Anthropological Atheism

Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe
Author(s): Katherine P. Ewing

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 571-583
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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KATHERINE P. EWING
Duke University
Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism

and the Temptation to Believe
THE IDEA OF "GOING NATIVE" is one of the few taboos remaining within anthropology.
Considered antithetical to the social scientist's stance of objectivity and standing as
a professional, going native has traditionally been a term of derision among anthropolo-
gists. Despite an array of challenges to notions of objectivity, the taboo remains in place
and continues to carry a heavy affective load.' Those of an interpretive bent are far more
comfortable embracing the idea of "difference," an epistemological abyss between
anthropologist and informant, than seriously entertaining the possibility of entering or
believing in the world of the people they meet during fieldwork.
The perception of an abyss rests on the assumption that all experience is semiotically
constituted and historically contingent and that anthropologists, embedded in projects
fundamentally different from those of their informants, cannot penetrate the language
games2 of the "Other." I argue, in contrast, that the experience of an abyss between the
interpretive world of an anthropologist and the people he or she gets to know stems
largely from the taboo against going native. It results from a refusal to acknowledge that
the subjects of one's research might actually know something about the human condi-
tion that is personally valid for the anthropologist: it is a refusal to believe. This refusal
constitutes a hegemonic act, an implicit insistence that the relationship between
anthropologist and "informant" be shaped by the parameters of Western discourse.3 In
this essay I explore my own experience with this anthropological taboo. I suggest that
though the possibility of neutral observation on which it rests has been vigorously
challenged at the theoretical level, this stance has been retained in anthropological
practice. Even in experimental ethnographic writing, the anthropologist rarely budges
from this subject position into the embarrassing possibility of belief.4
The act of participation in a particular mode of social life draws us into a common
reality. The fieldwork situation provides not only stimuli to respond to but also new
models for how to respond to them, as the ethnographer struggles to situate himself or
herself in a world of radically changed circumstances. Anthropologists have written
about the experience of culture shock and the threats to identity that immersion in the
field produces.5 My own early experiences in the field were consistent with this literature:
I often felt an intense need to escape into privacy or to see other Americans. Tempta-
tions to believe, to accept aspects of a new worldview as true, were a part of this personal
challenge that I labeled culture shock. But these temptations eventually ceased to be
threatening to me, except as they constituted threats to my identity as an anthropologist.
My experience suggests that, in order to preserve a stance of what he or she imagines
to be professional involvement, an ethnographer may place the act of observing and
recording between himself or herself and others. The effect is not only to shield those
people from the ethnographer's own gradual immersion but also to misrepresent the
"truth" of the field experience in the resulting ethnography, fitting that experience into
existing stereotypes available in Western discourse.
Dreams occupy a privileged place in this issue of immersion and distance. Dreams are
what Foucault in his existentialist days called the roots of the imagination (Foucault
1986:21). Western research indicates that at least one important function of dreams is
to help the dreamer master new experiences and integrate them into existing cognitive
American Anthropologist 96(3):571-583. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.
571
572 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [96, 1994
and affective structures.6 Field-workers and researchers have reported a change in the
content of dreams during the course of immersion in another culture, with the gradual
appearance of elements of the new situation in dreams.7 Western dream research thus
suggests that dreams play an important role in the adaptation of the ethnographer to
the field situation.
But dreams also have a specific significance within the discourse of the people whom
the ethnographer studies. Dream sharing as a communicative event is in many societies
an important social process (B. Tedlock 1987, 1991a). The nature and content of one's
reported dreams may affect one's social status and networks. One may also be expected
to take certain specific actions as a result of having experienced a particular dream.
Under these circumstances, how anthropologists manage their own dreams may have a
major impact on the research situation and play a pivotal role in shaping their relation-
ships with the people they get to know during their research.8 Researchers who shield
their own dreams and other subjective reactions from the interpretive nets of their
informants may remain forever in the status of outsider. Those who share their dreams,
in contrast, may suddenly find themselves insiders in unexpected ways.
Susan Harding, in her review of Alan Peshkin's (1986) study of a fundamentalist
Christian school, argued that Peshkin was so locked into his outsider status that the
fundamentalists' "born-again culture remain[ed] an unfathomed mystery" (Harding
1988:582). In her assessment, Harding echoed the reactions of Peshkin's informants,
who "continuously and vigorously questioned Peshkin's authority to know them, denied
the validity of his culture, and tried aggressively to convert him." Peshkin, in contrast,
argued that "true understanding ... is fully separable from true belief' (Harding
1988:582).
This dilemma dogged my own tracks as I delved into the practice of sufism among
Muslims in Pakistan. Sufis argued that sufism cannot be learned from books; it can only
be absorbed through contact with, belief in, and dedication to one's spiritual master.
They maintained that true understanding is not separable from firsthand experience
and true belief. Given the current sensitivity of the discipline of anthropology to sources
of ethnographic authority, Christian fundamentalist and Muslim sufi objections to the
validity of the anthropological project cannot easily be brushed aside. Practitioners are
right to argue against the box that the anthropologist's representations places them in.
To rule out the possibility of belief in another's reality is to encapsulate that reality and,
thus, to impose implicitly the hegemony of one's own view of the world. The anthro-
pologist's community-reinforced resistance to belief has created a lacuna within the
discipline as a whole. By creating a blind spot, by placing a taboo around the possibility
of belief, anthropologists have prevented themselves from transcending the contradic-
tions embedded in a situation in which the imposition of one's own mode of discourse
interferes with the project of representation.
Geertz, in an often-quoted statement, articulated an interpretive stance of neutrality:
"to put aside at once the tone of the village atheist and that of the village preacher, as
well as their more sophisticated equivalents" (1973:123). This stance was developed in
reaction to the reductive atheism of earlier, especially Durkheimian, social science, but
it remains an atheism nonetheless.9 While espousing cultural relativism, the anthropo-
logical community has maintained a firm barrier against the possibility of belief.1? The
act of entertaining this possibility is not the same as the paradoxical and ultimately
impossible, or at least paternalistic, effort to give "voice" to one's informant; it is the far
more radical concession of acknowledging that the person one is talking to might
actually know something about the human condition and an encompassing "reality"
that is valid for the anthropologist. Though anthropologists do occasionally share
embarrassed stories about fleeting experiences of going native, the problems, the
temptations, and perhaps the necessity of being in the camp of the "village preacher"
have rarely been seriously addressed.'
Ewing] DREAMS FROM A SAINT 573
Anthropologists have found the position of neutrality articulated by Geertz

