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- Convenors:
-
Simone Dennis
(The University of Adelaide)
Andrew Dawson (University of Melbourne)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Gumnut (S204), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
Thinking through dreaming has been of historical value to anthropology, from Culture and Personality to Structuralism to psychological anthropology. We seek papers that articulate new value that might be accorded to dreams and dreaming.
Long Abstract:
Thinking through dreaming has been of historical value to anthropology. Much was made of it the "Culture and Personality" school of North American psychological anthropologists, and it has certainly inspired some interesting structuralist analyse. Presently, the value of anthropologically analysing dreaming has been variously articulated. One value lies in its capacity to get at time. [The] Dreaming reaches into an ancestral past, knitting it together with present and future. Dreams might be oneiromancitic; a person might portend or predict the future in a dream, permitting her to reach forward in time. Interstitiality might characterise dreaming, as the dreamer occupies a liminal world between sleeping and an awakeness to spiritual realms, where they might receive special revelation of use in the waking world. Psychological analyses dig into the similarities and differences between cultural dreaming, and its place in metaphorical expression reveals its role in giving form and shape to our aspirations, hopes, fears and longings. There are also communicative theories of dreaming that assert instrumental outcomes, leading to Herdt's proposition, "that culture may actually change experience inside of dreams, or that the productions of dreaming do actually become absorbed and transformed into culture", indicating that dreaming has been useful to considerations of questions of structure and agency, and the role of 'culture' as an explanatory grounds for social life. Against this background of value, we seek papers that articulate new value that might be accorded to dreams and dreaming.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -Andrew Dawson (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers iconoclasm in ethno-nationalized post-Socialist former Yugoslavia. Its principal role is to reveal public secrets about Socialist Yugoslavia. In turn, lived realities of are rendered fantastical dreams and, ultimately, Socialist Yugoslav identification is rendered as pathology.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper - presented at a time for remembering on the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of socialism in Europe - I consider several 'high' and 'low' iconoclasms directed at iconic pan-ethnic cultural forms in post-Socialist former Yugoslavia. These include, respectively the avant-garde practice of 'retroquotation' and monumental vandalism. I argue that these practices serve to reveal hidden 'public secrets', especially of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia having been riven by repressed ethnic tensions and of having been a state always in dissolution throughout its very construction. Ethnographically the paper focuses on a section of the population commonly referred to as 'Yugonostalgics'. In common usage Yugonostalgic holds the same pathologizing weight that the original term nostalgia was designed to convey. Nóstos denotes to return home (whether to a place or a time), and álgos to a longing or sorrow. In the case of so-called Yugonostagics a double pathologizing takes place. These are people who are seen, especially by the new ethno-nationalist states in the former Yugoslavia, as nostalgically longing not only for a golden past, but also for a golden past that never actually existed. And, the iconoclastic acts that are the main focus of the paper play a special role in this regard. Their principal effect is, I argue, to render lived realities of the past as dreamed of unrealities in the present.
Stephanie Betz (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the affective relationships that people develop with video game characters are not an escape from reality, but a route back to the intersubjective world, acting as intermediaries in transnational debates about contemporary subjectivity.
Paper long abstract:
Dreams can be seen as an alternative social world in which relations between self and other are imaginatively explored, rehearsed, and critiqued through symbolic characters (Mageo 2003). Understood by Mageo (2003:8) to be "the characters who populate the world of stories in which we develop," I suggest that such dream figures are not limited to our slumbering hours but can pervade our waking lives as well.
In this paper, I engage with the affective relationships that people develop with fictional characters while awake. Focusing on people who incorporate computer-controlled video game characters into their inner lives, I explore how these figures affect and reflect the self and its relations with others. Suspending pathological or fantastical explanations, I argue that these relationships are not an escape from reality but a circuitous route back to the shared, intersubjective world. When brought into the social media environment of Tumblr, these figures act as intermediaries within a transnational social milieu; as points of friction and connection in debates over what it means to live in the contemporary world.
Simone Dennis (The University of Adelaide)
Paper short abstract:
This rather experimental paper will draw on Foucault's"Introduction to Binswanger's Dream and Existence in order to consider relationships between transcendental forms and empirical matter.
Paper long abstract:
This rather experimental paper will draw on Foucault's"Introduction to Binswanger's Dream and Existence in order to consider relationships between transcendental forms and empirical matter.