Dreaming as Precognition in Lowland South America

Gordon Ingram *

Introduction: Some Approaches to Dreaming

Dreaming is an experience that is difficult to understand. We realise, upon waking, that although some aspect of our self may have been involved in the events and images of the previous night, we cannot have engaged in them physically in the same sense as we engage in our waking life. The question thus arises of what dreams mean: if they are not to be understood as literal experiences of the self, then just what is it that they are trying to tell us? In twentieth-century Western thought, this question has generally been answered with reference to the dreamer's past (when dreams have not been dismissed altogether as meaningless fantasies). Psychoanalysts from Freud onwards have seen dreaming as "regressive" - an attempt by the unconscious to work through mental problems left over from past (especially childhood) experiences. Meanwhile neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists have tended to view dreaming as more a product of the recent past - as the fixing and reinforcement of everyday memories within the brain.
In contrast to the Western emphasis on past experience, a wide range of societies have interpreted the disguised meanings of dreams by referring them to the dreamer's future (Basso 1987: 86). For individuals within these traditions, the potentialities of the future are accessible to consciousness by the phenomenon of precognition or foreknowledge, just as memories of the past are brought into consciousness by processes of "normal" cognition. Such a tradition was in fact present in European society during Graeco-Roman and medieval times, until it was undermined by Cartesian rationalism, for which the only true reality was waking reality (cf. Price [1986] on the elaborate interpretations of Artemidorus of Ephesus, the most influential Greek writer on dreams). However similar beliefs and interpretative practices have survived for much longer in the indigenous societies of the Americas, where they are still widespread. In particular, the peoples of the Amazon Basin and other parts of lowland South America show a remarkable degree of uniformity in the way in which dreaming is seen as a process of precognition.
Most recent studies of dreaming in these societies have focused on the meaning and context of dream-beliefs. This present-day sensitivity to the indigenous understanding of what goes on during sleep is in stark contrast to the approaches used by earlier anthropologists. Without an appreciation of how our notion of "reality" is culturally defined, Edward Tylor was unable to comprehend the conceptual schemes into which other peoples fitted their interpretations: he believed that "the savage or barbarian has never learned to make the rigid distinction between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education" (Tylor 1903: 445, quoted in Tedlock 1987a: 2). Tylor's attitude may seem outdated today - it has long been clear that the perception of "reality" can never be rigidly separated from the culturally defined processes of mind which he glosses as "imagination" - but at the time it was thought that the new methods of natural science could provide positive solutions to problems in understanding the human mind. By gathering empirical data from different cultures with which to test psychological hypotheses, anthropology was to be an important part of this endeavour. So Seligman analysed dream-reports from various English colonies in the 1920s, in an effort to demonstrate universal links (postulated by Freud in his concept of the "type dream") between particular surface imagery or "manifest content" and the "latent content" of the dream's underlying meaning (Tedlock 1987a: 20-21).
Key assumptions about the possibility of studying the objective content of dream-reports across different cultures continued into the 1940s and 1950s, with the "Culture and Personality" school of psychological anthropology in the United States. Here the aim was "the creation of a corpus of manifest dream contents that were then analyzed, counted, and tabulated in various ways for numerous reasons" (ibid.: 21). Dorothy Eggan (1952, 1961) was especially vehement in claiming that dreams represented an excellent opportunity for looking at the effects of culture on individual psychology. Meanwhile in a helpful early review of the anthropology of dreaming, R. G. D'Andrade (1961) suggested six possible cultural universals of dreaming; of particular importance, he thought, was the cultural use of dreams as a means of contacting the supernatural. His concern with indigenous interpretations, and with dreaming as a method of gaining symbolic information within a specific cultural system, to some extent anticipated more recent interest in the social context of dreaming and dream-beliefs. One theme of my argument will be that dreaming, being inherently subjective, should be seen as having a "use" rather than a "function": it represents a resource which can be appropriated for future ends, rather than merely an adaptation to past or present circumstances. Moreover in South America it is perceived to be useful often because (like trance and ritual) it offers the dreamer contact and communication with supernatural beings, who have special knowledge of the future.