ient, but the idea that the anthropologist's own beliefs are "irrelevant" or
embarrassing is an illusion--an illusion that is not shared by the subjects of a
logical research. When looked at from a subject's point of view, anthropologists' e
to "bracket" their own beliefs look very different. One scholar who found h
Sefrou, where Geertz did his early Moroccan fieldwork, asked one of the resident
Geertz's beliefs-about whether Geertz was regarded as a village preacher or v
atheist. The resident replied, "Oh, no. He was the outsider atheist."'2 Anthro
communicate their atheism. As they are drawn more deeply into the interpr
social world of the people they are living among, they are often confronted
situations in which it is impossible to demonstrate neutrality: one's actions p
one's true convictions. For instance, when a village saint attempted to give my tw
old daughter some sweets during a ritual celebration, I could not avoid demon
a lack of belief in the curative powers of sweets that have passed through the
a living saint. I was more concerned about the disease-causing properties of the fl
had been crawling on the sweets than I was with the saint's power to bestow bless
my daughter. In this case, we compromised by having him give her an orange tha
peeled for her, but the transaction did not hide my outsider's perspective.
Anthropologists' resistance to belief can be seen even in experimental ethno
that reflexively depict the relationship of anthropologist and informant and
entertain alternative "truths." For instance, in the "Moroccan experiments"-R
Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), Crapanzano's Tuhami (1980), and
Moroccan Dialogues (1982)-the anthropologist remains a sensitive outsider neg
a delicate balance of power across the gulf of the anthropological project.1
implicated in the human relationships that make ethnography possible, most
pologists do not suggest that their own versions of reality have been seriously ch
The representation of clashing realities has been handled differently in various
ethnographies. The clearest admission of a challenge to Western or scientific
have seen is Favret-Saada's account (1980) of her personal entanglement in the
witchcraft that she set out to study in rural France. She states that it was only by believing
that she was able to see the practice at all. In his study of Greek and New Age firewalking,
Danforth's objectivity was more severely challenged by the American firewalkers he
encountered than by his fieldwork in Greece, because the relativist bracketing of the
Other was more problematic in his home territory. Luhrmann, in her study of witchcraft
in modern London, focused on the "problem" of belief. Belief was evidently a problem
for her personally, since she, too, observed people who were very much like her socially
and culturally. Though her research strategy involved becoming initiated into several
practicing groups, her research did not lead her to question her own premises about
rationality. She assumed that belief entails a move from a stance of rationality to an
acceptance of the irrational, an assumption that, it could be argued, is embedded within
the atheistic hegemonic discourse in which anthropologists participate. She asked, "Why
do they practice magic when, according to observers, the magic doesn't work?" (Luhr-
mann 1989:4). Luhrmann made it clear that, despite her initiation, she was one of those
"observers." Her disclaimer was unambiguous: "I never have and do not now 'believe'
in magic" (1989:18). She experienced the benefits of an insider's point of view that
participation confers, but her ethnography leaves the lingering question of whether her
participation entailed misrepresentation of herself to other participants, or whether
ethnographic conventions and the taboo against going native rose up after the fact of
her participation, pushing her to deny her experience in her ethnography. In either
case, the effect of her denial is to make her claims of respect for the people she worked
with sound somewhat hollow.T4
In this essay I write from a position on the fence, which is not at all the same as a
Geertzian neutrality. I neither claim nor deny belief but rather explore my experience
of the anthropological taboo against belief. I address two episodes, one of resistance
and one of temptation-even acceptance-when I, in my own cautious way, allowed

