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Article
Abstract This paper offers both an intertextual method for
analyzing dreams and a model of fantasy processes in culture.
The method consists in interpreting a dream in light of other
narratives in a culture that share a motif with it. There is a
spectrum of tales in cultures, ranging from founding myths rooted
in the political realm to the highly personal proto-narratives we
dream. I argue that narrative motifs from stories that circulate in
public life move into peoples dreams, where these motifs
represent shared meanings. In dreams, motifs are combined in
novel ways; these combinations are, in effect, thought about these
meanings. The narrative spectrum, together with this symbolic
traffic, comprises a cultural fantasy system that is compelled by
socially stylized desires and shared anxieties rooted in historical
experience. The method and the model are explicated and
illustrated through the analysis of four Samoan dreams from a
larger collection.
Key Words culture history, dreams, fantasy, intertextuality,
narratives, Samoa

Jeannette Marie Mageo

Washington State University, USA

Intertextual Interpretation, Fantasy

and Samoan Dreams
When I resided in Samoa from 1981 to 1989 I collected over 500 dreams,
including sometimes 30 or more dreams from a single individual. I did
not have occasion to look through the dream collection as a whole at
that time; when I did in the 1990s, something began to emergea
forest from the trees. I realized that in many of the dreams were narrative motifs that I recognized from Samoan tales and knew to be significant from my work on Samoan ethnohistory (see Mageo, 1992, 1994,
1996a, 1996b, 1998). In the dreams, these motifs were combined in
intriguing ways. What I gradually discovered was an intertextual way
of interpreting dreams that, in turn, suggested a model of the relation
between dreaming and culture.

The Narrative Spectrum

The narrative nature of dreams has been the subject of much investigation in psychology (Foulkes, 1985; Hunt, 1989) and in the humanities
Culture & Psychology Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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(Kilroe, 2000; States, 1993, 2000). Through analysis of several Samoan
dreams, I argue that dreams form the extreme subjective end of a
cultures narrative spectrum. This spectrum runs from highly conventionalized tales, like founding myths constitutive of the political realm,
to written and oral literatures, to theater, to film and television, to
personal histories and accounts, and to the more disordered, spontaneous proto-narratives we dream. A cultures narrative spectrum may
also include song lyrics, jokes, proverbs and speeches, when these
forms of discourse tell stories or refer to them. It also extends to more
visual and embodied arts (Hawaiian dance or some ballets, for
example) when they borrow motifs from stories, although these are
beyond the scope of this article.1
Along with Ricoeur (19848), I see meaning as narratized: that is, as
organized in narratives. Motifs can be looked upon as basic units of
narrative thought. Like folklorists, I take a motif to be an action theme,
along with the characters or objects with which it is associated. I will
show that motifs from many different kinds of culturally salient stories
can be found in dreams.2 Within the dream, motifs work like Kristeva
says language works in an intertext. For Kristeva (1986a), each literary
text is the absorption and transformation of another such that each
word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) (p. 37). As literary texts
allusively re-evoke other texts, so dream motifs evoke motifs from
other stories. This evocation, I argue, is part of dreams signifying
process.
Kristeva (1986b) says that intertextuality refers not only to the ability
of one text to pass into others, but also to the ability . . . to exchange
and permutate them (p. 112). Dreamers, likewise, permutate the motifs
of other narratives. In the dream, I propose, a motif from one story told
in the subjects culture is combined with others, along with original
elements supplied by the dreamer. This melding lends original nuances to
each motif and operates like a commentary on the meanings they signify. I
take the dreams message to lie in these mutations, which represent
imaginal thought about the dreamers unique relation to shared
cultural experiences, as well as creative responses to these experiences.
This intertextual way of looking at dreams works most powerfully,
therefore, when several dreams from different individuals sharing a
motif are analyzed together; then the similarities and differences
between each dreamers handling of the motif reveals a range of
possible responses to experiences shared in culture.
A cultures narrative spectrum, together with the symbolic commerce
that traverses it, I call the cultural fantasy system. Cultural fantasy
systems are not static but alive, humming with a conversational
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exchange, like that which I will demonstrate exists between dreams and
other kinds of stories. This conversation, I will show, is compelled by
culturally stylized desires and shared anxieties that arise out of
historical experience. Interpreting Samoan dreams in relation to cultural
fantasy systems, therefore, will allow us to witness how history affects
people subjectively. By fantasy, then, I do not refer only to the
individuals wishful imaginings into which one might retreat from the
disappointments and frustrations of daily life. Cultural fantasies are not
divorced from what one might call cultural realitythat is, from
economic and political realms. Indeed, a host of thinkers in anthropology and psychology have long seen fantasy as a mode of thinking
and as the counterpart of logical processing (for examples, see Bruner,
1986; Fernandez, 1991; Horton & Finnegan, 1973; Lvi-Strauss, 1970;
Neisser, 1967; Price-Williams, 1999; Stephen, 1989, 1995; Werner, 1973).
Like States (2000), I take dreams to be narratized ruminations
without communicative intent, similar to what Vygotsky calls inner
thought. For Vygotsky (1962), inner thoughts are verbal ruminations,
albeit highly condensed (p. 145). In inner thought, a single word is so
saturated with sense that it is something akin to thinking in pure
meanings (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 148). Dreams too are a kind of thinking
in pure meanings: I will demonstrate that they utilize highly condensed versions of a motif, obscure to the waking mind, to represent
and think about a problem. By bringing waking tales that share a motif
(but also story fragments in allusive phrases, jokes, song lyrics, and so
forth) to bear upon a dream, one can expand the motif and discover
the larger cultural and historical context to which it refers. We know
that dreams continue the concerns of waking life (Cartwright, 1981,
p. 245; Foulkes, 1993, p. 13). These are not, however, purely personal
concerns but ones we grapple with along with others in our society.
And these concerns are symbolically conveyed in stories that circulate
in a cultural world. Through motifs, dreamers register, think about,
and talk back to related stories in culture. By doing so, dreamers
partake of a conversation between the public and private registers of
human thinking that is deeply implicated in social change.
Cultural models organize various life domains (DAndrade &
Strauss, 1992; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). Narrative motifs carry cultural
models. So, we will see that in Samoa the narrative motif of marrying
exalted people carries a model of sexual relations as hypergamous.
When models are more or less adequate to an individuals experience,
I suggest, dreams are pleasant and obviously fulfill wishes. But there
are historical phases when cultural models prove inadequate for many
people. Colonialism and postcolonialism, for example, are historical
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phases during which local models are deeply challenged. When
cultural models are not adequate for an individual, then dreams that
bear upon these models are anxiety provoking and may evince adaptations of these models. This process, I will show, is visible in the way
dreams change the motifs of other stories.
If dreams respond critically to cultural meanings and models, this
posits an emotive and embodied aspect of the person that remains
open to perceptions and reactions not readily cognized in his or her
cultures linguistic system but that can be represented in imaginal
forms.3 Levy (1973) calls such perceptions/reactions hypercognized
(p. 324). Finding no modes of expression in language, Levy believes,
they are then driven back to the body for representation by default;
and, he suggests, they may be represented in dreams (1984, p. 225).
The relation between culture and the self, in this view, is dialogic, and
dreaming is one venue in which this dialogue takes place. Understanding the dreaming mind, therefore, can contribute to models of the
self and culture as fluid and emergent (for examples, see Gone, Miller,
& Rappaport, 1999; Rasmussen, 1999).
Looking at dreams in this light suggests that, while less intentional,
they resemble Jungs active imagination. Indeed, through this therapeutic procedure Jung (1976) aimed to mimic processes he believed
native to the psyche. In active imagination, individuals utilize
creative and spontaneous aspects of mind to ponder problems that
beleaguer them. In dreaming, people use their imaginations to ponder
problems that are their own but that they also share with others in their
communities. In the dreams of young Samoan women, we will see,
these problems are represented through culturally inscribed characters
and objects like kings, hair, lakes and horses, and through action
themes, like marrying a colonel or being cut off by an aggressive male
with evil intent. This is not to say that dreams are a personified inner
other who is trying to help us. Dreams are imaginal thinking done in
sleep that, like all thinking, works on what disturbs usas the oyster
works the pearl.

