Jeannette Marie Mageo

Spirits in Culture, History and Mind

Spirits in Culture, History and Mind reintegrates spirits into comparative theories of religion, which have tended to focus on institutionalized forms of belief associated with gods. It brings an historical perspective to culturally patterned experiences with spirits, and examines spirits as a locus of tension between traditional and foreign values. Taking as a point of departure shifting local views of self, nine case studies drawn from Pacific societies analyze religious phenomena at the intersection of social, psychological and historical processes. The varied approaches taken in these case studies provide a richness of perspective, with each lens illuminating different aspects of spirit-related experience. All, however, bring a sense of historical process to bear on psychological and symbolic approaches to religion, shedding new light on the ways spirits relate to other cultural phenomena.

Intertextual Interpretation, Fantasy and Samoan Dreams

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 people’s 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.

Myth, Cultural Identity, and Ethnopolitics: Samoa and the Tongan "Empire"

This article argues that cultural identity models not only are models of a group--a kind of group self-image--but also predicate models for a shared political way of being in the world, that is, for a political praxis. I present a processual form of structural analysis for mapping the meaning transformations through which people think about cultural identity in myth. Cultural identity is conceived in contrast and comparison to other cultures; therefore, myths render intercultural relations from a local viewpoint and are useful in constructing an interactive perspective on regional history. These ideas are presented via Samoan myths that were told to Western scribes during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, when Samoans were resisting foreign colonials and developing a new sense of cultural identity. They concern a central puzzle of Polynesian prehistory--the nature of the so-called Tongan empire.

Toward a multidimensional model of the self

This article presents a multidimensional model of the self that recognizes cultural variety while providing a comparative framework--giving translatability to difference. In this model, cultures of self can be mapped on an array of continua that represent modes of variation in a multidimensional field. These continua enable us to figure the position of one culture relative to others, while allowing for the possibility that dimensions of self do not co-vary among cultures. Continua also make it possible to plot variance in styles of selfhood within a single culture that could occur between contexts, through historical time, or among subgroups of class, caste, gender, or ethnicity. In the process of delineating this model, I interrogate theories, both venerable and contemporary, concerning experience and embodiment, ranking and gender, morality, emotion and cognition, attachment and need, asking how these elements of self articulate with one another and in what sense their cultural divergence is meaningful.

Male Gender Instability and War

Gender identity rests on cultural models of sex differences. Cultural models attempt to describe reality and people often take them as reality, but cultural models—gender models in particular—are as likely to reflect fantasy: images generated by emotion and reflecting its vicissitudes. Androgynous images haunt the early years of gender formation everywhere. Children fantasize that their mother has a penis. Couvade practices in many cultures (in which men imagine they are pregnant or imitate pregnancy) show that people also fantasize that males have female genitals. So do subincision practices in which the underside of the penis is cut open to make it vulva-like. Images of what one might call “vaginal males,” however, take on a special character when cultural models of male gender are unstable. Projective practices arise in which vaginal images move with frightening rapidity from one individual male body to another. These images represent men’s shared apprehensions about identity; when active within a culture, they evince and heighten identity concerns—which often find expression in violence and militarism. Why is male (versus female) gender instability significant for violence and warfare? One reason is that cross-culturally, men’s gender identity is more commonly insecure than that of women. Where men are relatively uninvolved with infants’ bodily care, boys lack a personal model for masculinity and develop a “negative gender identity.” They define themselves primarily in opposition to female caretakers. Negative gender identity is less secure than gender based on a positive identification with a person intimately known. With the exception of certain hunting and gathering societies and a few horticultural societies, people separate adult males and infants to a degree. When this is the case, male gender images are likely to be unstable in cultural fantasies.

Attachment and Culture: An Introduction

The fundamental argument that motivates this volume, namely that attachment theory’s claims and constructs suffer from profound ethnocentrism, is not new. A handful of cross-cultural researchers have raised these worries since the early days of attachment theory, for more than a quarter century now. Most of these earlier critiques questioned the cross-cultural applicability of a category system that designated children’s attachment to their caregivers as secure versus insecure, and measurement along this dimension by means of the Strange Situation (SS)—an experimental procedure for testing the child’s relative security through absenting its mother from the laboratory. The current volume expands this critique beyond questions of classification and measurement, to question the cultural assumptions behind such a category system and such an experimental design, and extends this line of questioning to ethnocentric concepts beyond insecure attachment.

Toward a Cultural Psychodynamics of Attachment: Samoa and US Comparisons

Attachment theorists see a capacity for close one-to-one bonding and autonomy as ideal developmental outcomes and tend to see early distrust as the inevitable consequence of largely unavoidable separation anxieties that are part of physical and emotional weaning—a consequence mitigated by secure attachment. For Freud ([1930] 1964), in contrast, socialization creates individual anxieties to syphon energy away from personal fulfillment and redirect it toward socially valued behaviors. A psychodynamic account of development, then, would question if one-to-one bonding and autonomy are really ideal or only normative and would ask if separation anxieties are somehow intrinsic to norms and to their reproduction.

Cultural models and the dream US Cinderellas and identity

Dreamers practice models, I argue here, that in daytime serve as efficacious ways of acting in a cultural world but that also incorporate socioeconomic hierarchies that may be disadvantageous for the dreamer. Melding personal experience with models represented as images, dreamers conceptualize these disadvantages and pursue remedies for them. I explore these ideas through the dream of a US undergraduate (Marlene) about hair. Hair is the target of an anthropological debate about putatively universal symbols and cultural messages, which this paper will address. In Marlene’s dream, hair symbolizes what I call a US Cinderella model for being a woman — a model that embeds a gender hierarchy within Marlene’s identity. Marlene’s dream, however, reconfigures her identity and this model along with it.

Cultural Psychodynamics: The Audit, the Mirror, and the American Dream

Based on dream and life-history data and research on American families in the US Northwest, this article argues that a contemporary US middle-class model that I call the Close Family prescribes child-rearing practices that alternate between adulation and audit. Adulation and auditing are forms of social mirroring that make what Lacan calls “the mirror phase” an enduring feature of American cultural psychology and produce feelings of porosity and dependence that compel defensive assertions of independence. Because these assertions are therefore common, they too take the form of a cultural model—the bounded person intrinsically separate from social context that Geertz and others associate with the West—yet this individualistic model is secondary, helping people deny and dissociate a more primary reaction. Models and defenses together, I argue, constitute cultural psychodynamics. The case study of a young woman I call Ruby further suggests that for aspirants to class mobility, what is a balance between adulation and audit in the middle class tips toward audit, magnifying feelings of shame and inadequacy and imposing one of the most formidable barriers such aspirants must overcome.

Race, Gender, and ‘Foreign Exchange’ in Samoan Performing Arts

Through an investigation of Samoan performing arts, I argue that artistic innovation is intentional, but not fully conscious in the linguistic sense. Performance artists grapple with disturbing shared experiences neither they, nor their cultural consociates, can get into words, but that artists render through a play of figures. By reframing figures and the cultural models they symbolise, artists think and feel through cultural memories in ways that germinate social, psychological, and artistic change. This capacity is particularly useful in historical periods of abrupt transition, as the colonial era was in the Pacific. The performances I review are wonderfully coordinated, collective endeavours in which players and audience together, within the quotation marks of play, consider interactions between foreign males and local females and their implications for models of race and gender.