Vampgeisticon

When we’re talking about a concept that is as fluid and as fantastic as the vampire, we really need to define our terms upfront. We’ve already outlined our definition of vampire. For the sake of clarity, here are some more words we use and what we mean by them in this instance.

ADVISORY

An advisory is an announcement with the intent to warn or otherwise make readers aware. When an advisory is posted to this site, it means that there has been sufficient evidence to consider a given situation as a threat.

AUDIENCE

These are the people you want to get yourself across to, whether in writing or another form of media. There really is nothing so valuable as an interested audience.

COMMUNITY

A group of individuals united by a common interest is a community.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

This academic field is really what Vampgeist is all about. A fuller definition is here reposted from Wikipedia.

Cultural anthropology is one of four or five fields of anthropology (the holistic study of humanity). It is the branch of anthropology that examines culture as a meaningful scientific concept. Cultural anthropologists study cultural variation among humans, collect observations, usually through participant observation called fieldwork and examine the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. One of the earliest articulations of the anthropological meaning of the term “culture” came from Sir Edward Tylor who writes on the first page of his 1897 book: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” The term “civilization” later gave way to definitions by V. Gordon Childe, with culture forming an umbrella term and civilization becoming a particular kind of culture.

The anthropological concept of “culture” reflects in part a reaction against earlier Western discourses based on an opposition between “culture” and “nature“, according to which some human beings lived in a “state of nature”. Anthropologists have argued that culture is “human nature,” and that all people have a capacity to classify experiences, encode classifications symbolically (i.e. inlanguage), and teach such abstractions to others. Since humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, people living in different places or different circumstances develop different cultures. Anthropologists have also pointed out that through culture people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances).

The rise of cultural anthropology occurred within the context of the late 19th century, when questions regarding which cultures were “primitive” and which were “civilized” occupied the minds of not only Marx and Freud, but many others. Colonialism and its processes increasingly brought European thinkers in contact, directly or indirectly with “primitive others.” The relative status of various humans, some of whom had modern advanced cultures that included engines and telegraphs, while others lacked anything but face-to-face communication techniques and still lived a Paleolithic lifestyle, was of interest to the first generation of cultural anthropologists.

Parallel with the rise of cultural anthropology in the United States, social anthropology, in which sociality is the central concept and which focuses on the study of social statuses and roles, groups, institutions, and the relations among them, developed as an academic discipline in Britain. An umbrella term socio-cultural anthropology makes reference to both cultural and social anthropology traditions.

EDUCATION

The process of attaining knowledge of both a practical and esoteric nature hopefully leads to better awareness and understanding.

MEDIA

For our purposes, a medium is that by which we gather our knowledge of the world around us. The media refers to the relay of information from a source to an individual.

RESOURCE

Hopefully, this would be a trustworthy and honest repository of information that can be accessed by individuals.

SEEKER

We are all seekers. Here, we will use “seeker” to differentiate from “vampire”, the latter being self-described as such.

At the moment we are undertaking an enthusiastic public relations campaign both with vampire groups and sites and with various media outlets (US, soon to go global). We are also interested in showing that real vampirism doesn’t have to be a masquerade and can be based in some very solid philosophy and experience.