Event Details
When: Thursday, April 11th, 2024 | 8:00 - 10:00 am (Time zone: Asia/Taipei)
Where: Google Meet https://meet.google.com/nnf-yfsg-grw
Author Spotlight
Nicolas Langlitz is a multifaceted anthropologist and historian of science, whose work intriguingly traverses the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. With a rich background that includes training as a physician at Freie Universität Berlin, Langlitz's intellectual journey has been marked by a deep engagement with biological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the anti-psychiatric movement. This diverse academic and practical experience has profoundly shaped his approach to understanding human life from multiple perspectives. His commitment to examining the interplay between competing conceptual schemes, knowledge practices, and material cultures within the sciences has made him a distinct voice in his field.
As an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York, Langlitz specializes in exploring the behavioral sciences, particularly fascinated by the philosophical and moral quandaries presented by Homo sapiens as a species. He is the author of significant works such as "Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain" and "Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists," which reflect his explorations across the cosmopolitan geographies of scientific fields. Through his leadership of the Psychedelic Humanities Lab and his participant observation of Homo academicus, Langlitz continues to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the complexities that define human and non-human life.
About the Book
Neuropsychedelia examines the revival of psychedelic science since the "Decade of the Brain." After the breakdown of this previously prospering area of psychopharmacology, and in the wake of clashes between counterculture and establishment in the late 1960s, a new generation of hallucinogen researchers used the hype around the neurosciences in the 1990s to bring psychedelics back into the mainstream of science and society. This book is based on anthropological fieldwork and philosophical reflections on life and work in two laboratories that have played key roles in this development: a human lab in Switzerland and an animal lab in California. It sheds light on the central transnational axis of the resurgence connecting American psychedelic culture with the home country of LSD. In the borderland of science and religion, Neuropsychedelia explores the tensions between the use of hallucinogens to model psychoses and to evoke spiritual experiences in laboratory settings. Its protagonists, including the anthropologist himself, struggle to find a place for the mystical under conditions of late-modern materialism.