About me
I'm old-fashioned and above all open to new ideas. Contrarian.
Location:
Perth, Australia
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
Favourite books:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
Biography:
I was born in Rhodesia in 1968.
Awards:
PhD (2011)
Description:
I make fun of my youthful lack of knowledge about my time and place, whilst endeavoring to understand the origins of my connection with nature and my sense of the natural as sacred. As as young adult, I struggled to understand why I lacked exact political and social information about who I was in the world. Twenty years later, I have pieced together much of the cultural logic that had led to my original psychological and historical naivete. I've developed all sorts of knowledge and power to control my circumstances.
Personal information:
I was born in Zimbabwe and live a vivid physical and intellectual life with an active USA guy.
I'm attached to stoicism as a trade-off for the ability to have wide-ranging experiences: I crave these experiences as my body craves roughage. Such challenges provide real intellectual, emotional and cognitive rewards.
I'm attached to stoicism as a trade-off for the ability to have wide-ranging experiences: I crave these experiences as my body craves roughage. Such challenges provide real intellectual, emotional and cognitive rewards.
Personal interests:
Extreme sports, martial arts, women's self-defence instructor, Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, feminism, the life of the mind, Western boxing, Shamanism. I coined this term, "shamanistic doubling" to describe how certain types of 'madness' can be productive states. One looks at oneself from the outside and gains valuable knowledge and experience by reducing or increasing the level of one's emotional involvement. Traditional shamans use various methods to achieve altered states of consciousness to experience reality from outside of the ego.
We can understand shamanism as a temporary departure from the here-and-now to bring something back from an altered state of consciousness. This could be a solution to a problem, a creative product or an intellectual idea. Notably, The double helix was discovered on LSD. Altered states of consciousness are often experienced spontaneously by those who exposed to war or extreme episodes of violence.
My PhD thesis (2010) examines the experiences of Zimbabwean writer, DAMBUDZO MARECHERA.
"Shamanistic" detachment and stoicism came naturally to me due to my stoical upbringing. My philosophical, psychological and aesthetic influences derive from Nietzsche and Georges Bataille.
My employment of the term, "intellectual shamanism", is intended to imply neurological shifts and in no way suggests mysticism, except as a phenomenological effect of mental processes. This model of "intellectual shamanism" is entirely my own and was developed over five years, whilst writing my PhD.
