Where Dream Worlds Are Lifeworlds and Anthropologists Break the Glass

 In his book Ways of Knowing, Canadian anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet reports from the dream world of the Dene Tha of northern Alberta. Here it is understood that "the mind resides transiently in 'someone’s body' kezi, and permanently in 'someone’s spirit or soul', key-uné." Goulet tells us that Dene Tha conceive of dreaming, sickness and death as so many journeys of the soul. "Dreaming involves the soul’s journeying away from the body to explore areas in our land, to engage in a medicine fight with other powers, or momentarily to spend time in the other land in the company of dead relatives. At the end of each journey, when one wakes up, one remembers the events that took place beyond the confines of the body. …Sickness may be induced by a prolonged absence of the soul from the body, in which case Dene Tha healers can be called on to retrieve the soul, bring it back to the body, and restore health. Death is the definitive separation of the mortal body and the enduring immortal soul." [1] 
    Goulet is a leading practitioner and advocate of what my extraordinary friend the late Barbara Tedlock called "participatory observation", in which the ethnologist does not hesitate to dream with the people they are studying, to practice their rituals, meet their spirits and share dreams both ways. In a pathbreaking essay, Barbara wrote that there has been a major shift in cultural anthropological methodology away from interviewing indigenous dreamers to gather reports for statistical content analysis. “Instead, anthropologists today are relying more on participant observation, in which they interact within natural communicative contexts of dream sharing, representation, and interpretation. In such contexts the introduction of an anthropologist's own recent dreams is quite natural, even expected.” [2] Barbara and her husband Dennis entered the dream worlds of the Quiche Maya and the Zuni in this way. [3]
    As a young ethnologist, Goulet chose the Guajiro [4] of northern Colombia as the people he wished to study. At the start of his fieldwork, he asked to be permitted to stay in a village where the people spoke only Guajiro so he could learn the language by total immersion. The question from the elders came back: Does he know how to dream? They accepted him when assured that he did. He then found himself immersed not only in a different language, but in a different way of dreaming. Each morning, he joined an extended family of fourteen people in the kitchen area to share coffee and dreams. The sharing began when an adult asked “Jamüsü pülapüin,?” “How were your dreams?”  Family members then took turns to recount their dreams. The grandmother was usually the one to comment. [5]
    Goulet had only a limited understanding of what was being shared until he started dreaming in similar ways. He could now grasp that for the Guajiro, as for most if not all indigenous peoples, the dream world is a real world, a lifeworld no less real than ordinary reality and sometimes more so. Things that happen in the dream world are real experiences, not symbolic "contents:" for analysis. Goulet tells us, "I began to share Guajiro-like dreams, dreams that contained elements of the Guajiro world."[6]
     When he lived with the Dene Tha, Goulet learned their ways of "knowing with the mind" communicating without speaking, seeing without ordinary eyes, traveling without moving. He knew he was in on a night when, troubled by the smoke of a fire ceremony in a native lodge, he watched his energy double get up and fan the fire the proper way with his hat.
     He makes a passionate case for participatory anthropology, supported by his first-hand experience. In anthropological fieldwork, Goulet tells us, “ it is possible, and even useful, for the ethnographer to experience this qualitatively different world of ghosts and spirits, and to incorporate such experiences in ethnographic accounts.”  [7] He calls to his fellow-ethnographers Go on, break the glass.
   “Anthropologists may do more than listen to what others say about their lives. Anthropologists may pay attention to their own lives, including their inner lives, and listen to other peoples' response to their accounts of their dreams and/or visions experienced while living among them” And then they can publish! “An interpretive synthesis of data pertaining to another society and culture may fruitfully include the anthropologist's accounts of his/her own dreams and visions as they inform his or her interaction with others in their lifeworld.” [8]
     This is the surely the remedy for the phenomenon observed in the South Pacific where it is still said that “when the anthropologists arrive, the spirits leave.” Alas, reports of participatory observation are still far from standard in the literature

 

References

1.      Jean-Guy A. Goulet, Ways of Knowing: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Dene Tha. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p.142

2.      Barbara Tedlock, “The New Anthropology of Dreaming”  Dreaming, Vol 1(2), Jun 1991, p.161

3.      Barbara Tedlock, “Zuni and Quiche dream sharing and interpreting”  in Tedlock (ed) Dreaming: Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992 pp.105-131

4.  An indigenous people of the Guajira peninusla in northern Colombia and northwestern Venezuala. Today generally called the Wayuu. 

5. Jean-Guy A. Goulet, “Dreams and Visions in Indigenous Lifeworlds: An Experiential Approach” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, p. 177.   

6.   Ibid, p. 178 

7.      Ibid, p. 171.    

8.  Ibid, pp. 173-4. See also David E. Young & Jean-Guy Goulet (eds) Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998. In their introduction the editors of Being Changed note that "experiences which may be extraordinary for Western-trained anthropologists may be commonplace for most traditional peoples around the world" - and, we might add, for active dreamers anywhere who have not fallen into the trap of reductionist thinking about dreaming and the mobility of soul. Goulet and Young go on to observe that "extraordinary experiences force one to deal with the possibility that reality is culturally constructed and that instead of one reality (or a finite set of culturally-defined realities), there are multiple realities — or at least multiple ways of experiencing the world."

 

Photo: Bistcho Lake, northern Alberta