Dreaming Culture - (Culture, Mind, and Society) by J Mageo (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Dreams seem the most private territory of experience. Yet Dreaming Culture argues they are a space in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency. Through an innovative "dream ethnography" from college students in the northwestern U.S., this book contributes to recent research on dreaming and the brain in psychology and continuing research on dreaming and the self in clinical psychology and psychological anthropology. Dreaming Culture uses critical theory to understand power relations embedded in cultural models, a perspective often lacking in cognitive anthropology and in psychological studies of self and mind"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Dreams seem the most private territory of experience. Yet Dreaming Culture argues they are a space in which we practice, consider, question, and adapt cultural models of the self, gender, sexuality, relationships, and agency. Through an innovative "dream ethnography" from college students in the northwestern U.S., this book contributes to recent research on dreaming and the brain in psychology and continuing research on dreaming and the self in clinical psychology and psychological anthropology. Dreaming Culture uses critical theory to understand power relations embedded in cultural models, a perspective often lacking in cognitive anthropology and in psychological studies of self and mind.

Review Quotes

"Mageo provides fresh entrée into relations of culture and mind through dreaming. Advancing both theory and method, she elucidates cultural shaping of the human imagination. Psychological anthropologists, cultural psychologists, dream analysts, and scholars of American culture will find an ethnography richly textured with insights into the inter-animation of society and personal experience." - Janet Dixon Keller, editor of Ethos, the Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

About the Author

Jeannette Mageo is Professor in the Anthropology Department at Washington State University, USA. She is author of Theorizing Self in Samoa: Emotions, Genders and Sexualities (1998) and Dreaming Culture: Meanings, Models, and Power in U.S. American Dreams (2011). She has published many articles and edited numerous volumes in psychological anthropology and Pacific ethnography.