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exchange, like that which I will demonstrate exists between dreams and
other kinds of stories. This conversation, I will show, is compelled by
culturally stylized desires and shared anxieties that arise out of
historical experience. Interpreting Samoan dreams in relation to cultural
fantasy systems, therefore, will allow us to witness how history affects
people subjectively. By ‘fantasy’, then, I do not refer only to the
individual’s wishful imaginings into which one might retreat from the
disappointments and frustrations of daily life. Cultural fantasies are not
divorced from what one might call ‘cultural reality’—that is, from
economic and political realms. Indeed, a host of thinkers in anthro-
pology and psychology have long seen fantasy as a mode of thinking
and as the counterpart of logical processing (for examples, see Bruner,
1986; Fernandez, 1991; Horton & Finnegan, 1973; Lévi-Strauss, 1970;
Neisser, 1967; Price-Williams, 1999; Stephen, 1989, 1995; Werner, 1973).
Like States (2000), I take dreams to be narratized ruminations
without communicative intent, similar to what Vygotsky calls ‘inner
thought’. For Vygotsky (1962), inner thoughts are verbal ruminations,
albeit highly condensed (p. 145). In inner thought, ‘a single word is so
saturated with sense’ that it is something akin to ‘thinking in pure
meanings’ (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 148). Dreams too are a kind of thinking
in pure meanings: I will demonstrate that they utilize highly con-
densed versions of a motif, obscure to the waking mind, to represent
and think about a problem. By bringing waking tales that share a motif
(but also story fragments in allusive phrases, jokes, song lyrics, and so
forth) to bear upon a dream, one can expand the motif and discover
the larger cultural and historical context to which it refers. We know
that dreams continue the concerns of waking life (Cartwright, 1981,
p. 245; Foulkes, 1993, p. 13). These are not, however, purely personal
concerns but ones we grapple with along with others in our society.
And these concerns are symbolically conveyed in stories that circulate
in a cultural world. Through motifs, dreamers register, think about,
and talk back to related stories in culture. By doing so, dreamers
partake of a conversation between the public and private registers of
human thinking that is deeply implicated in social change.
Cultural models organize various life domains (D’Andrade &
Strauss, 1992; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). Narrative motifs carry cultural
models. So, we will see that in Samoa the narrative motif of marrying
exalted people carries a model of sexual relations as hypergamous.
When models are more or less adequate to an individual’s experience,
I suggest, dreams are pleasant and obviously fulfill wishes. But there
are historical phases when cultural models prove inadequate for many
people. Colonialism and postcolonialism, for example, are historical
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Related Approaches
Bettelheim (1976) and more recently Stephen (1998, 2000) argue
persuasively that those fantasies described in psychoanalytic theory
constitute deep grammars of the imagination, although even these
show cross-cultural variation. Obeyesekere (1990), for example, tells us
that in India and Sri Lanka the dynamics of what Freud called the
Oedipus complex, while still present, involve a fantasy of the father
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killing/castrating the son rather than vice versa (what he calls the
Ganesa complex) (pp. 71–200). A culture’s fantasy system revolves
around culturally distinctive versions of panhuman issues that arise
out of family conflicts, but also, we will see, around issues that arise
out of the collision of cultural models and history.
The idea that cultures have shared narrative motifs that are internal-
ized by individuals and transformed has parallels in Vygotsky’s
activity theory (1976, p. 57). Vygotsky argues that children internalize
the social relations in which they develop. By re-creating these relations
within the self, they forge an interior world. I argue that people inter-
nalize the narrative environment in which they develop. Storytelling
is an important means by which young children, together with family
members, repeatedly construct personal experiences in cultural terms
(Miller, Fung, & Mintz, 1996). The role of narratives in changing
personal and cultural identity is well documented (Gone et al., 1999;
Miller, 1994; Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990, p. 292;
Peacock, 1984; Schiffrin, 1996; Shaw, 1994; Somers, 1994). By re-author-
ing shared stories to express personal experience, dreamers change
cultural meanings. Over time, changed meanings are likely to bleed
back into culture.4
The creative character that I ascribe to dreams has been ascribed by
others to fantasy processes. Stern (1938), for example, says that ‘fantasy
produces in the subject’s inner experience a new reality’ that trans-
forms the person and profoundly changes his or her relation to the
world (p. 330). Josephs (1998) argues similarly that fantasy is a way in
which people reconstruct their worlds’ meaningfulness: fantasy is a
world-making, or re-making process (p. 185). Fantasy involves ‘the
transformation of the present person–world relationship’ (p. 180).
