Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology

Author(s): Jeannette Marie Mageo

Source: Ethos, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 187-217
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 Dream Play and Discovering
Cultural Psychology
JEANNETTE MARIE MAGEO

ABSTRACT Dream play is a method of dream analysis I crafted

to help fathom the cultural psychology of Samoan dreams.
Drawing on Samoan aptitude for performance, this method
combines elements of Gestalt role-playing and Jungian active
imagination. What I discovered through the method was a Sa-
moan "kea complex," a bipolar constellation of ideas andfeel-
ings that reveals pivotal aspects of postcolonial psychocultural
dynamics in Samoa and probably in other locations as well.
This dynamic revolves around notions of relationality, engage-
ment, and self that hybridize indigenous Samoan psychological
schemata with Western Christian models of care.

he primary purpose of this article is to present a projective

method for working with dreams in the field that I call "dream
play." If dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious, I hope to
show that role-playing dream images is a shortcut into cultural
psychology. I illustrate this method through Samoan dreams,
with which I worked through the following three-step method.
First, I asked participants to recount a dream, to pick their favorite
dream image, and to role-play it. Dreamers simply pretended to be these
images, proceeding to describe and talk generally about themselves. Sec-
ond, they were to act out a dialogue between themselves and the image.
In fact, sometimes they would begin by interrogating a dream image in
their own persona, particularly one that had disturbed them, and then
role-played the dream image's response. Alternatively, the role-played
dream image might initiate a dialogue with the dreamer. The process
seemed to have its own emotional momentum. Dreamers were to go on to
role-play and dialogue with all those dream images they felt to be signifi-
cant. This role-playing could be lengthy; I reproduce only representative
samples of it here. Third, after role-playing, I asked dreamers to imagine

Ethos
29(2):187-217. ? 2001,American
Copyright Association.
Anthropological
188 * ETHOS

that the dream was about "holes" in themselves-meaning unexpressed

feelings or unrealized abilities-and to "guess" what these holes might be.
Sometimes one of the dreamer's friends served as a guide to role-play-
ing. The friend was supposed to get images to talk about themselves and
to periodically inquire about the images' and the dreamers' feelings. Some-
times I served as a guide, eliciting self-descriptions and feelings. Samoans,
like more socially oriented people in many locales, do not differentiate
between inner thoughts and inner feelings.' So frequently, when feelings
were solicited, dreamers gave dream interpretations, which were often
amazingly insightful. I did not share my own reflections on Samoan cul-
tural psychology with dreamers. These reflections were fragmentary at the
time, although they had begun to come into focus by the end of the dream-
collection period. Mainly, I did not want to prejudice their interpretations.
I also wanted to model Carl Rogers's "client-centered" approach (1951),
which reflects and opens the individual's self-reports, rather than impos-
ing a view on the material. Acting out dreams seemed apt because Samo-
ans are wonderful performers. They are trained and supported as
performers from an early age (Mead 1961:110-121). Role-playing draws
on this cultural aptitude, directing it toward psychological exploration.
Dream play is adapted from Jung's active imagination (1976) and
Perls's Gestalt therapy (1971). In Jung's analytical psychology (1976), ac-
tive imagination is a purely mental exercise as opposed to being dramatur-
gical. Further, Jung insisted that one identify only with the dream ego,
although he did use interior dialogues and confrontations with images to
elicit elements of self outside of consciousness. Perls (1971), on the other
hand, was antianalytical. Gestalt therapy can be regarded as striving to
remedy alienation in the form of dissociation from parts of the self. In
Perls's view "head trips" are a form of dissociation. Jungians distinguish,
sometimes sharply, between these two approaches (Dallet 1982:184).
Dream play utilizes Gestalt role-playing in an analytical exercise.
Perhaps the best known style of dream analysis is Freud's psychoana-
lytic method. Psychoanalytic dream analysis relies on free association.
Free associations are just those ideas we normally do not divulge, espe-
cially to authority figures, because our "superegos" tell us that we should
not: that these thoughts are irrelevant, not what the inquirer is soliciting,
evil, reflect badly on us, or silly. Free association takes training because it
involves a fairly direct encounter with repression. In my experience, a
background in psychoanalytic theory helps one to better grasp the strate-
gies of the superego and to form a commitment to circumventing it for the
purpose of better understanding oneself. Most people with whom anthro-
pologists work lack this training and commitment. Another reason I
adapted this method is because role-playing is a form of play; people are
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 189

less afraid of being irrelevant, "bad," silly, and so forth when they play.
Playing itself seems to sidestep the superego.
There is a good excuse for dream play as a method in psychoanalytic
theory. Lacan (1977) argues that the superego is the "No!" of the father,
the internalized law that repressively splits the mind into two parts, a con-
scious part and an unconscious repressed part. This "No!" is a word: it is
part of the word-based form of mind that Lacan (1968, 1977) calls the Sign,
as opposed to the image-based form of mind that he calls the Imaginary.
As a citizen of the Sign, this "No!"-the superego-controls words best; it
keeps us from putting forbidden thoughts into words spoken to others or
to ourselves in our own minds. It does not succeed as well with images;
this is precisely why dreams are the royal road. Role-playing images shifts
the accent of an exchange from the word-based type of mind toward the
image-based type of mind, helping to constitute a position of surprising
openness between the two, as the dream play in this article will indicate.
The method was devised in the context of a class I taught over a
number of years at a small college in American Samoa in the 1980s to
introduce students to their dreams' deeper meanings in a nonthreatening
and entertaining way. The dreams presented here are part of a larger col-
lection, including over 500 dreams, sometimes thirty or more dreams from
a single individual. Not all the dreams were explored through dream play;
some were merely recorded or explored through other projective methods
of my devising that I discuss elsewhere (in press). Classes were conducted
in English, the language in which my students had been educated in pri-
mary and secondary school. Dreamers were in their late teens and early
twenties. Occasionally I shared and role-played a dream of my own by way
of demonstration. Given the context, I do not have biographical material
on dreamers except what they provided in the context of dream work. This
material would no doubt further enrich analysis. But what I am arguing
here is that dream play is a projective method that can offer insight into
cultural psychology without the necessity of intimate biographies that pre-
sume great rapport and trust and much longer relationships than are often
possible in field circumstances (see Spiro in press).
In dream play, care or the lack thereof was my dreamers' most recur-
rent and pressing concern. Care and what it signifies-emotional engage-
ment-has long been a noteworthy topic in the literature on Samoa.
Writing in the 1920s, Mead tells us that in Samoa "those who care greatly
are always said to care without cause" (1961:128).2 Yet Samoans claim to
have what might be called a "care ethos." As one girl put it, "Samoan
people worked hand in hand; they love to help other people, for instance,
a Samoanfa'alavelave such as a funeral. All people related to the one who
is dying, are able to donate something-money, fine mats, keg beef, or
190 * ETHOS

whatever that family can afford to help the fa'alavelave. Therefore, the
Samoan life and culture is unique."
An obvious solution to this contradiction is that, in Mead's Western
view, care is interpersonal not intergroup. In the above quote, care coming
from a group, people working "hand in hand," is going to a group, people
holding a funeral, which is a fa'alavelave. Fa'alavelave refers to group
"troubles" but is also a general term for one's responsibilities to take care
of related groups-ceremonial obligations being the punctuation points of
that responsibility (Mageo 1998:13; Shore 1982:169-170). Yet dream play-
ers incessantly complained about a lack of care that was not intergroup
but interpersonal in nature. Although there are many Samoan terms for
care (terms I will consider herein), a word Samoans often use these days
is a pidgin term, kea. Further, leai se kea, meaning "I don't care," or just
le kea, meaning the same, is an extraordinarily common contemporary
expression. This ensemble of diverse voices in Samoan care discourse, I
argue, is best understood historically, as a hybridization of psychological
orientations deriving from colonial experience. I call it a "kea complex."
"Complex" is a concept borrowed from Jung's analytical psychology
(1973); it refers to a contrapuntal ensemble of ideas linked by an over-
arching theme and explains elements of individual personality. The Sa-
moan kea complex is a contrapuntal ensemble-consisting in loving "to
help other people," on the one hand, and leai se kea, on the other. For Jung
the contrapuntal voices of a complex share an underlying "feeling tone."
Likewise, the voices of Samoan care discourse share a feeling that one
might describe as a poignant longing for care. We will see that the ground-
work for the kea complex is laid in traditional child care practices that
favor group bonds and interpersonal disengagement. Colonialism intro-
duced a model of the self as inner. In the postcolonial world, the presence
of this alternative model has given shape to needs for interpersonal care
that, in Levy's terms (1973:430-485), may formerly have been hypocog-
nized.3 These new, largely unsatisfied care needs confuse young people
about how much elders and others actually care and inspire le kea atti-
tudes and postures.
Without more ado, then, let us turn to instances of dream play. The
method and analysis of the kea complex will be presented through three
major dreams, which I name and number to provide structural clarity.

