealing lessons for anyone interested in religious history, global patterns of cultural evolution, the interaction between culture and neurology, the plasticity of psyche, and its relation to social change
In his provocative but critically acclaimed theory about the origin of introspectable mentality, Julian Jaynes argued that until the late second millennium people possessed a different psychology: a “two-chambered” (bicameral) neurocultural arrangement in which a commanding “god” guided, admonished, and ordered about a listening “mortal” via voices, visions, and visitations. Out of the cauldron of civilizational collapse and chaos, an adaptive self-reflexive consciousness emerged better suited to the pressures of larger, more complex sociopolitical systems. Though often described as boldly iconoclastic and far ahead of it time, Jaynes’s thinking actually resonates with a “second” or “other” psychological tradition that explores the cultural-historical evolution of psyche. Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Jaynes, points out the blind spots of mainstream, establishment psychology by providing empirical support for Jaynes’s ideas on sociohistorical shifts in cognition. He argues that from around 3500 to 1000 BCE the archaeological and historical record reveals features of hallucinatory super-religiosity in every known civilization. As social pressures eroded the god-centered authority of bicamerality, an upgraded psychology of interiorized self-awareness arose during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. A key explanatory component of Jaynes’s theorizing was how metaphors constructed a mental landscape populated with “I’s” and “me’s” that replaced a declining worldview dominated by gods, ancestors, and spirits. McVeigh statistically substantiates how linguo-conceptual changes reflected psychohistorical developments; because supernatural entities functioned in place of our inner selves, vocabularies for psychological terms were strikingly limited in ancient languages. McVeigh also demonstrates the surprising ubiquity of “hearing voices” in modern times, contending that hallucinations are bicameral vestiges and that mental imagery—a controllable, semi-hallucinatory experience—is the successor to the divine hallucinations that once held societies together. This thought-provoking work will appeal to anyone interested in the transformative power of metaphors, the development of mental lexicons, and the adaptive role of hallucinations.
Why did many religious leaders—Moses, Old Testament prophets, Zoroaster—claim they heard divine voices? Why do ancient civilizations exhibit key similarities, e.g., the “living dead” (treating the dead as if they were still alive); “speaking idols” (care and feeding of effigies); monumental mortuary architecture and “houses of gods” (pyramids, ziggurats, temples)? How do we explain strange behavior such as spirit possession, speaking in tongues, channeling, hypnosis, and schizophrenic hallucinations? Are these lingering vestiges of an older mentality? Brian J. McVeigh answers these riddles by updating “bicameralism.” First proposed by the Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes, this theory postulates that an earlier mentality existed in which a “human” (the brain’s left hemisphere) heard voice–volitions issued by “gods” or “ancestors” (the brain’s right hemisphere). Ancient religious texts reporting divine voices were not mere poetic devices. Rather, they were recountings of audiovisual hallucinations that developed as a method of social control when populations expanded after the agricultural revolution. Eventually, as growing political economic complexity destabilized god-governed states in the late second millennium, divine voices became inadequate. Eventually, humans had to culturally acquire a new tool kit of cognitive skills to accommodate increasing social pressures. As part of this upgraded mentality selves replaced the gods and history witnessed an “inward turn.” This psychological interiorization of spiritual experience laid the intellectual foundations for the world’s great religions and philosophies that arose simultaneously in India, China, Greece, and the Middle East in the middle of the first millennium BCE. In the same way Darwinism shook the nineteenth-century, a Jaynesian approach to the origins of religion fundamentally challenges deeply-held beliefs and answers questions about how science can explain spirituality.
