The Mimetic Nature of Dream Mentation: American Selves in Re-Formation

Based on over a decade of research, this book connects dream studies to cognitive anthropology, to perspectives in the humanities on mimesis, ambiguity, and metaphor, to current dream research in psychology, and to recent work in economic and political relations. Traveling the dreamscapes of a variety of young people, Mimesis and the Dream explores their encounters with American cultures and the identities that derive from these encounters. While ethnographies typically concern shared social habits and practices, this book concerns shared aspects of subjectivity and how people represent and think about them in dreams. Each chapter grounds theory in actual cases. It will be compelling to scholars in multiple disciplines and illustrates how dreaming offers insights into twenty-first century debates and problems within these disciplines, bringing a vital theoretically eclectic approach to dream studies.

Jeannette Mageo is Professor of cultural anthropology at Washington State University. Her work focuses on dreaming and the self, on child development, and on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Her manifold writings on dreams show that cultural models tie the most profound aspects of subjectivity to politics and public culture, inscribing relations of privileging and marginalization within the self that generate anxiety and resistances registered and negotiated in the imaginary realm.