These transformations occur in many kinds of fantasies: Josephs
examines them in internal dialogues with a beloved deceased at the
graveside. But most anthropologists have been reluctant to ascribe
dreams a salient role in re-making cultural worlds.
Stephen (1995) tells us that people are normally unconscious of their
imaginal thinking; it can become consciousness and useful only with
special training (p. 99; see also Noel, 1983). Yet narration is a mode of
imaginal thinking in which we normally engage (Bruner, 1986). While
we are aware of the meaning of a logical argument, however, we may
be unaware of certain dimensions of meaning in the stories we tell.
Narratives, then, might be conceived as a liminal mode of thought and
communication, fluttering between conscious and unconscious; their
semi-opaque nature permits people to think about anxiety-provoking
topics they would otherwise feel the need to avoid. This is not to say
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Intertextual Interpretation
In this section, I interpret two wish-fulfillment dreams and two
anxiety dreams. But it is as if this ensemble of wishes and anxieties
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stupid!’ The friend tells the fishmonger ‘The man says he likes your fai but
he doesn’t have any tupe.’
Lack of a shared language in intercultural contact can be seen as a
metaphor for a lack of shared cultural categories. Sahlins (1981, 1985)
argues that when Hawaiian girls swam to Captain Cook’s ships to visit
sailors, it was in their minds merely a hypergamous practice. The
sailors, comprehending the nature of these commingling through a
capitalist cultural logic, paid them with bangles and with nails. In the
stingray joke, the distortion is similar but the mistranslation more
extreme. The sexual issue is all in the mind of the tourist (although this
perception is not entirely his fault). Significantly, mistranslation makes
him think the Samoan women are intellectually incompetent, ‘stupid’,
rather than immoral, probably because this is precisely how such situ-
ations have often made Samoans feel. Listen, for example, to this
excerpt from ‘Girls of Samoa’, a Samoan song about World War II,
which likewise tells a story.
Girls of Samoa,
I didn’t think your heads were stupid.
The boys from the military arrived
And all of a sudden you paint your lips . . .
Vanished are all the sailors of the military
Abandoning you on mainstreet . . .
Finished are the days of showing off
Next to a guy from the military . . .
You will end with no status whatsoever.
This song and others like it were sung for decades after the war. I first
heard this one from Loia Fiaui when I was interviewing him about
spirit possession. Loia had grown up in the westerly Samoan Islands
during the World War II period.
Cultural models predicate strategies and practices. As noted, in old
Samoa hypergamous begetting was not only a model of sexual
relations but also a strategy for augmenting family status. Practices of
self-display were entailed in this strategy. Pre-Christian girls wrapped
a finely woven mat around their waist leaving it partially open ‘to
expose the whole front side of their left thigh nearly up to the hip’,
rubbed scented oil over their skin until it shone ‘more brightly than
the sun’, rouged themselves with turmeric, especially ‘[u]nder the
armpits & about the root of the breasts’, draped blue beads down their
chests, and would then ‘walk about to shew themselves’ ( fā’alialia) so
as to attract the sons of chiefs (Williams, 1830–2/1984, pp. 102, 117, 144,
147). Similarly, in the above song girls paint their lips red ‘to show
off next to a guy from the military’. In World War II, however, these
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practices and the strategies they enacted produced the opposite of their
intended effect—humiliation. When one’s strategies fail, one tends to
feel stupid, just as one does when misled by a lover.
‘Every colonial people,’ Fanon (1967) says, ‘every people in whose
soul an inferiority complex has been created . . . finds itself face to face
with the language of . . . the mother country’ (p. 18). In Samoa, English
is not just a foreign language; during most of the 20th century it was
the language of colonialists, and Samoan language registers an inferi-
ority complex associated with it. Literally, nanu means ‘to speak a
foreign language’, but it usually glosses as ‘to speak English’; nanu also
means ‘to badly mispronounce’. When my former husband, Sanele,
was a teenager in the 1970s, his friends would jokingly tell girls, ‘Watch
it or you will speak English,’ using the word nanu. The boys meant to
boast that they were such excellent lovers as to induce girls to fall in
love with them. Here the motif of communication difficulty has
become a trope for romantic love. Why? The American servicemen
who seduced Samoan girls during World War II were likely to speak
their own culture’s language of seduction, which was the language of
romance, but they would have had to teach their girlfriends a little
English to use romantic language effectively.