DREAM
1:SUICIDE
I dream that a girl was on the roof of a tall building ready to jump. So I went up there
to ... talk to her, and I told her about life and what it would mean if she would jump
and kill herself .... Finally, I talked her from jumping, and I felt so good that I woke
up.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 191

I call this dreamer Faulalo (advise, dissuade). She role-played the girl at-
tempting suicide-whom I call Fa'aola (saved). Samoan first names are
often ordinary words, ideally words that refer to significant events; my
pseudonyms are in consonance with these naming practices. Fa'aola im-
mediately began complaining to Faulalo:
Fa'aola: Well, I am tall, with blue eyes and black hair, and I am very beautiful.
.. Faulalo, you don't really care ... what happens to people when they
try to help you out.
Faulalo: I do care.
Fa': You sure have a funny way of showing it .... I was going to jump down
from the building, all you did was stand there and talked to me but not
come and held me back and stopped me from jumping.
Fau: I don't really know you, and you expect me to care for you and help you
out of this mess that you got yourself in it.
Fa': Yes, I expect you to do this.
Fau: Why don't you do this to someone else? Why me?
Fa': Because you care too much about people that you sometimes forget
what it really means to care .... I don't want to talk to you because I
can see that you wouldn't care .... I have nothing to say to you.
Fau: But I have to talk you from jumping, and you will kill yourself, and I
don't want you to die.
Fa': I want to die because no one cares about me.
Fau: But I care, so please don't jump.
Fa': Okay, I won't jump. But only on one condition. You come and hold me
because I feel so lonely because I have nobody....

Next, Faulalo decided to role-play the building off of which the girl in-
tended to jump:
Building: I am a big and tall building with an elevator and windows. I am made
up with cement, and I have a dark, gray color.... Faulalo, why
wouldn't [you] let people stay in my building? ... I am so lonely here.
There is hardly anyone here. They only come, and go in, and paint me
up. I don't want to talk to you.
Fau: Okay fine!
After the dream play, Faulalo speculated: "The holes that I found out is
that I am lonely and don't really care about myself and my problems."
Dialogues between the dreamer and an image, or among images, often
take the form of an argument. In this dream the argument is about care.
Fa'aola, the girl trying to commit suicide, accuses Faulalo of failing in care
reciprocity: "you don't really care . .. what happens to people when they
try to help you out." Faulalo protests, "I do care." As if adducing evidence
for her side, Fa'aola next complains about Faulalo's lack of demonstrative-
ness, saying, "You sure have a funny way of showing it," meaning that
Faulalo does not come over and hold her. At first it seems that Fa'aola
simply wants to be held back, but then it becomes clear that she also wants
to be comforted. Faulalo counter complains that she does not know the
victim so why should she "expect me to care for you." The victim insists
192 ? ETHOS

that Faulalo is obligated because, paradoxically, she cares "too much

about people that you sometimes forget what it really means to care."
Moreover, Fa'aola "can see that [Faulalol wouldn't care." Faulalo protests
again that she does care, and Fa'aola insists on being held. Like Fa'aola,
the building complains that it is lonely and blames Faulalo: "why wouldn't
[you] let people stay in my building?"
A tendency toward suicide has been documented by Pratt in Samoa
since missionary times (Freeman 1983:220, 346n. 16). In the 1960s and
1970s there was a suicide epidemic (Macpherson and Macpherson 1985,
1987). Statistically speaking, young men were the predominant victims.
Most commonly they drank insecticides used in agriculture. Faulalo's
dream, then, does not enlist Samoan suicide scripts. Contemporary Samo-
ans frequently watch U.S. movies and television programs. This dream is
reminiscent of TV dramas in which a male police officer is trying to talk a
desperate individual out of jumping off a tall urban building. During the
suicide period there was a spirit possession epidemic, predominantly
among Samoan girls (Mageo 1991c, 1994, 1996a, 1996c, 1998: 164-190).
In the stories that linger about possession, young women with 'afakasi
(half-caste) features, most typically blue eyes or fair hair, are common
victims. In the dream play Fa'aola has blue eyes. In spirit possession,
'afakasi girls often symbolize the incursion of foreigners into precontact
feminine gender norms (Mageo 1998:173). Fa'aola seems to symbolize an-
other local/foreign alloy-an admixture of care.

ChristianCares
Samoans see their duty to others as playing their appointed role in the
group: "Stand at your post," they say. Part of one's role is to treat other
groups with care. So, it is one's duty to be a caring host, as Samoans typi-
cally are. In old Samoa the quality of hospitality was such that large trav-
eling groups (malaga) frequently journeyed around the islands, it being a
point of pride to take nothing with them (Kramer 1995:101; Stevenson
1892:12-13; Wilkes 1845:148-149). Christianization involved an awaken-
ing to a new form of care.
Beginning around 1830 evangelical missionaries Christianized Sa-
moa. In an 1839 letter to the London home office, the missionary Murray
quotes a convert: "Formerly ... we uttered love . .. while our hearts were
full of hatred and murder but now we know true compassion."4 In another
letter (March 20, 1840), Murray says that he found his Samoan servant "in
deep distress" and "poignant grief," proclaiming repeatedly "Woe is me!"
because "she had just discovered that she had all along been a hypocrite."'
Discourse about hypocrisy is by implication also about sincerity. Both
words carry with them a model of the self as inner. One is sincere inas-
much as one's words are congruent with one's private sensibility and intent;
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 193

one is hypocritical inasmuch as one's words are incongruent with one's

inner feelings.
"Soul," referring to the individual's inner life, was an aspect of self in
vogue in 18th- and 19th-century England. The Industrial Revolution broke
down many stable agricultural communities, precipitating the migratory
employment pattern that characterizes capitalism. Values that had once
resided within the community then had to be internalized (Levy 1973:
347-354, 1974). Evangelical religious practices played a role in this inter-
nalization process. Evangelicals preached surrendering the soul to God;
because people were sullied by original sin, this surrender dictated a habit
of vigilance toward one's own internal life (Davidoff and Hall 1987:88). The
minute and unflagging attention thus directed helped to make subjectivity
a site of identification and a basis for identity and helped to create an
internal space in which values might be carried within the individual be-
tween diverse social locales (cf. Foucault 1988, 1990; Levy 1974).
Samoans take role-playing as the primary site of identification and
basis for identity (Mageo 1989a). Postcontact, however, Samoans also
came to harbor a Christian sense of self that was inscribed within their
language by evangelical missionaries. In Samoan an aga is a social role as
well as a persona-what one might call one's image. The term agaga is
constructed from the root aga. In old Samoa and still today, agaga is the
word for ghost (Cain 1979:70-143; Turner 1984:16). Thus, Samoans be-
lieved that the constitutive component of self-one's face or image-survived
death. Evangelicals likewise believed that the constitutive component of
self survived death but saw this component not as image but as soul. The
missionary-linguist Pratt, therefore, translated agaga as "soul," and this
translation is indexical of a host of others that missionaries made to char-
acterize psychological life (Mageo 1998:10, 144-147). The London Mis-
sionary Society ministers who Christianized Samoa made epistolary
reports back to the home office in London. Through the first several dec-
ades after their arrival, missionaries wrote with joy and amazement at the
number of Samoans, avid for literacy, filling their schools (see, for exam-
ple, Turner 1986:18-19, 27, 61-78).6 Well into the 20th century, mission-
ary sects were the primary translators and publishers of texts in Samoan
(Iluebner 1986). As a result, Christian concepts of self acquired an endur-
ing presence in the language.
In Faulalo's suicide dream the victim, Fa'aola, is two sided. She has a
blue-eyed Western side and a Samoan side. The dreamer too is in a sense
double. Faulalo feels two different and seemingly contradictory emo-
tions-one individual, one social. Commenting on her role-play, Faulalo
said: "Sometimes I felt left out, I don't belong. But sometimes I felt that I
am happy with this crowd." This doubleness is iterated in the dream in
two uses of the word care. Paradoxically, Fa'aola says Faulalo cares in the
194 ? ETHOS

