The Role of Dreams in Religious Enculturation, Seminarium, Artykuły nieskatalogowane
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The Role of Dreams in Religious Enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea
Author(s): Roger Ivar Lohmann
Source: Ethos, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 2000), pp. 75-102
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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Ethos.
The
Hole
of
Dreams
in Religious
EnCulturation
among
the
Asabano of Papua
New Guinea
ROGER IVAR LOHHMANN
ABSTRACTDreams play an important and often underesti-
mated role in cultural transmission
because
they provide per-
sonal experiential
verification
of incoming information.
Dreams
facilitated the reception of religious beliefs among the
Asabano
before, during, and after their conversion to Christianity.
As-
abano hold the "classic"view that dreams are real experiences
of the soul. Therefore,dream encounters with supernaturals
provide evidencefor such beings'existence and power. TheAs-
abano case suggests that, as evidence, dreams are vital, espe-
cially in the transmission of extraordinaryreligious ideas.
inYakobvillage,allisfreshfrom
the
rains
thatfall
almost every night. The sun shines warmly upon the drenched land,
and the Fu River can be heard rushing far below. The rainforest-cov-
ered mountains begin to poke through the mists that envelop them,
while smoke from morning fires sifts through the leaf thatching of
houses. Gentle murmurs grow into conversations, babies cry, and sleepy
dogs occasionally yelp as they are slapped to get out of the way. Asabano
people awaken to such a scene each day, with their dreams still fresh in their
minds.
On such a morning, after the mists had cleared away and the sun was
shining intensely to the accompaniment of the songs of a dozen species of
birds, a young woman named Lin, after finishing her breakfast of sweet
potatoes baked in the ashes of the hearth, was deep in thought. She pro-
ceeded up Samlai hill, which rises above the village to the house of the
dablesebobu: the white
man from America who had come to live with her
people and learn about their culture. I was interested in religion, but I was
not a Christian, which made me anomalous in Asabano eyes. Lin had
28(1):75--102.
Copyright
?
2000,
Amnerican
Anthropological
Association.
I
ntheearlymorning
Ethos
76 0 ETHOS
promised the day before to
come and talk with me about her religious
beliefs. We sat on the floor with cups of coffee, and I
asked her if she
thought the Holy Spirit and angels truly exist. "In my dreams, angels come
and sleep with me at night," she answered. She
then continued:
Last night was my first time to see an angel; he was a man, and
he said, "Do you know
my name?" I said, "No."And he said, "Myname is Isaac." He was a white man. He came
down and said, "Let's go up." I said, "I'm afraid my faith isn't strong enough, and
that
God will reject
me." He replied, "No, don't worry, let's go." We flew like birds without
wings and came to a big door. The angel knocked on the door,1 and the Lord opened
it, saying to the angel, "Come inside." The
angel entered and asked the Lord, "Maythis
woman come inside and see your house?" The Lord said, "All right, you call to her to
come inside." The angel called me inside,
and the Lord got a big book and put it on a
table. He
wrote and said to the angel, "Take her around so she can see inside my
house." In the house I saw pictures of men and
pretty flowers. The Lord is a very
handsome young white
man.
After we went around, the Lord said to the angel, "Show her the book I'm writing in."
I stood next to him. The Lord said to me, "I won't take
everyone, only a few will come
to me." He said the
names
of
all the important men and women at Duranmin, Onai,
Wani, Mandi, Diyos [all active in the church]; and said those whose
names he hadn't
called he will throw
into the fire. Then he said, "That's all." The angel said, "Iwanted
to show you these things." The Lord said to the angel, "Take this woman
back to
her
own place now." So the
angel took me to the door and pushed me out, saying, "Go
back." I protested, "We came a long way, how do I get back?" I then fell down, and I
hit Semi, Walen's little girl who had come to
sleep with me. She cried, and then I woke
up.
So this story the angel gave me. I thought, "I have to come tell
you
this." I dreamed
it only last night. I had
agreed
to come
and interview today, so this morning I dreamt
a lot. This is the first time I had this kind of dream. Now this afternoon, I'll tell others
this dream in church. Now that I've seen this I know the Lord is there
and it's changed
my belief a little. Having seen this, I think I must truly believe in this now.
Narratives such as this one were told to me very
frequently during
the
year-and-a-half
of
my fieldwork among
the
Asabano, in 1994-95. My re-
search focused on religious change. I extensively interviewed
virtually
all
adults and older children about their
religious
beliefs to document belief
patterns
remembered from
precontact days, the conversion process, and
current beliefs.
I concentrated
my inquiries on transmission patterns and on local
forms of evidence invoked in accepting and rejecting beliefs. When I asked
people to describe their religious beliefs and the reasons
why they
found
them compelling, very often dreams were
given
as an
explanation.
As-
abano attribute a
high degree of experiential reality to
the dream
(aluma).
Elders and missionaries assert the existence of certain mythological be-
ings, and when Asabano, in turn, have dream encounters with these be-
ings, it is easy for them to believe that they in fact exist:
seeing
is
believing.
