ABSTRACT
A society is similar to a house, divided into rooms and corridors. The more a society resembles our own form of civilization the thinner are its internal partitions and the more open are its doors of communications. In the anthropological literature the experience of the affective recreation and maintenance of community depends upon periodic intensification of this kind. Encounter Groups insofar as they achieve the coordination of group energy would be, by anthropological standards, affective agents of community. The works of Carlos Castaneda imaginatively convey, better than any strictly anthropological account, the world of shamanistic tutelage and the wandering search, with the aid of hallucinogens, for a significant other. The popularity of Castaneda's work suggests that he offers, concurrent to the popularity of Encounter Groups, an alternative vision of relatedness to men and women caught up in the utilitarian industrial-bureaucratic world.
