Relational Dreams and Porous Minds in Tanzania

Abstract

In contemporary Tanzania, dreams are often understood to be ongoing experiences of the world, populated by various actors, rather than merely expressions of what—in a Western context—we would call the “mind”. Thus, the power of dreams’ content often comes from elsewhere—from witches, jinn, the divine, ancestors. While there is a long history of such understandings in Africa—particularly in relation to witchcraft experience (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1937), contemporary experiences of dreaming are also in dynamic dialogue with transnational religious networks. To demonstrate this, I focus on one case of bewitchment which has plagued my interlocuters in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania for years. For this family, the mother’s dreams offered opportunities to fight the powers of darkness in “another dimension”, which resulted in the death of a bewitcher in waking life. This practice was informed by the family’s participation in Cornerstone Church—a Pentecostal megachurch based in Texas, which produces sermons that are translated into Swahili by the family’s local pastor. Thinking with this case, I attempt a “controlled equivocation” between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ (Bonelli 2012, Viveiros de Castro 2004), while asking how transnational religious practice is reconfiguring the quality and texture of dreams in Tanzania today (Dulin 2020) and what significance the phenomenology of dreaming might have for conceptions of the mind (and soul) in waking life (Cassaniti & Luhrmann 2014). I conclude that attention to culturally-embedded practices of dreaming can offer new insights into the relationship between culture and the porosity and relationality of the mind.