NAME

Richard Haridy

BIO

Richard has long had an interest in cultural and sociological issues. His strangely dislocated and observant view on cultural groupings stems from his isolated childhood.

After contracting a disease that is yet to be named, he spent his formative years (8 – 18) in a sterile bubble with no human contact. He emerged from the bubble once scientists discovered he was never ill in the first place (this is yet to be proven and Richard is adamant he was ill with some form of meta-virus) and so he began his re-entry into the social world.

He quickly had to learn skills most of us took for granted, and he learned through observation. What do people talk about? How do they interact? The animalistic nature of humanity immediately struck him. He also was working at a zoo initially as he thought he would begin communicating at a lower level of consciousness before moving up to his human counterparts. This didn’t work as he discovered animals had very little to talk about other than what they ate for lunch. Occasionally he would strike up an interesting conversation, usually with the lemurs, but they often got distracted by a gust of wind and ran off.

He spent many a night sitting in the corner of busy nightclubs, studying and analysing people while drinking his favourite brand of lemonade. My how he loved his lemonade! Sometimes he even took notepads but realised this drew attention and he quickly replaced them with a Dictaphone, better to look like your talking to yourself than taking notes about people.

His fascination with watching people easily was misinterpreted by many resulting in frequent physical confrontations to which Richard always responded by dropping to the ground and curling up into a ball. This passive manoeuvre worked, most of the time.

Eventually he developed social skills and some form of observable personality (although this is debatable, Richard is resolute in his opinion that his identity is an arbitrary ego construct that can be changed at any time, hence his side business with the slogan “I can be whoever you want… For a price”. Unfortunately that business is not going too well).

He moved his observational practices to watching films and currently he is completing an honours degree at Griffith in film theory.

He has graciously come to this conference to share his outsider perception of a segment of the psychedelic community with us.

WEBPAGE

N/A

SYNOPSIS 1

TITLE

The Functional Relatioship between Tribal Ritual and Doof

FORMAT

Lecture

*Elucidation of Functional Elements present in a Tribal Ritual.

*Comparison of elements with doof.

*Hypothesis of pragmatic purpose inherent in functional elements.

*TAZ’s

*Victor Turner’s Communitas.

*Neural Tuning.

*Brief open dcussion.

NOTES