Sensuality and Consciousness IV Where Did the Liminal Flowers Go?: The Study of Child Behavior and Development in Cultural Isolates

Examination of isolated human enclaves in the world shows that basic human consciousness can differ strikingly across cultures, moreso across eras. Such anomaly was first stumbled onto during studies of child behavior in the Central Range of New Guinea at the time of Western contact. When similar child nurture was later seen spawning similar consciousness in isolated enclaves elsewhere, it became clear that a type of mentality very different from world norms today existed widely in prehistory. Such mentality emerges from a sociosensual nurture common to such peoples but shunned in Westernized societies. The southmost Fore people of New Guinea are a quintessential example of this pre‐Western type. Among such isolates consciousness focussed liminally, in contrast to the supraliminal consciousness that is the norm of the Westernizing world. Up to now liminal consciousness has not usually been set apart from supraliminal consciousness. Nonetheless, liminal consciousness was the norm among those aboriginal groups roaming the southern forest slopes of New Guinea's Central Range at the time of contact. They differed from peoples near them to the north, where sweet potato agriculture was settling in. In those northern regions a supraliminally focussed type of consciousness was taking shape. In the real life of those neolithic peoples, liminal consciousness was emerging from a sociosensual type of infant nurture. Actualizing instantly and nonverbally from at‐the‐moment, point‐blank, sensory experience, such consciousness was nakedly open and direct (rather than cloaked and self‐serving). It spawned a subtle but pervasive nonverbal human interconnectedness—an intuitive rapport— unequaled in the modern world. Focussing on immediate sensory experience, this liminal type of consciousness was continuous, i.e., not broken into separate units of cognition. With no clear boundaries between cognitions, liminal awareness was unmanageable by rules of syntax and formal logic. Yet it was reckoned sensibly— though seemingly intuitively to us. This paper will inquire into the nature of this liminal consciousness by focussing on the people of the southern Fore region. It will show how such consciousness developed. And it will show how it got replaced by a supraliminal type. This transformation becomes increasingly significant in the light of recent laboratory and psychological research on mentality.