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

Coming back from the dead as a dream shaman

 

My retelling of a wild tale of soul retrieval and shamanic initiation among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest. After putting a dead man's vital soul back in his body and telling him he will now be a shaman, the great wolf shaman explains how he will know how to heal: "I will always make you dream".

This is what the old ones say about Lebid. He was of the people called Kwakiutl or Gwasila. Their place was up in the north of Vancouver Island, where the winters can freeze your marrow. Lebid got pretty sick and no medicine could help him. His people watched him die. They couldn't bury him the old way, because the earth was frozen hard. They just laid him outside on the ice. They would deal with his remains when the ground thawed, if nothing took care of him first. In the meantime, the next snowfall made a blanket that covered him up. 
    Wolves came around after a couple of nights. The people heard them snuffling around Lebid's mound. The wolves started to howl, maybe calling the rest of the pack for free meat. What happened next was unexpected. A man's voice joined in, and the howls began to sound like a song. Nobody went outside to see what was going on.
     Time went by. Some days you could see the sun. One morning it showed a wolf pack nearing the village. The wolves scattered at the sight of the people, but one remained. He slowly rose up on two legs and became a man. The man was rail-thin and naked except for wreaths of dark  hemlock, round his neck and waist.
    When he came close to the lodges, people saw this was Lebid, the dead man. They saw he had become a skinwalker, a shapeshifter. Some thought he was also a zombie or a witch and wanted to drive him away, or burn him. A grandmother spoke up.
     "Bring him inside. Give him soup . Let him tell his story."
     "I was dead," Lebid started with what they knew "But the wolves dragged me to their place, and their great shaman. His name is Nau'alakume.He wears a crown of red cedar."
      He described how the wolves licked him all over his body. Then the wolf shaman vomited a crystal that he inserted in Lebid’s lower sternum. The shaman opened his palms to reveal something that might have been inside the crystal, a tiny fluttering creature the size of a fly or a lightning bug. Lebid understood that this was his vital soul, that had left his body with his last breath. The wolf shaman pressed down hard on the top of Lebid’s’ head, again and again, as if to loosen the bone. He blew the tiny soul throiugh the fontanel, and sealed the opening.
     He gave Lebid his own name, with its numonous power. He told Lebid that now he had died and come back, he, too, would be a shaman, "You will be a life bringer for your people."
    Then his followers rose up, put on their wolf masks, dropped to all fours, and and escorted Lebid home.
     The revenant sang a song to honor the wolf shaman who raised him from the dead, put his soul back in his body, and gifted him with his own powers. He sang of treasure again and again. 

They took me to the edge of the world by the magical power of heaven, the treasure
I was healed when the power of Nau’alakume, the life bringer, the treasure, was really thrown into me
I come to cure with this power of healing of Nau’alakume, the treasure. Therefore I will be a life bringer.
I come with the water of life given into my hand by Nau’alakume, the means of bringing to life, the treasures 

     If his people had any doubt that he now possessed the powers of a true shaman healer, a "life bringer", Lebid reassured them that he would operate under the wisest direction, delivered in what they all knew to be the most reliable way.
     He said that the great shaman, Nau'alakume, had told him, "I will always make you dream". Lebid told his people, "When you get sick, I will dream for you and my dreams will show me what you need to be healed."

 

Source: I have retold a report of the narrative of a Kwakiutl informant in Franz Boas' classic work The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930) vol 2, pp. 46-50. It is worth noting that an elder of the Kwakiutl told Boas that "dreams are the news the soul brings us when it comes back from its journeys.". Franz Boas, "Ethnology of the Kwakiutl" in F. W. Hodge (ed.) Thirty-fifth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921) pp. 724-725.

Wolf Mask. A Northwest Coast wolf dance headdress in Rayna Green, The British Museum Encyclopaedia of Native North America, Bloominton: Indiana University Press, 1999, p.177.