By the 1960s and 1970s, as structuralism became popular, there was a growing feeling within anthropology that the reduction of complex dream-reports to stereotypical "manifest contents", which could then (supposedly) be objectively compared between cultures, was unsatisfactory. A few researchers tried to avoid this kind of ethnocentric, positivistic approach by concentrating instead on the internal logic governing the expression and interpretation of dreams. An early example of the structuralist perspective is Roberto Da Matta's (1970) analysis of the premonitions experienced by the Apinayé of central Brazil. Interestingly he found that belief in dreaming as precognition was similar, in structural terms, to more general Apinayé beliefs about omens (which also appears true for other South American societies): dreams formed just one of four groups of premonitions, alongside abnormal behaviour of certain animals, malfunctioning of parts of the human body, and deviation from the norm in certain activities or objects. This shows the status of dreams as a semiotic resource, a pool of possible signs to be shaped by interpretation; they should not be separated too rigidly from events in waking life that may serve the same purpose.
A later article by Adam Kuper (1979), also developing a structural approach to dreams, is better known than Da Matta's work. Both are concerned with the explicit application of Lévi-Strauss's methods of structural analysis - originally developed for systems of North and South American Indian myths - to the dream-report as a text. Kuper views dreams "as modes of argument, in which the dreamer moves from one proposition to another through the application of general transformation rules until a resolution of the dream problem is achieved." (ibid.: 647-648) He illustrates this with a reworking of George Devereux's psychoanalytic study of a Plains Indian's dreams.
Rather than focusing solely on the content of dreams, Philippe Descola (1989) - a student of Lévi-Strauss - makes a structural study of dream-interpretation (pp.13-14 below). He argues that the interpretation of dreams by the Jivaroan Achuar of Upper Amazonia follows similar logical rules (of permutation and inversion) to those used by structural anthropologists in the interpretation of myths; and hence that they must represent structurally similar fields of experience. Both Descola and Waud Kracke (1987; pp.32-33 below) point out the parallels between the structure of associations revealed in dreams ("primary process thinking", in psychoanalytic terms) and Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, the process by which he sees myths as being constructed. However, structuralist investigations of both myths and dreams sometimes suffer from a failure to consider fully the role of the dream-teller (or myth-making bricoleur) as a conscious agent; it sometimes seems as if the narrative of the myth or dream simply represents the resolution of essentially unconscious forces. Descola, in contrast, is keen to stress how dreamers are constantly selecting and modifying various rules of interpretation to suit their purposes. From this perspective, both dreams and myths represent resources which their narrators can use to orient themselves within space and time.
Outline of the Argument
First and foremost, what I want to show in this study is that the role of dreaming in many parts of lowland South America is very different from the role it plays in modern European society. The differences are not limited to the possibility of using dreams as a form of precognition. I have already described some parallels between dreams and myths: these do not just represent a structural isomorphism, but involve a certain mingling of content and imagery between the two fields of experience. The affinities they share are recognised in South America: the Jivaro, for example, see dreaming as accessing a kind of mythical time-scale, which does not merely exist in the distant past (as does our own), but is still bound up with the present (Descola 1996; pp.15-16 below). I have also mentioned the continuity between dreaming and waking omens: this reminds us that not all traditions share the European identification of dreaming as something that only goes on during sleep. In fact, a discussion of hallucinogenic visions is necessary for a proper understanding of dreaming among the Jivaro and other peoples, because they do not necessarily draw a rigid distinction between the two experiences. Dreams and visions, along with myths and rituals, are intimately linked in that all allow individuals a means of contacting and making sense of the invisible world. This is very different from the notion of dreams as passive objects to be apprehended by the dreamer that has taken hold in Western culture; in many other traditions, dreaming transforms a subject's orientation towards the World, and is linked to entirely different ideas about time and human agency. In these cultures dreaming is an interactive and transformative process, which may be deliberately sought after.
Looking at the differences between South American and European conceptions of dreaming can help us to open up fresh perspectives in our own understanding of cognition. I pointed out above that there is a deep-seated modern bias in connecting the content of dreams to events in the dreamer's past. Aside from the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, recent experimental studies have emphasised the function of the neural correlates of dreaming in reinforcing sensory impressions and "fixing" memories in the brain. Yet in societies where dreams are endowed with predictive power, the memories they incorporate will be conceptually linked to the dreamer's future as well as to his or her past. This reminds us not to neglect a consideration of the future in our studies of cognition: but this viewpoint is hard to reconcile with a positivistic approach in which dreaming is seen as a kind of psychological adaptation. More helpful is a basically phenomenological approach, focusing on the experience of dreaming as it is understood (and socially defined) by thinking human subjects. Indeed it is interesting to compare the phenomenological ideas of Edmund Husserl - in particular his concepts of retention and protention - with some South American ideas about dreaming.