myself to be taken up into sufi practice, to be accepted as a believer by the followers of
a Pakistani sufi saint. In these two episodes, I was the recipient of a dream sent by a saint.
My involvement was not, strictly speaking, volitional. I still find it difficult to examine
these dreams without experiencing tremendous resistance. Though my resistance is, of
course, fed by my own idiosyncratic concerns, immaturities, and other peculiarities, I
now conclude that my extreme reaction stems at least partly from my internalization of
the anthropological taboo against going native, a reaction that I suspect is shared by
many anthropologists under similar circumstances and that shapes the ethnographic
project.
Early in my fieldwork a sufi saint (pir), the first I had met, told me explicitly that he
would come to me while I was sleeping. He also told me that he could reach me, come
to me, in America. I heard many stories from Pakistani followers who had studied abroad
that they had received communications, including help on exams, from their saint. At
that point, I eagerly recorded everything they told me, thinking, as the interpretive
relativist I had been trained to be, about the implications of such beliefs for Pakistani
concepts of self and person. But these pronouncements did not touch me, their
evidence was not evidence for me. Privately, I translated their experiences into Freud-
ian-like developmental schemata and labeled them "magical thinking." Only now, as I
ponder my relationships with these men for this essay, do I feel that they extended their
webs of significance to reach me across the sea and across time.
But the saint who had promised to come to me in a dream managed to do so that very
night. At the time, I was living with a Pakistani family who themselves maintained a pious
but modernist, pragmatic orientation to the world, an orientation that rejected the
"superstitions" of their neighbors and denied the legitimacy of saints. That night I awoke
in the middle of the night, so startled from a dream that I sat upright. My awakening
woke a young woman sleeping on a cot next to mine. She had visited the saint with me
and had been critical of him. I told her about the dream, in which I had seen a white
horse approach me. In the dream I had the clear sensation of something touching my
thumb, which startled me awake. The young woman declared that it had been the saint,
just as he had promised. I marveled aloud about the power of suggestion, thereby
placing the phenomenon immediately within a psychological interpretive scheme in
which dreams come only from the dreamer's internal states, but I was haunted by the
odd sensation of the touch. A feeling of what Freud (1955) described as the "uncanny"
washed over me. On our way to visit the saint the following morning, the young woman
told me that she planned to get some salt blessed by the saint for her brother, who had
been ill, and her mother. She apparently regarded my dream as authoritative and was
at least temporarily convinced of the saint's spirituality and power because of the dream.
My having had that dream was highly significant for people of all backgrounds, a fact
that repeatedly reinforced the powerful impression that the dream had made on me.
But early in my fieldwork, such social reinforcements, though offering temptations to
believe, were not serious challenges to my own orientation and identity. To accept such
beliefs would have meant entering a social world that was beyond the pale for me
personally: I could not imagine taking on what I saw as beliefs characteristic of an
uneducated Pakistani woman. I imagined that I was learning the beliefs of those whose
parochialisms had not yet been eroded by the realities of modem life. I was studying
the wholly Other.
This episode illustrates how impossible it often is for the anthropologist to bracket
his or her own beliefs as irrelevant, to maintain a stance of neutrality. One must first ask
how one goes about bracketing: does it simply mean to hide one's beliefs? In this case,
I could have avoided making the comment about the power of suggestion, though such
a strategy would mean being on guard against spontaneous reactions, a strategy that
makes "participation" difficult. I could not have avoided telling the dream, under the
circumstances, without actually lying about the source of my distress. But once people
DREAMS FROM A SAINT 575
Ewing]
had taken up my dream as significant, my subsequent actions themselves b

