Simulation of Social Reality: Dreaming as an Anthropological Field: A Review of Jeannette Mageo, Robin E. Sheriff (eds.), New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming. New York: Routledge, 2021, 250 pp.

Abstract

The collection of articles under review proposes new approaches and directions for the anthropological study of dreams. In articles devoted to the analysis of the dream plots of representatives of different social, ethnic, and gender groups in Europe and the United States (Germans, American women, national minorities and immigrants), the authors emphasized the connection between personal concerns and the problems of society as a whole (violence, inequality, hypocrisy). In societies labeled as “dream cultures” (the Asabano of New Guinea, the Tzotzil Maya of Mexico) and religious groups (the Tibetan Buddhists, the Muslims of Egypt), dreams are perceived as a special reality in which the dreamer interacts with deities, spirits and other people (so that dreams can be described as a “shadow society” influencing social relationships in waking life). Exploring these cultures, the authors raise questions of how dreams and their discussion form religious ideas (by validating or disproving religious concepts), change statuses and social roles of dreamers. The study of cultures through the prism of dream images allowed authors to see in them something unobservable and inaccessible to other methods of research (hidden conflicts, contradictions, and the potential for social change).