Weston La Barre
Personal Information
Description
La Barre was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of a banker. After graduating from Princeton University in 1933 he began field work with the Yale Institute of Human Relations. During this period, La Barre worked with one of his lifelong academic associates, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University. Travelling and sleeping in Schultes' old car, they traveled extensively throughout Oklahoma on their quest to study the peyote cult of the Plains Indians. La Barre received his doctorate from Yale in 1937 with a thesis on peyote religion. In a 1961 article, La Barre wrote that "It was [La Barre's teacher at Yale] Edward Sapir, more than any other person, who first effectively imported psychoanalysis into the body of American anthropology...At a time when the official anthropological journals were systematically ignoring psychoanalysis and the prevailing climate of opinion was chilly if not hostile, Sapir was giving his students as required reading the works of Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and other classic writers." In the 1970s, La Barre taught those same classic psychoanalytic works to Duke medical students.
Books
The Peyote Cult
For half a century, readers on peyotism have devoured La Barre’s fascinating original study, which began when the author, at age twenty-four, studied the rites of fifteen American Indian tribes using Lophophora williamsii, the small, spineless, carrot-shaped peyote cactus growing in the Rio Grande Valley and southward. Continuing his research from the 1930s through the 1980s, Weston La Barre reviews topics such as the Timothy Leary-Richard Alpert “experiments” with peyote and other psychotropic substances, the Carlos Castaneda phenomenon, the progress of the Native American Church toward acceptance as a religious denomination, the presumptions of the Neo-American Church, the legal ramifications of ritual drug use, and the spread of peyotism from the Southwest to other North American tribes. This new edition of La Barre’s classic study includes 334 new entries in the latest of his highly valued bibliographical essays on works relating to peyote, not just in anthropology but in a variety of fields including archeology, economics, botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. The bibliography lists important contributions in popular media such as newspapers, audiotapes, and films, as well as in scholarly journals.
The human animal
Where the fuck is the book I just went through signing up for?