plural, "too much about people," such that "you sometimes forget what it
really means to care." Here the first usage corresponds to a traditional
Samoan care type that is social in nature; the second corresponds to a
Western type-a care for one's own inner feelings and those of others.
Really is a term from a discourse of sincerity-like that noted above in
Murray's converts who disapproved of uttering "love . . . while our hearts
were full of hatred." This discourse of sincerity again appears in Faulalo's
speculation on what "holes" the dream represents-that she does not "re-
ally" care about herself. Such statements are recurrent in my dream data.
Another dreamer, for example, remarked, "Most of the time, I don't care
much about myself and what's going on inside me."
This second "real" type of care, or actually a lack thereof, is what
motivates Fa'aola to attempt suicide: "I want to die," she says, "because
no one [really] cares about me"; this is why she feels "so lonely." This
lonely self is represented by the building, a modern Western construc-
tion-tall, fancy, cement, uniformly gray-and particularly by its interior
into which, the building tells us, Faulalo admits no one. Care is shown only
to the building's exterior: "They only come, and go in, and paint me up."
The Samoan word teu means "to care for"; it also means "to decorate."7
Fa'aola's expression of loneliness is paralleled by a request for a West-
ern care behavior-to be held. I noted in Samoa that when someone cried,
others stood around, often looking down, rather than physically reaching
out to the person, even when they were friends. I was married to a Samoan,
Sanele, and asked him why. Sanele spoke of the time he told his much
beloved mother that her favorite unmarried daughter was pregnant. She
cried. He sat beside her, looking down, waiting quietly for her to finish. To
have held her, he said, "would have only made her cry more." Entering
into a person's feelings by holding someone does not help the person re-
gain composure, composure the person needs in order to resume an ap-
propriate social role. Samoans sense themselves to be actors upon a
stage-persona (aga). Looking down gives others an offstage moment. Sa-
moans often look down themselves when overcome with emotion to take
an offstage moment.

CaringChildren
Faulalo and Fa'aola's argument reveals a care confusion, the basis for
which is laid by child-rearing practices. Succoring and dependency roles
are distributed differently by various cultures (Bateson 1972). Samoan
children are supposed to care for their elders. My Samoan mother-in-law,
for example, distressed that I did not become pregnant, was always telling
Sanele to have children so that "you will have someone to take care of you."
Traditionally,American mothers serve their children meals; Samoan children
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 195

serve their parents meals. One girl gave a contemporary illustration of this
ethic:
All my life ... I never did anything for myself.... I was given to my grandparents, so
I could run errands for them. My grandmother was put on a hemodialysis machine
every four days within a week, and most of the time I was there with her. ... I learned
how to put her on [the] hemodialysis machine. ... I gave her insulin shots in the
morning, took her blood pressure rate after every meal, made her food to fit her diet
the doctor told me to give her. I translated everything she felt to the doctor because
she didn't speak English, but I did. I had to do all this, and I was still going to elementary
school. I did this until my grandmother passed away.... Then I took care of my grand-
father till he passed away.

Samoan parents lavish care on infants. But by weaning (between the

first and second year), parents and to a lesser extent grandparents have
suspended physical and verbal demonstrations of affection.8 Child care is
transferred to older siblings. Parents, of course, continue to care deeply
about their children, but more distant parent/child relations are dictated
by Samoan definitions of care.
In Samoa care is demonstrated by helping others, with money or kegs
of beef in a fa'alavelave but also by working for them. One Samoan gave
this example: "Suppose there were two sisters. Each sister had a big job to
do, like weeding one section of a plantation. Both had the same amount of
work, but one finished sooner. If the faster sister were fealofani to the
slower sister, she would help her finish her work." Fealofani means "re-
ciprocal care," as Samoans believe care should be.
In capitalist societies, work is a synonym for money: like money,
work is a medium of exchange. In Samoa, traditionally more feudal in
organization, work is a synonym for service: service (tautua) is the me-
dium one uses to acknowledge that another is high status. High-status peo-
ple act on their own auspices rather than following the advice and orders
of others (Gerber 1975:160; Tuiteleleapaga 1980:39). Because Samoan
care inspires a desire to serve, a demonstrative elder conveys to children
that they are high status and can act independently, giving misleading
information about the status hierarchy. This Samoan semiology of status
dictates that those who in more egocentric societies have the closest in-
terpersonal bond to children-parents-express care indirectly. It does
not mean that children lack for care. They live in a world replete with
group care, which Mead beautifully describes in the 1920s: "A child of
three can wander safely and ... be sure of finding food and drink, a sheet
to wrap herself up in for a nap, a kind hand to dry causal tears and bind
up her wounds. Any small children who are missing when night falls, are
simply 'sought among their kinsfolk' " (1961:41-42).
Tausi means "to care for" but also "to put in order." Ideally, Samoan
elders care for children by putting them in order-giving them advice or
orders and watching over them to make sure that they follow the advice
196 ? ETHOS

or carry out the orders. Ideally, children care for elders by listening re-
sponsively to orders and serving them.9 In dream play, however, ordering
is often role-played as if it demonstrates a refusal to care. One dreamer
acted out a conversation with a dirty towel that wanted to be washed: "I
don't care! Just keep your mouth shut," he told the towel, or "I won't ever
wash you again." Silence is often seen as a refusal to care on the part of a
younger person in response to a perceived lack of care. In role-playing the
suicide dream, Fa'aola says, "I don't want to talk to you because I can see
that you wouldn't care.... I have nothing to say to you." When Faulalo
role-plays the building, it too refuses to talk, to which Faulalo responds
with a Samoan synonym of leai se kea-"Okay fine!"-a very common
English expression.
When children fail to serve elders, they are accused of a lack of care.
"I took care of you and made you alive," a parent may say: "Now you don't
care about me anymore." Feeling heaped with responsibilities, young peo-
ple may seem not to care, as in the following dream fragment:
The scene changed to a big two-story house. ... I was with one of my relatives. We were
told to stay home and clean up. .... Everybody was gone for some meeting or service.
... All we did was play cards.... We were tired of playing, so we went out to stretch.
Right when we got to the door, we saw a long line of people heading toward us. They
were my whole family plus some other people I don't know.

Worse than failure to serve is talking back to an order, being tautalai-

tiiti, "talking while little." Tautalaitiiti is a general term for importunate
behaviors and attitudes; it is to these that elders most frequently direct
those physical punishments that pepper Samoan childhood. The intent of
punishment is to silence the child and to silence those personal inclina-
tions that are so likely to cause one to diverge from carrying out orders.
When beaten, the child must sit down and mute the tears and rage that
express personal feelings at such a pass; only then will the beating abate.
I have shown elsewhere that Samoan children become inhibited about
expressing personal feelings and even dissociate them, such that the inte-
rior self is obscured (1991a:17-28, 1998:31, 60-61, 65-67, 73-76). Thus,
Samoans say, "One cannot know what is in another's depths" (Gerber
1985:121-167).
In dreams, the inhibition of personal feelings often takes the form of
a le kea reaction, although this reaction may melt away during the dream.
In the following a dreamer sees a stranger at a rugby game, remarking: "I
didn't seem to care about him.... As I walked toward my house, I saw the
same guy standing on top of the roof.... Only this time he is waving good-
bye at me. I stood there, freezing [paralyzed].... And at the same time I
realized I was crying. I woke up and discovered myself crying." lIere the
inability to move is an image of inhibition. Immobility, muting, punish-
ment, and le kea reactions are often grouped together in Samoan dreams.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 197

Another boy, for example, dreamed of being late for a class. The dream
teacher yelled, "Where were you?" The boy "just stood there ... the words
just couldn't come out of my mouth." The teacher "opened his belt ...
ready to hit me, and I yell back to him . .. 'Who cares?' " Iere a pro-
claimed lack of emotion-"Who cares?"-actually expresses rage, as is
evident in the boy's delivery, "I yell back."

