Dreaming in the Contact Zone
Zulu Dreams, Visions, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5772628 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Chidester (0000-0003-2957-8669, University of Cape Town, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-53 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jaarel/lfm094 |
| OpenAlex | W2085662186 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 15 |
In Primitive Culture (1871), E. B. Tylor supported his theory of religion, animism, by referring to reports about "savage" dreams. Citing Henry Callaway's Religious System of the Amazulu (1868-1870), Tylor invoked the dreams of a Zulu diviner, a "professional seer" who becomes a "house of dreams," as a classic example of animism because "phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep." In the original account, however, these spirits were not coming "to talk" to the diviner. They were coming to kill him. By situating nineteenth-century Zulu dreams and visions in a colonial contact zone of transcultural relations and asymmetrical power relations, we find a hermeneutics of dreams dealing with indeterminacy, an energetics of dreams, linking dreams to ancestral ritual, which is radically disrupted, and a new interreligious space of resources and strategies for negotiating and navigating within a violent world
Animism · Archaeology · Colonialism · Indigenous · Power (physics · Sociology · Vision · Zulu · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy · Religious studies · South African History and Culture
Universalising the particular? God and Indigenous spirit beings in East Kimberley
Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship
Conversion and the Problem of Discontinuity in the East African Revival
Women as Diviners and as Christian Converts in Rural South Africa, C . 1880–1963
Pesquisa de Campo
Communing with the Gods
Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman
Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa
Aspects of clinical practice and traditional organization of indigenous healers in South Africa
The Influence of Urban/Rural Background, Gender, Age & Education on the Perception of and Response to Dreams among Zulu South Africans
Ancient Greek and Zulu Sacrificial Ritual a Comparative Analysis
Parsing God
On Divination and Analogous Phenomena Among the Natives of Natal
On the Limits of Savage Religion
Lord of the Sky-King of the Earth
The Man who would be Inkosi
Zulu dreamscapes
Outward and Visible Signs of Conversion in Nineteenth-Century Kwazulu-Natal
Isangoma
The social stuff of revelation
Social Aspects of First Fruits Ceremonies among the South-Eastern Bantu
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2023 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |