Abstract
In this chapter I discuss the status of dreams and the social significance and consequences of dream experiences in two contrasting societies: Melanesian swidden horticulturalists in Southeast Ambrym, Vanuatu (henceforth SE Ambrym), and the Mardu, Aboriginal hunter-gatherers who now live in settlements in Western Australia’s desert. The nexus between the dream experience, or inspiration, and its mediation in social process—its subsequent impact, if any, on human actors and the social fabric—is a challenging topic, because it entails a movement from an intensely private experience into the realm of shared understandings that is so variable as to make generalization difficult. As Hollan (this volume, Chapter 9: 169) notes, “People do not merely register or reproduce cultural meanings and beliefs in their dreams; they use, manipulate, and transform those cultural resources in personally creative and expressive ways.” A major inspiration for this attempt at comparison has been the work of Ken Burridge, who, in his groundbreaking studies of millenarian movements, Mambu (1960) and New Heaven, New Earth (1969), has explored the complex interplay of real-world experiences, ideas, and desires and their expression in myths and dreams.1 In his writings, Burridge has made patently clear that issues of status, politics, and power are inevitably implicated in the passage of dreams outwards from a reported individual experience and in their diffusion and potentially transformative impact on a given group or society.
To dream a dream and make it come true; to realize the shape of what can be seen only in the mind’s eye; to feel compelled to bring about the seemingly impossible—these are the prerogatives of man.
—K. O. L. Burridge (1969:3)
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© 2003 Roger Ivar Lohmann
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Tonkinson, R. (2003). Ambrymese Dreams and the Mardu Dreaming. In: Dream Travelers. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982476_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982476_5
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