Paper short abstract:

Visual field-recording techniques have increasingly become subjects of anthropological reflection. Dreams may also provide rich visual record of fieldwork. This paper explores how dreams are narratively, interpretively and intersubjectively shaped, to reflect on fieldwork and its artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

In recent times, visual field-recording techniques of various kinds (e.g., fieldnotes, drawing, film-making) have increasingly become subjects of anthropological attention and reflection. Ethnographer's dreams may also provide a rich visual record of fieldwork, one that also contains a great deal of information about the dialogic nature of fieldwork.

Writing about drawings in fieldwork notebooks, Taussig (2011:33) asks a rhetorical question. 'Is it fair', he says, that these are 'generally considered to be at best mere aids, steps towards a published text that obliterates all traces of them'; and he identifies an associated issue: 'what is lost in translation?' This account of a single dream in the fieldwork context and successive Bardi interpretations of it provides an illustration of what may be lost in translation: how these interactions unconsciously shaped the way I remembered the dream.

This paper considers dreams as a kind of visual memory artefact. One of my aims is to highlight the intersubjective, dialogic nature of participatory anthropological fieldwork, and the socially co-constituted aspects of memory and thus 'head-notes' that anthropologists draw on. Such reflections may be important in an era in which anthropologists' fieldnotes may be taken as stand-alone facts, or as unmediated records of an Indigenous culture.