Related Approaches
Bettelheim (1976) and more recently Stephen (1998, 2000) argue
persuasively that those fantasies described in psychoanalytic theory
constitute deep grammars of the imagination, although even these
show cross-cultural variation. Obeyesekere (1990), for example, tells us
that in India and Sri Lanka the dynamics of what Freud called the
Oedipus complex, while still present, involve a fantasy of the father
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killing/castrating the son rather than vice versa (what he calls the
Ganesa complex) (pp. 71200). A cultures fantasy system revolves
around culturally distinctive versions of panhuman issues that arise
out of family conflicts, but also, we will see, around issues that arise
out of the collision of cultural models and history.
The idea that cultures have shared narrative motifs that are internalized by individuals and transformed has parallels in Vygotskys
activity theory (1976, p. 57). Vygotsky argues that children internalize
the social relations in which they develop. By re-creating these relations
within the self, they forge an interior world. I argue that people internalize the narrative environment in which they develop. Storytelling
is an important means by which young children, together with family
members, repeatedly construct personal experiences in cultural terms
(Miller, Fung, & Mintz, 1996). The role of narratives in changing
personal and cultural identity is well documented (Gone et al., 1999;
Miller, 1994; Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990, p. 292;
Peacock, 1984; Schiffrin, 1996; Shaw, 1994; Somers, 1994). By re-authoring shared stories to express personal experience, dreamers change
cultural meanings. Over time, changed meanings are likely to bleed
back into culture.4
The creative character that I ascribe to dreams has been ascribed by
others to fantasy processes. Stern (1938), for example, says that fantasy
produces in the subjects inner experience a new reality that transforms the person and profoundly changes his or her relation to the
world (p. 330). Josephs (1998) argues similarly that fantasy is a way in
which people reconstruct their worlds meaningfulness: fantasy is a
world-making, or re-making process (p. 185). Fantasy involves the
transformation of the present personworld relationship (p. 180).
These transformations occur in many kinds of fantasies: Josephs
examines them in internal dialogues with a beloved deceased at the
graveside. But most anthropologists have been reluctant to ascribe
dreams a salient role in re-making cultural worlds.
Stephen (1995) tells us that people are normally unconscious of their
imaginal thinking; it can become consciousness and useful only with
special training (p. 99; see also Noel, 1983). Yet narration is a mode of
imaginal thinking in which we normally engage (Bruner, 1986). While
we are aware of the meaning of a logical argument, however, we may
be unaware of certain dimensions of meaning in the stories we tell.
Narratives, then, might be conceived as a liminal mode of thought and
communication, fluttering between conscious and unconscious; their
semi-opaque nature permits people to think about anxiety-provoking
topics they would otherwise feel the need to avoid. This is not to say
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that the intent of dream narratives is to disguise latent dream thoughts,
as in the Freudian model; rather, the opacity of meaning in dreams
provides protection and provokes interpretation all at onceas is clear
in the hermeneutical practices that surround the dream in so many
societies.
Obeyesekere (1981) argues that religious specialists change shared
meaning systems by taking a public symbol and investing it with
deep personal significance. He studies ecstatic priestesses in Sri Lanka
who believe that they spontaneously develop matted locks. Matted
locks are an important symbol in Sri Lankan religious traditions.
Obeyesekere theorizes that the involuntary character of these womens
relations to their locks indicates that these locks have come to symbolize their childhood conflicts. For him, these womens articulation of
private experience with public symbols (what he calls subjectification) creates personal symbols, which can then become meaningful
to others (pp. 169182). It also removes these symbols from deep
motivationthose enduring compulsions that derive from the family
dramas of early life. But, Obeyesekere (1990) avers, dream symbols
lack this remove (p. 54).
While closer to emotional and embodied experience than personal
religious symbols, like them, I argue, dream motifs interdigitate individuals most private responses with elements of public meaning
systems. Sri Lankan priestesses personal symbols represent novel
usages of shared religious symbols and rituals and are instances of
hypnomantic thought through which, Obeyesekere (1981) says,
culture is created (p. 176). Not only visions but dreams too are
instances of hypnomantic thought, which I simply call imaginal
thought. If the visions of mystics or artists move us, it is because they offer
us resolutions to problems we encounter in dreams.
My idea of the narrative spectrum resembles Kristevas idea of the
intertext, but in its original formulation (1986a) this idea referred to a
relation among literary texts; in later versions intertextuality came to
refer to a limitless field of signs and tropes in which a vast range of
human productions were read as texts. I am interested neither in the
broad circle of all cultural texts, nor in the narrow circle of literary
texts, but only in a spectrum of storiesa spectrum that bears symbolic
traffic. Tedlock (1981) presents intertextual analysis as one of a number
of common folk approaches to the dream (p. 314; see also Degarrod,
1989). Here, by intertextual, she refers to an approach one might call
comparative prophesizing: the dream message is taken to be prophetic
and compared to other forms of prophecyRomans reading the
entrails of birds, for exampleto confirm or disconfirm a dreams
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interpretation (Tedlock, 1981, pp. 319320, 327329). In my version of
intertextual analysis, one compares the dream narrative only to other
stories that have been in cultural circulation during the dreamers
lifetime.
For the most part, ethnographers like Tedlock (1981, 1982) have
focused upon documenting indigenous systems of dream interpretation and recording them. This is the approach of ethnopsychologists,
who seek to discover a cultures way of understanding psychological
phenomena like emotion, the self or the dream.5 At the other extreme,
Hall and Van de Castles (1996) content analysis is a comparative
method that has been utilized by many researchers to discover psychological variation between cultures (Domhoff, 1996, pp. 99129). My
intertextual method seeks to discover local psychologies through
dreams, rather than indigenous ideas about dreaming; however, unlike
content analysis, it does so by reference to a cultures own symbol
system as carried by its narratives. In this respect, I offer a set of intermediate concepts, poised between the shifting sites and histories of
ethnography and the transcultural models of Western science.

