The opening section, “Building and Connecting Communities,” highlights lessons from scholars and practitioners working to connect theory and practice and to enact equitable relationships with communities based on reciprocity and dialogue. The contributions address, at times more implicitly than explicitly, the questions: “How can anthropologists  and others serve as allies for communities they work with? What states of consciousness, conceptual tools and disciplinary lenses are useful in bridging formal academic training and applied field work or advocacy?”

The practice of medicine and healing involves the exercise of power in both its political and literal, physical senses. In a concern with embodiment and the social and cultural dimensions of the power to heal, the anthropology of consciousness and medical anthropology share many overlapping concerns and methods. Cross-cultural comparison of healing practices, the neurocognitive bases of the healing response, and the social construction of death, dying, and near-death experience have all been explored as topics in both subfields. Each of the chapters in the second section, “Healing and Medicine,” addresses the ethical and moral dimensions of social praxis associated with healing, sickness, or death, and suggests alternatives to the status quo in Western biomedicine.

Language has been a continuing theme in many of the Society’s sessions and publications precisely owing to its special status as a  principle mediator of culture and consciousness. The first entry of the third section, “Language and Learning” (Bronson), centers on several vignettes of critical incidents from a study of how international graduate students acquire academic English. It advances a “grammar of transformation” as a working model for understanding, effecting, and assessing transformative learning on a small and large scale.

Anthropologists and linguists are often called upon to aid minority peoples in their efforts to maintain and revitalize their threatened cultures and languages (Bronson 2003), as in for example “salvage anthropology.” The next chapter (Amiras) traces a story of language revitalization from the eyes of an outsider and dedicated ally of the Tamazight (Berber) people, an important minority in largely Arabic Morocco. The author notes her shifting positionality as both a resource and a challenge in conducting her research while serving as a genuine ally to the community. The narrative leads to powerful lessons in the unintended consequences of attempts to standardize and teach a “language” with a huge range of oral and graphic varieties. Even the best intentions of the ethical researcher–advocate are subject to the exigencies of competing agendas, history, and context, a reality that becomes starkly clear as the story unfolds in the mountains of North Africa and a classroom in San Francisco.

The final section, “Re-Animating the World,” focuses on relationships with the more-than-human world, and the rituals and stories that connect people with their spirit ancestors and the living earth. It begins with a classic report by a respected senior anthropologist (Turner) who saw a spirit during a ceremony in Africa and experienced many other “anomalous” phenomena. This chapter is testimony to the long tradition within the Society of incorporating first-hand accounts by researchers who have inadvertently or purposively “gone native” and experienced first-hand the phenomena they are studying (Bronson 1992). A gift this area of study offers is a glimpse of human possibilities outside the habitual enculturated realities to which one has been unconsciously socialized since birth, based on chance and circumstance. To embrace the reality of the anomalies one witnesses in the field is to take the first step toward a more expansive, rigorous, and encompassing worldview—one that is alive with possibility and new insights for the researcher as both a scholar and as a person.

A commitment to reanimate the world can begin with a fresh look at the very stones upon which we walk every day unthinking. We close with an account of the living stones of Hawai’i and the lessons their stories hold, especially for those who do not heed their message of respect for the land (Fields). Together, the two pieces in this section indicate an emergent, reanimated world one in which science, indigenous ways of knowing, and nature are not inherently at odds.