Samuel, Geoffrey

   Australian professor of Tibetan religions, now at Cardiff University in Wales. In addition to important ethnographic discussion of Tibetan shamanism and Tantric Buddhism, Samuel has also proposed a “multimodal framework” for approaching and theorizing about indigenous and other knowledges and practices. Rather than seeing rational thought as being opposed to symbolic thought, Samuel proposes that people (as totalities rather than conflicting minds and bodies) live within frameworks that are multiply and variously interconnected and multicentered, like a plant’s underground rhizome. Only theoretical approaches that attend to the currents and vortices that swirl around us, move us, and shape us have any hope of leading to a full and rich understanding of particular cultures and societies, worldviews, and lifeways.