Roger Bartra - Böcker

Focuses on the subject of 'melancholy madness' in Spain. This work demonstrates that the subject of melancholy in the Spanish Golden Age is an indispensable link in a chain which may help us to understand the appearance of sadness and malcontent in Europe at the dawn of modernity.

This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures. They were written at different points in time and even though they have been corrected and adapted, they have kept the tension and fervour with which they were originally created. They provide the reader with a vision of what goes on behind those horrifying images that depict Mexico as a country plagued by narcotrafficking groups and subjected to unbridled homicidal violence. These images hide the complex political reality of the country and the accidents and shocks democracy has suffered.

Pens and swords, words and blows: for Roger Bartra, the culture of ink and the culture of blood offer two contrasting approaches to the political transformations of our time. In this compilation of essays, Bartra thinks through these transformations by tracing the complex interplay between popular culture, nationalist ideology, civil society, and the state in contemporary Mexico. Written with verve over a period of twenty years, these essays-most translated into English here for the first time-suggest why Bartra has become one of Latin America’s leading public intellectuals. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from the canonical forms of Mexican culture to the meaning of postnational identity in a globalizing age, from the repercussions of the 1994 Zapatista uprising to the 2000 election of Vicente Fox and the end of the PRI’s seven-decade rule. Across this range of topics, Bartra imparts astute insights into a critical period of transition in Mexican history, stressing throughout the importance of democracy, the complexity of identity, and the vibrancy of the Left. In Blood, Ink, and Culture, he provides a stimulating inside look at political and intellectual life in the southern reaches of North America.

In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system. He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness. Placing culture at the centre of his analysis, Bartra brings together findings from anthropology and cognitive science and offers an original vision of the continuity between the brain and its symbolic environment. The book is essential reading for neurologists, cognitive scientists and anthropologists alike.

In this unique exploration of the mysteries of the human brain, Roger Bartra shows that consciousness is a phenomenon that occurs not only in the mind but also in an external network, a symbolic system. He argues that the symbolic systems created by humans in art, language, in cooking or in dress, are the key to understanding human consciousness. Placing culture at the centre of his analysis, Bartra brings together findings from anthropology and cognitive science and offers an original vision of the continuity between the brain and its symbolic environment. The book is essential reading for neurologists, cognitive scientists and anthropologists alike.

A profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devicesIn this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence. Charting the extensive history of the placebo effect through medieval healing, shamanism, and early psychoanalytic practices, Bartra posits that consciousness is not simply the province of the mind but something equally shaped by external systems and objects. He finds evidence of this “exocerebrum”-the extension of our brains outside the body-in the shamanistic concept of the placebo, in which external objects heal our bodies, and in modern technical devices like prostheses or robots, whose development of a mechanical consciousness would have to mimic, and in turn elucidate, the processes involved in the creation of consciousness in humans. Through this radical concept, he analyzes digital media’s relationship to the functions of the human brain and probes the possibility of artificial consciousness. Both a look at the human body’s potential to restore itself and a profound reflection on the curative power of symbolic structures, Shamans and Robots explores how our technologies increasingly serve as extensions of our cognitive selves.

Sublime madness and ennui: melancholy is a condition of imbalance, chaotic and desolate, and a keystone of modern Western thought. In Angels in Mourning, Roger Bartra explores how three lucid European thinkers – Immanuel Kant, Max Weber and Walter Benjamin – addressed the irrational and the dolorous, drawing attention to some apparently marginal aspects of their work in order to illuminate the way in which they gazed into the darkness.It is not obvious why melancholy should find such a prominent space in our society. Why did this threatening expression of langour and disorder gain such a foothold at the heart of a European culture guided by the light of rationalism? In this surprising and insightful study, Bartra considers this question through investigations of Kant, Weber and Benjamin, and suggests that one explanation may lie in the blossoming of Romanticism, that deep-seated protest against the Enlightenment and the capitalist order.

This is a historical and anthropological study of the myth of the werewolf aimed at reflecting on the metamorphoses of evil and understanding the long evolution of a mythical structure. The myth was contaminated with religious fanaticism when werewolves were persecuted and burned during the times of the witch hunts.