Dreams of Change: The Innovative Role of Altered States of Consciousness in Traditional Melanesian Religion1

How Evaluating Dreams Makes History: Asabano Examples

“…As Marshall Sahlins (1981: 8) pointed out, "The great challenge to an historical anthropology is not merely to know how events are ordered by culture, but how, in that process, the culture is reordered." Dreams themselves certainly reorder culture even as they reproduce it (Stephen 1979). My point is that not only dream experiences, but also epistemic assessments of remembered dreams, are the sort of culture-enacting-and-transforming historical events to which Sahlins alluded, because when dreams are considered to have been true, they inspire actions and events.…”

‘Dreaming is Another Power!’: The Social Significance of Dreams among the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea1

“…I have attempted elsewhere to document the importance of the role of dreams and other altered states of consciousness in Melanesian societies (Stephen 1979a). Largely from scattered references and inferences from incomplete data, I have argued that such phenomena, as well as being valued as religious experiences, were significant in facilitating change and adaptation to change.…”

“…Jung 1964Jung , 1976Hadfield 1974: 113-116;Jones, 1976: 169-171;Megroz 1936: 163-184;Hall 1977). This potential can presumably be regarded as a human universal and is reported for many traditional societies including those of Melanesia (Lincoln 1935: 44-98;Stephen 1979a).…”

Big men and the conversational marketplace of Tanna (Vanuatu)

“…Firstly, they dream. A person may contact authoritative voices (ancestors, principally) in dreams and thereby receive an authorized message that he can deploy within the island's conversational field (se Stephen 1979;. Secondly, men get drunk on kava {Piper methysticum).…”