In science and philosophy, there is still no general agreement on what ‘consciousness’ is. But how do normal people (with no education in psychology or philosophy) use the term in their everyday life? What is the folk understanding of the word “conscious”? We conducted an online study on how the general public uses the word “consciousness” in their daily life. Participants (n=445) answered the ...

The Revolutionary period did (after some hesitation by those who dreamed of a society without hospitals) bring about the conversion of the main houses of Christian care for the sick poor in the large urban centres (Hotels-Dieu, Charite's, and Hopitaux Ge'neraux) to medical institutions concerned with the study and treatment of disease. The process of medicalization of Paris hospitals has been w...

Here I challenge the philosophical consensus that we use folk psychology for the purposes of metarepresentation. The paper intends to show that folk psychology should not be conceived on par with fact-stating discourses in spite of what its surface semantics may suggest. I argue that folk-psychological discourse is organised in a way and has conceptual characteristics such that it cannot fulfil...

This paper will explore the role and practices of magic-using folk healers - curandeiros and saludadores - in early modern Portuguese society. The article will examine the ambivalent place of the folk healer as a figure both central to and marginal in Portuguese popular culture. In considering some of the services offered by unlicensed popular healers and their recourse to the unorthodox magica...

This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological...

Information on 22 claims of Tribal and other Folk-lore Medicine on Rheumatism, gathered from the aboriginals and villagers of Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa States is presented in this article, proposing an indepeth study into these claims on the same lines as those formulated for Ayurvedic research and in accordance with the advice of the author of Dhanwantari Nighantu, vido Slokas ...

In the first edition of this journal, we published a paper reporting that fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were over-represented in the field of engineering. This result was interpreted as providing supporting evidence for the folk-psychology/folk-physics theory of autism. After carrying out further analyses on the same data, Jarrold and Routh found that fathers of children with...

Lepcha, Bhutia and Nepalis, three ethnic groups of Sikkim practicing traditional medicines have a strong belief of different supernatural forces and deities. The study is an attempt to focus on the beliefs, practices and prospects of folk healers of Sikkim. The study was conducted in whole Sikkim and the data were collected by the field survey and personal interviews of 102 identified folk heal...

OBJECTIVE There were two objectives: first, to make the reader familiar with folk remedies that might be confused with child abuse; second, to challenge the idea existing in the literature that treatment for the Hispanic folk illness caida de mollera can cause the injuries seen in the shaken baby syndrome. METHOD Literature review and analysis with case application were used. RESULTS A wide...