In order to bring out some of the basic differences in human understandings of the dreaming-experience, I look first at the Jivaro peoples of Upper Amazonia (Fig. 1), drawing in particular upon the ethnography of Philippe Descola (1989, 1996) and Michael Brown (1985, 1987). Both of these authors share a theoretical focus on the place of the individual within society (understandably, since the Jivaro are a very individualistic people). This leads me to look at some of the more subjective aspects of transformation through dreaming: how dreaming may be used to construct a certain image of the self, and how it is related to the individual's construction of time. As I will show, Jivaroan conceptions of time, as well as of dreaming, are fundamentally different from current Western ideas.
I then turn to the Guajiro Indians of northern Venezuela (Fig. 1), who have been studied by Lawrence Watson (1970, 1981; Watson & Watson-Franke 1977). The strong empirical leanings of Watson's work prompt me to consider longer-term and larger-scale transformations, and especially the changing context of dreams in Guajiro social relations as they are affected by acculturation. I want to show that the notion of "adaptation" is inadequate for comprehending the role of dreaming among the Guajiro, and hence that their ideas, though different, are not necessarily inferior to concepts used by Western science: where science sees dreams from the perspective of the past, they see them from the perspective of the future.
My first two chapters make some use of a subject/object dichotomy, focusing in turn on the meaning of dreams to the individual, and on their place in a wider historical context. However in my final chapter I try to undermine this dichotomy, since my argument is precisely that a study of dreaming in South American cultures can help us to escape from traditional European assumptions. I compare two anthropologists' approaches to separate cultural traditions in central Brazil (Fig. 1): the Kagwahiv, as studied by Waud Kracke (1981, 1987); and the Kalapalo of the Upper Xingu, studied by Ellen Basso (1985, 1987). I argue that the psychoanalytic model of conscious and unconscious mind (which has come to have a pervasive influence on Western thought, and is explicitly employed by Kracke) has led to some glaring misconceptions of human existence, and is of little use in understanding the particular Amazonian experience of dreaming. Ultimately, a more phenomenological model of consciousness seems to fit better with indigenous ideas.


Chapter 2: The Jivaro - Dreaming and the Individual
The Jivaro languages are spoken on either side of the (long-disputed) Peru/Ecuador border, in a sparsely-inhabited region where the Amazonian rainforest meets the Andean foothills. Four separate groups can be identified: the Shuar, or "Jivaro proper" (Harner 1972), of the Ecuadorian foothills; the Achuar of the Ecuadorian/Peruvian lowlands; and the Aguaruna and the Huambisa of the Peruvian montaña marginal zone. These groups share a large number of cultural similarities, as well as linguistic affinities (Achuar and Shuar being more or less mutually intelligible). The boundaries between them are far from rigid, and contact ranges from inter-ethnic raids (though these are gradually dying out) to trading-partnerships and marital exchange. However, important differences between them have recently been produced due to differential processes of acculturation. In particular, western groups like the Shuar - being closer than their eastern neighbours to the ancient centres of population in the Andes - have found their way of life increasingly under pressure, even as they are forced to contend with the ecological changes brought about by the settlement of colonists on their lands. The Shuar themselves have been used as agents of acculturation by North American missionaries, who entrust them with persuading their Achuar trading partners to cease their internal warfare, build landing-strips for the missions' aeroplanes, and settle down in villages (Descola 1996: 55). The organisation known as the Shuar Federation has also been active in integrating both Shuar and Achuar into the wider Ecuadorian society, as well as energetically representing their interests in political circles.
