Where Have All Our Naps Gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the Consolidation of Sleep, and the Historiography of Emergence

Bibliographic Data

ID2994056
AuthorsMatthew Wolf‐meyer (0000-0001-7249-9726, University of California System, corresponding author), Matthew Wolf-Meyer (University of California System)
Year2013
Volume24
Issue2
Pages96-116
Publication date2013-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropology of Consciousness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1053-4202 • E-ISSN: 1556-3537
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/anoc.12014
OpenAlexW1897713391
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited8

In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present; more specifically, I am interested in Kleitman's disallowance of napping in his scientific protocols, which may seem incidental until one apprehends the lack of napping as therapeutic treatment in modern sleep medicine. By forwarding a conception of historiography building on Raymond Williams' "structures of feeling" and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of immanence, I show how the work of William Dement in the 1970s to found a medicine of sleep and the eclipse of biphasic sleeping patterns as a biological and social possibility is indebted to Kleitman's scientific work. The modification of sleep is also the modification of society itself; and, as Kleitman argued, the harnessing of nature can lead to the finer entrenchments of human nature and society

Archaeology · Consolidation (business · Feeling · Historiography · Sociology · History · Psychology · Sleep and Wakefulness Research · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub