Usuário:E. Viveiros de Castro
De Abaete
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro é um dos fundadores deste wiki.
In Robert Anton Wilson, Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy:
- Blake Williams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since William's’ own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them.
- On a deeper level—there is always a deeper level—Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.
- But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.
- (...)
- Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.
- But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time—the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health—claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn't work.
- Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.
- Young Williams soon enough discovered—on his very first field trip, among the Hopi Indians—that witchcraft does by God and by golly work, after all. He began, tentatively and secretly, sharing his knowledge with carefully selected colleagues. Most of them were pretty evasive about the whole subject, but Marilyn Chambers, the author of the epoch-making Neuroanthropology, was startlingly blunt.
- “Everybody who's been in the field knows that,” she said with a kind of weary patience.
- “But why doesn't anyone say so?” Williams aesked, still young, still naïve.
- “Freud and Charcot had virtually this same conversation,” Dr. Chambers said, “but the topic then was the sexual origin of the hysterical neuroses of Victorian women. Charcot invited Freud to be the goat and talk about it in public...”
- “I see,” Blake Williams said slowly. He did see.