Yet up until about the 1930s, the Jivaro had proved remarkably resistant to Western incursions and influences, despite their proximity to the Andes. No doubt their independence and reputation for violence contributed to the initial shortage of ethnographic literature (of a genuinely scholarly variety) concerning them, the most widely-used source being Michael Harner (1972), who lived among the Shuar. Since Harner, who worked in the late 1950s, study of the Jivaro has greatly intensified; the best-known English-language or translated texts are Michael Brown's (1985) study of the Aguaruna, Philippe Descola's (1994) work on the socialisation of nature among the Achuar, and The Spears of Twilight (1996), Descola's stimulating ethnography-cum-travelogue (also about the Achuar). These authors have all tended to be drawn to the sense of individuality and egalitarianism of the Jivaro: for instance Descola (1994: 108-135) focuses on the house (inhabited by an adult man, his wives, children and sons-in-law) as the only social unit of any strength and permanence; while Brown (1987) discusses the importance of human agency and free expression in Aguaruna society (see below). Egalitarianism and the lack of formal social institutions have a restraining influence on the role of an Achuar juunt or "great man", who must adopt a "fatherly or elder brotherly manner" (Descola 1996: 291) towards the relatives he leads in war. This conceptualisation of "political" relations in terms of close kin-relationships highlights the fact that among the Jivaro there are no corporate groups corresponding to the lineages and descent-groups of traditional anthropology, and hence there are no formalised associations of kin over which one man might be set as a permanent lineage "chief". Apart from the "great man", the one category the Jivaro have which could be defined as in any way an objective social role, rather than a subjective expression of a person-to-person relationship (as with kinship-terms), is the shaman (uwishin in Achuar and Shuar, iwishin in Aguaruna). It is quite common for men of influence (for female shamans are rare) to become shamans in order to further their own prestige. Yet despite the material benefits they enjoy (in the form of plentiful access to Western goods), it seems clear that shamans enjoy no formal authority except in the spheres of healing and of visionary knowledge (Harner 1972: 201).
Dreams and Visions
Although, for convenience, I use the word "dreams" to describe the forms of imagery subjected to interpretation by the Jivaro, the categories they use to classify their own mental experiences do not coincide exactly with our own. The Aguaruna verb kajamat (to dream) applies equally to the experience of seeing hallucinogenic visions induced by psychoactive plants: the key element of its meaning seems to be a certain privacy of experience, coupled with drowsiness and often with lying down (Brown 1987). One hallucinogenic plant, called datem (genus Datura), is taken specifically to provoke dreams of game animals, which are favourable omens for hunting (ibid.). The most desirable form of deliberately-induced experience is the ajutap (the Shuar/Achuar form is arutam) vision, which consists of an encounter with an ancient "warrior soul" - the ajutap himself (ibid.: 162-166; Harner 1972: 91, 138-139; Descola 1996: 299-314). The content of such visions is remarkably similar across the different Jivaro groups. In the first part of the vision, the subject must confront the ajutap in the form of a terrifying apparition - typically a giant jaguar or pair of anacondas, a great ball of fire or blast of light, or a gigantic disembodied head. If he or she (though as with shamanic powers, it is comparatively rare for women to experience this type of vision) can muster enough courage to touch the apparition, the ajutap spirit will appear in human form in the second part of the vision, and prophesy future success in battle.
An ajutap or arutam vision can be obtained only after the strictest of privations, involving sexual abstinence and dietary restrictions, as well as the ingestion of substantial quantities of psychoactive plants, and culminating in a lonely vigil in the forest. However, once he has achieved his goal, the vision-seeker is not just guaranteed success at some time in the future: he immediately gains great self-assurance, often accompanied by a change in personality that is quite obvious to those around him (so that a man may be mocked if he claims to have had an arutam vision while remaining manifestly weak of will [see Descola 1996: 303-304]). Such visions may be repeated many times, until the man who has experienced them becomes a "warleader" or "great man" who is invulnerable to all physical harm, and can be killed only by a shaman.
What is striking here is the conscious motivation behind it all. Ambitious men - and for the Jivaro, with their fierce sense of individual independence, that means nearly all men - repeatedly strive to obtain a vision, despite the great hardships (and real physical danger) involved. Those who have plainly met with ajutap command great respect partly for that reason - a factor which surely helps to foster the self-assurance engendered by the vision. The very content of the vision, as well as its cultural context, involves conscious motivation: the subject must strive to make physical contact with the object of his fear. Finally the dream-imagery itself follows a stereotypical pattern - one which was freely admitted to several ethnographers, and hence was probably general knowledge within the societies concerned. Yet to a European like myself, used to thinking of dreams as manifestations of the unconscious mind, this is all rather strange. One way of understanding it is to look at the ajutap experience as Brown (1987: 164) does, in terms of the creation of order from disorder: "By means of immense personal effort, a warrior establishes control over his dream imagery and therefore increases his ability to structure events in the world." This ordering of experience is linked, I will suggest, to the individual's construction of time, and to his or her development of a particular orientation towards the World.