The Data and the Method

Approximately two-thirds of my 61 dreamers were young women in
their late teens and early twenties. Four dreams are presented in this
paper from young women who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. The
relevant narrative environment for them consists in tale types from this
period on into the 1980s. Predominantly, these include legendary tales
(fagogo), proverbs, narrative jokes (poka), songs, spirit possession stories
and, more recently, films and television. Let me briefly introduce a few
of the less familiar types here.
Fagogo were common bedtime stories during this period (Moyle,
1981, p. 45). Children were supposed to support the telling with exclamations of Aue! (Alas!). When they begin to slip off to sleep and
failed to do so, the elder telling the tale would whack them with a long
stick to remind them of their role. I was married to a Samoan named
Sanele. Saneles maternal grandmother often told him these stories and
would whack him when he forgot to aue. From grammar school on
into college young Samoans engage in folkloric projects in which they
collect legends and their derivative proverbs, which gives these tale
types currency even if they have a tala o le vavau (once upon a time)
flavor. In village land and title disputes, these legendary tales are used
to justify and support claims; today they are also used in court (Mageo,
1991, pp. 2728, 35). Samoan oratory still uses allusions to these tales
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and derivative proverbs to underwrite its cultural authority (Mataafa
Tui, 1987). In school, children and adolescents often have an annual
culture day celebration, Samoa Day, in which there are oratory competitions that likewise rely upon knowledge of these stories.
Narrative jokes, poka, are called after poker, a name that indexes
their playfully competitive nature. Poka tend to be sexual or scatological. To talk about such things outside the frame humor in Samoa
is to insult anothers dignity and presumes status competitiveness.
Poka is an interchange of mock insults in which people try to top the
last joke told.6 Sharing poka is a common pastime among groups of
adults in relaxed and convivial situations such as bathing in the sea,
passing time in the early evening, sitting in a bar in town, or lounging
at a picnic (as long as no children are nearby).
In the decades after World War II, there was a rise in the incidence
of spirit possession in Samoa (see Mageo, 1994, 1996a, 1996b). By
then, possession episodes had taken on a shape that contrasted
starkly with pre-Christian spirit possession. Formerly, high-status
priests, chiefs or their sisters were mediums for spirits who gave
helpful advice, but in these latter-day episodes, ordinary girls were
possessed. Spirit possession stories were frequently told during the
1960s and 1970s when my subjects were children and teenagers. They
are still told among villagers and are sometimes collected in students
folkloric projects. In these tales girls frequently have starring roles
(Mageo, 1998, pp. 164190; Schoeffel, 1979, pp. 402413). They are,
therefore, of particular relevance to the dreamers in this paper, who
are all female.
The dreams presented here were collected in the context of a class I
taught primarily on dreams over a number of years at a small college
in American Samoa. Students kept dream journals, which formed the
basis for sharing and discussion. Dream journals were turned in at the
end of the semester. Although I was not publishing at the time, I told
students that they could retrieve their journals or leave them with me,
but if they left them I might use the material in future research. I have,
of course, used pseudonyms for all dreamers. Through lecture and
demonstration with my dreams and theirs, I taught them several
theories of dreaming (Freudian, Jungian and Gestalt). I also taught
them free association and devised a number of projective exercises to
help them discover meaning in their dreams (see, further, Mageo, 2001,
in press-a). The dreams to follow, however, were not subjected to any
analysis. The class was conducted in English, in which my students
had been educated in primary and secondary school, although their
English was supplemented by my increased understanding of Samoan
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as time passed. I had no special relationship to these young women
and never saw them outside of the college setting.
During the several years I taught this class, I was neither working
on nor thinking about Samoan ethnohistory, so my ideas on this subject
could not have influenced students. On the other hand, the context in
which the dreams were reporteda college class with a CaucasianAmerican teacheris likely to have contributed to a tendency to dream
about colonial and postcolonial issues. Although an unincorporated
territory of the United States, American Samoa today is run by a locally
elected legislature and governor. In this limited sense, American
Samoa, like the westerly islands that form an independent country, is
postcolonial. In regards to dreams, it is particularly true that remembrance is an act of redescription (Kracke, 1992, p. 36; Philips, 1994,
p. 34; Ricoeur, 1970, p. 5). Another significant contextual effect, therefore, was probably an enhanced story-like quality and a further elaboration of those motifs the dreams shared with waking tales.
My dreamers came from various villages in American Samoa; some
were from the westerly Samoas, residing with American Samoan
relatives. They were ordinary young women. To my knowledge, their
personal histories were not unusual, nor were they so regarded by peers.
A number of them had transnational experience. Sojourning far and
wide is an old addiction among Samoans, whom Krmer (1902/1995)
affectionately calls travel-happy (p. 101)a habit now lubricated by
communities of Samoans that have sprung up in Hawaii, the West Coast
of the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Given the context in
which I collected the dreams, I do not have additional personal information on these dreamers, which would add to this analysis.
When practicing this intertextual method, one first needs to determine what tales and tale types constitute the past and present narrative environments of ones dreamers. Second, one needs a sense of
shared problems rooted in culture history and of how they are related
to motifs from tales. Third, one considers how motifs are combined and
altered in dreams. Fourth, one analyzes how motif combinations or
elements of a motif that are unique to a particular dream reflect a
dreamers personal reactions to cultural meanings and models. This
method is meant to supplement other anthropological and psychological approaches to dream analysis.

Intertextual Interpretation
In this section, I interpret two wish-fulfillment dreams and two
anxiety dreams. But it is as if this ensemble of wishes and anxieties
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are historically entangled and cannot be entirely separated. Although
all four dreams share the same wishes/anxieties, in those dreams
where wishes are in the foreground, anxieties recede into the background. Alternatively, when anxieties are in the foreground, the
desires with which they are associated retreat (but do not disappear).
Clearly, the cultural models carried by those motifs shared in these
four dreams are more adequate for some dreamers than for others, but
evidence of issues generated by historical experience can be found in
all the dreams. Each dream I chose featured a motif that occurred in
at least one of the other three. These motifs were: marrying highranking people (hypergamy), communication difficulties, coloring,
hair display and haircuts. Elements of these motifs branch into one
another. Hair, for example, may be colored or cut. Further, I consider
all of these to be higher-order motifsthat is, as encompassing others.
So, in two dreams there is a half-caste motif that I treat as a sub-case
of the color motif.
The King and I
Last night I dreamed I was the Queen of England. It was so horrible. The
dream started out with me visiting England for one week, within that one
week I met an English guy. . . . The first day that we have met with [this]
guy [he] gave me a hard time to introduce myself to him. So when we knew
each other very well, we used to go out some of the nights like, going to the
movies and go for a ride. And then at my last day over there this same guy
came over to me and ask this question, will you marry me? I am the King
of England. I was so excited I dont know what to do and so I answer him
okay.

Hypergamy is a salient motif in this dream and in Samoan legends. In

one fagogo, for example, a dying father instructs two older sisters to
serve the youngest girl, contravening the Samoan age-grade system
(Moyle, 1981, pp. 196207). Instead, they make her their servant and
force her to live in the cookhouse, the place of lowest status, renaming
her Scabby-Oven-Cover. A handsome young chief appears who
marries Scabby-Oven-Cover, bestowing an exalted status upon her.
Her envious sisters become her servants. This is a Cinderella story,
recognizable in many cultures, the first known version being Chinese
and dating to the 8th century BC (Bettelheim, 1976, p. 236).7 Cinderella
stories are common cross-culturally, I believe, because female hypergamy is; these stories glorify hypergamy as the solution to womens
status problems in patriarchal cultural worlds, also cross-culturally
common.
How does this motif carry a cultural model, and how is it rooted in
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Samoan historical experience? The pre-Christian Samoan model of
sexual relations was hypergamous, in a manner of speaking; this
model was not so much about marrying up as about begetting highborn infants. A womans child was supposed to be a gafata i luma, a
genealogic step forward (Hjarn, 1979/1980, pp. 9193). Aiga
(extended families) were the basic social unit; they were organized via
shared and contested understandings of rank and status. These understandings were grounded in land ownership and titles. Aiga could
step forward through children sired by high-born men of other
families because these children had rights in their fathers families
estates. The mother qualified for a piece of land on which to bring up
her offspring and on which she might install her relatives. Samoan
titles were and continue to be awarded on lineage and merit (section
6.0107 of the America Samoa Codesee American Samoa Digest, 1982,
pp. 91124; Krmer, 1902/1994). If a low-ranking woman bore an
intelligent and charming son who served his fathers family well, he
might gain a minor title in that family. If that sons descendants
married up, genealogically speaking, they had even better prospects.
Taking genealogical steps forward was aided by the emic category for
marriage, a vaga. Avaga referred simply to a girl following her chosen
one back to his familys estate (Schultz, n.d. [1911] ).8 In this dream, as
in Christian Samoan culture, hypergamy is no longer about begetting
genealogical steps forward per se, but about the marriage itself. The
dream reflects this change in the cultural model of sexual relations.
Another motif in The King and I dream is communication difficulties. When the dreamer first met the king, she said that he gave me
a hard time to introduce myself to him. In other words, he behaved
in a manner that made the situation awkward for the dreamer. Is this
why the dreamer says of an apparently delightful situation, It was so
horrible? Communication difficulty is also a dominant motif in poka
(narrative jokes).
Some poka have to do with sexual relations with foreigners, like The
King and I dream. I preface the following poka with a few linguistic
tips. In Samoan, stingray are called fai; fai means to make but also to
make it, that is, to fuck. The word for money is tupe, and a common
response when a seller importunes a passerby to purchase something
is Leai se tupe, meaning that the person has No money! There is no
d in Samoan. Without the d, the English word stupid sounds like
se tupe.
A woman at the market in Western Samoa is selling stingray with an Englishspeaking friend. A male tourist stops and looks at a stingray. The friend says
in English Do you want to buy some fuck? The tourist exclaims, Shut up

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stupid! The friend tells the fishmonger The man says he likes your fai but
he doesnt have any tupe.

