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Chapter 4 Anthropology We now shift the focus from psychology to anthropology, the discipline that runs a very close second to psychology in the length and sophistication of its research tradition on dreaming. The primary audience for this chapter is teachers of undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology who are looking for new strategies to help their students better understand the interaction of cultural and psychological forces in human life. We also address the chapter to the wider audience of teachers from other disciplines whose students can benefit from learning about the many fascinating discoveries in anthropological dream research over the past 100 years. Dream-related courses in virtually any field can effectively broaden their students’ range of knowledge by including an anthropological perspective among the readings and class discussions. Indeed, for many teachers today there is no way to avoid cross-cultural issues, thanks to shifting trends in the demographics of higher education. College and university students are becoming increasingly multicultural in their backgrounds, interests, and life experiences. The best educational practices of the 21st century will acknowledge this reality and provide these students with the conceptual tools they need to feel confident stepping into a world of growing pluralism and diversity. As this chapter shows, dreaming is an ideal subject for cross-cultural exploration, and anthropologists have led the way in developing useful methods to study these dimensions of dreaming. Anthropology arose in European and North American universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a scientific discipline aimed at understanding the premodern ways of non-Western “primitives” and “savages.” The earliest research was morally ambiguous, to say the least, insofar as it was usually funded by the same colonizing forces (military, economic, religious) whose encroachment was destroying the native cultures the anthropologists were trying to study. Although originating independently from psychoanalysis, anthropology was 65 66 Dreaming in the Classroom strongly influenced in its early years by Freudian ideas about dreams and their symbolism. Several pioneering anthropological studies of dreams used psychoanalysis as their chief interpretive lens, and a number of later anthropologists combined their field research with professional training in psychoanalytic theory and practice, leading them to develop novel ways of analyzing the relationship between Western researchers and non-Western informants. We start this chapter with a discussion of these psychoanalytic approaches to cross-cultural dream study, looking at their useful insights as well as their theoretical limitations. After that we describe three other milestones in the anthropology of dreaming that bear special significance for present-day teachers and students. The first is the work of Dorothy Eggan, whose interest in the “manifest content” of dreams showed how anthropologists could learn valuable information about people and their cultures without relying on the questionable interpretations of the “latent content” by Freudians. Eggan’s approach opened the way to a new appreciation of dream reports as valuable windows into a culture’s impact on people’s thoughts and feelings, particularly around issues of change to people’s traditional ways of life. Next is a section on the controversy surrounding the dream beliefs and practices of the Senoi, an indigenous community from the Malaysian rainforests . Reports published in the mid-20th century by Kilton Stewart described an idyllic “dream people” who practiced a powerful method of consciously controlling their experiences while dreaming. These reports were tremendously influential on popular dreamwork in the United States and Europe from the 1960s through the 1980s. Subsequently, serious questions arose regarding the reliability of Stewart’s anthropological work, and a sharp debate ensued over the possibility of ever knowing what the Senoi thought about dreams prior to their first encounter with Western civilization. The Senoi debate offers a good case study of the difficulties of cross-cultural analysis, including the complex legacy of colonial history, the danger of unreflective projection, and the romantic yearning to reconnect with premodern spiritual wisdom. A third post-psychoanalytic development has pushed the field in the direction of greater self-reflexivity and critical awareness. Barbara Tedlock has made a particularly big impact in this area, beginning with the anthology she edited in 1987 titled Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations. Tedlock ’s fieldwork with the Quiché Maya of Guatemala involved a deep personal exploration of her own dreams, prompting her to become trained and initiated by the Quiché as a dream interpreter. In her writings, Tedlock points to other anthropologists who have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by their own dreams while studying non-Western cultures, and she...

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