statement of lack of belief: I did not become a follower of the saint.
The challenge to my reality became more serious when my research expanded be
the urban village where I was living. Casually, I once reported the dream to a P
psychiatrist who had spent several years in England. After a formal discussion abo
ways in which some of his highly disturbed patients experience their beliefs in sai
invited me to lunch with his family at his home, which adjoined his office. He ask
to tell him more about my research. At some point, almost jokingly, I mentio
dream, and he suddenly became very serious and wanted to know more about that
I found this shift of orientation on the part of a colleague even more jolting
dream experience itself-I was being socialized into the significance of dream
Pakistani whom I had thought shared my interpretive, scientific world, a man
regarded as an authority.
Why was this conversation such a jolt? Put rather facilely, it was a threat to my i
For many anthropologists in the field, myself included, the notebook and th
inscribing kept me at arm's length from those whom I was observing. In her r
Peshkin's ethnography of a fundamentalist school, Harding saw, just below the
Peshkin's "struggle to hold together the pieces of his identity" (1988:58
anthropologists have written openly about such threats to identity, the moves the
made to contain them, and what they learned about the people they were s
through their own subjective reactions.15
It is not that being a white, middle-class American necessarily leads to the t
shattered identity at the prospect of accepting sufis and their powers as a reality.
off to South Asia in search of sufis and other mystics is no unique undertaking. W
was in Pakistan, I knew two other Americans who considered themselves disciples
masters. Studying sufis as an anthropologist was more unusual. I conceptual
defense of my distance from the sufis I met in terms of my goals as an anthropo
was also aware that, like Kondo, Peshkin, and other anthropologists, I clung t
goals to protect something I thought of as my "identity." But as I reconceptu
concerns now, the primary issue seems to have been the taboo against going
which may be even stronger in anthropology than in other academic disciplin
After my early experience of shock at meeting a psychiatrist who did not s
own dismissal of my dream experience as psychological, I decided to pu
intersection of these two interpretive worlds as a research problem. In the lat
of my fieldwork, I worked primarily with businessmen and professionals, many o
had extensive experience in the West and were also actively involved in sufism
context of this research agenda, I talked with a high court justice who was also a d
of a sufi saint. I described the distance I felt I had maintained with a saint we had
together, and he explained that the seeker after God sees just what we are. He rec
our stage of development but is too polite to tell us just what he sees, according u
because we are human beings. When I explained to him the difficulty, the da
sense when I get personally involved, my concern that perhaps my work woul
done at all, he suggested that Sufi Barakat Ali probably realized this and want
sure my work was successful. "The seeker after God treats each man differently,
him and giving him just what he needs at any one moment." But he also com
"It's too bad you couldn't have actually had the experience of sufism yourse
having champagne rather than just a coke." This man himself radiated an aura
and wisdom: his worldview seemed to encompass and perhaps transcend mine. I
couldn't help thinking that perhaps he was right.
At that point, three weeks before the end of my fieldwork, I decided to go off to
Peshawar, where the justice's own saint lived-and, for once, to approach the whole
encounter as a personal experience rather than as anthropological research. In my first
meetings with the saint, who received me cordially and set aside time for two hour-long
meetings with me on our first day, I was restrained and embarrassed. My main concern
576 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
[96, 1994
seemed to be with asking him which direction my life should go in. He talk
to have true dreams. The next day, I made a journal entry.
* * * * *
Last night I had a vivid dream, in which I perceived c