Care
Trusting
Attributions of lack of care to parent figures suggest a lack of trust.
One young woman role-played an argument with her teeth, taking a Sa-
moan elder's role and placing her teeth in a child's role: "But who cares
anyway? . . . If they don't listen to me, that's their problem. I told them
what to do. They don't care. Why should I care? I don't care how they feel.
It's what they do that counts. If they do something wrong, they have to be
punished for it." The mouth and teeth symbolisms of these two examples
are apt. Erikson (1963) argues that orality is conjoined to trust issues: it
is trust that we incorporate along with our mother's milk. Trust issues are
evident in the suicide dream and are associated particularly with the inte-
rior self. Faulalo later said that the girl attempting suicide, Fa'aola, "is me,
[the] disbelieving part of you that feels lonely and wants to be held." Notice
the shift from me toyou: even in the act of claiming these feelings, Faulalo
needs to distance herself from them. This "disbelieving part" is acted out
in Fa'aola's persistent refusal to believe that she is actually cared about.
This relation between care and trust is yet clearer in the role-playing that
accompanied the following dream:
I dreamt that I was swimming with a lot of people, and ... I dived under the ocean....
I saw a skeleton.... I picked up a bone [that] ... looked more like a comb, so I combed
my hair with it when I went up above water. My sister . .. picked up the skeleton skull,
and when she came up she started playing football with her friends using the skull,
which now looked like a football.

The dreamer role-played a conversation between the skull and the

bone. The bone describes the skull as "very demanding and tough....
Skull always tells me what to do." The skull describes the bone as "lazy,
but [it] will do what it's supposed to do." Here the bone takes the child's
role in the elder-child Samoan pattern; the skull takes the elder's role. The
bone and skull continued:
Bone: Skull, I don't think you care all that much about how I feel.
Skull: I do care, but you don't know that.
B: I don't believe you.
S: Whether you believe it or not, that's the truth....
B: I'll never believe you.

Barred from demonstrativeness toward children, Samoan elders must

rely on children to trust in their care. The problem is that today young
198 ? ETHOS

people have two models of care-one Samoan, one Western. The result of
these competing care models is a crisis of faith. The football game with the
skull conveys the hostility some Samoan young people now feel toward
elders amid this care crisis.
Trust is threatened when nurslings begin to bite (Klein 1984; Klein et
al. 1952). Mothers then withdraw. Nurslings' frustrated desire to suck and
bite intensifies. Overwhelmed by frustration, aggression, and desire, they
project these feelings back on their internalized images of their mothers,
which are in consequence split in two. One image is a remembrance of the
beloved mother; the other is a monster mother who represents the babe's
own frustrated orality-that is, the desire to suck and bite the mother.
This is the monster who eats little children found in tales worldwide. The
crisis Klein depicts may well be universal. In Samoa, however, it is over-
laid by a colonial complication of care, which makes children addition-
ally dubious about parent figures. Further insight into this care crisis is
provided by the next major dream.

DREAM AND
THE
2:GRANDMOTHERMONSTER
I was back at the age of 11, and my friends and I were playing marbles in front of our
house.... Suddenly, out of nowhere, I saw this big, hairy monster. It was about seven
foot, 11 inches. This monster was coming toward my friends and me. My friends got
scared and ran away. Somehow this monster ... wanted to eat me ... [W]hen I ran
around the house I saw a trash can .... I jumped into it. ... While I was in this smelly
trash can, I found this small hole that I could use to look outside. I peeked through this
hole.... As I was moving my eyeball around, I spotted the monster heading for the
trash can. ... It came closer and closer. I knew that if it got any closer it was going to
get me. I jumped out of the trash can and started running again. Every time I would
run around the house I would yell, "Help! Help! Someone help me!" As I ran past the
house door it was open, so I ran for the doorway. As I got closer, the door slammed
shut.... I screamed, and yelled, and pounded on the door, but no one would open it.
... As the monster reaches its big, long, hairy arms to me, I pounded the door.... Right
when the monster was about to reach the back of my shoulder, my grandmother
opened the door. I found myself face first in front of my grandmother's feet.... I told
her about the monster that was about to grab me. She said, "What monster? I don't see
any monster.... [G]o back and play marbles." She closed the door again. I sat there
thinking, oh, it was just a big imagination. But out of the ground, its hairy head came
out. Its two hands grabbed my feet.... It came out from the ground slowly and slowly.
... As the monster opened its big mouth with its sharp, bone-like, curved teeth, it
moved its mouth toward my head. I screamed for help again ... Right when... I woke
myself up. I was wet with sweat and scared.
The dreamer, whom I call Fefe (afraid), immediately began addressing
himself to the monster, whom he proceeded to role-play:
Fefe: Hey monster, why are you chasing me?
Monster: I'm chasing you because you're nice and small. Besides ... [t]he other
kids are inside their houses. Why aren't.you in your house?
F: . . . I tried knocking [on] the door, and no one inside would let me in.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 199

M: ... I might as well eat you, it seems like no one cares....

F: No, Monster, you're wrong. They do care.
M: Oh yeah? They sure don't show it.... Just let me get a bite of you....

Fefe then role-played the trash can:

Trash Can: ... [H]ey kid ... you look scared. What's wrong?
F: Well, there's a monster chasing me, and I think he wants to eat me ....
TC: Don't talk now.... You can hide in me.... You're safe here with me.

Next Fefe role-played the door:

F: Please, Door, open. There's a monster . . . going to eat me if you don't

let me in.
Door: What monster, kid? Are you crazy or what? Stop hitting me....
F: Okay, Door.... Is there anyone in the house?
D: Of course. Your aunty and your grandmother are watching TV and talk-
ing.... [T]he way you be pounding me they should be able to hear....

Last, Fefe role-played his grandmother:

Grandmother: Who's that knocking on the door?
F: It's me, Grandma. Fefe.
G: ... [G]o play marbles.
F: There's a monster after me. Open up the door, Grandma.
G: ... [S]top talking rubbish. Go play marbles.
F: Grandma, please open the door. Please.
G: You wait. If there's no monster, you're gonna get it....

This dream play dialogue, too, is an argument about care. The mon-
ster says, "I might as well eat you, it seems like no one cares." To which
Fefe rejoins, "No, Monster, you're wrong. They do care." Grandparents
often play the parenting role in Samoa, and here the monster's "no one"
is Fefe's grandmother. She has locked him outside the house and responds
to his repeated entreaties for protection by telling him to "go play mar-
bles," shutting the door in his face. The dream, then, portrays feelings of
abandonment. The groundwork for these feelings is laid by Samoan child-
rearing practices: when parents distance children, children are apt to feel
abandoned.
Evidence for an enduring fear of abandonment can be found in Sa-
moan reactions to the death of a loved one: they tend to be accused of
abandoning the living. Today mourners complain, "How could you have
gone and abandoned me?" This tendency to react to death as if it were an
unloving departure has long been documented. "Oh, my brother," said one
19th-century mourner, "why have you run away and left your only brother
to be trampled upon!" (Turner 1986:133; cf. Freeman 1983:214-215;
Mead 1961:1991). These abandonment protests against the dead are also
found in dreams: "Mymother is inside the house, ... I was playing outside.
200 ? ETHOS

... I saw a car coming. ... So we came outside. We stood in front of our
house's door. We saw the man opened the door of the car ... and shot my
mom without a word. My mom fell down. I was crying hugging her. I was
saying, 'Mom, Mom please don't go. Who's gonna take care of me?' "
The death of a parent is a frequent terror that haunts Samoan dream-
ing. If dream figures, murderers included, often represent dreamers' re-
pressed feelings, then these dreams are indicative of hostility toward
parents in response to feelings of abandonment. Fefe's monster can be
seen as an image of his hostility in reaction to abandonment feelings: num-
bers subtly identify the boy with the monster. In the dream Fefe is 11; the
monster is seven feet, 11 inches. Later Fefe remembered being locked out
of the house as a child, but he was nine years old when this event occurred.
This divergence suggests that the number 11 is in the dream for the pur-
pose of identifying boy and monster. Psychologists might attribute Fefe's
feelings to insecure attachment.
Insecure attachment is Ainsworth's (1973) term for an inadequate
interpersonal bond between mother and child; it is reflected in acute sepa-
ration anxiety manifest in either avoidant or hostile behavior on the part
of a child. I have argued elsewhere that elders in all cultures actively forge
some form of "insecure attachment," rooted in patterned experiences of
acute separation anxiety, in order to remedy a type of relational blurring
that is perceived in their culture as boundary confusion (1998:40-48).
In more egocentric cultures, the most emphatic psychological bound-
ary is between individuals. Infants are cared for predominantly by one
individual (the mother) who is occasionally physically absent, creating a
type of separation anxiety that acquaints infants with the difference be-
tween persons, as Freud noted long ago:
An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world....
He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which
he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any
moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time-among them what he
desires most of all, his mother's breast. [1961:13-14, 66-67]

