Dream cultures: University of Helsinki preliminary program (original) (raw)
Related papers
Typologizing the Dream / Le rêve du point de vue typologique, 2022
There is nothing like a firmly established typology of dreams – simply because the taxonomies on which existing typologies are based vary widely: They can be oneirocritical, thematic, or based on dreaming characters or their responses, on narratological functions, etc. The essays in this volume will discuss a broad range of dream types, with a special focus on nightmares and erotic, funny, indigenous and children’s dreams. Examples are taken from a great variety of cultures and historical periods. Their authors and artists include: Akinari, Barrie, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Black Elk, Buñuel, Burroughs, W. Busch, Calvino, Cantilo, Cao Xueqin, Cardano, Carroll, Coogler, Corkran, Cortázar, Crébillon fils, Dalí, Eco, Ende, Foer, Fuseli, Garnier, Gatore, Grévin, Grünbein, Guo Moruo, Hauptmann, Hawthorne, Hebbel, Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Huysmans, Ilboudo, Ilibagiza, Kafka, F. Lang, Leiris, Li Yu, Malerba, Mizoguchi, Morgenstern, Mussorgsky, Nodier, Nolan, Okopenko, Pushkin, Radcliffe, Rimbaud, Robison, Schafer, Schiller, Schnitzler, Schwarz-Bart, P.B. Shelley, Soqluman, Storm, Szittya, Tamapima, Tchaikovsky, D.M. Thomas, Tristan L’Hermite, Valenzuela, Vava, Yourcenar, Yu Dafu, and many others. Areas of interest: Cultural, literary and medial history of the dream; dreams in Literature; dreams in film; theory of the dream; the nightmare; dream in the visual arts; dreams in computer games / video games; dream reports.
Dreams Inside-Out: Some Uses of Dream in Social Theory and Ethnographic Inquiry
In the last decade or so the citizens of Serbia often described their bewildering social world in the idioms of magic realism, conspiracy theories, mud, slush, jelly, and other amorphous substances, Kafkian parables, or twilight, in-between states of consciousness. Occasionally, the social world was explicitly likened to a dream (nightmare). Taking the cue from my informants, I ask whether the Serbian " imaginary " might not be better figured as a " dream " than as a " text, " or a " depository of dialogically intertwined narratives " (" stories Serbs tell themselves and others about themselves "), as is customary in " interpretative anthropology. " In order to extract its maximal figurative potential, I thread the dream through Marxist social theory as a major site of its most fruitful use – from its anticipation in Marx's varied figurations of modern capitalism's peculiar enchantments to its full development in the work of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. I then turn from these ethnographers of metropolitan modernity to anthropological theory and the way it historically conceptualized the dream in the exotic peripheries. By threading it through metropolitan social theory as well as ethnography of peripheries, I hope to show the amazing internal complexity of dream as a figure and to recommend its serious and sustained use for figuring the social thought and action.
Introduction: Dreaming as an Object of Anthropological Analysis, Dreaming 14, 2-3 (2004): 75-82.
This article introduces a special issue on anthropological approaches to dreaming. A running history of dreams in the field of anthropology serves as a device for contextualizing the articles. The narrative identifies perennial areas of interest such as the question of why some societies value dreams while others do not. Anthropological approaches have varied from Victorian evolutionism to contemporary psychoanalysis and reflexivity. Each new theoretical paradigm has pushed the study of dreams in different directions, led to the study of new aspects of dreaming, and, sometimes, guided the exploration of new dimensions of social life. The presentation of ethnographic case studies of dreaming in specific cultural contexts constitutes one of anthropology's strongest contributions to the study of dreaming.
The Ohio State University Dissertation, 1975
The thesis of this paper is that dreams take on different meanings when interpreted from the point of view of the cultures in which they occur and are communicated. Various American "deviant" groups were researched to see how they interpreted the dreams of their members.