In 1976 the late Julian Jaynes of Princeton University published the groundbreaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which he argued that before the twelfth century BCE the minds of individuals were of a different neurocultural organization. Rather than being consciously self-aware as we think of it, the behavior of our ancient predecessors was governed by religiously-inflected “voices” and visions. These were produced by a “two-chambered” or “bicameral” mentality: language areas in the right hemisphere (the ruler or “god” side) organized advice and admonishments and coded them into hallucinatory experiences that were conveyed over the anterior commissure to the left hemisphere’s corresponding language regions (the follower or “person” side). Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Julian Jaynes, took the opportunity in 1991 to record a series of informal, wide-ranging, and unstructured discussions with Jaynes, considered a controversial maverick of the psychology world. Weaving their way in and out of the discussions are the following themes: a clarification of the meaning of “consciousness”; the relation between linguistics and consciousness and language study as a crucial method to reveal this relation; the history of psychology and its prejudices (e.g., the marginalization of consciousness as a research topic, ignoring socio-historical aspects of psyche, the significance of religion, the fraudulence of Freudianism, and the overuse, vagueness, and emptiness of “cognitive”); and some practical, therapeutic implications of Jaynes’s ideas on consciousness. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the emergence of consciousness, language and cognition, cultural psychology, the history of psychology, and the neurocultural transformation of our species. A Glossary of Names provides useful historical context. Presenting a series of wide ranging and thought-provoking conversations with Julian Jaynes, who was one of the most insightful and original thinkers of the twentieth century, Discussions with Julian Jaynes constitutes an important contribution to the growing literature on Jaynes and his ideas.
How have figures of speech configured new concepts of time, space, and mind throughout history? Brian J. McVeigh answers this question by exploring “meta-framing”: Our ever-increasing capability to “step back” from the environment and search out its familiar features to explain the unfamiliar and generate “as if” forms of knowledge and metaphors of location and vision. Analogizing and abstracting have altered spatio-visual perceptions, expanding our introspective skills and allowing us to adapt to changing social circumstances. By illuminating how new introspectable faculties transformed experiences, unexpected linkages among understandings of historical change, geography, and psyche reveal themselves. In particular, abstraction drives “psychological interiorization,” so that over the centuries, more and more weight has been given to the “inner stuff” of the person relative to the external world. Interiorization, conjuring up increasingly abstract images, launched the journey from a supernatural, mystical “cosmic” to a scientific, measurable “scopic” worldview beginning in the 1500s. Technological advances, such as the telescope and microscope, propelled meta-framing, ushering in the ability to envision the astronomical vastness of the universe, the hidden world of invisible organisms, and the nineteenth-century birth of experimental psychology that measured the soul’s interior. These advances demonstrate how perceptions of physical space and the internal scenery witnessed by the mind’s eye are woven from the same intellectual fabric. Interiorization—sharply segregating the external from the inner world—also explains why dualism has been so central to philosophical debates, how the individualistic self has come to define modernity, and the “therapeutization” of daily life. Just as significantly, the invention of hypothetical, imaginary “spaces” allowed us to reimagine the passage of time as future-oriented, giving birth to our faith in political economic “progress” and the desire to relentlessly re-engineer society. This work combines intellectual history, philosophy, and psychology. It is premised on the notion that the psyche is not a “black box” but a collection of competencies configured by dynamic cultural conditions and demonstrates that psychological processes are an adaptive force in their own right. Consequently, cultural developments, as much as biological evolution, have shaped the saga of human history.