Dreaming is, therefore, a catalyst for cultural
transmission, providing per-
sonal
experiential
verification of
incoming information.
The Role of Dreams among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea
0
77
To the Asabano, dreams represent the wanderings and adventures of
one's disembodied soul. As real experiences, dreams are a valued source
of
information. Asabano describe dreams either as actual events directly
witnessed, or as symbolic messages displayed by other beings.
Dreamers
learn characteristic forms of information from interactions with the dead,
with benevolent forest beings,
with malevolent
place spirits,
and with
characters from recently introduced Christian mythology. The beings en-
countered can impart knowledge to dreamers by telling them in words, or
by showing them images.
The use of dreams to communicate
with
powerful beings
has not
changed through the conversion to Baptist Christianity in the 1970s. In
fact, dreams played
a
major
role in the initial
acceptance
of
Christianity,
and remain important in the maintenance of faith, and in the
encultura-
tion of the next generation. In Asabano thinking, dream encounters with
angels, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God provide
direct evidence
for
the
existence and power of these supernatural beings.
THEASABANO
The Asabano are a small, ethnolinguistic group, numbering about
200.2 They are swiddeners and small-scale pig raisers, living on the fringe
of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, at Duranmin in Sandaun Province.
They are culturally part of the Mountain Ok or Min sphere,3 centered to
the south at Telefomin, but linguistically are tied to the Sepik-Ramu lan-
guage groups to the north.4
Asabano traditional religion revolved around male initiations into se-
cret myths and magicoreligious practices that were marked by progressive
presentations of formerly tabooed foods. Offerings for hunting and garden-
ing success were made to wild humanlike beings called
wobuno,5
and to
ancestors, whose bones were kept in sacred houses or rock shelters. Vin-
dictive spirits of stones, trees, and waters could be persuaded through of-
ferings to cease causing sickness.
Stephen (1995:131) observes that through understanding dream
theories, local notions of self-its partitions, propensities, abilities, and
place in the cosmos-are revealed. Indeed, my understanding of the As-
abano
conception
of
personal existence
in life and death became clear only
when I
investigated ideas about sleep.
According to traditional and contemporary Asabano religious belief,
each
person has two souls: the alomo kamalanedu (little soul), and the
alomo kamayadu (big soul), each of which plays an important role in life,
as well as after death. Sesi, a vivacious, hardworking young mother ex-
plained what happens when a person is dreaming:
78 0 ETHOS
The big soul goes around at night and shows us good dreams while we are alive. When
we sleep, the little soul watches the body, and the big one goes around. So dreams are
what the big soul sees when it's travelling around. What we see in dreams will happen
later. When I have a bad dream I wake up afraid, and then I pray and the Lord shows
me a good dream.
Analogously, at death the two
souls part ways. The little soul remains
a potentially dangerous presence
at the gravesite, while the benevolent big
soul travels to one of several villages of the dead, located in tabooed sec-
tions of forest.
Local beliefs have been influenced by a cascade of events in the past
half century. During the 1940s, Asabano heard stories of the arrival of
white people in nearby areas. Shortly afterward they heard aircraft over-
head, and neighboring groups brought the first steel axes to trade. In about
1951,
two men, Bledalo and Sumole, walked through the mountain passes
to Telefomin, where the nearest government station had been established,
and made first contact. The first official contact was made by an Australian
colonial patrol to their territory
in
1963 (Marks
1963).
The Asabano were converted to Baptist
Christianity by Papua New
Guinean missionaries from Telefomin. The
mission was lead by a well-
educated and charismatic pastor named Diyos, who arrived in 1974.
In
1977, a "revival"movement involving revelatory dreams, visions, and Holy
Spirit possession began at the Asabano mission and Bible college at Duran-
min, and soon spread throughout the region (Brumbaugh 1980:16-19;
Brutti 1997; Gardner 1981:32-34; Hyndman 1994:131-142; Jorgensen
1981; Morren 1986:300-301; Robbins 1995; 1997a; 1997b; 1998. For a
discussion of dreams
in African churches, see
Charsley 1992).
As a conse-
quence, traditional sacred houses
and relics were
destroyed,
and
virtually
all Asabano embraced
a charismatic form of
Christianity.
I argue that because individual
Asabano often cited their dreams as
sources of reliable supplementary
information on
newly
learned
religious
matters, dreams played
a
significant part
in their
religious
enculturation
before, during, and after the conversion process.
As
such,
dreams are a
significant factor in cultural transmission-or more specifically,
in cul-
tural reception.
ENCULTURATION
ANDCULTURAL
TRANSMISSION
A word of explanation is necessary regarding my generalized
use of
the terms
enculturation and cultural transmission. Many of the religious
beliefs that
I describe
moving
between individuals
initially
came from a
source
external to Asabano society. Therefore, some readers could object
to my use of the term enculturation to describe this process. Likewise,
in
some quarters transmission is used to refer only
to cultural
learning
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