By combining the hypergamy motif with the communication-
difficulty motif, this dream represents the collision of the Samoan pre-
Christian model of sexual relations with historical experience and
shows how this collision affects a contemporary girl. The dreamer’s
sexual desires are culturally stylized in a hypergamous mode but seem
to have been transferred to an intercultural arena. In turn, these desires
have come to be associated with anxiety about feeling stupid
(inferior)—an anxiety that can be traced back to the American occu-
pation. The novel elements (riding in a car, going to the movie) that
orchestrate the motifs suggest that these desires and anxieties have not
disappeared with colonialism. Admittedly, this anxiety is expressed
only symbolically in the nationality of the king and as a ‘hard time’ (in
the dreamer’s words) that vanishes as quickly as military guys once
did. At first glance, other dreams like the one to follow seem to lack
this anxiety altogether.
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On the day of our wedding, I dreamed that there were thousands and
thousands of guests invited and those who came to honor our big day. I let
my friends be my maid of honor and my bridesmaids. I was married on my
twenty-fifth birthday and that’s even the number of bridesmaids that I had.
It was one of the happiest thing[s] ever happen to me and the guy I was
married to. We had a great time with the guests . . . both families and friends.
After our wedding, we flew to Korea on our honeymoon on the very next
day. We spent two weeks in Korea and then we flew to Siberia for another
two weeks. We came from our honeymoon and we flew to Germany where
my husband’s family is and we decided to stay there just for the time being.
I had a great time . . . and we were a happy couple too. Everything had
made me happy but most all my husband . . . [was the most] loving person
I ever have [known] and I was surely married to the right guy.
Here again is the Christian version of the hypergamy motif—although
this time the girl’s desire falls equally on the groom and on the
ceremony. The friends serving as maids of honor and bridesmaids can
be read as a kinder and gentler version of Scabby-Oven-Cover’s
servant sisters—for girls genuinely enjoy being bridesmaids in Samoa;
it is like winning a beauty contest or being appointed tāupōu, official
village princess (Mageo, 1998, pp. 71–73). The number of bridesmaids
one can have is a matter of entitlement; in some villages, this number
is calculated by relative rank (Schoeffel, 1979, pp. 141–42). Twenty-five
bridesmaids imply an exalted rank indeed. On their honeymoon the
dream couple goes to Korea. Many Koreans currently reside in
American Samoa. I have heard prejudicial comments against them, at
least in part because a number of Koreans have opened small country
stores that compete all too successfully with Samoan stores and appear
to be making lots of money. Given this racial prejudice, it is unlikely a
girl would happily dream of wedding a Korean, but the honeymoon
destination symbolically entails this foreign wealth.
How is this version of the hypergamy motif rooted in historical
experience? Prior to missionization there were two kinds of weddings:
(a) ceremonies for high-status girls, which centered on deflorations and
an exchange of wealth between, to use the dreamer’s phrase, ‘both
families’; (b) and unceremonious elopements for girls of no special
status, which were also legitimated by gift exchange, but usually not
until the birth of a child (Hjarnø, 1979/1980, p. 107; Turner, 1884/1984,
pp. 95–96). Christian church weddings were a new version of formal
marriages to which every family could aspire. As money has slowly
saturated the Samoan economy, weddings have been celebrated by
ever-greater displays. In American Samoa, brides may have several
expensive wedding gowns, changing their gown repeatedly during the
wedding day. In New Zealand, Samoans may mortgage their homes
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it. As in this song, ‘sailors of the military’ ‘vanished’ after the war,
‘abandoning’ unwed girls. Samoans, who seldom lose their sense of
humor, called these plentiful babies ‘little armies’ of ‘lost marines’
because their fathers were politely presumed to be lost at sea. There
are no colonels in the navy; this is a military title properly belonging
to the army and the marines. By making the husband a ‘naval colonel’,
the dreamer symbolically encompasses three branches of the military.
