In seven pages this paper compares these two works that provide alternatives to Western cultural ideologies. Two sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: JL5_JLnarby.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Even though it is evident
that writers Will Ferguson and Jeremy Narby approach the human condition from different perspectives - Narby, for instance, is a scientist with unexpectedly shamanistic leanings, and Ferguson an outspoken critic
of North American society with a somewhat Randian view of the inadequacies of the modern world - there are a number of notable similarities in the way that the two
authors not only challenge the dominant ideologies of the social cultures which they deal with, but also introduce new perspectives which empower their readers and at the same time allow
the authors to control the way in which the audience apprehends those new perspectives.
The basic premise of Narbys The Cosmic Serpent, for example, can be seen as challenging the traditional concept of the irreconcilable
divide between the empirical nature of scientific knowledge and the mystic wisdom of religious experience: having been previously accustomed to the deterministic empirical model of scientific thinking, Narby studied the
shamanistic view of life and found that there were significant correspondences between the view of molecular biologists and that of the shaman.
This he saw as exemplifying the fact that there are in fact several roads to
knowledge, which are not mutually exclusive, and that those methodologies which had for centuries been ignored by traditional ways of scientific thought were, in fact, not only equally valid but