During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the individual became the basic, self-contained unit of society whose interior life was increasingly privileged. This “inward turn” resonated with new forms of governance and constitutionalism that demanded self-determining citizens. Meanwhile, burgeoning capitalism required workers to become isolatable but interchangeable parts for mechanized economic production. Around this time the nascent social sciences began theorizing about the autonomous though alienated subject. Such developments were part of a broader psychological revolution that valued “inner experience.” How did this interiorization of the person play out in Japan? This book explores the origins of Japanese Psychology. By highlighting the contributions of pioneers such as Motora Yūjirō (1858–1912) and Matsumoto Matatarō (1865–1943), it charts cross-cultural connections, commonalities, and the transition from religious–moralistic to secular–scientific definitions of human nature. Emerging at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, physiology, and physics, Psychology confronted the pressures of industrialization and became allied with attempts to integrate individual subjectivities into larger and larger institutions and organizations. Such social management was accomplished through Japan’s establishment of a schooling system that incorporated Psychological research, making educational practices both products of and the driving force behind changing notions of selfhood. In response to new forms of labor and loyalty, applied Psychology led to and became implicated in intelligence tests, personnel selection, therapy, counseling, military science, colonial policies, and “national spirit.” The birth of Japanese Psychology, however, was more than a mere adaptation to the challenges of modernity: it heralded a transformation of the very mental processes it claimed to be exploring. Richly supplemented with appendices contextualizing and shedding new light on the development of Psychology worldwide, this book is useful for courses on Asian studies, comparative intellectual history, and the globalization of the social sciences.
Written by an experienced teacher and scholar, this book offers university students a handy "how to" guide for interpreting Japanese society and conducting their own research. Stressing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach, Brian McVeigh lays out practical and understandable research approaches in a systematic fashion to demonstrate how, with the right conceptual tools and enough bibliographical sources, Japanese society can be productively analyzed from a distance. In concise chapters, these approaches are applied to a whole range of topics: from the aesthetics of street culture; the philosophical import of sci-fi anime; how the state distributes wealth; welfare policies; the impact of official policies on gender relations; updated spiritual traditions; why manners are so important; kinship structures; corporate culture; class; schooling; self-presentation; visual culture; to the subtleties of Japanese grammar. Examples from popular culture, daily life, and historical events are used to illustrate and highlight the color, dynamism, and diversity of Japanese society. Designed for both beginning and more advanced students, this book is intended not just for Japanese studies but for cross-cultural comparison and to demonstrate how social scientists craft their scholarship.
“Leading revisionist scholar Brian McVeigh has written a highly original book, synthesising his critical readings of Japanese society into an easily accessible format. This provocative text will stimulate class discussions, and enable students to gain a ready understanding of the key debates in Japanese studies. I recommend it very highly.”—Duncan McCargo, Professor of Political Science, University of Leeds, UK
“Brian McVeigh’s book provides the new paradigm of Japanese Studies. All readers that are interested in Japan, shackled by several stereotypical views to Japan, involved in teaching, etc. will be thrilled with his brilliant insight towards various important issues about Japan.”—Akiko Sugawa-Shimada, Associate Professor, Yokohama National University, Japan
“In this crisp introduction to Japan, students are provided with concepts that will help them make sense of a fascinating and complex society. By including in his scope imperial weddings, student uniforms, patterned etiquette, new religions, and manga icons, McVeigh introduces general readers to the breathtaking richness and diversity of contemporary cultural life.”—Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA
“Brian McVeigh distills twenty-five years of research, providing a thorough and fresh approach to viewing Japan through multiple lenses and locations. As much an introduction to classic social-scientific methods as a refreshing case study of Japanese culture and society, this useful book also includes numerous suggestions for further study.”—Debra J Occhi, Professor of Anthropology, Miyazaki International College, Japan
