Carlos Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan, takes us through that moment of twilight, through that crack in the universe between daylight and dark into a world not merely other than our own, but of an entirely different order of reality. Anthropology has taught us that the world is differently defined in different places. Don Juan has shown us glimpses of the world of a Yaqui sorcerer and Castaneda presents it in such a way that enables us to apprehend it with a reality that is utterly different from our own. This is the special virtue of this work. Castaneda asserts that this world has its own inner logic. He explains it from inside, as it were — from within his own rich and intensely personal experiences while under don Juan’s tutelage — rather than to examine it in terms of our logic. Through this experience, Castaneda leads us to understand that our own world is a cultural construct and from the perception of other worlds, we see our own for what it is.
Carlos Castaneda
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
The Author's Commentaries on the Occasion of the Thirtieth Year of
Publication of
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
was first published in 1968. On the occasion of its thirtieth year of publication, I would like to make a few clarifications about the work itself, and to state some general conclusions about the subject of the book at which I have arrived, after years of serious and consistent effort. The book came as a result of anthropological field work which I did in the state of Arizona and in the state of Sonora, Mexico. While doing graduate work in the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Los Angeles, I happened to meet an old shaman, a Yaqui Indian from the state of Sonora, Mexico. His name was Juan Matus.
I consulted with various professors of the Anthropology Department about the possibility of doing anthropological field work, using the old shaman as a key informant. Every one of those professors tried to dissuade me, on the basis of their conviction that before thinking about doing field work, I had to give priority to the required load of academic subjects, in general, and to the formalities of graduate work, such as written and oral examinations. The professors were absolutely right. It didn't take any persuasion on their part for me to see the logic of their advice.
There was, however, one professor, Dr. Clement Meighan, who openly spurred my interest in doing field work. He is the person to whom I must give full credit for inspiring me to carry out anthropological research. He was the only one who urged me to immerse myself as deeply as I could into the possibility that had opened up for me. His urging was based on his personal field experiences as an archaeologist. He told me that he had found out, through his work, that time was of the essence, and that there was very little of it left before enormous and complex areas of knowledge attained by cultures in decline would be lost forever under the impact of modern technology and philosophical drives. He put to me as an example the work of some established anthropologists of the turn of the century, and the early part of the twentieth century, who collected ethnographic data as hurriedly but as methodically as possible on the cultures of the American Indians of the plains, or of California. Their haste was justified, because in a matter of one generation, the sources of information about most of those native cultures were obliterated, especially among the Indian cultures of California.
At the same time all this was happening, I had the good fortune of attending classes with Professor Harold Garfinkel of the Sociology Department at UCLA. He supplied me with the most extraordinary ethnomethodological paradigm, in which the practical actions of everyday life were a bona fide subject for philosophical discourse; and any phenomenon being researched had to be examined in its own light and according to its own regulations and consistencies. If there were any laws or rules to be exacted, those laws and rules would have to be proper to the phenomenon itself. Therefore, the practical actions of shamans, viewed as a coherent system with its own regulations and configurations, were a solid subject for serious inquiry. Such an inquiry didn't have to be subject to theories built a priori, or to comparisons with material obtained under the auspices of a different philosophical rationale.