With the exception of ajutap visions, the Aguaruna have no consensus on what causes their dreams and visionary experiences. Some see them as arising from the out-of-body wanderings of the iwanch or "shadow soul" (known to the Achuar as the wakan, "the seat of intentionality and true meaning" [Descola 1989: 440-441]); but others argue that this is impossible, since such soul-loss normally entails illness. Brown (1987) suggests that this lack of consensus may be due in part to a loss of interest in dream-interpretation - perhaps a result of the growing influence on Aguaruna society of Christianity, the market-economy and other aspects of Western culture, which has led to a decline in the traditional practice of small-scale warfare and the public declaration of warriors' dreams that preceded it (compare Harner 1972: 139-140, for a discussion of the former importance of such customs among the Shuar). On the other hand, it may simply be that the Aguaruna, along with the other Jivaroan peoples, are generally much more interested in the implications and results of their dreams than in their specific causes.
This interest comes out clearly in the way Jivaro people classify their dreams. Descola (1996: 103-119) describes three main types of dreams recognised by the Achuar (in addition to the arutam visions): these are kuntuknar, which prefigure success in hunting; mesekramprar, which indicate some form of impending misfortune, especially death; and karamprar, a type which differs from the other two in that it represents "a real dialogue of souls" (ibid.: 115) with the persons (living or dead) or supernatural beings who appear to the dreamer, rather than consisting of a system of signs which can be interpreted to predict the future. For the first two categories, it is clearly the implications of the kuntuknar or mesekramprar that are important in classifying the dream. Even for the karamprar dream, it makes no difference, in terms of typology, whether the dreamer converses with a living acquaintance, a dead ancestor, or a "powerful being": what matters is that he or she is engaging in a real form of communication, and getting a literal, rather than metaphorical, message, which can often be used to advantage in later life (ibid.: 113-117). A similar emphasis on the implications of dreams can be found among the Aguaruna, who distinguish between waimakbau visions, foretelling success in warfare, and niimagbau visions, foretelling general prosperity and good health (Brown 1985: 59). For both groups, it is irrelevant whether the visions are deliberately sought through taking psychoactive plants, or occur in the form of dreams during sleep, indicating once again the very secondary importance of what a European might see as the direct causes of such experiences.
Because of the insights into their future which they believe they can obtain, the Jivaro - in common with many Amazonian peoples - naturally attach a great deal more importance to recalling and recounting their dreams than do most Europeans. Every time one wakes during the night, one's dreams are briefly recalled - perhaps even communicated to one's spouse - until "the final morning awakening provides a rich collection of images to be interpreted" (Descola 1996: 110), an activity which takes up several hours just before dawn. In a masterly analysis, Descola goes on to show how Achuar interpretation does not rely on fixed rules (as has been the case with many Western systems of interpreting dreams, such as the classical system developed by Artemidorus of Ephesus [Price 1986]), but is essentially a creative process, open to individual manipulation. Instead of focusing on the properties of dream-signs as objects, the interpretative process concentrates on getting at the structural relations between the various elements of the dream-imagery. The dreamer then derives the dream's "message" by applying what are essentially logical operations, such as structural inversion, homology, or symmetry, to its "content" (cf. Descola 1989).
In this way, if a woman dreams of threading glass beads, she does not dwell upon the desirable properties of these artefacts, but upon:
the altogether ordinary operation of placing small, hard, hollow objects upon an elongated, flexible support - an operation identical to, albeit a symmetrical reversal of, the operation that she performs when she removes an animal's intestines, making soft, solid objects slip out of a hollow support or container that is likewise flexible and long. (Descola 1996:107-108)
This is therefore an example of a kuntuknar dream, foretelling success in hunting by reminding the dreamer of an activity that takes place after a successful hunt. But there is no set element in the dream's imagery that automatically makes it a kuntuknar: rather, it is a matter of identifying it as such after reflecting on the possibilities of logical inversion and other methods of interpretation that it offers. It is the same with the mesekramprar dreams that augur misfortune, and in which images of the natural world, such as a prowling jaguar, are taken as warnings of impending death, war or other calamities. Thus a mesekramprar dream "seems to be a kind of inverted kuntuknar" (ibid.: 112), since the latter portrays success (by hunting) in the animal world using the imagery of human activities
. But both categories may be set against the karamprar dream, which is immediately established upon waking as a record of direct contact with a "powerful being", is subject to literal rather than metaphorical interpretation, and in many ways has more in common with the arutam vision.