down a city street with my sister. A minibus drove by an
hippie-types in search of a mystical experience. They s
to go to India with them. I said I didn't want to go that w
and I were flying through the air, naked with arms fo
reminiscent of Rococo cupids or angels. We were flyin
indescribable beauty, filled with vividly colored flowe
blue and yellow. As we flew over a lake in the garden, my
a sensation I clearly remember. The next thing I remembe
present. I was in a space of no particular characteristics, a
the presence of a sufi saint, whose physical characteristic
question was, "What should I name my son?" He responded
eyes, like "Ankhyana." I didn't find that satisfactory, so h
for student) and one other which I don't remember. I e
"Sanskritized" and said, "What about a Muslim name?" He looked noncommittal, and
I said, "What about Tariq?" He clearly responded, "No, that should be for your second
son." Then he kept repeating some words over and over, I think they were "I mean, I
mean, I mean ..." I woke at that point and heard a loud, repetitious sound, which had
been assimilated to the sufi's talking. I think it was Nasreen, my hostess, groaning in
pain. It was about three o'clock in the morning.
The next morning, I visited the saint at his home, which was a couple of blocks from
his niece's home, where I was staying. I reported to him that I had a dream with vivid
colors and had talked with a saint in the dream. To my disappointment, he did not ask
me to tell him the dream. He merely said that I would know my teacher, or murshid, in
the years to come. I felt let down by his apparent lack of reaction to what had felt to me
like a highly significant dream.
What do I make of this dream? Can I make any inferences about the significance of
this dream from a sufi point of view? When I described the dream to the woman with
whom I was staying, she expressed the conviction that it had been sent by her uncle. She
explained that he had not asked to hear the dream because he already knew it. She
commented that this sort of thing happened to her all the time in her relationship with
her uncle. He often gave her advice before he had even heard her explain her situation
or tell her dreams. On the other hand, he often communicated this advice in dreams.
She told me several moving stories about how he had guided her in the making of wise
decisions in her life.
As I prepared to write this essay and thought about my dream-from a Pakistani suf
perspective on the one hand and a psychoanalytic perspective on the other-I experi-
enced shame and embarrassment from both perspectives as I tried to leap the interpre
tive gap between them. I began my anthropological analysis of this resistance by thinking
about the dream as an expression of difference, of the incompatibility of translating
between one culturally constituted reality, one language game and another. From this
perspective, Islam and Western thought represent two hegemonic forms of discourse
two incompatible realities.
When it comes to dreams, the Western orthodoxy most relevant to my own experience
(several years in psychoanalysis and training at a psychoanalytic institute) is Freud's
theory as articulated in TheInterpretation of Dreams (1953). At the most basic level, Freud's
Ewing] DREAMS FROM A SAINT
577
premise is that dreams arise from intrapsychic processes within the drea
specifically, are an expression of unresolved conflict arising from infantile
their prohibition. Perhaps my search for a saint, for instance, could be exp
terms of the stresses of culture shock and my anticipation of returning home,
weakened my psychological defenses and triggered a regressive reaction in w
emergence of infantile needs for merger threatened. But reducing my drea
search for a saint to determinative forces emanating from my past not only den
possibility of a sufi explanation, it also objectifies my own projects in a way that
to resist (Foucault 1986).
Within the context of my particular dream, this explanatory model stands in emo-
tionally charged opposition to a sufi explanatory model. According to this model, a sufi
may communicate with a disciple through a dream; such a dream, therefore, has its
sources in an intentionality external to the dreamer, that of the sufi saint who has sent
the dream. If I accept such a proposition, there are implications for my experience of
causality and for my place in a network of human relationships that are incompatible
with the secularized world of the Western social scientist and the psychoanalyst. Little
wonder that it feels so impossible to jump from one interpretive frame to another. Yet
my work with sufis who are also among the educated elite suggests that the leap is not
as impossible as I make it seem, and that my use of this relativist paradigm may be an
evasion of other sources of my discomfort, including the anthropological taboo against
belief, against taking a sufi perspective seriously.
I struggled (and struggle now) to understand this dream as I thought an educated
Pakistani involved in sufism might. I thought back to the high court justice's comments
about the seeker of God knowing me completely, but telling me only what I am ready
for. I remembered a man who had described receiving dreams, being "called" by a saint
years before finally finding him (Ewing 1990). When I allow the representations of such
people to shape my understandings instead of holding one or the other in brackets, I
find that they have solutions to the problem of inconsistency from which I can gain new
understanding. The temptation to believe, to go native, was so strong precisely because
the people who were taking me in, these sufis, shared my scientific world. They found
science no barrier to belief. In fact, one sufi told me that he was sending his son to the
United States to study psychology. He called sufism "Muslim psychology" and clearly did
not see Western psychology as a threat to sufism.
Classical Islamic dream theory can itself be interpreted to encompass Freud's views
concerning the sources of dreams, a strategy used by some people I met. According to
the dream theory of the legendary Ibn Sirin (d. A.H. 110/728 C.E.), whose work is
perhaps the best known example of early Islamic dream theory, the true dream comes
from God and must ultimately be interpreted in terms of its meaning in order to discover
its significance for the life of the dreamer. False dreams, in contrast, must be interpreted
in terms of their causes (Daim 1958:58). Among the primary causes are the demands
of the nafs, or body soul (Ewing 1980:94) .171 have heard Pakistanis equate this body soul
with Freud's id. In this model, even true dreams may be distorted by the demands of
the body soul, which is the source of confused and unclear images. In this interpretive
schema, the elements that embarrass me from a Pakistani perspective can be seen as
emerging from the desires and distortions of the body soul, which are markers of the
current limits of my spiritual development.
The discrepancies between psychoanalytic and sufi dream theories for explaining
many aspects of the dream experience can be dissolved, at least for the Pakistani sufi
trained in Western psychology. But the radical breach created by the possibility of a true
dream remains. What does it mean to have a true dream? If we look at some of the
dissident strands in Western psychology, the theme that emerges repeatedly in reactio
to the determinism of Freud's theories as they have been developed in orthodox cir
is that psychoanalytic theory does not account for creativity and the possibility
transcending one's situation and one's past. This theme has been perhaps most clea
578 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
[96, 1994
articulated within the French phenomenological tradition, specifically by the early