Lack of a shared language in intercultural contact can be seen as a

metaphor for a lack of shared cultural categories. Sahlins (1981, 1985)
argues that when Hawaiian girls swam to Captain Cooks ships to visit
sailors, it was in their minds merely a hypergamous practice. The
sailors, comprehending the nature of these commingling through a
capitalist cultural logic, paid them with bangles and with nails. In the
stingray joke, the distortion is similar but the mistranslation more
extreme. The sexual issue is all in the mind of the tourist (although this
perception is not entirely his fault). Significantly, mistranslation makes
him think the Samoan women are intellectually incompetent, stupid,
rather than immoral, probably because this is precisely how such situations have often made Samoans feel. Listen, for example, to this
excerpt from Girls of Samoa, a Samoan song about World War II,
which likewise tells a story.
Girls of Samoa,
I didnt think your heads were stupid.
The boys from the military arrived
And all of a sudden you paint your lips . . .
Vanished are all the sailors of the military
Abandoning you on mainstreet . . .
Finished are the days of showing off
Next to a guy from the military . . .
You will end with no status whatsoever.

This song and others like it were sung for decades after the war. I first
heard this one from Loia Fiaui when I was interviewing him about
spirit possession. Loia had grown up in the westerly Samoan Islands
during the World War II period.
Cultural models predicate strategies and practices. As noted, in old
Samoa hypergamous begetting was not only a model of sexual
relations but also a strategy for augmenting family status. Practices of
self-display were entailed in this strategy. Pre-Christian girls wrapped
a finely woven mat around their waist leaving it partially open to
expose the whole front side of their left thigh nearly up to the hip,
rubbed scented oil over their skin until it shone more brightly than
the sun, rouged themselves with turmeric, especially [u]nder the
armpits & about the root of the breasts, draped blue beads down their
chests, and would then walk about to shew themselves ( faalialia) so
as to attract the sons of chiefs (Williams, 18302/1984, pp. 102, 117, 144,
147). Similarly, in the above song girls paint their lips red to show
off next to a guy from the military. In World War II, however, these
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practices and the strategies they enacted produced the opposite of their
intended effecthumiliation. When ones strategies fail, one tends to
feel stupid, just as one does when misled by a lover.
Every colonial people, Fanon (1967) says, every people in whose
soul an inferiority complex has been created . . . finds itself face to face
with the language of . . . the mother country (p. 18). In Samoa, English
is not just a foreign language; during most of the 20th century it was
the language of colonialists, and Samoan language registers an inferiority complex associated with it. Literally, nanu means to speak a
foreign language, but it usually glosses as to speak English; nanu also
means to badly mispronounce. When my former husband, Sanele,
was a teenager in the 1970s, his friends would jokingly tell girls, Watch
it or you will speak English, using the word nanu. The boys meant to
boast that they were such excellent lovers as to induce girls to fall in
love with them. Here the motif of communication difficulty has
become a trope for romantic love. Why? The American servicemen
who seduced Samoan girls during World War II were likely to speak
their own cultures language of seduction, which was the language of
romance, but they would have had to teach their girlfriends a little
English to use romantic language effectively.
By combining the hypergamy motif with the communicationdifficulty motif, this dream represents the collision of the Samoan preChristian model of sexual relations with historical experience and
shows how this collision affects a contemporary girl. The dreamers
sexual desires are culturally stylized in a hypergamous mode but seem
to have been transferred to an intercultural arena. In turn, these desires
have come to be associated with anxiety about feeling stupid
(inferior)an anxiety that can be traced back to the American occupation. The novel elements (riding in a car, going to the movie) that
orchestrate the motifs suggest that these desires and anxieties have not
disappeared with colonialism. Admittedly, this anxiety is expressed
only symbolically in the nationality of the king and as a hard time (in
the dreamers words) that vanishes as quickly as military guys once
did. At first glance, other dreams like the one to follow seem to lack
this anxiety altogether.
The Blue-Eyed Colonel
I had a dream last night and it was the best dream I ever had. I dreamed
that I [was] married to a guy from the service . . . a colonel in the Navy. He
was a half-German and half-Palagi [Caucasian]. He was tall with black short
hair right on the shoulders. Hes got blue eyes and was a very handsome
guy.

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On the day of our wedding, I dreamed that there were thousands and
thousands of guests invited and those who came to honor our big day. I let
my friends be my maid of honor and my bridesmaids. I was married on my
twenty-fifth birthday and thats even the number of bridesmaids that I had.
It was one of the happiest thing[s] ever happen to me and the guy I was
married to. We had a great time with the guests . . . both families and friends.
After our wedding, we flew to Korea on our honeymoon on the very next
day. We spent two weeks in Korea and then we flew to Siberia for another
two weeks. We came from our honeymoon and we flew to Germany where
my husbands family is and we decided to stay there just for the time being.
I had a great time . . . and we were a happy couple too. Everything had
made me happy but most all my husband . . . [was the most] loving person
I ever have [known] and I was surely married to the right guy.

