BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: On Ethics and the Self in Indigenous Mexico
Professor Louis Sass
The Silverman Phenomenology Center
Friday, May 1 at 5:00 pm
Abstract: The religious syncretism of Mesoamerica involves more than a juxtaposing of pre-Hispanic deities with Christian saints. On a more profound level, there is a coexistence or merger of overall viewpoints, mood-visions, or ontological frameworks. I will consider several ways in which ethical visions common in Mexico may differ from the official as well as the everyday ethics of the “modern West”: especially regarding notions of evil and fatalism and ways of tolerating conflict and ambiguity. Affinities with existentialism and implications for selfhood are discussed. The talk is grounded in ethnographic research conducted with indigenous healers in Michoacan, Mexico.
Professor Sass is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP), at Rutgers University. He has published extensively on schizophrenia, phenomenological psychopathology, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics. He is the author of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion, works that have transformed the field of phenomenological psychopathology and contemporary approaches to schizophrenia.



