Hopi Dreams and Anthropologists’ Dream Collection Strategies

Abstract

A unique collection of over five hundred dreams transcribed from Hopi people—Native American families from the Hopi Pueblo group in the American Southwest—lies almost entirely forgotten in the archives and microcard records of a mid-20th century anthropologist named Dorothy Way Eggan (1901-1965). The article delves into the relationships Eggan pursued with Hopi people, especially Don Talayesva, a man who became quite famous in the 1940s and 1950s as the “Sun Chief” (the title of his autobiography, one of the first of a Hopi). Eggan was immersed in psychoanalysis but preferred to view dreams as cultural technologies defying a standard interpretation, Freudian or otherwise. The article examines how dreams were treated by the collector and the collected—the interpreter and the dreamer. Eggan believed Talayesva to be a “marginal man,” a concept borrowed from the sociologist Robert Park. Meanwhile, Eggan herself was a marginal woman in a way that enabled this unusual arrangement.