Here again is the Christian version of the hypergamy motifalthough

this time the girls desire falls equally on the groom and on the
ceremony. The friends serving as maids of honor and bridesmaids can
be read as a kinder and gentler version of Scabby-Oven-Covers
servant sistersfor girls genuinely enjoy being bridesmaids in Samoa;
it is like winning a beauty contest or being appointed taupou, official
village princess (Mageo, 1998, pp. 7173). The number of bridesmaids
one can have is a matter of entitlement; in some villages, this number
is calculated by relative rank (Schoeffel, 1979, pp. 14142). Twenty-five
bridesmaids imply an exalted rank indeed. On their honeymoon the
dream couple goes to Korea. Many Koreans currently reside in
American Samoa. I have heard prejudicial comments against them, at
least in part because a number of Koreans have opened small country
stores that compete all too successfully with Samoan stores and appear
to be making lots of money. Given this racial prejudice, it is unlikely a
girl would happily dream of wedding a Korean, but the honeymoon
destination symbolically entails this foreign wealth.
How is this version of the hypergamy motif rooted in historical
experience? Prior to missionization there were two kinds of weddings:
(a) ceremonies for high-status girls, which centered on deflorations and
an exchange of wealth between, to use the dreamers phrase, both
families; (b) and unceremonious elopements for girls of no special
status, which were also legitimated by gift exchange, but usually not
until the birth of a child (Hjarn, 1979/1980, p. 107; Turner, 1884/1984,
pp. 9596). Christian church weddings were a new version of formal
marriages to which every family could aspire. As money has slowly
saturated the Samoan economy, weddings have been celebrated by
ever-greater displays. In American Samoa, brides may have several
expensive wedding gowns, changing their gown repeatedly during the
wedding day. In New Zealand, Samoans may mortgage their homes
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to pay for their extended familys daughters wedding celebrations
(Macpherson, 1991), as one might have to fund a party for thousands
and thousands of guests. Weddings themselves have become a hypergamous project: that is, a strategy to gain status through marriage.
This dream also features a half-caste motif, with a twist. The dreamer
calls the colonel half-German and half-Pa lagi. Pa lagi, meaning Caucasian, is inclusive of Germans; it is the shortened form of papalagi, sky
bustersfor so European sailors seemed to Samoans when their ships
appeared on the horizon. Although one presumes the husband is pure
white, the dreamers half-and-half phraseology evokes the Samoan
term for people of mixed parentageafakasi, literally one half. The
westerly Samoas were a German colony from 1900 until World War I.
The dream husband is in the navy. This dreamer resided on Tutuila
where the American navy was stationed through much of the 20th
century (Gray, 1960) and where Americans still form the preponderance of resident Pa lagi. The husbands halves evoke these two colonial
traditions. The dream husband has blue eyes and is very handsome.
I have frequently heard Samoans who marry a Pa lagi express hope that
their child will have blue eyes, like those of the colonel.
In spirit possession stories too one finds a half-caste motif. Possessed
girls are often of mixed descent, sometimes indicated by blue eyes.
Then their eye coloring tends to be attributed to a German descent line,
as in the dream. Take, for example, the following anecdote. One of
Saneles sisters, Nia, led a group of Sunday school teachers on a trip
from Upolu to Savaii. One of the teachers was part-German and had
blue eyes. The group bathed in a pool. Later the blue-eyed teacher was
missing. Nia found her sitting naked on a rock facing the pool; she was
spirit possessed. Later still, several other teachers became possessed.
It is true that Germans, more than Americans, tend to be blue-eyed,
but in fact half-caste Samoans are more likely to descend from Americans than from Germans. There was a tidal wave of illegitimate
children born in both Samoas in the wake of World War II (see, further,
Enright, 1997; Mageo, 1994, 1996a, 1998; Shankman, 1996, 2001;
Stanner, 1953, pp. 325327). German ancestry, however, is more
respectable than American ancestry. German planters came to Samoa
up until World War I; some stayed and fathered elite half-caste families
(Davidson, 1967). In contrast, American ancestry often traces back to
the babies of World War II GIs. Samoa was not a battlefield but
a military depot where huge numbers of soldiers were temporarily
stationed (Franco, 1989; Mageo, 1996a, pp. 7072; 1998, pp. 151152).
The Samoan friend who first recited Girls of Samoa to me said that
angry boys whose girlfriends jilted them to go after those Pa lagi wrote
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it. As in this song, sailors of the military vanished after the war,
abandoning unwed girls. Samoans, who seldom lose their sense of
humor, called these plentiful babies little armies of lost marines
because their fathers were politely presumed to be lost at sea. There
are no colonels in the navy; this is a military title properly belonging
to the army and the marines. By making the husband a naval colonel,
the dreamer symbolically encompasses three branches of the military.
The dreamers sexual desires, like those of the preceding dreamer,
are culturally stylized in the hypergamous mode and focused on an
intercultural context. Rather than being associated with the communication-difficulty motif, however, these desires are associated with the
color motif. But the uncomfortable condition of being half-and-half
has been displaced onto a colonial otherand this is an original
element. There is no anxiety on the surface of the dream. Nonetheless,
this displacement offers evidence that colonial experience linked
anxiety-generating inferiority feelings to the cultural model of hypergamous sexual relations. So does the color motif: the blue eyes of this
colonial other (as opposed to the girls own racial features) are deemed
particularly attractive. These motif combinations offer psychological
documentation as to how the collision of cultural models like Samoan
hypergamy with historical experiences like colonialism shapes
peoples fantasy worlds.
The Beauty Salon
I dreamt that I am at a Beauty Salon. The beautician, or whatever you call
him, freaks me out. He was wearing pink sunglasses shaped as hearts. His
lips were colored purple. His shirt was half button[ed] showing his hairy
chest, and he was wearing shorts that look like the American flag. . . . His
hair was colored yellow and it was [in] . . . an afro. I sat down without
telling him what style I want my hair cut. But anyway, he went right ahead
and cut my hair. I told him I want a trim and a perm, but he doesnt seem
to listen. I kept talking to him, but he turned his back and walked to his
stereo and turned it on full blast. Maybe it was his way to cut me off. He
walked back to me. Only this time he scares me. As he walks toward me
holding a knife in his right hand, at the same time he was stripping. Taking
his clothes off one by one throwing [them] on the floor. I screamed, covering
my eyes with my hands. I realized Im bald. I felt my head. I touched
nothing. I screamed louder for help. The man laughed very loud, it echoed
in the building and in my head. I woke up shaking.