“Somber school uniforms and cloyingly cute fashions seem equally ubiquitous in metropolitan Japan, and the tense relationship between the official regulation of dress and the playful aesthetic of cuteness is the subject of McVeigh's fine, provocative study. With subtle analysis and a focused appreciation of the forms of everyday life in Japan. McVeigh offers a powerful theorizing of how state and corporate interests project themselves on to the bodies of students and workers and how individuals can fashion styles of resistance.”—William W. Kelly, Yale University
“Why does civil society in Japan take on the contours that it does? How does the state enter the drama? McVeigh's careful mix of theoretical control and ethnographic detail provide a refreshing perspective which takes the reader from the 'micro' fabric of uniforms to the 'macro' fabric of society. This book deftly demonstrates how the self emerges over the life cycle amid the complex matrices of political economy, self-presentation, and material culture. Those who have done fieldwork in Japan and have observed uniform-wearing firsthand in the daily tedium of study, work, and play will appreciate the linkages the author offers.”—Paul Noguchi, Bucknell University
“In his refreshingly unorthodox conclusion, McVeigh seizes this opportunity and celebrates the individuality that lurks in the shadows of Japanese Society.”—The Japan Times
“Systematic in its approach, empirically committed, containing a host of insights, and theoretically informed McVeigh presents us with a well-thought-out and thought-provoking formula for understanding this society.”—Journal of Japanese Studies
“It is an impressive work, and one that is likely to attract attention beyond the field of Japanese studies.”—Japan Studies Review
“A rarity in the field of both fashion studies and Japan studies.”—Fashion Theory
“The strength of this book lies in the use of secondary research to compose a comprehensive picture of uniforms in Japan. [It] provides an interesting and well-informed analysis of the role uniforms play in Japan.”—The Language Teacher
“McVeigh was able to combine full participation with observation … He offers fascinating details and a highly critical account of the layering of overt education and hidden curriculum."—William W. Kelly, Yale University, Journal of Japanese Studies
“His book is meant for serious study … [Japan’s] schooling is unreformed and traditionalist business leaders like it that way.”—The Economist
Managing and Mystifying Identity
“McVeigh … explicitly debunks the myths of Japanese uniqueness advanced both by romantics and by those who want to demonize Japan.”— Lucien Pye, Foreign Affairs
“McVeigh's ingenious study contributes to our understanding of both Japan and nationalism. A very important book.”—Chalmers Johnson, Japan Policy Research Institute
“A masterful, comprehensive analysis of nationalism in Japan, whose methodology should be an example for the study of nationalism anywhere.”—Harumi Befu, Stanford University, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“An ambitious attempt to synthesize and critique this large body of scholarship [on Japanese diversity], to reveal the workings of the ideological fields that continue to sustain myths of Japanese exceptionalism. This is a theoretically rich book that crosses the boundaries of discipline and area studies.”—Journal of Japanese Studies
“A fascinating study of nationalism in Japan … By the end [of the book], readers have a much more complex and nuanced sense of what it means to be Japanese, as well as what it might mean for a non-Japanese outsider to study Japan. Highly recommended.”—Choice
“McVeigh's important contribution is his demonstration that Japan is not unique in the way that its myths of identity have been managed and mystified at both official and nonofficial levels.”—Journal of Asian Studies
“A timely study that deserves to be read by anyone interested in contemporary Japanese culture or politics.”—Kevin M. Doak, Georgetown University
Using Japanese higher education as a case study, Brian J. McVeigh explores the varieties of "exchange dramatics" among the Education Ministry, universities, faculty, and students. With one eye on large-scale processes and the other on everyday practices, he elucidates trafficking between micro- and macro-levels and key concepts of "value," "exchange," and "role performance" by studying how political economy configures dramatization and deception at the everyday level. He demonstrates how excessive stagings of self are demanded in order to placate politico–economic authorities. With so much attention given to pretend affectations, the ability to discern the "real value" of education, grades, and diplomas is eroded. Relying on extensive ethnographic participant observation and the notion of the "gift," McVeigh challenges the commonly accepted idea of "social contract" for understanding state–society relations. Written to be read as both a political philosophical commentary and anthropological investigation, The State Bearing Gifts has theoretical implications for comparative studies of political systems, particularly regarding the relation between self-deception and the ideological manufacture of legitimacy.
Nominated for the Francis Hsu Book Prize (2004), Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.
