Published in Journal of Religion and Health
This essay discloses a personal reaction to the events of September 11th filtered through the experience of teaching a class on film that explores the heroic quest. American myths and the archetypes they contain can be turned upside down by an event such as the attack on the World Trade Center. By acknowledging that acts of interpretation in which ...
Published in Science and Engineering Ethics
Technology is believed to have liberated health care from dogmas, myths and speculations of earlier times. However, we are accused of using technology in an excessive, futile and even detrimental way, as if technology is compelling our actions. It appears to be like the monster threatening Dr. Frankenstein or like the socerer’s broom in the hand of...
Published in Journal de la Société des Océanistes
Barrau has concisely made the point that both sea and land are harvested equivalently and yield interchangeable crops. The Lau of Malaita had long shared the same view and have expressed it in their myth of origin of the yam. Culture heroes steal tubers from the island of spirits that, angry, sink their get-away boat. Fallen in the sea, the yam tur...
Les fondements transculturels du genre épique à travers quelques exemples pris à différentes cultures
Published in L'Homme
Published in Journal des anthropologues
The economic theory of currency is an indigenous intellectual construction which merits examination as such. It is the expression of a « rational myth » which is all the more interesting to analyse in that its most developed version incorporates market and gift economies in a single model. These are conceived as two alternative means of obtaining t...
Published in L'Homme
The notion of hasina – a Malagasy variant of mana associated with the ritual money used during the ancient « Royal Bath » ceremony and with political speech and sight as a means of political domination – is explored from a psychoanalytic perspective. The current forms of this notion are also explored as it appears in rites for exhuming the dead and...
Published in Health Care Analysis
This paper presents a reading of the transcripts of interviews withNHS Trust Chief Executives. Using a poststructuralist understanding ofthe interviews, it privileges a reading that (ironically) representsthese Chief Executives as heroes. Following the classic hero story line,they leave the civilized order of home and journey into a threateningwild...
Nous menons une analyse des forces qui structurent l'œuvre littéraire d'Anatole France sous le jour original d'un concept-clé, le Désir. Celui-ci, central, renégocie catégoriquement le sens et l'architecture des textes franciens : cette instance encore peu étudiée organise toute la pensée de l'auteur, rendant une nouvelle cohérence à son œuvre. Le ...
Published in Journal of Religion and Health
In the context of psychology, myth takes on a therapeutic aspect that moves it beyond the negative connotations of common usage to a position of “religious” significance.