The dreamer’s sexual desires, like those of the preceding dreamer,
are culturally stylized in the hypergamous mode and focused on an
intercultural context. Rather than being associated with the communi-
cation-difficulty motif, however, these desires are associated with the
color motif. But the uncomfortable condition of being ‘half-and-half’
has been displaced onto a colonial other—and this is an original
element. There is no anxiety on the surface of the dream. Nonetheless,
this displacement offers evidence that colonial experience linked
anxiety-generating inferiority feelings to the cultural model of hyper-
gamous sexual relations. So does the color motif: the blue eyes of this
colonial other (as opposed to the girl’s own racial features) are deemed
particularly attractive. These motif combinations offer psychological
documentation as to how the collision of cultural models like Samoan
hypergamy with historical experiences like colonialism shapes
people’s fantasy worlds.
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spirit possession. At home their parents had made the sister wear her
long hair up. When she went into the forest, the sister let this shiny
black hair down. Later she was possessed by a spirit girl named
Sauma’iafe. A Samoan healer was called in who promised Sauma’iafe
the sister’s hair would be cut off; this was done as soon as the spirit
left the girl’s body. In spirit stories, possession is frequently a conse-
quence of self-display, which we saw was a practice associated with
the pre-Christian model of hypergamous begetting.
Cutting hair has ethnohistorical roots in Samoa. In pre-contact times,
girls, particularly girls of rank, wore their hair in the gita style—which
consisted of a ‘braid worn at the left temple’ or ‘braids hanging at both
temples onto their chests’; the rest of the head was shaved (Krämer,
1902/1995, p. 325; see also Freeman, 1983, p. 229; Turner, 1884/1984,
p. 122). After the flooding of Victorian culture into Samoa in the
mid-19th century, girls began growing their hair long, braiding it to
go to school and binding it up in a bun thereafter. In the 1870s,
elders punished a girl who committed a sexual indiscretion by cutting
off all her hair but a tuft or two, as in the gita style; by the 1890s, her
head was entirely shaved (see Krämer, 1902/1995, p. 329; Mead, 1961,
p. 273; Willis, 1889, pp. 17, 78). Shaving the head is still a punishment
for girls’ sexual indiscretions and for behaviors thought to be leading
in that direction.
In this dream the beautician usurps the role of a punitive elder or
spirit, cutting the dreamer’s hair; it is not only her hair that is signifi-
cant but his too. His hair’s color and style are remarkable. So is his
hairy chest, which peeks through his ‘half button[ed]’ shirt, the signifi-
cance of which develops as he takes ‘his clothes off one by one
throwing [them] on the floor’. All the while he holds a knife and
proceeds to cut off all of the dreamer’s hair—his hirsute body soon
counterpointed by her bald head. This scene seems to signify seduc-
tion, as the beautician is doing a striptease, and rape, as the dreamer
is an unwilling victim, but it also connotes castration. The dreamer
reacts as if she is undergoing a form of mutilation pertinent to her
sex/gender identity.
Leach (1958) argues that in cultural iconography, hair symbolizes
sexuality—as it seems to in the case of possessed Samoan girls and
dream beauticians. Leach also holds that hair signifies penises, a theory
that Hallpike (1969) debunks because women have hair and get
culturally significant haircuts. I have argued elsewhere that in cultural
fantasies people often have androgynous bodies—whatever their
actual gender anatomy (Mageo, 1994, pp. 421–3; see also Moore, 1997,
p. 83; Strathern, 1990, pp. 121–2). Obeyesekere (1981), for example,
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dream, it actually opens with desire: the dreamer wants ‘a trim and a
perm’ presumably to show off her hair to advantage. The cultural model
of hypergamous sexual relations is evoked through that practice with
which it was associated in old Samoa—flaunting. But the hair-display
motif is combined with a haircut motif. Haircutting was an indigenous
practice that came to symbolize Christian ways of restricting girls. This
combination, then, codes complications introduced into this Samoan
model through colonial experience. Adding a new element, hair display
is transferred from the dreamer to the beautician. This transference
suggests the dreamer is dissociating both her desire to flaunt and the
sexuality it represents. The dream, furthermore, provides a commentary
on the causes of this dissociation by combining the haircut motif with
motifs of communication difficulty and color. For prior dreamers, the
hypergamy model, while still viable, was tainted with intercultural
inferiority feelings. The Beauty Salon dreamer’s combinations intimate
that for her this model of sexuality triggers colonially engendered
anxieties in which an intracultural sense of powerlessness is entangled
with feelings about sex/gender identity and race.10
Indeed, rather than an English king or a naval ‘colonel’, it is a
Samoan boy who brings these anxieties violently to bear upon the
dreamer. The blond American-flag-bedecked beautician stripper with
the pink-heart sunglasses embodies a threat to this dreamer so great
that she wakes up ‘shaking’. The dramatic novelty of this dream vis-à
-vis similar waking tales serves to locate the dreamer’s anxiety in
relations with Samoan boys and suggests it is there that she (and
perhaps other girls too) most acutely suffer them. The next and last
dream indicates that not only do Samoan girls suffer such anxieties,
but they successfully escape them; and if some males are ‘castrating’,
others are allies.
