Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness

Bibliographic Data

ID20071714
AuthorsRoger Ivar Lohmann (0000-0001-6495-7985, corresponding author)
Year2003
Pages189-210
Publication date2003-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueDream Travelers (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781403982476_10
OpenAlexW2479353927
ISBN9781403982476
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited9

Dreams and the supernatural are perhaps the two cultural realms most infused with imagination. The Asabano of Papua New Guinea's Sandaun Province share with one another numerous accounts of supernatural experiences that occur not only in dreams, but also in trance and alert awareness. I collected many of these during fieldwork among them in 1994–95. Nearly twenty years earlier they had abandoned their traditional religion and adopted Baptist Christianity. Supernatural encounters experienced in pre-conversion times influenced the content of later experiences in Christian times. Both indigenous and exogenous cultural forms are found in each person's experience, and spirits of local and foreign myth borrow characteristics from one another. Likewise, memories of supernatural experiences in one state of consciousness shaped and encouraged such experiences in other states. In a daily cycle, memories of the day's events or "day residues" shape dreams, and memories of dreams or "night residues" shape waking experiences, particularly those that rely heavily on imagining.KeywordsReligious ExperienceSick PersonTraditional ReligionTree SpiritDream ExperienceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Christianity · Consciousness · Ethnology · Indigenous · Literature · Mythology · New guinea · Sociology · Trance · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Psychology

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