“McVeigh brings a rare combination of anthropological insight, personal experience, and healthy skepticism to bear on an essentially political problem—the endlessly discussed dysfunction of higher education in Japan ... With palpable sympathy for his students, the true victims of an educational system geared to non-educational purposes, McVeigh has at last set the true agenda for Japan's university reform—and in terms so cogent that it will be much more difficult now for Tokyo's bureaucratic and business leadership to argue it the old way.”—Ivan Hall, author of Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop
“McVeigh's excellent analysis of institutional dysfunction focuses on how learning is sacrificed and students are poorly served by the simulated schooling that passes for higher education in Japan. ...a sobering reminder about Japan's future, as chances for a more robust civil society rest on the efforts and initiatives of tomorrow's graduates.”—The Japan Times
“An astonishing aspect of modern Japan is how institutions created toward the end of the nineteenth century aimed at 'catching up to and surpassing the West' remain entrenched well after they have lost their functions. Brian McVeigh offers the best analysis of why Japan can't reform its educational system ... Japanese Higher Education as Myth is indispensable reading for those who need to know what's wrong in Japan and why it will not soon change.”—Chalmers Johnson, author of MITI and the Japanese Miracle
“Students of anthropology, sociology, comparative education, and the catch-all field of “Japanese Studies” should find McVeigh's thesis provocative, his analysis of the problems confronting many daigaku [universities] compelling, and his description of their effects on individual students and Japanese society illuminating.”—The History of Education Quarterly
“McVeigh's book is a provocative addition to the debate on Japanese higher education and should be compulsory reading for anyone in the field.”—Journal of Japanese Studies
“McVeigh comprehensively shows that the role of higher education in Japan is being played imperfectly. The prime value of this work will be to increase the pressure for real change.”—The Proceedings of the Japan Society
“This book should be top of the reading list for all politicians, bureaucrats and university leaders, not only this semester, but for all future ones until Japan's universities are thoroughly reformed.”—The Daily Yomiuri
Two undeniable trends characterize history: the steady accumulation of wealth and an “inward turn” toward more self-autonomy, self-determination, and reflexivity. Are these signs of progress? What is driving globalization and feverish consumerism? How has mass affluence redefined political freedoms? Are political ideologies grounded in human nature? To answer these questions, in The Propertied Self: Wealth, Progress, and Human Nature I trace the transition from a worldview discouraging economic mobility to one that seduces us to “keep with the Joneses.” This development, justified by the “propertied self,” heralded the shift from restrictions on consumption to faith in the liberating power and inherent goodness of property rights and unfettered self-expression. The propertied self reflects our belief both in the redemptive powers of personal narrative as well as in economic development at the collective level. We are burdened with the choice of pursuing amoral hedonism, dangerously naïve ideologies of social perfectibility and wealth redistribution, or stabilizing society by coming to terms with how the human psyche has changed along with history.
The Nature of the Japanese State: Rationality and Rituality
“McVeigh has read widely and thought hard … the boundary between anthropology and political science … may never be the same again.”—David Williams, The Japan Times
“McVeigh is … a social science all-rounder, equally at home in the fields of education, sociology, and politics … This iconoclastic book is essential reading for all serious students of Japanese politics.”—Duncan McCargo, Japan Forum
“Ambitious in the scale of its topic, informative in its generally meticulously researched content, challenging in its thought-provoking arguments.”—Asian Studies Review
This book examines the beliefs and practices of the religious movement Sukyo Mahikari and how, as a product of Japanese culture, shares a normative discourse with Japanese society. The ethnopsychological theories of self and spirit possession and how culture constructs mind/belief is also investigated. Chapter headings include: Mahikari in the Sociocultural Context of Japan's Religious Tradition; The Cosmology of Mahikari; The Spirituality of Being Japanese; The Moral Authority and Power of the Cosmos; The Master Metaphor of Purity—The Symbolism of Authority and Power; Gratitude, Obedience, and Humility of Heart—The Morality of Dependency; Rituals—The Ordering of Sociopolitical Relations; Ancestors and Attaching Spirits—How Selves are Socially Produced and Presented. Appendices include Symbolism of the Divine Crest; Exegesis of the Amatsunorigoto; Additional examples of Kotodama; A Typical Month at the Dojo; Glossary; Bibliography.
