Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization

by Hans Peter Duerr

Book Overview

Argues that man creates a cultural order inside which he lives. Outside of that form of life is the 'wilderness': the outer wilderness of untamed nature and the inner psychological wilderness of areas... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0631155481
• ISBN13: 9780631155485
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Blackwell Publishers
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The souls leave the island when the anthropologists arrive

When reading descriptions of foreign cultures and history, it is often worthwhile to ask whether the book at hand says more about it's subject matter or its author. As an example, we might read a myth of another culture in distant past on the one hand, say "Popol Vuh" - try to comprehend the frame of mind producing such a text, and hope we're intelligent enough not to completely lose it in "translation" to our familiar terms. We're also hopefully somewhat thrilled, but nevertheless quite clueless as to its underlying logic - becouse every time we try to understand it, we run into the boundaries of our own line of reasoning and conceptualizing reality. So we turn to the help of commentators, interpreters and experts, who share our own culture and expect them to explain us what on Earth is going on. On the other hand, we might skip the first part and turn straight to "explanations" - shape the whole "messy" story into a convenient structure resembeling all the already existing ones in our head, and put it thus to rest. According to Duerr, this kind of problem would not only be a question concerning the mediation between general public and the ones initiated into specific fields of knowledge such as anthropology, but even more acutely between the latter and their subject matter. This is to say that most of the time even they are not willing to enter into a serious dialogue between their own culturally conditioned frames of reference - the scientific Procrustean beds - and the foreign systems of belief and worldview under their study. (More precisely - the scientificism turns into Procrustean bed because regardless of its famous self-criticism it not willing to step out of its shoes and try for the sake of comparative view - a dialogue - walking barefoot with the natives.) Duerr is not suggesting that the scientist drop his frame of reference and go embrace the "otherness" (even if this would be possible), he just points out that most of what they are writing has, due to a lack of respect, serious personal effort and willingness to understand, often little or nothing to do with the foreign ways of life and are therefore more like monologues of the Western culture with itself. Authentic contacts are avoided out of fear of losing oneself, one's identity and the acceptence of the "scientific community". These are only some of the problems of "Dreamtime", to me among the most interesting. The discussion of many of them and other ones is pushed to footnotes, which makes the format of the book quite peculiar: of the 400+ pages, footnotes make up roughly 200 and (an unusually long...) bibliography about 100, so this leaves for main text only 100 + pages! It should be also noted that the book starts with a lot of factual information, the relevance of which only becomes apparent if the reader has patience to proceed. If you liked this book, Jordan Peterson's "Maps of Meaning: the Architecture of Belief" deals with similar problems in another language.

Transformative, Awe-Inspiring, Creative Scholarship

This is one of the most incredible works on epistemology ever written! Finding the indigenous undercurrents of European civilization, Duerr inspires us to discover our own lycanthropic potential. This is literally a life-changing book. Anyone interested in paganism, psychedelics, enchantment, and protean lyncanthropy should plunge into this book like the lifegiving wellspring it is! This book should continuously be in print, and should inspire sequels as well. There is nothing like this book anywhere. Everyone should read this incredible work of scholarship and synthesis.

Recommendation for "Dreamtime" by Hans Peter Duerr

This book would be extremely interesting to any person experienced with plant hallucinogens and "natural" conciousness. The book is written with great style, by an erudite european "hippy" academic anthropologist who has uncovered fascinating insights into particular areas of european folklore which bear on the suppression of wilderness and "animal" identity as a conspiracy across the centuries