The scene implicit in Freud's analysis is one in which a mother has tem-
porarily left her child alone or with a substitute caretaker. Ier physical
absence generates separation anxiety that brings the difference between
bodies to the infant's attention. Again implicitly, through the repetition of
this situation, the difference between bodies becomes symbolic of the dif-
ference between individuals. Developmentally, separation anxiety comes
to insure that children will not be confused by this difference/boundary.
In socially oriented Samoa, the most emphatic psychological bound-
ary is between the ranks of the social hierarchy. Infants are cared for by a
number of elders who, when the child is around the age of two, become
interpersonally distant. This distance generates separation anxiety: toddlers
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 201

respond with tears and tantrums (Gardner 1965:154-155). This anxiety

brings the difference between age-grade ranks to the toddler's attention,
which later serves as a model of other kinds of status differences. Devel-
opmentally, interpersonal distance becomes symbolic of the differ-
ence/boundary between ranks and insures that children will not be
confused about this boundary. But given the copresence of two models of
self and correlative modes of care in postcolonial Samoa, distancing is now
likely to appear to the child as leai se kea.
Remember that one of children's common reactions to separation
anxiety is hostility. Building on Klein's work, Bettelheim (1976) says that
this hostility is likely to be projected back on the parent figure, who then
appears to the child like the monsters of fairy tales. A moment ago we saw
that the dream identifies Fefe with the monster (intimating that his aggres-
sivity is at issue), but Fefe's grandmother is also identified with the mon-
ster through the sequence of dream images. Just "as the monster reaches
its big, long, hairy arms," Fefe finds himself starring at "my grandmother's
feet." After the role-playing, a friend commented to Fefe, "In a way, the
monster relates to your grandmother," to which Fefe responded, "Yeah,
come to think of it. Yes it does ... The part of me the image represents is
my grandmother and family":
I feel like the monster is right about my family.... I remember one time when I was a
small boy around nine years old, my family would never give me their support when I
needed it.... [T]he monster is forever chasing me. To compare that to my fam-
ily-they're always chasing me and telling me to do this and do that. Oh, a thought just
passed through my head. ... I remember my grandmother always telling me if I don't
pick up the trash ... she's going to send me to my mother. And she knows I don't like
my mother's family.
Klein (1984) believes that the child splits the image of the mother into
good and bad figures. In his analysis of "Cinderella," Bettelheim (1976)
tells us that Klein's bad mother is that mother who demands that the child
work (like a wicked stepmother), as Fefe's grandmother demanded that he
pick up the trash.
Trash collecting is the task of lowest status and is one of Samoan
children's chores. By jumping into the trash can, Fefe identifies himself
with trash. Ilere trash is a trope for a feeling of worthlessness-being rub-
bish, unworthy of care. When Fefe tells his grandmother his fears, she
says, "Stop talking rubbish. ... If there's no monster, you're gonna get it."
Rubbish, then, is also a symbol of the grandmother's lack of faith in Fefe's
words-his disbelief, his care crisis, projected back on her. When she
emerges from the door, she says, "I don't see any monster."
The door that shuts Fefe out also says, "What monster. . . ? Are you
crazy... ?" and tells Fefe that his grandmother is watching television and
talking. To talk to others is to make a claim on their attention; to listen is
to attend to them. Fefe commented, "Whoever was inside should have
202 * ETHOS

heard me.... This dream is telling me the answer.... I have to talk

straight up with my family and grandmother about my feelings. My grand-
mother has to take the time to sit down and hear me out." While here Fefe
was reversing the silence/listening age-grade relation that is usually en-
joined on Samoan children, he was also resolving a postcolonial problem
by adapting a response from his own cultural repertoire. In Samoa the high
chief is a model of ideal conduct; he plays his role nobly, and his speech
is sa'o, "straight" (Mageo 1998:54; Shore 1977:437, 1982:243). Aiming at
this ideal, one woman said, "I always have to face straight and say
straight," meaning without prevarication. Fefe's resolution was shared by
a number of dreamers. Another young woman, for example, dreamed of a
policeman, whom she identified with her father. What she said she needed
was "to be straightforward with people.... To be able to face the police-
men and tell them what I feel without being afraid of. . . hurting the other's
feelings and disregarding mine."
Fefe's problem is not just the difference between his grandmother's
care model and his own; his care crisis reflects a colonial revision of gender
roles. Christianization was centrifugal for boys-driving boys to the outer
reaches of the family world. In the 19th century, boys slept in the ceremo-
nial house (faletele) of the village's organization of untitled young men,
and girls slept in the ceremonial house of their village organization (Stair
1897:109-110; Stuebel 1976:126-131). Faletele are situated in the village
center. Sleeping arrangements remained the same through the early 20th
century (Brewer 1975:38-40). By the mid-20th century, boys had moved
to small shelters (faleo'o) behind their families' compounds; girls moved
into their families' main houses where they could be more closely watched
(Schoeffel 1979:176; Shore 1977:424, 1982:233-234). What did this revo-
lution in sleeping arrangements reflect? The next dream holds the answer.

3:THE
DREAM AND
ANGEL THE
BOX
I saw myself in this . . . garden.... I picked one of the flowers. As I was standing, I
heard a voice .... The voice ... said to look in the flower. I looked, . . . and I saw a girl.
... She was standing naked.... crying and telling me that she was sorry and she's been
talking behind my back.... I started to cry too. All of a sudden, my parents were in
the back of me, . . . and in the back of them was a girl ... like an angel. She was wearing
a white puletasi. She walked toward me and grabbed me. I scream and called for my
parents, but it seems like they don't care. I saw my mom crying and my dad was just
standing there. This angel put me into a box that was so dark that I couldn't even see
anything.
I call this dreamer Sei (flower in the hair). She first role-played a dialogue
with the girl in the flower, who addressed herself to Sei and initiated a
dialogue with her:
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 203

Girl: I'm naked, I have white skin, pretty, fat, and I'm sad ... because I've
been unfaithful to Sei ... talking behind her back.... Please forgive
me....
Sei: Why did you talk behind my back for?
G: I guess I'm too jealous of you....

Next Sei role-played her father:

Father: I'm an old man.... I have a black skin, white hairs.... I love my
daughter very much.
S: No, you don't [shaking her head].
F: [HIelooks down toward his hands, not saying anything. Tears come.]
S: Why didn't you help me when I called for your help? You just stood
there staring. You didn't even cry.
F: I couldn't.
S: What do you mean... ? You said you loved me.
F: I do love you with all my heart.
S: I don't think so.
F: See, my child, the reason I didn't help you was ... I wanted you to be
safe.
S: In that dark scary room?
F: I just want what is best for you, my child.
S: [Tears.] I'm sick and tired of playing your protecting me game.... I
don't want to talk to you Dad.

With a friend's help, Sei role-played the angel:

Angel: I'm wearing a white puletasi, long hair, fair skin, and I'm also a caring
person.
Friend: Why did you put [Sei] in the dark box?
A: I wanted her to be safe. Sei, are you mad at me?
S: Of course I'm mad at you.