Foucault (before he became a Foucauldian) and Ricoeur. According to Foucault,
"Psychoanalysis explores only one dimension of the dream universe, that of its symbolic
vocabulary, which from beginning to end transmutes a determining past into a present
that symbolizes it" (1986:56). "The dream subject is not a later edition of a previous
form, or an archaic stage of personality. It manifests itself as the coming-to-be and the
totality of existence itself" (Foucault 1986:57).'8 Ricoeur (1970), in his analysis of Freud,
highlights the Hegelian strands lying hidden in Freud's theory that allow for the
possibility of transcendence and the expression of that transcendence in dreams. For
the sufi, the ultimate source of transcendence is God.
Having reconciled two incompatible modes of dream interpretation using analogies
suggested to me by Pakistani sufis (and there are others that I have not developed here),
I was still disturbed by what felt to me like a crucial incompatibility between ideals of
healthy functioning assumed in psychoanalytic models and the sufi ideal of giving
oneself up to one's saint in a relationship of dependence. Psychoanalytic theory has
embedded within it an ideology of independence as a sign of maturity. Sufi theory and
Islam, in contrast, rest on an ideology of maturity manifested in submission and
relationship. But when the dichotomy has been shifted into such terms, it becomes
obvious that we are no longer talking about a dichotomy between science and supersti-
tion but rather are discussing value systems that highlight and perhaps exaggerate
different aspects of human experience. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut came to
recognize only near the end of his life that even mature, independent Westerners retain
a lifelong need for the support of others.19 Both the sufi and the psychologist might be
said to recognize that maturity comes from the ability to internalize our experiences of
relationship and operate autonomously in our daily lives, unswayed by worldly demands
of the bodily soul-in the world but not of it, as the sufi might say.
My intention has been to demonstrate that the epistemological gulf between the
researcher and the subject of study is not as wide as it might seem. The gulf is created,
or at least reinforced, by the anthropological taboo against going native. This taboo is
held in place by a doctrine of cultural relativism that prevents anthropologists from
taking seriously the beliefs and ideas of the people they come to know, a doctrine that
turns these people into "objects" of research. There are other barriers to participation
and understanding that arise out of sociohistorical circumstances, barriers that may
keep the anthropologist an outsider at some level. There are, for instance, certain beliefs
that an anthropologist may not find tempting or plausible to share, such as the idea that
spiritual blessing from a saint may overcome the possible harmful effects of bacteria-
laden sweets, and the anthropologist must here deal with the consequences of acting
the skeptic. But members of the society being studied may struggle with such issues as
well and must deal with the very real consequences of disease. Perhaps relativistic
neutrality is not an appropriate stance in this situation either; a stance of overt
disagreement and engaged debate might be more responsible. It is impossible for
ethnographers not to become a part of the society in which they spend a significant part
of their lives. Ethnographers are drawn, often involuntarily, into the nets of significance
cast by the people among whom they conduct research and are thrust into their
discourse and debates.
One commentator has suggested that there might be an ethical problem with the
anthropologist sharing dreams with informants: the telling of dreams, while it may serve
as an effective entree for the researcher, might also serve as a strategic means of getting
past "local gatekeeping," allowing the researcher to do a kind of cultural "strip mining."20
This certainly seems to have been the fear of the Kiowa holy men who prevented one
of their colleagues from revealing aspects of their belief and practice to the anthropolo-
gist Alice Marriott. A holy man had been tempted to talk with her after they had
exchanged "power" dreams (Marriott 1952:74-87, discussed in B. Tedlock 1991a:168-
169). The anthropologist triggered and was caught in a debate within the community
she was studying. Certainly, the revelations produced by such an intimate r

