ABSTRACT
One approaches a definition of ‘reading’ with embarrassment. ‘Reading’ is, after all, what we already know how to do; it is what you are doing here and now. The kind of obviousness which this activity has for us is, if anything, confirmed when we turn to the dictionary and see ‘to read’ defined as ‘to take in the sense of’. For Castaneda, the ‘outlandish’ or ‘bizarre’ characteristics of the phenomena that occurred in don Juan’s world relative to the world of Castaneda’s everyday life, meant that any Western scheme of classification ‘would be futile’. As any Western man, Castaneda experiences don Juan’s world as ‘outlandish’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘alien’. As a student of anthropology, Castaneda feels committed to thematize this ‘difference’ by producing a classificatory scheme. Such a scheme will systemize don Juan’s teachings through a classification which separates and relates in a logical form each diverse element.