To my question, "What hole in you does the dream represent?" Sei re-
sponded, "Anger and fear stored in myself."
Although this dream play, too, devolves into a care argument, it begins
with each figure's self-description: they answer an implicit question about
their identity. The girl in the flower describes herself as white skinned; one
might think she is another 'afakasi (half caste). But she is also fat, and fat
is a traditional Polynesian beauty principle (Luomala 1986:148; Mageo
1996c:77). It is more likely that this girl's color is an evocation of the
archetypal beautiful girl in Samoan tales of long ago, Sina, whose name
means "shining white."
We also know that the girl in the flower talks behind Sei's back. Talk-
ing behind another's back is synonymous with lotoleaga. Lotoleaga, "ill
will," is the Samoan antonym of care; it is jealousy of anyone else who gets
special privileges or attention not expressly warranted by their role. In-
deed, the girl in the flower tells Sei, "Iguess I'm too jealous of you." Samoans
see lotoleaga as the source of all vicious behaviors. This form of jealousy
is so motivating a feeling, I believe, because Samoan children are censured
204 ? ETHOS

for calling attention to themselves, just as Fefe is rebuked for demanding

his grandmother's attention.
Fia means "to affect"-to want to be or to pretend to be what one is
not. Calling attention to oneself is criticized in Samoan childhood with a
host of fia words. Children, for example, may be accused offiapoto, "acting
smart." Pidgin fia words suggest that colonial experience exacerbated chil-
dren's appetite for attention and elders' feelings about children who ask
for it. Now kids may also be calledfiasio (pronounced "fia-show"), "to
want to make a show," orfiapalagi, meaning "to affect the airs of a West-
ern European." Tendencies to call attention to oneself are countered by
teasing about personal characteristics. Children nickname one another
with the most insulting personal features they can find-like a tendency
toward diarrhea, protruding ears, or dark skin. The practice is called
faipona, "to point out that which is not smooth." Elders, too, faipona chil-
dren. I have heard of older women nicknaming their young female rela-
tives with words for female body parts, thereby teasing them about their
sexuality. By intimating that certain parts of the self are worthy of deri-
sion, teasing delivers a metamessage: attention is undesirable. Children
become shy (ma) about their personal sides.

Gender
History
Samoans believe that lotoleaga in the form of gossip is a female pro-
clivity. Inasmuch as lotoleaga suggests inhibited attention needs, this pro-
clivity implies that Samoan girls are teased more than boys. The earliest
example of faipona in the missionary record is of a young woman being
teased about her body. "If a person should jeer a young woman ... by
remarking freely on her person saying she was diseased or ill formed," says
the missionary Williams, "she would instantly throw off her cloth & expose
herself in every possible direction & pass on" (1984:232). Curiously, in
this quote the girl's immediate reaction to being teased is not shyness but
flaunting her body. Missionaries to Samoa often remarked on this feminine
penchant for flaunting. The Tahitian teachers that Williams left in Samoa
complained that they "could not induce" Samoan women "to cover their
persons of which they are exceedingly proud" (1984:117). Likewise, the
missionary Hutton complained of the Samoan women "obstinately refus-
ing to cover the upper part of their persons" (1874:149).
I have argued elsewhere that childhood attention needs, inhibited by
teasing, foster a countertendency toward exhibitionism that is redirected
in adulthood to occasions deemed culturally appropriate and into sanc-
tioned modes of expression (1992, 1996b, 1998:74-79). In old Samoa,
bawdy joking was a sanctioned mode of expression and could be verbal or
bodily. I suspect that the pre-Christian girl who exposed herself "in every
possible direction" was making a jocular response to the boy teasing her.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 205

One highly appropriate occasion for bawdy joking was a frequent enter-
tainment called "Joking Night" (Poula). Self-exposure was part of the jok-
ing style of these occasions. "The young virgin girls taking the lead," the
missionary Williams tells us, "enter the house entirely naked" (1984:247;
cf. Colvocoresses 1852:87; Wilkes 1845, 2:130, 134,140). These girls ban-
tered shamelessly but also jested by throwing their nude bodies into ab-
surd postures, Williams says, "in order to make the most full exposure of
their persons" (1984:247). In the dream, the girl in the flower is naked,
evoking pre-Christian girls.
Exposing one's body, according to Williams, was also the daily habit
of pre-Christian girls. They would "gird a shaggy mat round their loins as
low down as they can tuck up the corner in order to expose the whole front
side of their left thigh anoint themselves beautifully with scented oil, tinge
themselves with turmeric put a string of blue beads round their neck &
then faariaria [fa'aialia], walk about to shew themselves" (1984:117).
Fa'alialia means "to flaunt oneself." The dream girl lives in a flower. In
Christian Samoa flowers are symbolic of fa'alialia, as is evident in spirit
possession stories. Earlier I mentioned the 20th-century spirit possession
epidemic that afflicted Samoan girls. Traditionally in Samoa illnesses were
conceived of as spirit induced. Priests and other high-status mana-emanating
people served as spirit mediums, entering into states of possession (Free-
man 1983:176-177, 339; Shore 1977:308; Stair 1897:222). By the 20th
century, girls of no designated status were reported to be the typical vic-
tims (Goodman 1971:471; Mageo 1991b; Schoeffel 1979:394-395). Spirit
possession came to be regarded as an illness resulting from a spirit's blow
inflicted as a punishment (Mageo 1996a, 1998:164-190). One common
pretext was that a girl was fa'alialia; for example, she might have worn a
flower in her hair in a place sacred to a spirit (Cain 1971:178). When
possessed, girls would often shed their clothes.

Christian
Gender
Ethics
The second girl in Sei's dream is the angel. Angels, of course, are
Christian creatures; however, with her long hair and white puletasi, this
angel is Samoan Christian. Long hair for girls was a colonial import. Tra-
ditionally, girls' hair was cut short at puberty, and boys' hair was left to
grow long. Thus, the missionary Williams remarks disapprovingly, "I can-
not assign a reason why the females crop themselves so close, while the
men generally have long hair" (1984:231). A puletasi, consisting of a short
fitted dress over a sarong, is the colonial version of traditional dress. In the
postcolonial present this is the outfit Samoan women, and often foreign
women, too, wear on Samoan culture days at work and to Samoan culture
celebrations. White is the color Samoans are apt to wear to church, prob-
ably encouraged by the missionaries who were forever comparing the light
206 ? ETHOS

of Christianity to the dark heathenism of the past. White Sunday is a

uniquely Samoan religious holiday. Children get new white clothes, are
served a special meal by their parents often involving vanilla ice cream,
and generally get to be the center of attention. For weeks before White
Sunday children memorize little speeches out of the Bible or practice bib-
lical plays called tala in which girls often act the part of angels. The occa-
sion identifies Christianity with an attentive style of child care.
Why does the angel put Sei in a box? Property is largely common
among extended family members, so Samoans may hide their most pre-
cious possessions away in chests, which are big wooden boxes (Sinavaiana
1992:111). During Christian times, girls were to be hidden away like fam-
ily treasures.
In old Samoa the taupou, "ceremonial village virgin," according to
Kriimer, was "reared with great care": "Wherever she may turn her steps,
to the bath, or gathering blossoms or fragrant leaves in the woods, visiting
friends and relatives, at all times she is accompanied by some elderly
women (soafafine) who care for her and who are responsible for the main-
tenance of her virginity" (1994:34). Missionaries thought that every girl
should be cared for like the taupou, "for the maintenance of her virginity"
(Mageo 1996b:596-601, 1998:197-217). One of Shore's informants de-
scribed the "taup6u style," which all Samoan Christian girls were sup-
posed to imitate: "She shouldn't walk about too much. ... She doesn't
speak too much. She doesn't laugh all the time" (1982:232). In Christian
Samoa bawdy self-display on Joking Nights and like occasions came to be
condemned for girls. They were made to cover their bodies (Shore
1982:228). Physical confinement accompanied this new sexual confine-
ment: girls were kept more around the house within the circle of their
elders' watchful gaze. It is this "thou shall not" Samoan Christian girls'
gender ethic, represented by the long-haired angel, that boxes in Sei.
Long hair for girls became a focus around which this Samoan Chris-
tian gender ethic revolved. Girls were supposed to wear their long hair
neatly tucked up, but sometimes they secretly let it down. When they did,
particularly in sacred places, they were likely to be possessed by spirits.
Remember the skeleton dream in which the bone plays the child's role and
the skull, the parent's role. The bone looked like a comb, and the dreamer
combed her hair with it. In Samoan spirit lore combs, like the flower in
Sei's dream, evoke the motif of self-display. In colonial Samoa the Spirit
Girl was a newly prominent species of possessing spirit. In narratives,
Spirit Girls had long hair, wore their hair down, decorated their hair with
red flowers, and were frequently seen combing out their hair. If lotoleaga
is the Samoan opposite of care, then Spirit Girls were the opposite of an-
gels: Samoan Christians called them tevolo, a pidgin version of the Latin
for "devils."
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 207

Long-haired girls were the new definition of beautiful. In one of Ameri-

can Samoa's first beauty pageants (held in the early 1980s) the winner was
determined by measuring each girl's hair with a yardstick. Long-haired
girls also became the particular objects of their elders' protectiveness, so
much so that they sometimes cut their hair to escape surveillance. Like
teasing, being too closely watched to insure that one displays graceful good
manners and Christian decorum can be an unpleasant form of attention.
The motif of putting Sei in a box is reminiscent of placing a body in a coffin;
the presence of the angel taking her away while her mother cries strength-
ens the comparison. Implicitly here Christian protectiveness embodied by
the angel is depicted as burying Sei alive.

