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Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western PacificPublisher:New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright:2003
Pages:x + 246
Review:
In the beginning, dreams occupied a central role in the discipline of anthropology. In his Primitive Culture (1871), E. B. Tylor posited that dream encounters with spirits and the ghosts of deceased ancestors confirmed the existence of these spirits.
Tylor labeled the erroneous conviction that there are worlds buzzing with ghosts and spirits “animism” and considered it characteristic of the “savage” stage of human evolution. Lévy-Bruhl later defended “primitive” peoples from Tylor’s assertion. “Primitives” did not mistake dreams for reality. Rather, they recognized dreams as a mode of real emotional, experiential involvement. The reality effect of dreams exemplified the power of “mystical participation” within “primitive mentality.” A reader picking up this volume of 11 high-quality chapters discussing the significance of dreams in Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia might be forgiven for assuming that dreams have remained a perennial focus of interest within the discipline. But Freud’s monumental treatise on dream interpretation had the effect of claiming the study of dreams for psychology as a product of the unconscious, understandable principally in individualistic terms. The result, as Sylvie Poirier points out in her contribution to this volume, is that anthropologists have only recently begun to integrate the consideration of dreaming into standard ethnography. Her clarion call for reappropriation sounds like this: “Dreams and dreaming can be approached as a ‘royal road,’ not, as Freud would have it, to the unconscious, but to cultural ontology and epistemology, including those dominant in Western culture” (p. 108). The analytic of “traveling” is quite useful in this endeavor, not for exposing conceptions of locomotion, but insofar as traveling raises the question of destinations. The Melanesian societies represented in the volume vary on this point. For the Hagen and Duna of highland Papua New Guinea (PNG) studied by Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, the dead and the living form a single, symbiotic community. Communication between the two principally occurs via dreams, sacrifices, or omens. At death, the spirit of the deceased departs to a remote place in the landscape (p. 46). In sleep, the dream self travels through the countryside to meet spirits. Among the Ngaing of Madang Province, PNG, Wolfgang Kempf and Elfriede Hermann single out dreams during male and female initiation ceremonies in which the dream self sees cities inhabited by white people. This results either from oneiric travel to Australia or the dream soul mystically seeing a white city just below the initiation spot (pp. 71, 76). These dreams of elsewheres—heterotopias—express a local counterhegemonic strategy in the face of the current global matrix of power. The initiation practices involve becoming white through purification and the release of black blood. The dreams look ahead to a world to come when the Ngaing will be white. Whereas the Hagen and Duna dreamers visit the ancestors in mundane spaces separated by distance, the Ngaing dream space is distinguished more by temporal separation; it involves a sojourn in the future. The Australian Aboriginal dreams considered by Robert Tonkinson, Poirier, Ian Keen, and Jane Goodale reveal yet more complex ideas of the dream space. Goodale, for instance, reports on the Tiwi, who occupy two islands just off the north coast of Australia. The Tiwi hold that before birth, children exist as spirits playing in the shallows around sacred sites created in the Dreamtime. If a man sees one of these spirits in a dream, he may assign it to his wife, who will give birth to it. To succeed in this hunt for spirit children, a man may recruit the help of a deceased father, who exists, like all deceased, as a ghost in the sky. Basically, the world has three dimensions: the yet-to-be, the present, and the deceased (p. 163). In dreams of spirit children, all three of these temporalities interact in the face of the Ur time, “the Dreaming.” The idea of the Dreaming prevails throughout Aboriginal Australia, although Poirier alludes to debates over the correctness of this gloss. For social innovations such as new rituals to emerge, or for flora and fauna to increase, someone must travel to the Dreaming and return. This is done through individual dreaming, which is thus quintessentially a collective enterprise, as Keen argues on the basis of linguistic analysis. More than one person may share a dream, and specialists may be enlisted to guide dream travels (pp. 95, 113). The person who dreams of a new dance or art motif, or who increases the stock of animals by visiting an “increase site,” does not egotistically claim credit for it. Tonkinson contrasts this collective quality of dreaming in Australia with the individualistic use of dreams by shamanic healers in Southeast Ambrym, Vanuatu (p. 98), and sees this as a major reason why dreams are more central to religion in Aboriginal Australia than they are in Melanesia. Douglas Hollan contributes a perceptive study of the dreams of a single informant, a prominent Torajan elder (Sulawesi Indonesia). This man’s dreams involved violent and frightening imagery, which he interpreted as predicting his successes to date. Hollan relates this consistent theme to the life stage of the elderly dreamer, who had begun to worry about his weakening grip on power. The dreams might also have been conditioned by the intersubjective encounter with an educated foreign anthropologist who needed to be kept aware of the dreamer’s high local status. A practicing psychoanalyst, Hollan demonstrates that psychoanalysis and anthropology can be combined. Clearly, there is plenty more mileage in the anthropological exploration of psychoanalytic formulations such as “transference.” Indeed, in a substantial and thought-provoking afterword, Waud Kracke elaborates this topic of intersubjectivity and uses it to make novel connections between the various chapters, including Joel Robbins’s chapter asking why charismatic leaders in PNG do not more often consolidate long-term influence on the basis of dreams. The answer seems to be that, because dreams are so widely available as a source of revelation, opponents will sooner or later come forward with dreams that undercut the authority of would-be charismatics. Dreams are too democratic an instrument to be co-opted into exclusive political use by a single group. The editor contributes an introduction as well as a chapter exploring the continuities between dreams, trance visions, and wakeful life among the Asabano of PNG. He supplements Freud’s idea of the day residue with the anthropologically useful idea of “night residues”—carryovers from dreams that inform waking life. In Dream Travelers, Roger Lohmann has assembled a collection of essays bursting with ethnographic detail and crisp theoretical formulation. The volume may be read as western Pacific ethnography or as a guide to current anthropological thinking about dreams. [photographs, index.]
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