Sueños dentro-fuera: algunos usos del sueño en la teoría social y la investigación etnográfica

Abstract

In the last decade citizens of Serbia have described their bewildering social world in the idioms of magical realism, conspiracy theories, amorphous substances, kafkian burocratic parables, twilight, in-between states of consciousness. The social world was also likened to a dream or nightmare. Taking this cue from informants, I ask whether the Serbian “imaginary” might not be more fruitfully figured as a “dream” than as a “text,” or a “depository of dialogically intertwined narratives” -“stories Serbs tell themselves and others about themselves”-, as is frequent in “interpretative anthropology.” In order to extract its maximal figurative potential, I thread the dream trope through Marxist social theory as a site of its most fruitful use -from its anticipation in Marx’s varied figurations of modern capitalism’s peculiar enchantments to its full development in the work of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin-. I then turn from these ethnographers of metropolitan modernity to anthropological theory and the way it historically conceptualized the dream in the exotic peripheries it studied. By threading it through metropolitan social theory as well as the ethnography of peripheries, I seek to show the internal complexity of dream as a figure and to recommend its use to anthropology in the figuring of social thought and action.