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As in ‘The Beauty Salon’ dream, here we find the haircut motif, but
the knife-wielding haircutter is not a punitive elder or a punitive spirit
but a ‘guy’. Sitting on rocks is a motif this dream shares with spirit
possession tales. The dreamer is sitting on the first rock when she
senses that ‘a creature’ is pursuing her. In possession stories, spirits are
said to have resting rocks; they sometimes possess people who sit on
the wrong rock. The husband tells the dreamer that the second rock is
a horse. Then the horse is standing on the second rock. As rock number
two seems to transform into the horse, the creature seems to transmute
into the boy who is likewise pursuing the dreamer and wants to cut
her hair. The dreamscape is a lake. Lakes and rivers are common pos-
session sites that evoke the hair-display motif because there girls let
down their hair in order to bathe, combing it out afterwards. In spirit
stories, this sequence of actions may provoke an attack. If a girl goes
to swim in the river near the village of the spirit girl Telesa, - for
example, and combs her hair on getting out of the water, that spirit
will ‘hit’ (possess) her (Goodman, 1971, p. 470).
The dreamer’s husband tells her to get away on the horse, with
which she is progressively identified—initially by bodily contact (the
horse sniffs her) and then by the ‘voice’ (disembodied like a spirit?)
that refers to her hair as a ‘horse braid.’ Like a horse, the dreamer is
good at jumping and running. Horses are not native to Samoa. This
escape motif is probably intertextual with escapes in cinema ‘Westerns’
and other types of movies to which Samoans have long been exposed.
(Does the motif of ‘the creature’ come from thrillers?) From the age of
3 (1961), Sanele attended movies in Apia. As early as the 1960s, even
in remote villages, a family would sometimes get a film proje-ctor and
small generator to show a movie in exchange for coins or coconuts.
The dreamer runs across a bridge. Crossing bridges or malae (oval
village centers) is a common motif in spirit stories; they may operate
as narrative synonyms. In one spirit story, for example, a boy sees a
beautiful girl combing her hair on a bridge and is soon beset with a
fever (Schoeffel, 1979, p. 397). On the way to his bedside, a healer sees
the same girl on the village malae and concludes it is a spirit girl. In
spirit stories, girls are likely to be possessed if they cross a malae with
their hair down or with a flower in their hair. The malae is the symbolic
core of ‘traditional’ Samoan life: that is, of a Christian-Samoan version
of respect relations. One informant explained that around the malae one
lowers one’s umbrella and speaks softly—signs of respect; deep in the
forest one might walk naked, one’s sarong around one’s shoulders.
Spirit girls like Telesa- and Sauma’iafe are the tutelary deities of certain
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malae. Yet, like the spirit girl on the bridge, they are apt to display their
hair—combing it out and decorating it with red flowers. Spirit girls
thereby embody censured elements of pre-Christian feminine gender
practices. Iconically, malae span historical contradictions; the crossing
motif, I believe, symbolizes a condition of being halfway between
different sex/gender worlds.
Culturally stylized sexual desire is connoted by the dreamer’s hair,
particularly given the lakeside setting. As in the last dream, this desire
is not unrestrained: ‘The Beauty Salon’ dreamer wants a ‘trim’, and this
dreamer’s hair is braided. Yet, this girl’s desire, like that of the salon
dreamer, triggers anxieties associated with colonial experience that
threaten to cut her off—to castrate her emotionally. But rather than
being reduced to screaming for help, ‘The Horse Braid’ dreamer resists
mutilation. In the salon dream, the hair-display motif (symbolizing
sexuality) was combined with a color motif (symbolizing racial issues)
and with a communication motif (symbolizing agency issues). Here
hair display is combined with a crossing motif (symbolizing historical
transition). When the dreamer jumps on the bridge, she is already
halfway across. A halfway state or position is recurrent in these
dreams: in half-caste lineages, in the beautician’s half-unbuttoned shirt,
and now in this dreamer’s halfway location. In this case, the dreamer’s
location seems to indicate that she is attempting to bridge the coloni-
ally generated contradictions that were pivotal in prior dreams. And,
as her husband and his nephew tell her, she ‘made it’—an American
phrase associated with success.
