Hi Nort,

Thanks for the encouragement. I do feel that I am on the right track. It is not that people have not thought about the extrasomatic origins of emotions. You find it throughout the ethnographic literature, where it is considered a premodern construct, almost a quaint ethnopsychology that has no relevance to our understanding of the modern psyche. However, I hope to make a more emphatic case for ethnopsychology, in order to explode the notion of the atomized, individual self which the modern West is so tied to and cannot let go of. Part of this modern conceptual fallacy lies in equating the mind with the brain. Whereas the later is located in the body, the former is a creation of culture and language, or in other words, has an extrasomatic origin. The mind is superorganic to use Kroeber's term. Animism is the mind mapped onto the world at large. Our consciousness of the world is the world. It is as if you took Freud's tripartite construct of the psyche and mapped it onto the universe, with the superego and id having locations outside the body. It represents a different labelling of the mind, but it is a labelling nevertheless that still can be understood and possibly managed.

Tad