Cutting hair is a salient motif in this dream and a ubiquitous motif

in 20th-century Samoan spirit possession stories; girls are most
commonly cured by a haircut. A Samoan librarian at the college where
I worked in American Samoa, for example, told me about her sisters
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spirit possession. At home their parents had made the sister wear her
long hair up. When she went into the forest, the sister let this shiny
black hair down. Later she was possessed by a spirit girl named
Saumaiafe. A Samoan healer was called in who promised Saumaiafe
the sisters hair would be cut off; this was done as soon as the spirit
left the girls body. In spirit stories, possession is frequently a consequence of self-display, which we saw was a practice associated with
the pre-Christian model of hypergamous begetting.
Cutting hair has ethnohistorical roots in Samoa. In pre-contact times,
girls, particularly girls of rank, wore their hair in the gita stylewhich
consisted of a braid worn at the left temple or braids hanging at both
temples onto their chests; the rest of the head was shaved (Krmer,
1902/1995, p. 325; see also Freeman, 1983, p. 229; Turner, 1884/1984,
p. 122). After the flooding of Victorian culture into Samoa in the
mid-19th century, girls began growing their hair long, braiding it to
go to school and binding it up in a bun thereafter. In the 1870s,
elders punished a girl who committed a sexual indiscretion by cutting
off all her hair but a tuft or two, as in the gita style; by the 1890s, her
head was entirely shaved (see Krmer, 1902/1995, p. 329; Mead, 1961,
p. 273; Willis, 1889, pp. 17, 78). Shaving the head is still a punishment
for girls sexual indiscretions and for behaviors thought to be leading
in that direction.
In this dream the beautician usurps the role of a punitive elder or
spirit, cutting the dreamers hair; it is not only her hair that is significant but his too. His hairs color and style are remarkable. So is his
hairy chest, which peeks through his half button[ed] shirt, the significance of which develops as he takes his clothes off one by one
throwing [them] on the floor. All the while he holds a knife and
proceeds to cut off all of the dreamers hairhis hirsute body soon
counterpointed by her bald head. This scene seems to signify seduction, as the beautician is doing a striptease, and rape, as the dreamer
is an unwilling victim, but it also connotes castration. The dreamer
reacts as if she is undergoing a form of mutilation pertinent to her
sex/gender identity.
Leach (1958) argues that in cultural iconography, hair symbolizes
sexualityas it seems to in the case of possessed Samoan girls and
dream beauticians. Leach also holds that hair signifies penises, a theory
that Hallpike (1969) debunks because women have hair and get
culturally significant haircuts. I have argued elsewhere that in cultural
fantasies people often have androgynous bodieswhatever their
actual gender anatomy (Mageo, 1994, pp. 4213; see also Moore, 1997,
p. 83; Strathern, 1990, pp. 1212). Obeyesekere (1981), for example,
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documents that the matted locks of Sinhalese female ascetics are
imagined as penis-like buds of flesh and tender fleshy growths
(p. 35). Couvade and subincision practices similarly demonstrate that
in many cultures female genitals are symbolically attributed to male
bodies. If females can have male genitals in cultural fantasy systems,
and if these genitals may be symbolized by hair, it follows that women
can suffer symbolic castration, by our knife-wielding beautician in the
present case.
If hair signifies masculine body parts, what masculinity means is
culturally contingent: in patriarchal worlds masculinity is often synonymous with effective agency, but this masculinity can be attributed
to females. Throughout Polynesia, effective agency was imagined
through the concept of mana. Mana was manifest in hair and penises
(mana-charged chiefs were believed to have big ones), but was attributed to all people of exalted lineage.9 The male beautician, like the
Philistine Delilah, deprives the dreamer of any agency and cuts off her
hair in one gesture.
This dream is far more complex than the others surveyed so far,
featuring a number of motifs. As in The King and I dream, we find a
communication-difficulty motif. This dreamers problem, however, is
not lack of a shared language (as in the stingray joke), but that the
beautician doesnt seem to listen and turns his back when she persists
in talking to him. In World War II, the communication motif was
associated with agency problems in an intercultural context (failing
strategies that left girls feeling stupid); here it signifies agency
problems in an intracultural contextalthough the beauticians
American flag shorts complicate this meaning. Not listening is tantamount to cutting her off by blasting his stereo: in using the term cut
off for describing this gesture, this dreamer intimates an isomorphism
between cutting her hair and being cut off verbally.
The historical shift in Samoan hair practices paralleled a shift in
discursive ones. In old Samoa, discourses were gendered. Boys studied
and, as adults, performed the discourse of ceremony and oratorical
argument; girls led a discourse of bawdy jest that was verbal and
choreographic, in which both sexes participated (Colvocoresses, 1852,
p. 87; Mead, 1961, pp. 8283; Wilkes, 1845, pp. 130, 134, 140; Williams,
18302/1984, pp. 247248). Choreographic jesting entailed flaunting
oneself at public entertainments and was congruent with girls efforts
to induce high-status boys to father genealogical steps forward.
Missionaries tended to equate giving up dancing with adopting
Christianity. Thus the missionary Williams (18302/1984) says, Many
were added to their number & those who had become lotu [Christian]
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had abandoned their indecent dances (p. 128). Missionaries disapproved of hypergamous begetting; their model of sexual relations
focused on abstinence prior to a marriage with someone with whom
one was spiritually compatible (Davidoff & Hall, 1987, pp. 179,
219221, 323324, 327). This model entailed practices of cloistering
girls and restricting their activities. Even in the 1980s when I resided
in Samoa, in gossip any girl said to be laughing too much was also
disapprovingly characterized as looking for a husband. Boys took up
the discourse of jest, becoming star comedians in a colonial comedy
genre, Spirit House (Mageo, 1992, 1996c). As if in remembrance of
the older gendering of this discourse, a male transvestite miming
girls was the signature figure (see also Mageo, 1992, pp. 446455; 1996c,
pp. 590604; 1998, p. 191205; Shore, 1977, pp. 318333; 1978, p. 178;
Sinavaiana, 1992a, pp. 196197).
As in The Blue-Eyed Colonel dream, we again find a color motif:
the beautician is blond. Like blue eyes, blond hair evokes the halfand-half (afakasi) motifwhich I suggested is ancillary to the color
motif. Indeed, this beauticians hair is emphatically half-and-half for,
while blond, it is styled in an Afro. Afro evokes Africans (or AfroAmericans?) and their racial characteristics like dark skin. Samoans
have none too positive feelings about dark skin. Uliuli means black
but can be a synonym for ugly. A Samoan proverb about a high-status
man who was ignored in an important title deliberation because of his
looks says I may be ugly (uliuli) but Im not here to catch flies (Schultz,
1994, p. 102). The darkest child in a family may be called, teasingly
or derogatorily, Black Thing (Meauli). The archetypal heroine in
legendary tales is Sinawhich means dazzling white. Sina was an
appellation for the village princess (Krmer, 1902/1994, p. 34) and
today is the most common girls name.
Also like blue eyes, blond hair figures prominently in Samoan spirit
stories. In these tales, any girl who flaunts herself (by letting down her
hair or decorating it with flowers in a spirits haunt or in a village
where a spirit girl acts a tutelary role) may be possessed; this is
especially likely if that girls hair is blond. Unlike blue eyes, blond hair
is an ambiguous image. In one story, for example, a fair-haired girl
is spirit possessed. Fair-colored hair, while rare, occurs naturally in
Samoans and is considered an imprimatur of aristocratic lineage.
Samoan spirit girls are often said to have been fair-haired human girls
of aristocratic families who were taken alive by spirits. The possessed
girls family has a German side but on their Samoan side descends
from the spirit girl, Saumaiafe. The girls hair might descend either
from a foreign or a local lineage. Ambiguity, I believe, is a form of
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condensation, signifying two ideas at once; here, as in the afakasi motif
itself, ambiguity underlines cultural hybridity.
The color motif occurs in multiple guises in the dream. The beauticians lips, for example, are colored purplelike the World War II
girls whose lips were painted red? Wearing make-up, symbolized by
lipstick, continued to be an issue between Samoan girls and their elders
(Mageo, 1989, p. 183). The beauticians weirdly colored lips evoke
Samoan transvestites who caricature girls. We saw that, although by
the early 20th century missionized Samoans had come to disparage
pre-Christian girls flaunting ways, boys in Spirit House tended to be
scantily clad (Sinavaiana, 1992b, p. 197). Spirit Houses signature
figure was a transvestite. In contemporary urban Samoa, male beauticians are usually transvestites. The dream beautician is aggressively
heterosexual but, like a transvestite, he appropriates girls ways of selfdisplay. This appropriation is signaled by his abundance of hair in
contrast to the dreamers hairless head and by his hairs color and
style. The dreamer calls it colored yellowwhich, given the beauty
salon setting, implies that he has colored his hair to make himself
attractive. The dreamer wanted a perm; is the beauticians Afro natural
or is it a perm? Self-display is redundantly signified by his striptease,
his painted lips, his sunglasses and his shorts. Girls are generally forbidden to wear shorts despite the summer heat in Samoa because
nowadays it is thought proper to cover (rather than to flaunt) ones
thighs.
The beauticians Lolita-like pink heart-shaped sunglasses also caricature girls ways of display and concatenate these ways with romance.
There was an Elvis-like Samoan crooner who traveled through
American Samoa during the early 1980s calling himself Mr Fatu. Fatu
means heart. Mr Fatu was a felicitous stage-name because heart had
come to symbolize romantic sentiments. Heart had no such connotations in old Samoa because romance was not an indigenous concept.
The language has suffered significant amendments to accommodate
this idea. Samoan pop songs, which presumably the beautician blasts
on his stereo, use the Samoan word alofa to denote romantic attachments of an emotional-physical nature. Previously, this word denoted
only compassionate care. As late as the 1970s, a Samoan boy who felt
alofa for a girl would never suggest physical intimacy to her because
such a relationship would be injurious to her status and that of her
family (Shore, 1982, pp. 228229). Is this why the beauticians overtures
appear so injurious?
How do motif combinations in this dream reflect this dreamers
participation in the cultural fantasy system? Although this is an anxiety
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dream, it actually opens with desire: the dreamer wants a trim and a
perm presumably to show off her hair to advantage. The cultural model
of hypergamous sexual relations is evoked through that practice with
which it was associated in old Samoaflaunting. But the hair-display
motif is combined with a haircut motif. Haircutting was an indigenous
practice that came to symbolize Christian ways of restricting girls. This
combination, then, codes complications introduced into this Samoan
model through colonial experience. Adding a new element, hair display
is transferred from the dreamer to the beautician. This transference
suggests the dreamer is dissociating both her desire to flaunt and the
sexuality it represents. The dream, furthermore, provides a commentary
on the causes of this dissociation by combining the haircut motif with
motifs of communication difficulty and color. For prior dreamers, the
hypergamy model, while still viable, was tainted with intercultural
inferiority feelings. The Beauty Salon dreamers combinations intimate
that for her this model of sexuality triggers colonially engendered
anxieties in which an intracultural sense of powerlessness is entangled
with feelings about sex/gender identity and race.10
Indeed, rather than an English king or a naval colonel, it is a
Samoan boy who brings these anxieties violently to bear upon the
dreamer. The blond American-flag-bedecked beautician stripper with
the pink-heart sunglasses embodies a threat to this dreamer so great
that she wakes up shaking. The dramatic novelty of this dream vis-
-vis similar waking tales serves to locate the dreamers anxiety in
relations with Samoan boys and suggests it is there that she (and
perhaps other girls too) most acutely suffer them. The next and last
dream indicates that not only do Samoan girls suffer such anxieties,
but they successfully escape them; and if some males are castrating,
others are allies.
The Horse Braid
My husband and I went fishing at a lake where there was a bridge and two
big rocks below. We were sitting on one of the rocks. My husband [was] . . .
walking toward the other big rock. . . . Hes now on the side of the road
looking down at me. I was trying to get away from some kind of creature.
My husband yelled down Jump and run to the other rock, its a horse. The
horse got on top of the rock. It is now sniffing my arm while my feet were
in the water. . . . I got on the other rock, climbed quickly on top and jump to
the bridge. I was halfway down to the main entrance of the bridge when
some guy jumps up with a knife trying to cut my hair off. I heard a voice
from one end He wants the horse braid on your head. I was running really
fast and finally reached the main gate. My husbands nephew was waiting
for me there. He said to me Youve made it. . . . I felt scared [of] this dream.