A CareConfrontation
Whereas the girl in the flower talks behind Sei's back, the angel is "a
caring person." This angel stands for a Christian version of care, like that
practiced toward children on White Sundays. In dream play, Sei uses this
kind of care to reproach her father. The father's dark skin underlines his
Samoan identity. HIiswhite hair identifies him as an elder and as repre-
sentative of those values that today people regard as traditional. Sei com-
plains that he "just stood there staring" when the angel put her in the box:
he neither cried nor defended her. Crying is a Western Christian version
of care. Thus, in Camus's The Stranger (1988) the protagonist's dry-eyed
vigil over his mother's dead body the night prior to her funeral is taken as
evidence that he is an uncaring person, capable of murder. At Samoan
funerals no one is supposed to cry. People do, but character is demon-
strated by abstaining from the display of personal feeling.
In answer to her doubts, Sei's father gives her Western evidence of
care: tears come to his eyes. Even this is not enough for Sei, who counters,
"Why didn't you help me when I called for your help?" Sei's father tries to
explain: "I wanted you to be safe" (which the angel later tells us is her
motive too). IIe wants to protect her like a family treasure, to care for her
as once only taupou were. But in Sei's view, confinement to a "dark scary
room" is a protection "game." Sei rejects Christian Samoan parental pro-
tectiveness as being in her own best interests and, therefore, as proof of
care. Like the girl in the suicide dream, Sei ends the dialogue with her
father by refusing to talk in response to what she judges to be a lack of
care. Ironically, in the end Sei implicitly turns this care reproach back on
the angel herself.
There are interesting location references in Sei's dream. The girl in
the flower talks behind Sei's "back." IHerparents are "in the back" of her.
The angel is "in the back of them." I suspect that in this context "back" is
an image of having no knowledge of something-that is, of unconscious-
ness, as in the first instance when the girl talks about Sei without her
208 ? ETHOS

knowledge. Sei's protective angel and father are internalized as inhibi-

tions, which operate, as it were, behind Sei's back. Remember that Sei
believed that the "hole" her dream represented was "anger and fear stored
in myself." Although Sei screams in the dream, in dream play she ex-
presses only anger. In her role-playing, Sei mentions that the box is
"scary" but seems to be describing its properties (it is a dark box, it is a
scary box) rather than her emotions. Fear is the internalized correlative
of protectiveness: when afraid, we strive to protect ourselves. Sei attrib-
utes protectiveness to others and is only minimally aware of her internal-
ized fears, which are the counterpart of their protectiveness. "Back" may
also be a causal reference: the Christian practice of cloistering girls, which
the angel represents, is "behind" her parents' protectiveness. Thus, the
dream offers what one might call an imagistic analysis of Sei's problem.
In precontact times only girls with high lineage, like that of the tau-
pou, warranted serious concern about virginity. By recommending univer-
sal female premarital virginity, in Samoan eyes missionaries seemed to be
offering all girls taupou status. For this and other reasons I have detailed
elsewhere (1998:146-150, 218-239), girls came to identify with mission
schooling. In Samoa comedy theater, for example, the language often
taught in mission schools, English, was apt to be portrayed as a female
affectation (Sinavaiana 1992:104-106). Girls' mission affiliation offers an
explanation as to why Sei seems so firm in her demands for a Western
Christian care style, while Fefe fears that he has no just cause. Maybe, he
thinks, the monster is just "a big imagination." Yet, caught between West-
ern and indigenous care models, Fefe takes refuge inside the trash can: for
him, too, greater interiority and its correlative mode of care communica-
tion-telling his grandmother his feelings-offer potential refuge.
Until well into the 20th century most Samoan houses had no doors or
walls, only posts holding up roofs: nobody could be shut out or in. The
pivotal psychological geographic dichotomy in this earlier cultural world
was between the bush and the village center (Shore 1982:48-51). Dream
play verifies that this older geography has been overlaid by a newer one of
outside and inside. This geography characterizes all three dreams. In the
first dream, the building complains that Faulalo "wouldn't let people stay
in my building." It is for this reason that the building is "so lonely." While
Fefe hides inside the trash can, no one will let him inside the house. Ile is
locked outside by his grandmother and, therefore, is vulnerable to the
monster. The monster says, "The other kids are inside their houses." Fefe
feels that "whoever was inside should have heard me." Sei is vulnerable to
the angel who puts her into a box, which is also a dark scary room. In-
side/outside geography represents a postcolonial sense of psychological
space.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 209

The Western character of Sei's care demands is also suggested by the

soap opera quality of this interchange. U.S. soap operas are an important
context in which contemporary Samoans study Western care discourse.
They are exceedingly popular, even among old people who do not speak
English. An old woman might sit before a television often with a grand-
daughter who translates, just as the girl with the diabetic grandmother
quoted earlier "translated everything she felt to the doctor." Linguistically
and psychologically, contemporary young people mediate between West-
ern and Samoan cultures and tend to internalize the contradictions be-
tween them-as all these dreamers do in relation to care.
Television is a symbolic presence in all three dreams. TV is implicitly
present in the suicide/care script of Faulalo's dream-in which a caring
alter ego attempts to dissuade a stranger from jumping off a tall Western
building. It is also implicit in Sei's mimicry of Western soap operas, with
their tearful/reproachful care discourse. Ironically, in the one dream in
which TV is explicitly present, Fefe's dream, it represents the distractions
of modern life, responsible for his grandmother's lack of attentive care.
Modernity seems to have opposite effects for girls and boys. Whereas, for
the two girls, TV may have contributed care scripts, it has instead contrib-
uted to the boy's doubts about his elders' care.

THE
KAE
COMPLEX
ANDPOSTCOLONIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
Dream play is a less intrusive method than many Western styles of analy-
sis. Traditional Western psychotherapeutic styles are confessional (Fou-
cault 1990). Dream play achieves therapeutic epiphanies of reflection by
acting out rather than confessing. Confessing in religious circumstances
carries with it the emotions of guilt and shame. Do people engaged in psy-
chotherapeutic confessions escape these emotions? Perhaps in the best of
therapeutic relationships they do, but what about lesser therapeutic rela-
tionships? In the dream play recorded here dreamers are assertive rather
than ashamed, even though they are discovering "holes" in themselves.
Further, dream play resembles the manner in which many small-scale so-
cieties treat dreams themselves (Tedlock 1991, 1992). Graham (1995), for
example, describes the Xavante of Central Brazil who act out their dreams
in ritual performances. In the particularistic climate of contemporary an-
thropology, ethnographers are reluctant to attribute meanings to cultural
data, dreams included, other than those meanings that culture members
themselves give. This climate discourages cross-cultural psychological
theorizing. Dream play is a middle path, offering a method that could be
used in various locales to elicit comparable data.
What do I intend in calling dream play a shortcut to cultural psychology?
There is a divergence between a culture's psychological doxa (prescribed
210 ? ETHOS

