New Directions In The Anthropology Of Dreaming

This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment on sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated by a range of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of current anthropological and psychological research, the volume accounts for local dream theories and how they are situated within distinct cultural ontologies. It considers dreams as a resource for investigating and understanding cultural change; dreaming as a mode of thinking through, contesting, altering, consolidating, or escaping from identity; and the nature of dream mentation. In proposing new theoretical approaches to dreaming, the editors situate the topic within the recent call for an "anthropology of the night" and illustrate how dreams offer insight into current debates within anthropology’s mainstream. This up-to-date book defines a twenty-first century approach to culture and the dream that will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as other disciplines such as religious studies, the neurosciences, and psychology.

Based on over a decade of research, this book connects dream studies to cognitive anthropology, to perspectives in the humanities on mimesis, ambiguity, and metaphor, to current dream research in psychology, and to recent work in economic and political relations. Traveling the dreamscapes of a variety of young people, Mimesis and the Dream explores their encounters with American cultures and the identities that derive from these encounters. While ethnographies typically concern shared social habits and practices, this book concerns shared aspects of subjectivity and how people represent and think about them in dreams. Each chapter grounds theory in actual cases. It will be compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines and illustrates how dreaming offers insights into twenty-first century debates and problems within these disciplines, bringing a vital theoretically eclectic approach to dream studies.

This insightful volume is designed as a series of invitations towards living attentiveness, examining how we all make the “other”, through “projection” (blaming and shaming the other outside ourselves), our enemy with whom we prefer not to dialogue. All of us are faced daily with individual and collective manifestations of the Shadow – all that we fear, despise and makes us feel ashamed. Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow, emerging as it did from his personal confrontation with the realms of his unconscious self, is one of the most important contributions he made to the understanding of humanity and to depth psychology, that realm where the focus is on unconscious processes. The contributors to this book reframe his concept in the context of contemporary Jungian thinking, exploring how the Shadow develops in an individual’s infancy and adolescence, and its culmination, where collective manifestations of the Shadow are addressed. The book offers a voyage through a series of fundamental Shadow concepts and themes including couples relationships, disease, organizations, Evil, fundamentalism, ecology and boundary violation before ending with a chapter designed to help us integrate the Shadow and hold contra-positions with patience and a tilt towards mutual understanding, rather than being locked in polarities. This fascinating new book will be of considerable interest to the general public, Jungian analysts, trainees, scholars and therapists both in training and practice with an interest in the inner world.

"This work illustrates how people like Smith Islanders claim their lives in an ecologically changing unstable place"--

Decolonial Arts Praxis: Transnational Pedagogies and Activism illustrates the productive potential of critical arts pedagogies in the ongoing work of decolonization by engaging art, activism, and transnational feminisms. Offering contributions from scholars, educators, artists, and activists from varied disciplines, the volume highlights how arts can reveal intersectional forms of oppression, inform critical understandings, and rebuild transnational solidarities across geopolitical borders. The contributors present forms of enquiry, creative writing, art, and reflection which grapple with issues of colonialism, racism, and epistemological violence to illustrate the power of decolonial arts pedagogies in formal and informal education. Using a range of multiple and intersectional critical lenses, through which readers can examine ways in which transnational feminist theorizing and art pedagogy inform, shape, and help strategize activism in various spaces, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students, and practitioners with interests in arts education, the sociology of education, postcolonialism, and multicultural education.

The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it. With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential "problem" may be singularly a matter for the post-enlightenment West. The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods.

The authors, Jungian analysts, write for psychoanalysts and therapists who wish to integrate dream interpretation into their clinical practice. In this book, first published (hardcover) in 1987, ten contributing anthropologists and psychologists explore the ways in which dreams are remembered, recounted, shared (or not shared), interpreted, and used by peoples around the world. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR