Customer Reviews

Maps of Meaning (Contours)

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The reviewer is reviewing Maps of Meaning: the architecture of belief, not Maps of Meaning: an introduction to cultural geography.

Some people may have wondered whether it's possible to define human geography in some useful, rational way. After all, people need space, food, warmth, company and so on - surely it ought to be possible to apply human ingenuity to deduce useful and true overview statements? Maybe; but this book is simple-minded garbage on things like 'racism', prostitution, materialism, sexuality, the wonders of Marx and what have you. Huge bibliography of books that could only have been written by force-funded liars. Avoid this, or study it as a sort of textbook example of worthlessness.

The author starts with a detailed and well-diagramed analysis of how humanity's ideas evolve through stages such as ritual, myths etc, before they finally reach religion and philosophy. Deep-rooted archetypes store various psychological fixations, which he shows with art from around the world. The conclusion is in a diagram with various pictures. It shows `anxiety-threat' on one side, and this is depicted with Kali in all her details. On the other side of the diagram is `hope-promise' depicted by a picture of the Greco-Roman Goddess Diana. The message of several hundred pages basically boils down to the conclusion that one must rise above the evil-terror-anxiety-threat side that drives humans (i.e. the archetype of Kali) and move to the positive side depicted by Diana. This is a college textbook on psychology by a major publisher.

Nobody would argue with the suggestion to move from negative to positive archetypes. But a better method of illustration would have been to use another Hindu deity also as the hope-promise archetype in the diagram. Hinduism is rather rich in deities depicting positive aspects, and there is no need to switch to the context of the West when depicting the positive side. The Hindu Goddess has millions of forms in which people have conceived of her, of which four are especially popular: wisdom (Maheshwari), strength (Durga-Kali), harmony (Lakshmi), and perfection (Saraswati). Within the `strength' aspect, Kali is but one of her many manifestations, Durga being another popular form. And even within Kali, there are at least three levels of worship: as terrorizer to be feared and placated is the lowest view; as Shakti expressing herself as the power of nature is the middle level; and at an even higher level she is the divine power operating through the devotee. The book's author's understanding of Kali is incorrect. But even if she were the icon of evil, it would still not justify in a textbook on psychology to make the contrast with Diana. He should not have departed from Hindu symbolism when it came to explaining the positive outlook on life. His methodology portrayed the West as the positive culture while the East as the proverbial `world negating' burden on humanity. In fact, any religion could supply the author with both kinds of art, the dark side and the light side.

If he wanted to remain in Western iconography throughout, he could have chosen negative pictures from the holocaust, witch burning, and genocide of the Native Americans, the list of candidates for negative imagery being rather long. So why would a college text depict the dark side using an Eastern tradition and the positive side using Western tradition, unless there is also a subliminal message intended to position one culture better than the other. This is a case where the facts in isolation might be correct but their juxtaposition and context creates a false impression. The effect of this psychology book might be that clinical psychologists will attend weekend seminars on diagnosing and treatment "Kali syndrome", as the archetype afflicting clients who suffer from negative conditions.

Amazingly, other colleagues of this psychologist have been very busy appropriating the pioneering knowledge of Indic spiritualists precisely in the realm of higher states of consciousness - including Jung, Wilber, Maslow, etc. So one team of psychologists takes the cream of Indic contribution an re-labels it as their own, while the other team such as this book's writer, are busy enhancing the negative stereotypes about the same source tradition.