between an anthropologist and a member of the community can be betrayed
expect that such a betrayal is most likely if, in the act of ethnographic represen
the anthropological community, a stance of neutrality is claimed and the si
of the dream for oneself and for the anthropological project is denied. Clear
important that there be a compatibility between fieldwork strategies and eth
style.
Various approaches to anthropological research have their advantages and pitfalls.21
A strategy in which the anthropologist maintains personal distance, adopts a stance of
neutrality, and works as closely as possible to the scientific model of observation may be
less invasive. The role of the anthropologist is more predictable, so that research subjects
may find it easier to draw whatever boundaries they think appropriate, analogous to the
boundaries drawn by the anthropologist. Conversely, such an approach may be more
likely to treat the subjects of research as objects. It is also unlikely to challenge Western
hegemonies. Participation based on mutuality, developing trust through personal
involvement, as suggested by sharing dreams, runs a risk of greater pain if things go
sour. But a mutuality of this sort also allows us to treat members of another community
as equals. Dreams are one of the places where we, both anthropologists and the people
we study, struggle to create new meanings that transcend difference. Instead of brack-
eting these sources of significance and, hence, the subjects of our research, we should
take them seriously and allow them to play a role in shaping what are ultimately realities
we share as participants in a global human community.
KATHERINE P. EWING is Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, Box
90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091.
Notes
Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Annual Meeting
American Anthropological Association in the session, "The Re-presentation of Dreams," N
ber 21, 1991. It is based on research conducted in 1975-77 and in 1984-85 in Lahore, Pakistan,
which was funded by the American Institute for Pakistan Studies. I would like to thank Charles
Briggs, Karla Poewe, Paul Stoller, Barbara Tedlock, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful
comments on earlier drafts and Laura Graham and Greg Urban for organizing the AAA session.
1. Pratt (1986:28) has noted the controversies, hasty dismissals, and accusations of fabrication
that accounts of going native, in particular those of Castaneda (1968) and Donner (1982), have
stirred within the anthropological community.
2. This is Wittgenstein's term (1953), reinterpreted by Lyotard (1984:10).
3. The phrase "going native" itself indicates the power imbalance. By contrast, we don't think
of South Asians or others who come to the United States as going native, but rather as
"assimilated," or some such phrase.
4. There are exceptions, however. Some anthropologists have explored the implications and
possibilities of a more open stance (Cesara 1982;Jackson 1989; Narayan 1989; Stoller 1989; Stoller
and Olkes 1987).Jackson (1989), for instance, argues that intersubjectivity should be at the heart
of a radically empirical ethnographic practice and representation. Jean Rouch was an early
advocate of "shared anthropology" (Rouch 1989). Paul Stoller has asked why we are so hard-
pressed to admit that Others have much to teach us about the human condition (personal
communication, addressing a theme central to his own work). Narayan has effectively demon-
strated the wisdom of an Indian swami. Karla Poewe, feeling obliged to write under a pseudonym
(Cesara) back in 1982, discussed how the Luapulans of Zambia seriously put into question her
unbelief in Christianity and made her realize her insensitivity toward religious experiences
(Cesara 1982:165-166).
5. For example, see Anderson 1971 and Garza-Guerrero 1974.
6. See Cartwright 1977:131-133, Palombo 1978, and B. Tedlock 1991a:174.
7. See Agar 1980, Anderson 1971, Cesara 1982:22-23, Roseman 1991, and B. Tedlock
1991a:166.
8. See Foster 1973, Marriott 1952, B. Tedlock 1991a, and D. Tedlock 1990.
9. In the field of religious studies, scholars have opted for a stance of methodologica
cism, which at least takes seriously the ontological foundations of the beliefs of r
practitioners, though continuing to bracket the issue of the researcher's belief. See P
for a discussion of the limitations of methodological agnosticism.
10. This barrier is both illustrated and challenged by Danforth's discussion of his own
ship to Greek firewalking. In his ethnography, he admitted that on a personal level he
in" anthropology and physics, rather than in the protective powers of Saint Constantine,
in the field, he "simply bracketed" these beliefs (Danforth 1989:290).
11. For discussions of the emergence of the anthropologist's subjectivity into anthro