Jivaroan Time
According to Descola, the Achuar have no conception of historical time as we understand it. Few of the people he lived with knew the names of their own great-grandparents; and their awareness of "the past" rarely stretched back beyond their own childhood memories. The alliances that people inherit from their parents, and that they make themselves, replace altogether those formed by their grandparents. In contrast, Europeans like myself, "who set so much store by the perpetuation of lineages and lands and who live in part on the patrimony and fame amassed by our ancestors", have a very different conception of time (Descola 1996: 67-68). Time to us is like a road along which our ancestors stretch back into the distant past, handing us heirlooms - such as our surnames and our genes - which we must pass on, in turn, to our own descendants. This idea of time as a linear road, and of the past as a legacy, in part is formed by our social institutions, ethnic groups and genealogies, which loudly proclaim their "roots" in the past; and in part it helps to preserve them, by means of tradition. With no tradition of mutual association between groups among the Achuar, there is no basis for the foundation of permanent institutions. More than that, with no means of calculating family-relationships beyond three or four generations, there can be no formation of fixed lineages, which in anthropological accounts of many other societies have been taken as fundamental units of social organisation. Lacking a concern with the roots of the present condition of the world, and with the genealogy of social relations, it is hardly surprising that the Achuar tend to be less concerned with the causes of their dreams than with their potential effects.
Any event which must lie further back than the last three or four generations tends to be consigned by the Achuar to the time of myth (Descola 1996: 223-227). This is well illustrated by the myth of the Ajaimp, a race of cannibalistic giants who are now extinct from the Earth. Some of the Achuar apparently believe that these Ajaimp were responsible for making the polished stone axes that they occasionally find in their gardens - despite the fact that, according to the reports of pre-war explorers, the Jivaro themselves were using these axes no more than three generations ago (ibid.). On the whole, however, the myth of the Ajaimp is unusual because it includes a dimension of time, in that the giants are now thought to be extinct. Most myths completely lack this dimension, for they are not situated back along a linear scale of time, somewhere in the "past"; instead, the time of "powerful beings" is in some sense adjacent and connected to the "present". The events recounted in myths "certainly took place in another time, a confused period when distinctions of appearance and topography were not yet established in the universe, but a time still close enough to the present for the figures peopling it to continue to intervene in the daily life of today" (ibid.: 224).
And so in spite of the explanation of the stone axes in the myth of the Ajaimp, Achuar myths are generally not concerned with the origins of things (in contrast with those of the peoples of North-West Amazonia, for example). Their cosmology is not linear like the Western tradition, in which historical figures (e.g. the Greek heroes) and places (e.g. the Garden of Eden) are situated far back in time. Nor is it cyclical like that of India, with its wheel of life coming round again and again to the same points. It is essentially atemporal - or rather, perhaps, it is extremely short-term. Conceiving of time as "the passing of a single year" (ibid.: 225) - unobtrusively marked by the disappearance of the Pleiades between mid-April and mid-June - the Achuar have little use for longer-term distinctions of cosmological time. Hence there is an interpenetration (after a fashion) of different spheres of reality. People in this world can contact and communicate with the powerful beings of myth by means of magical songs (anent); and they in turn can communicate with us when they meet us in our dreams and visions. Communication is made possible because the blurred distinctions of cosmological time allow a kind of sharing of meaning between the different perceptual worlds of "real" people and powerful beings.
