Steve Carlisle's Homepage
I am an anthropologist, presently teaching a variety of course at the University of California, San Diego. I completed my Ph. D. here in 2003, my work focusing on psychology, religion, the nature of knowledge, ethics, and the problems that come with development. Currently, I teach classes on those topics at UCSD.
My Research:
I've spent about two and a half years in Bangkok, gathering information, learning the city, and trying to find the answers to the questions I find most interesting. I recently completed the manuscript of what I expect to be my first book, called Lives of Pain and Pleasure: Thai Buddhist Self-Creation in Days of Global Change, in which I ask, and I think I answer, some basic questions about what it means to be a person. How is it that people can look at the same phenomena, and come to different conclusions? If people are creatures that lack the ability to see through to our underlying natures naturally, how can we come to understand what we are at all?
In spite of our inherent ignorance, most people believe that they have the tools to figure out what it means to be human. I'm interested in looking at this, which I think of as a conspiracy that people perpetrate against themselves: in the search for truths about themselves that are also practical and pleasing, they often develop strategies to keep themselves ignorant of the fact that their ultimate "truths" about human existence are, in the end, inventions, created for the sake of expediency and self-gratification. It appears that the opacity of our minds is our saving grace, because it allows us to imagine and reimagine our selves in ways that are flexible, satisfying, and appropriate to the contexts in which we find ourselves.
I also have something to say about the clash between Thai Buddhism, with its emphasis on asceticism and otherworldliness, and modern consumerism.
Classes On-Line:
ANSC100: Ethnopsychology: Cultural Conceptions of the Mind
ANSC126: Childhood and Adolescence
Healing and Meaning: Freud, Culture, and Psychoanalysis