discourse and ethnography, see Rosaldo 1989 and B. Tedlock 1991b. Tedlock's focus
intersubjectivity of the field experience as a source of knowledge that is increasin
included in ethnographic accounts. Though she does not in that essay address direc
epistemological problems of taking on the beliefs of one's consultants, she does sug
recommend the possibility of going native, at least to the extent of becoming "bicult
she recognizes the stresses and threats to identity that the ethnographer experience
such immersion.
12. Bruce Lawrence, personal communication.
13. For Moroccan Dialogues, Dwyer decided to go and just be with an old Moroccan friend; bu
once there, he asked standard ethnographic questions and recorded the answers. Though
Crapanzano argued for Tuhami's "truth," he never suggested that Tuhami's truth might ever
have become his own, even for a moment. Their "negotiated reality" seemed more a sensitiv
negotiation of relationship than of reality.
14. Her denial of having gone native, even for a moment, is in sharp contrast to the stanc
taken by MargotAdler (1986) in her study of the current practice of paganism and witchcraft in
the United States. Adler, a prominent journalist and reporter, gave a careful treatment of source
and data, but she wrote as a witch and demonstrated how paganism is reasonable for her. Ther
are also anthropologists who have become apprentices in the field. Paul Stoller served as an
apprentice to Songhay sorcerers. In the book In Sorcery's Shadow (Stoller and Olkes 1987), he
describes how he went as far as he could go before he found himself unable to move forward on
his path of apprenticeship. But he does not thereby dismiss the validity of the project itself
Desjarlais (1992) reports on his own experience of trance healing as a shamanic initiate in Nepa
15. See especially Briggs 1970 and Kondo 1990. Ultimately, Kondo's effort to account for he
profoundly disorienting experience of being simultaneously Japanese and not-Japanese shaped
her ethnographic project and led her to articulate a theory of "multiple subject positions" (Kondo
1990:44), which she then used as a framework for analyzing Japanese self-constructions. Oth
theories have also been constructed to account for the threatening nature of such experienc
that have been glossed as "threats to identity." One approach has been to objectify the phenome-
non by analyzing it in clinically descriptive terms, labeling it "culture shock," a syndrome wit
recognizable stages, thereby psychologizing and distancing the observer from himself or herself
(see, for example, Garza-Guerrero 1974).
16. Several of my colleagues in other disciplines such as history and religion have becom
Muslims. One person, who did not actually convert, nearly did so after a powerful dream that he
experienced while visiting the shrine of the saint Nizam-ud-Din Aulia in India.
17. The conditions of the dreamer that shape a dream may include mental or spiritual state
such as the presence of a desire or other waking preoccupation; immediate situation, such as
fright felt immediately before sleep; and temperament of the individual. Such dreams have their
source in bodily and what I would call psychological stimuli.
18. Foucault distinguished his position from that ofJung by saying that "strictly speaking, th
dream does not point to an archaic image, a phantasm, or a hereditary myth as its constitutin
elements" (Foucault 1986:66).
19. Kohut discussed this need in terms of the psychological function served by the Other,
downplaying its social component by calling it a need for "selfobjects." The selfobject helps the
individual maintain a "cohesive" self experience (Kohut 1984:47).
20. Charles Briggs made these observations in his role as discussant when this material was first
presented.
21. This point has been made by Rosaldo, who argued that, therefore, "social analysts should
explore their subjects from a number of positions" (Rosaldo 1989:169), a point with which Iwould
certainly agree.
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Anthropological Atheism

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Anthropological Atheism

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Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe

Author(s): Katherine P. Ewing

Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism

American Anthropologist 96(3):571-583. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.

Anthropologists have found the position of neutrality articulated by Geertz

and one of temptation-even acceptance-when I, in my own cautious way, allowed

had taken up my dream as significant, my subsequent actions themselves b

Last night I had a vivid dream, in which I perceived c

articulated within the French phenomenological tradition, specifically by the early

she was studying. Certainly, the revelations produced by such an intimate r

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