attitudes and actions and what they are supposed to mean) and its psycho-
logical experience (how these attitudes and actions feel to individuals in
context). Role-playing quickly reveals the former, the latter, and the dif-
ferences between them. Fefe and Sei cast dream images-the grandmother
and father, respectively-in roles that caricature prescribed attitudes/ac-
tions: Fefe's grandmother is so distant as to be a monster, and Sei's father
is so protective as to bury his daughter alive. Fefe and Sei play out how
these prescriptions are subjectively experienced in their own personas.
Faulalo plays out the prescriptions in her own persona, assigning the more
experiential role to the girl in her dream who wants to commit suicide.
In normal interviewing, young people offered me largely the same psy-
chological doxa as their elders: yes, of course, they knew their parents
loved them; parents just did not show it, except when a child was seriously
ill. But this credo is a psychological ideology about the way people are
supposed to feel, not necessarily what they do feel. In Samoa, ordering
children is supposed to express parental care but may be experienced as
a lack thereof. Silent obedience is supposed to express a young person's
care for elders, but in dream play an unwillingness to speak is typically a
refusal to care in response to emotional injury and distrust. People are
supposed to be allowed to regain emotional composure by themselves, but
dream play suggests that this may leave them feeling lonely and in doubt
about others' care. Boys are supposed to be just fine on their own, but they
may actually feel frightened and abandoned and may long for more atten-
tion. Girls are supposed to need sheltering, but they may feel "sick and
tried" of it. Dream play surfaces both sides of these configurations.
Dream play is literally dialogic, inevitably enlisting the dialogic imagi-
nation and drawing out what Bakhtin (1981) calls the heteroglossic nature
of the self. Jung's concept of the complex can help us comprehend hetero-
glossic elements as parts of a larger discursive/emotional ensemble. Jung
used this term much as I use it for the Samoan kea complex-for contra-
puntal psychological configurations. Contemporary Samoans, beset by
cares in the form of obligations to help their extended families, vaunt care
as a primary feature of their cultural identity. Talofa, "We care for you,"
is the Samoan hello. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a popular Samoan
song called "We Are Samoa" told Samoans to "teach the world hospital-
ity." But Samoans also suspect one another of leai se kea-just as these
dreamers do. Dream play diagrams how these contrapuntal voices in Sa-
moan care discourse engage in dialogue with one another. In this essay the
idea of the complex has helped to make sense out of a multitude of voices:
those of a girl attempting suicide, a painted but lonely building, a voracious
monster, a preoccupied grandmother, an invalidating door, a pleading
grandchild, an angel, an overprotective father, and his reproachful daugh-
ter. Jung's idea of the complex is universalistic and not oriented toward
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology ? 211

colonial or postcolonial psychologies. But colonial/postcolonial worlds are

particularly likely to be beset by contrapuntal voices-some with local and
some with foreign accents (Mageo 2001).
The Samoan kea complex sheds light on how Samoan colonial history
has played on the emotionally trying aspects of traditional child care prac-
tices, generating confusions about parental distancing, ordering and pun-
ishment, and trust and abandonment, as well as attention, self-worth,
straight talk, and gender roles. But if Samoan child care lays the basis for
a postcolonial care crisis, that does not mean that there is anything intrin-
sically wrong with the Samoan way of raising children. It is just that chang-
ing social worlds causes children new difficulties; child care must also
change to help young people with these difficulties. Fefe is right: he needs
to speak straightforwardly to his elders about his feelings, and they need
to hear him. And Sei, at least in dream play, practices what Fefe preaches.
The forms of child rearing considered heretofore are common
throughout Polynesia (Beaglehole and Beaglehole 1938; Howard 1970;
Levy 1969, 1973; Morton 1996; Ritchie 1956; Ritchie and Ritchie 1979,
1989). Through this article I hope to invite further research into how co-
lonial experience has problematized them. Samoan dream play opens a
window on the problematics of postcolonial psychology even beyond Poly-
nesia. Anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists have long docu-
mented and, indeed, are still documenting places where socially oriented
styles of selfhood prevail. But colonialism brought Christian models of in-
teriority to these places. In Samoa but probably also elsewhere, older ways
of being a person have been overlaid by colonial complications like those
depicted herein. Although Fanon (1967) writes as a psychologist about the
effects of colonialism, in anthropology there is still a relative dearth of
work on colonial and postcolonial psychologies.10
Samoan dream play, however, is relevant even to those who live in
societies that have never been colonized. Whether subject to colonialism
or not, social orders are inevitably disjointed by history. What this means
is that one can only heal by transforming the social order, as these dream-
ers and their dream figures seek to do: the girl attempting suicide demands
to held; Fefe, to be heard; and Sei, to be let out of the box. Dream play puts
fantasy in the service of this transformative endeavor. Like Jung's active
imagination, dream play can profitably direct people's fantasy lives. HIeal-
ing is necessarily a creative, even a revolutionary, activity and one that
probably goes against the grain of one's own society by drawing on the
creativity of dreams-on what Stephen (1989, 1995) calls the autonomous
imagination. Dream play deploys projective fantasies to highlight and fa-
cilitate the imaginative processes incipient in dreaming. Yet, if dream play
catalyzes universal human processes, it is also grounded in a culture site.
The fantasies found in the three instances of dream play are shared by
212 * ETHOS

many Samoan dreamers, as the several supplementary dreams and dream

fragments drawn from my larger collection attest.
I end with an admission: dream play may have intensified my dream-
ers' postcolonial psychological dilemmas. The method is, after all, adapted
from the repertoire of Euro-American psychological culture, which valor-
izes the inner life of the individual. It made dreamers more aware of their
own personal thoughts, needs, and feelings. I was inevitably a latter-day
missionary for the Western orientation to self. Knauft (1997) argues, and
this article demonstrates, that today global interchange and global-local
tension place the dynamic aspects of self between the sociocentric and
egocentric orientations to which we have all now been exposed. But, as in
the dialogues recorded here, dream play has the potential to help Samoans
and others negotiate this intermediate territory by recrafting their own
cultural resources.

MARIE
JEANNETTE isanAssociate
MAGEO Professor atWashington
ofanthropology State
University.

NOTES
Acknowledgment. I thank Kathey-LeeGalvinfor proofreadingan early version of this
article.
1. A numberof ethnographersin more sociallyorientedcultureshave noted that there is
but one word for personal thoughts and feelings. See, for example, Carucci 2001; Lutz
1988:92; Mageo1989a:191-192, 1998:10-11, 39-40, 83, 219, 247n12; Tedlock 1992:109,
112; Wikan1990:35-37.
2. FreemanarguesagainstMeadand for emotionalintensity in Samoa(1983:212-225).
In support of this view he presents data on suicide (1983:220-222), spirit possession
(1983:222-225), emotionaloutpouringsand states of transportat missionaryrevivalmeet-
ings, and publicweeping(1983:214-215). Myanalysishere does not concern emotionalin-
tensity per se but, rather,a postcolonialconfusionaboutcare.
3. Although Western Samoa is clearly postcolonial, people may question this term in its
application to American Samoa. Although an unincorporated territory of the United States,
American Samoa today is run by a local legislature and an elected governor.
4. A. Murray, letter to London Missionary Society Headquarters from Tutuila, January
15, 1839, CWMArchives (12/6/A), School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Lon-
don.
5. A. Murray, letter to London Missionary Society Headquarters from Tutuila, March 20,
1840, CWMArchives (13/5/A), School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
6. See also C. H-ardie,letter to London Missionary Society Ileadquarters from Savai'i, No-
vember 3, 1839, CWMArchives (12/6/E), School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London; and A. Murray, letter to London Missionary Society Headquarters from Tutuila,
January 15, 1839, CWMArchives (12/6/A), School of Oriental and African Studies, Univer-
sity of London.
7. Previous work has been done on teu in connection to the Samoan ethos. See Duranti
1981:29-30; Mageo 1998:48-49, 52, 55-56, 81, 84; Shore 1977:161, 1982:136; Tuitelelea-
paga 1980:32.
 Dream Play and Discovering Cultural Psychology * 213

8. There is an extensive literature that supports the portrait of normative Samoan child
rearing presented over the course of this article. See Freeman 1983: chs. 13-14; Gardner
1965; Gerber 1975; Mageo 1989b, 1991a, 1991c, 1998: chs. 2-6; Mead 1961; Ochs 1982;
Schoeffel 1979; Sutter 1980.
9. As children become adolescents and young adults they are also supposed to care for
elders in material ways. O'Meara (1990) attributes the Samoan suicide epidemic to the in-
creasingly heavy financial burden of caring for parents and other elders who have acquired
a taste for Western commodities.
10. For exceptions, see Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1992; Dalton 2001; Knauft 1997;
Mageo 1992, 1994, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1998: chs. 7-11, 1999, 2000, in press. The Comaroffs
are not psychological anthropologists per se, but their work nonetheless concerns these psy-
chologies.

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