Underlying Jivaroan attitudes to history and myth is a metaphysical conception of time that is very different from most European ideas. The European tendency - going back to Greek thinkers such as Aristotle - is to see time as a series of discrete events, linked together by a chain of causality. However the Achuar - at least in Descola's account - seem to structure time more in terms of a relational network of potential happenings. So a kuntuknar dream may offer the potential of a successful hunt; but whether a man actually goes hunting will depend just as much on the circumstances in which he finds himself, such as whether it is a dry or rainy day - on the context as well as the content of the dream. "A kuntuknar dream is a necessary condition for hunting, then, but not a sufficient one. . . . This necessary precondition does not so much specify a result as render an action possible." (Descola 1996: 109) Moreover it must be assumed - given the flexible system of interpretation - that a man who already has it in mind to go hunting will search the more carefully through his own (and his wife's) dreams of the previous few nights, looking for the patterns of relations that are characteristic of kuntuknar. So going hunting is not merely the logical consequence of dreaming one of a set of fixed signs: it transpires from the selective interpretation of potential relations, influenced by subjective desires and values, as well as by other people and the external circumstances.
The way in which Jivaroan attitudes towards time are largely structured by potentiality, rather than causality, can be seen still more clearly, perhaps, in the interpretations they give to arutam or ajutap visions. To the Achuar, it seems that each arutam vision is a vague, immaterial entity until it becomes actualised in a living person. "In its disembodied form, arutam is purely a possibility of destiny, a motivating principle aimed at no visible existence in particular. . . . It is thus acted upon as much as activating, constantly revitalized by those whom it animates" (Descola 1996: 312). It is also significant that the arutam is thought to leave the body of someone who is dying, before returning as a new vision (in the dead person's form) to someone that he or she knew. Trying to explain the interaction between arutam and someone's personality, a shaman with whom Descola spoke used the analogy of a radio-battery that never dies, and which becomes stronger after leaving a strong man, but weaker after leaving a weak man. It represents, therefore, "no mechanical predestination", but an interactive entity which has a tangible influence on those who see it, in accordance with their personality (ibid.: 311). The real strength of what would seem to be a very vague concept lies in its appearance as a definite, culturally-patterned vision, which can be held in the memory. Similarly among the Aguaruna, "it is the evocativeness of the dream text's imagery that makes it both effective in the practical sense . . . and persuasive in the social sense." (Brown 1987: 165) By integrating practical skills with spiritual knowledge and mystical imagery - like the shamans of the nearby Canelos Quichua (Whitten 1978), who share many cultural similarities with the Jivaro - Aguaruna warleaders gain a measure of respect and social control that enables them to shape their own destiny all the more effectively.
Conclusion
I have looked at three different aspects of the Jivaroan conception of time, and how they relate to dreams. Their idea of historical time is much more short-term than the European conception of history, being essentially confined to their own personal memories and those of their acquaintances. Their idea of mythological time is not concerned with roots and origins, and progression or regression, but represents a reality which touches on our own at certain points. Finally their idea of metaphysical time is not couched in terms of a linear chain of causality, but the complex interaction of influences and potentialities. Ideas about time can be characterised in terms of transformation, in the sense that by persisting through time, form provides a link between past and future, yet is also subject to alteration. So, for example, a dominant European conception of the transformative power of time is based on progression (a fixed path from the past to the future); and a dominant Hindu conception is based on rotation (a wheel turning around). However these conceptions have in part been created to serve the needs of powerful institutions in these traditions: as Barbara Adam (1994) notes, the linearity of traditional Western frames of reference is rooted in the "commodification" of time in modern capitalist society. By contrast, the dominant Jivaroan conception of time is looser and less structured. It appears to be grounded in various forms of interaction and communication between conscious entities - the forms I have highlighted here being communication with powerful beings in dreams and arutam visions, and subsequent interpretation of these dreams and visions. In this way, Jivaroan time acknowledges the transformative power that face-to-face social relationships can have on the individual's personality, a power which has perhaps been underemphasised in recent Western, objectivist traditions.
In this chapter, I have been concerned above all with setting out some of the basic differences between the Jivaroan and European world-views. Highlighting these differences involved using a slightly artificial dichotomy between the "objectivity" of Westerners, with their linear conception of time, and the "subjectivity" of Amerindians, with their more relational view of time. However I doubt if there is really much difference between everyday experiences of people, objects and activities (including dreaming): even in the most rational and scientific of societies, one's perception of time is bound to be fundamentally self-centred. What differ are the frames of meaning and interpretative schemes which are culturally prescribed to make sense of aspects of everyday experience - and more than that, to justify and legitimate a certain social order. It is in these circumstances that the Western tendency towards impersonal, institutionalised linear progression becomes clear.

*Gordon Ingram
Anthropologist
-E-mail: gordon_ingram@hotmail.com