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As in The Beauty Salon dream, here we find the haircut motif, but
the knife-wielding haircutter is not a punitive elder or a punitive spirit
but a guy. Sitting on rocks is a motif this dream shares with spirit
possession tales. The dreamer is sitting on the first rock when she
senses that a creature is pursuing her. In possession stories, spirits are
said to have resting rocks; they sometimes possess people who sit on
the wrong rock. The husband tells the dreamer that the second rock is
a horse. Then the horse is standing on the second rock. As rock number
two seems to transform into the horse, the creature seems to transmute
into the boy who is likewise pursuing the dreamer and wants to cut
her hair. The dreamscape is a lake. Lakes and rivers are common possession sites that evoke the hair-display motif because there girls let
down their hair in order to bathe, combing it out afterwards. In spirit
stories, this sequence of actions may provoke an attack. If a girl goes
- for
to swim in the river near the village of the spirit girl Telesa,
example, and combs her hair on getting out of the water, that spirit
will hit (possess) her (Goodman, 1971, p. 470).
The dreamers husband tells her to get away on the horse, with
which she is progressively identifiedinitially by bodily contact (the
horse sniffs her) and then by the voice (disembodied like a spirit?)
that refers to her hair as a horse braid. Like a horse, the dreamer is
good at jumping and running. Horses are not native to Samoa. This
escape motif is probably intertextual with escapes in cinema Westerns
and other types of movies to which Samoans have long been exposed.
(Does the motif of the creature come from thrillers?) From the age of
3 (1961), Sanele attended movies in Apia. As early as the 1960s, even
in remote villages, a family would sometimes get a film proje-ctor and
small generator to show a movie in exchange for coins or coconuts.
The dreamer runs across a bridge. Crossing bridges or malae (oval
village centers) is a common motif in spirit stories; they may operate
as narrative synonyms. In one spirit story, for example, a boy sees a
beautiful girl combing her hair on a bridge and is soon beset with a
fever (Schoeffel, 1979, p. 397). On the way to his bedside, a healer sees
the same girl on the village malae and concludes it is a spirit girl. In
spirit stories, girls are likely to be possessed if they cross a malae with
their hair down or with a flower in their hair. The malae is the symbolic
core of traditional Samoan life: that is, of a Christian-Samoan version
of respect relations. One informant explained that around the malae one
lowers ones umbrella and speaks softlysigns of respect; deep in the
forest one might walk naked, ones sarong around ones shoulders.
Spirit girls like Telesa- and Saumaiafe are the tutelary deities of certain

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malae. Yet, like the spirit girl on the bridge, they are apt to display their
haircombing it out and decorating it with red flowers. Spirit girls
thereby embody censured elements of pre-Christian feminine gender
practices. Iconically, malae span historical contradictions; the crossing
motif, I believe, symbolizes a condition of being halfway between
different sex/gender worlds.
Culturally stylized sexual desire is connoted by the dreamers hair,
particularly given the lakeside setting. As in the last dream, this desire
is not unrestrained: The Beauty Salon dreamer wants a trim, and this
dreamers hair is braided. Yet, this girls desire, like that of the salon
dreamer, triggers anxieties associated with colonial experience that
threaten to cut her offto castrate her emotionally. But rather than
being reduced to screaming for help, The Horse Braid dreamer resists
mutilation. In the salon dream, the hair-display motif (symbolizing
sexuality) was combined with a color motif (symbolizing racial issues)
and with a communication motif (symbolizing agency issues). Here
hair display is combined with a crossing motif (symbolizing historical
transition). When the dreamer jumps on the bridge, she is already
halfway across. A halfway state or position is recurrent in these
dreams: in half-caste lineages, in the beauticians half-unbuttoned shirt,
and now in this dreamers halfway location. In this case, the dreamers
location seems to indicate that she is attempting to bridge the colonially generated contradictions that were pivotal in prior dreams. And,
as her husband and his nephew tell her, she made itan American
phrase associated with success.
Combining the hair-display/haircut motifs with the crossing motif
provokes a dangerous level of anxiety for this dreamer. Yet her feelings
are more manageable than those of The Beauty Salon dreamer, whose
dream combined hair-display/haircut motifs with motifs of color and
communication difficulty. These dreams offer us something like a
chemistry of anxiety for Samoan girls; some motif combinations are
devastating, some are stimulating. While all these motifs probably represent feelings recognizable to Samoan girls of this age group (late
teens and early twenties) during the period the dreams were recorded,
some may have had more experiential salience for an individual than
others. Creativity is also at work here. The Horse Braid dreamer puts
the narrative resources of a colonizing culture (the horse and Westerns)
to work, imagining novel resolutions to anxieties generated by
colonialism. Similarly, Lattas (1992) and Stephen (1997) have noted that
the iconic resources of colonizing cultures are put to work creating new
symbolic orders in Melanesian cargo cults.

