Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Wayuu people, binational Indigenous between Colombia and Venezuela, consider dreams as agents of resistance against extinction, guiding settlement in search of water or medicinal plants. Recognizing dreams as sovereign mandates inserts Wayuu ontology into the political discourse.

Paper long abstract

The analysis of dreams in the political field reveals the tension between legibility and unintelligibility, and between the absurd and the meaningful, in every culture. For the Wayuu, what is going to happen first occurs in dreams. Sometimes the dream is imposed, or it is also dreamed at will, as the wise women or elders do when consulting about an illness, a decision that needs to be made, or an action that must be carried out. In these cases, the dream, and with it the message sent by beings, dead or living, acquires a prominent agency and becomes a speech act with performative capacity.

Dreams assist in understanding the relationship between what the dreamer narrates, what the interpreter hears, and its materialization in the actions of the community, creating several steps in the performative act of speech: an object, a ritual, a specific action that contributes a new reality to the relationship that began with the dream. This creates community through a chain of connections between different discursive moments, even allowing Wayuu political demands that transcend kinship and articulate them as a people. The cycle of dreaming-communicating-interpreting-ritualizing reconstructs the community, establishing a type of sovereignty in relation to beings that are more than citizens: spirits, the dead, plants, animals, and other entities or actors that come together in this dreamlike circulation. Dreams construct a socio-spatial framework capable of providing protection amidst inter-clan wars, mining extractivism, pandemic diseases, or state actions with biopolitical characteristics.