Combining the hair-display/haircut motifs with the crossing motif
provokes a dangerous level of anxiety for this dreamer. Yet her feelings
are more manageable than those of ‘The Beauty Salon’ dreamer, whose
dream combined hair-display/haircut motifs with motifs of color and
communication difficulty. These dreams offer us something like a
chemistry of anxiety for Samoan girls; some motif combinations are
devastating, some are stimulating. While all these motifs probably rep-
resent feelings recognizable to Samoan girls of this age group (late
teens and early twenties) during the period the dreams were recorded,
some may have had more experiential salience for an individual than
others. Creativity is also at work here. ‘The Horse Braid’ dreamer puts
the narrative resources of a colonizing culture (the horse and Westerns)
to work, imagining novel resolutions to anxieties generated by
colonialism. Similarly, Lattas (1992) and Stephen (1997) have noted that
the iconic resources of colonizing cultures are put to work creating new
symbolic orders in Melanesian cargo cults.
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context’ (p. 254). The American encampment in Samoa during the war
and the sexual unions that followed could not easily be integrated into
age-old Samoan models of sexual relations. Because historical experi-
ences are often radically new and elude the familiar meanings that
we would impose upon them, they may rupture cultural models and
the identities people build through them. We collectively repress and
obliquely remember what overwhelms us, but seemingly extinguished
events may haunt fantasies in symbolic forms—as spirit girls haunt
Samoan fantasies. Through dream motifs we mull over cultural experi-
ence. This thought is inspired by our least cognized, most affective and
embodied reactions to shared meaning systems and inflects these
systems in accord with them. Dreaming seeks out unhealed wounds,
both personal and shared, remembering these wounds in meaningful
but also meaningfully altered forms in which the variations express
personal relations to collective problems and may constitute attempts
at resolution.
If dream motifs may be interpreted by reference to other narratives
and via their connections to cultural history, does this mean that
dreamers are working on collective psychological experience in a
significant sense? When new cultural symbols in religion, entertain-
ment, art or elsewhere capture our imaginations, it is because these
symbols resolve problems with which we are engaged and for which
we too have sought resolution. In culture change, readiness is all, and
readiness comes about through many people working on cultural-
historical issues on emotional and embodied levels that are reflected
and enacted in dreams. Shamans, prophets, artists and other symbolic
innovators do not spring up solitary but rise on a tide of creative
imaginings that thrive in stories—dream stories among them. Their
revisionings are the fruit of cultural work that is collaborative in nature.
Notes
1. Kracke (1992) notes the presence of images and themes from myths in
Kagwahiv dreams and proposes that in Kagwahiv performances myths
move from words to sensory images, while dreams move in the opposite
direction (pp. 32, 34–35, 40–50). In my terms, he is discussing movement
back and forth along a culture’s narrative spectrum. Cassirer (1975) sees
myth as hovering between the world of dreams and the objective world.
2. In anthropology, Eggan (1955) showed that mythological symbols in
dreams could be found in myths.
3. Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls these kinds of perception preobjective (1962).
See, further, Csordas (1990); Mageo (in press-b); Mageo & Knauft (2002).
4. Similarly, Valsiner (1989) argues that people personalize myths in fantasy
life: that is, myths move into the person and are transformed, just as I
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Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment. New York: Knopf.
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Biography
JEANNETTE MARIE MAGEO is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at
Washington State University. Her degree is from the History of Consciousness
Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Mageo has
published numerous articles and books on cultural psychology, cultural
history, religion, as well as sex and gender in Pacific societies. Topical areas in
her published work include self, power, dreaming, transvestism, spirit
possession, moral discourse and body symbolism. She resided and did
fieldwork in Samoa from 1981 to 1989, returning on several occasions since
then. Recent publications include Power and the Self (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the
Postcolonial Pacific (University of Hawai’i Press, 2001) and Theorizing Self in
Samoa: Emotions, Genders and Sexualities (University of Michigan Press, 1998).
ADDRESS: Prof. Jeannette Marie Mageo, Anthropology Dept. 4910,
Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164–4910, USA.
[email: jmageo@mail.wsu.edu]
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