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Dreaming and Culture

Now let us revisit the model of dreaming and culture I proposed
earlier. Dreams are an important venue in which people encounter
collectivities and respond to them. Dreams are fantasies in which
cultural meaning systems are brought into dialogue with the deepest
reactions of the person as a subject. This dialogue takes places through
stories, specifically through motifs, which represent fundamental components of narrative thinking. Dreams constitute the subjective end of
a narrative spectrum that bears symbolic traffic. Motifs travel along
this narrative spectrum from waking tales into dreamsas do Samoan
motifs of marrying high-ranking people, communication difficulties,
coloring, hair display, haircuts and crossings. Motifs from other tales
may be only cryptically represented in a dream, as the half-caste motif
is represented only by the blue-eyed colonels half-Pa lagi/half-German
heritage. Cryptically represented or not, motifs in dreams evoke the
larger tales with which they are associated. Motifs can be deciphered,
therefore, by juxtaposing them with other sorts of tales from the
dreamers narrative environment that share the same motiflike spirit
possession stories about blue-eyed girls. What these juxtapositions
suggest is that, as embedded as Samoan dreams no doubt are in subjective worlds, they speak in symbols that circulate in a cultural fantasy
system. Speaking a common language with other stories in this system,
dreams partake of an ongoing conversation about culturally shared
concerns. In the Samoan dreams we examined, these concerns might
be termed postcolonialhaving to do with desires and anxieties
shaped by colonial experience.
Inasmuch as this intertextual method looks for recurrent patterns
within a dream collection, it resembles content analysis (Hall and Van
de Castle, 1996). But rather than codifying types of action, interaction,
and so forth, this intertextual method examines how dreamers permutate motifs from other stories. The King and I dreamer transforms
the language embarrassments of poka into a Cinderella date. The BlueEyed Colonel dreamer replaces the half-and-half girls of spirit stories
with an ideal colonial military man. In The Beauty Salon, the vengeful
spirits of possession stories are exchanged for a dangerously seductive
boy. The Horse Braid dreamer transmutes the victimizations of spirit
stories into heroic, if scary, adventure. These permutations, in effect,
are commentaries on the socio-historical possibilities and problems
reflected in waking tales and betray each dreamers personal hopes
and fears about them. In Samoa, they map how colonial history affects
contemporary girls and in which relations (with seductive boys) it
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affects them most painfully. Defining an ensemble of common psychological issues through motifs that recur in a number of dreams, this
method casts light on an individuals relation to these issues and shows
which issues are most relevant to her.
How can considering dreams in relation to a cultures narrative
spectrum help us think about culture and psychology in a general
sense? Samoan dream material shows how cultural history is distilled
in symbols around which peoples subjective lives revolve. Dreaming
of English kings and naval officers, beauty salons and pink heartshaped sunglasses, half-German husbands and American flag shorts,
these Samoan girls dialogue with symbols that are historical but that
also reflect issues that orchestrate personal lives. Dreams map precisely
how and where the past penetrates the present, shaping a local psychology. Ideally, cultural models help us make sense of experience. As
strategies and practices, they are also models for acting in the world.
But junctures come in culture history when our models fail to serve
cognitive or practical purposes. When they fail, these models are likely
to become associated with personal pain, fear, even despair for culture
membersand then people are likely to dream about them, as Samoan
girls dream about the model of hypergamous sexual relations through
the characters, objects and action themes associated with this model.
Dreams, in imaginal terms, articulate personal difficulties with cultural
models through motif combinations like hair display and haircuts,
marrying kings and communication difficulties, or marrying half-andhalf colonels. And some dreams offer possible solutions to these
problems as wellas The Horse Braid dream offers a Wild West
version of the crossing motif. I am suggesting, as others have, that
dreams represent a form of mind that is potentially progressive (Basso,
1992; Foulkes, 1993, p. 17).
To think of history as a phenomenon large in scale and dreams as
small in scale is to miss the interpenetrations of culture and subjective
experience. While it is true that Samoans find history a charged topic
at this quasi-postcolonial point in time, what one finds in dreams is not
so much history-as-topic as history-as-experience, which inevitably, for
Samoans and for ourselves, animates daily life. There is a presumption
that we forget historical experience that is not politically salient, or that
when we can no longer accurately recount history, we have forgotten
it. But we relive historical experience symbolically in dreams, particularly times that change our cultures in disturbing ways, even when we
appear to have forgotten.
Like personal history, collective history does not go away until, in
Ricoeurs (1981) words, it can be fully integrated in a meaningful
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context (p. 254). The American encampment in Samoa during the war
and the sexual unions that followed could not easily be integrated into
age-old Samoan models of sexual relations. Because historical experiences are often radically new and elude the familiar meanings that
we would impose upon them, they may rupture cultural models and
the identities people build through them. We collectively repress and
obliquely remember what overwhelms us, but seemingly extinguished
events may haunt fantasies in symbolic formsas spirit girls haunt
Samoan fantasies. Through dream motifs we mull over cultural experience. This thought is inspired by our least cognized, most affective and
embodied reactions to shared meaning systems and inflects these
systems in accord with them. Dreaming seeks out unhealed wounds,
both personal and shared, remembering these wounds in meaningful
but also meaningfully altered forms in which the variations express
personal relations to collective problems and may constitute attempts
at resolution.
If dream motifs may be interpreted by reference to other narratives
and via their connections to cultural history, does this mean that
dreamers are working on collective psychological experience in a
significant sense? When new cultural symbols in religion, entertainment, art or elsewhere capture our imaginations, it is because these
symbols resolve problems with which we are engaged and for which
we too have sought resolution. In culture change, readiness is all, and
readiness comes about through many people working on culturalhistorical issues on emotional and embodied levels that are reflected
and enacted in dreams. Shamans, prophets, artists and other symbolic
innovators do not spring up solitary but rise on a tide of creative
imaginings that thrive in storiesdream stories among them. Their
revisionings are the fruit of cultural work that is collaborative in nature.
Notes
1. Kracke (1992) notes the presence of images and themes from myths in
Kagwahiv dreams and proposes that in Kagwahiv performances myths
move from words to sensory images, while dreams move in the opposite
direction (pp. 32, 3435, 4050). In my terms, he is discussing movement
back and forth along a cultures narrative spectrum. Cassirer (1975) sees
myth as hovering between the world of dreams and the objective world.
2. In anthropology, Eggan (1955) showed that mythological symbols in
dreams could be found in myths.
3. Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls these kinds of perception preobjective (1962).
See, further, Csordas (1990); Mageo (in press-b); Mageo & Knauft (2002).
4. Similarly, Valsiner (1989) argues that people personalize myths in fantasy
life: that is, myths move into the person and are transformed, just as I

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5.

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

argue that the motifs of various kinds of stories are transformed in

dreams.
On the ethnopsychological approach to emotion and to the self, see, for
example, Lutz (1988); White and Kirkpatrick (1985). In pre-Christian
times, Samoans had a folk theory of the dream as a boundary land
between the living and the dead where these two peoples meet, especially
close to the time of crossing (Williamson, 1933, pp. 216217). To an extent,
this survives to the present day.
On joking in Samoa see, further, Mageo (1992, 1996c, 1998, pp. 8689,
9597, 191217).
Cinderella stories have varying elements cross-culturally (Rooth, 1980).
Sometimes the boy stayed with the girls family instead; staying
together is still a common term for marriage.
On mana, hair and sexuality see Mageo (1994, pp. 410414). On the
attribution of mana and glorified genitals, see Sahlins (1985, pp. 1517)
and Shore (1989, p. 142).
Sex/gender and race were mutually constituted in 19th-century Victorian
discourse (McClintock, 1995). This discourse was imported to Samoa by
the London Mission Society ministers who Christianized Samoa (Mageo,
1998, pp. 141163).

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Biography
JEANNETTE MARIE MAGEO is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at
Washington State University. Her degree is from the History of Consciousness
Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Professor Mageo has
published numerous articles and books on cultural psychology, cultural
history, religion, as well as sex and gender in Pacific societies. Topical areas in
her published work include self, power, dreaming, transvestism, spirit
possession, moral discourse and body symbolism. She resided and did
fieldwork in Samoa from 1981 to 1989, returning on several occasions since
then. Recent publications include Power and the Self (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the
Postcolonial Pacific (University of Hawaii Press, 2001) and Theorizing Self in
Samoa: Emotions, Genders and Sexualities (University of Michigan Press, 1998).
ADDRESS: Prof. Jeannette Marie Mageo, Anthropology Dept. 4910,
Washington State University, Pullman, WA 991644910, USA.
[email: jmageo@mail.wsu.edu]

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