This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment on sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated by a range of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of current anthropological and psychological research, the volume accounts for local dream theories and how they are situated within distinct cultural ontologies. It considers dreams as a resource for investigating and understanding cultural change; dreaming as a mode of thinking through, contesting, altering, consolidating, or escaping from identity; and the nature of dream mentation. In proposing new theoretical approaches to dreaming, the editors situate the topic within the recent call for an "anthropology of the night" and illustrate how dreams offer insight into current debates within anthropology’s mainstream. This up-to-date book defines a twenty-first century approach to culture and the dream that will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as other disciplines such as religious studies, the neurosciences, and psychology.

Dreams: The Basics presents introductory and accessible information about what dreams are, where they come from, what they do, and how to understand and work with them. This book demythologises dream interpretation, with each chapter inviting the reader to ask questions about their own dreams and try exercises. Chapters explore social dreaming, how culture impacts dreams, and their use in counselling, therapy, and analysis. They offer suggestions about how to engage with and develop a skill set to work with dreams. This book summarises the latest thinking and research in this subject, as well as exploring key analytic theorists such as Freud, Jung, and their successors. A glossary is included, along with useful diagrams and images. The book is aimed at high school and A-level students, undergraduate students, and anyone interested in dreams.

As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions—or even paradoxes—in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity—challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution—in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself. Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation—even in failed movements—has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era.

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.

This insightful volume is designed as a series of invitations towards living attentiveness, examining how we all make the “other”, through “projection” (blaming and shaming the other outside ourselves), our enemy with whom we prefer not to dialogue. All of us are faced daily with individual and collective manifestations of the Shadow – all that we fear, despise and makes us feel ashamed. Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow, emerging as it did from his personal confrontation with the realms of his unconscious self, is one of the most important contributions he made to the understanding of humanity and to depth psychology, that realm where the focus is on unconscious processes. The contributors to this book reframe his concept in the context of contemporary Jungian thinking, exploring how the Shadow develops in an individual’s infancy and adolescence, and its culmination, where collective manifestations of the Shadow are addressed. The book offers a voyage through a series of fundamental Shadow concepts and themes including couples relationships, disease, organizations, Evil, fundamentalism, ecology and boundary violation before ending with a chapter designed to help us integrate the Shadow and hold contra-positions with patience and a tilt towards mutual understanding, rather than being locked in polarities. This fascinating new book will be of considerable interest to the general public, Jungian analysts, trainees, scholars and therapists both in training and practice with an interest in the inner world.

Russian Literature and Cognitive Science applies the newest insights from cognitive psychology to the study of Russian literature. Chapters focus on writers and cultural figures from the Golden to the Internet Age including: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sologub, Bely, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Baranskaya, and contemporary online discourse. The authors draw on a wide array of cognitively-informed fields within psychology and related disciplines and approaches such as social psychology, visual processing, conceptual blending, cognitive narratology, the study of autism, cognitive approaches to creativity, the medical humanities, reader reception theory, cognitive anthropology, psychopathology, psychoanalysis, Theory of Mind, visual processing, embodied cognition, and predictive processing. This volume demonstrates how useful a tool cognitive science is for the analysis of literary texts.

"This work illustrates how people like Smith Islanders claim their lives in an ecologically changing unstable place"--