Mushrooms in Post-traditional Culture
Apropos of a Book by Terence McKenna
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18968542 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Duncan Clarke (0000-0001-8509-3194, corresponding author), David B Clarke (0000-0003-3816-6674), Marcus A Doel (0000-0002-8892-2709) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 389-408 |
| Publication date | 2011-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for Cultural Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-7585 • E-ISSN: 1740-1666 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14797585.2011.613219 |
| OpenAlex | W1981829712 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 43 |
Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods exemplifies the reanimation of tradition characterizing an increasingly anxiety-ridden consumer culture. McKenna attempts no less than rewriting human evolution in terms of hallucinogenic-mushroom consumption. On this basis, he contends that the liberated use of such natural drugs today would reconnect humanity to the Gaian mind of the planet, solving most of the world’s ills by restoring a harmonious relationship with a feminized nature. Although McKenna’s commitment to drug use as a means of resolving society’s most pressing concerns reveals its 1960s countercultural provenance, the reinvention of tradition his work entails is characteristic of the proliferation of reinvented traditions that – paradoxically – define “post-traditional” society. Ultimately, McKenna’s vision of an intoxicated planet misrecognizes both the character of the sacred and the nature of the unconscious. Yet, read symptomatically, it is capable of revealing particularly clearly the contours of contemporary culture: the New Age beliefs that McKenna’s work encompasses amount to a tale of lost innocence, which underlies the search for arcane knowledge such work so often involves
Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Humanity · Innocence · Literature · Media studies · Popular culture · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Psychology
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The Elementary Structures of Kinship
Reconstructing Power in Second Life®
Transpolitical Urbanism
Green politics
Archaeology and Language
Detraditionalization
The Chalice and the Blade
Postmodernity and Its Discontents
Superstructuralism
Archaeology and Language
Structural Anthropology
Cultures of fear
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature
Hybrid Geographies
The Signs of All Times
Food of the Gods
Consuming life
A thousand plateaus
The Consumer Society
Risk Society
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Soma
Tastes of Paradise
Risk Society, Towards a New Modernity
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
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Survival as a Social Construct
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |