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Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on January 31, 2008
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2008 76(1):27-53; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm094
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Dreaming in the Contact Zone: Zulu Dreams, Visions, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Africa

David Chidester

David Chidester, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

E-mail: davidc{at}iafrica.com


  Abstract

In Primitive Culture (1871), E. B. Tylor supported his theory of religion, animism, by referring to reports about "savage" dreams. Citing Henry Callaway's Religious System of the Amazulu (1868–1870), Tylor invoked the dreams of a Zulu diviner, a "professional seer" who becomes a "house of dreams," as a classic example of animism because "phantoms are continually coming to talk to him in his sleep." In the original account, however, these spirits were not coming "to talk" to the diviner. They were coming to kill him. By situating nineteenth-century Zulu dreams and visions in a colonial contact zone of transcultural relations and asymmetrical power relations, we find a hermeneutics of dreams dealing with indeterminacy, an energetics of dreams, linking dreams to ancestral ritual, which is radically disrupted, and a new interreligious space of resources and strategies for negotiating and navigating within a violent world.

The author acknowledges the financial support of the South African National Research Foundation and the assistance of research staff of the Institute for Comparative Religion in Southern Africa.


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