A peer-reviewed monograph by Federico Divino, published by Aisberg (University of Bergamo), argues that multi-layered drawings co-produced with participants during their contemplative paths offer a workable method for investigating subjective awareness and its transformation in meditation. The central proposal is that standard ethnographic methodology needs critical reassessment when the experiences under study are highly intimate, and that visual elicitation may bridge that gap by giving participants a medium through which to articulate interior states.
What the work does not show, at least at the level of the abstract, is outcome data. There are no comparisons, effect sizes, or systematic evaluations demonstrating that drawings elicit richer accounts than conventional interviews. The claims about image agency in intersubjective and introspective relations remain theoretical assertions, and the autoethnographic dimension is noted but not assessed against explicit validity criteria. Confidence in the specific empirical findings is low without access to the full text.
The project drew on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in modern Buddhist meditation and mindfulness contexts, combined with autoethnography and qualitative analysis. That span of fieldwork and the monograph's peer-reviewed status support moderate confidence in the overall design, even if the methods are qualitative throughout and yield no quantitative metrics.
The work bears on consciousness studies because it takes first-person meditative experience as its direct object of inquiry, asking how subjective awareness is altered and organized during contemplative practice. Anthropological fieldwork rarely centers that question so explicitly, and the methodological argument, whatever its ultimate merits, opens a conversation about how qualitative researchers might gain access to states that resist ordinary interview formats. The central claims would be undermined if visual elicitation proved no more informative than standard ethnographic interviews, or if participants' reported experiences showed no coherent relationship to their contemplative trajectories.
Source: https://doi.org/10.13122/978-88-97253-42-6