Historizing the Dream / Le rêve du point de vue historique. Ed. by Bernard Dieterle and Manfred Engel (Cultural Dream Studies; 3), 2019
The essays in this volume trace the development of dream cultures through time both in synchronic and diachronic case studies. The scope of the contributions ranges geographically from New Zealand and China, over India, Mesopotamia, and Africa, to diverse European countries, and historically from Antiquity to the present. The volume covers various media and disciplines, such as literature, historiography, philosophy, painting, film, and TV series, and includes studies on Addison, Ammianus Marcellinus, Bachmann, Bembo, Bhāsa, Blake, Buñuel, Cáo Xuěqín, Chaucer, Dalí, De Quincey, Deren, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, van den Eeckhout, Eich, Flaubert, Grace-Smith, E.W. Happel, Herodotus, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joyce, Kālidāsa, Keller, Kleinschroth, Kouka, Kourouma, Lamkos, Langfus, Levi, Lessing, M.G. Lewis, C.F. Meyer, Michaux, Moreau de Tours, Nerval, Nietzsche, Petrarch, Plato, Subandhu, Tacitus, Tang Xianzu, Tiepolo, Tolstoy, Wieland, and others.
In this article I consider accounts of historical and recently collected Greek dreams, all of which occurred in moments of anxiety caused either by the dreamer's own illness or by the serious illness of a close relative. The imageof a field or pedhiadha (green meadow, pastureland) recurs in these dreams. These fields can be interpreted as simultaneously personal and collective symbols (Obeyesekere 1981), and I contend that this ambiguity reflects the synthetic, irreducible quality of dream experiences, and no doubt other emotional experiences as well. There has been a temptation within anthropology to treat emotions and feelings as cognitions, thereby reducing them to culture (Leavitt 1996:522; Reddy 1997:329). The limitations of such a view, which cleaves the mind from the body and culture from nature, have become increasingly apparent (Lyon 1995:259; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Underlying this split is another divide that must be repaired—namely, the insistence on the strict separation of the individual from the collective (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996:189). The image of the field that I explore here reveals the continuities between the personal and the social, the emotional and the cognitive, and thus offers an example of how these putative dichotomies merge in human experience. The challenge is to develop a sufficiently broad analytical framework to cope with the complexity of experience. In examining experience people's accounts are generally our primary means of access. Dreams present an extreme instance of this situation because no observer can directly share in another person's dream visions and sensations. The dreamer's retrospective narrative, based on the memory of what happened during sleep, represents the only evidence for the dream. This situation has led philosophers such as Malcolm (1959:122) and Dennett (1977:249) to doubt that dreams are really experiences at all. Even psychologists who study dreams in sleep In this study of Greek dreams at moments of illness and anxiety I explore the relationship between individual experience and cultural representation. Ethno-graphic data and textual sources show that the image of fields recurs in dreams, thus throwing into question the uniqueness of personal experience as well as the concept of "experience" as something separate from cultural narratives. Yet these same images might also be independently generated "from below" by the emotional , physical experience of distress and illness. This case points to the convergence of cultural and personal symbols and to their fusion in the moment of experience. Approaches from psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, anthropology , and folklore studies all provide possible theorizations. None of these options excludes the others. The image of the field in dreams is overdetermined precisely because the historicocultural, the cognitive, the psychobiological, and the social all simultaneously figure in human experience,
Making - or Not Making - Sense of Dreams / Trouver - ou non - un sens au rêve, 2024
Dreams frighten and attract us because of their ›otherness‹, their manifold deviations from the world we know when we are awake. One of the most consistently used techniques of coming to terms with this otherness has been the attempt to ›make sense‹ of dreams, to consider and portray them as messages which can and have to be deciphered. On the other hand (and much more rarely), dreams have been considered as a welcome source of entertainment, or as a key instrument to expand the limitations of a rational and conventional world view. Our book analyses aspects of this dialectic in factual dream reports and in fictional representations of the dream in literature, film, music, and painting. Examples are taken from a great variety of cultures and historical periods. Their authors and artists include: Adorno, Agualusa, Andreas-Salomé, Apollinaire, Artmann, Beckmann, Benjamin, Breton, Carroll, Carter, Diderot, Droste-Hülshoff, Flaubert, Goethe, Gondry, Grandville, Ji Yun, Johannot, Kafka, Keller, Klinger, Kubin, Li Gongzuo, Liu E, Ma Jian, Meyrink, Michaux, Minnelli, Montaigne, Mora, Ofenbauer, Okri, Oppenheim, Plath, Proust, Pushkin, Rousseau, Scho¬pen¬hauer, Scott, Seghers, Sorel, Sōseki, Wagner, Walser, Wang Jian, Weiner, Wu Jianren, Yuan Mei, Zschokke, and many others.
eds. Pp. 35-69. Westport, CT: Praeger. 36 Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives contributions to the science of dreaming. Before outlining what these contributions are, we must understand what the ethnographic method entails.