‘Dreamcraft’ in Austronesian art

Researcher: Farrer, Douglas Stephen

Research Project: ‘Dreamcraft’ in Austronesian art

Region: Southeast Asia, Micronesia

Anthropology commenced with the nightdream as the wanderings of the soul to fabricate an alternative rationality of animist ontology. To consider dreaming as embodied rationality, I unpack results from a five-year collaborative ethnography with bomoh (spirit-healers) in Singapore and Malaysia. Ethnographic methods from visual anthropology combined with Deleuzian “practical philosophy” help to articulate a deep ecology of dream cognition in bodily resonance. “Shamanic” cultural forms arise upon dreams in what Devereux referred to as “dream learning”. In the Muslim-Malay world attaining permission (ijazah) through dream-learning is deemed “witchcraft” (menurun). Such dreams form the basis of multiple cultural, performative, healing, and material practices. Painting in waking dreams/trance, bomoh channel “divine” power from the unseen realm (‘alam ghaib). Conceptualized here as dreamcraft, artists embody, enact, extend, and embed dreams into material culture. Sufi dreamcraft results in artworks that startle the recipient, trigger nightdreams, and prove the reality of the unseen realm. Beyond dreamwork in the Anthropology of Islam, the interpretation of dreams as true, meaningless, or false, dreams build worlds. Dreamcraft has wide purview: Freud created psychoanalysis through the interpretation of dreams, the Qur’an emerged from the lucid dreams of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and as shown here, Wicca sprouted from Malay magic.