The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

Conversation between Jean Rouch and Professor Enrico Fulchignoni

The text of an interview recorded on video in August 1980 to serve as an introduction and commentary to a retrospective presentation of films by Jean Rouch. The published text appears in: Jean Rouch: une rétrospective. Paris: Ministère des Affaires Etrangères— Animation audio‐visuelle/SERDDAV‐CNRS, 1981, pp. 7–29. Translation by Anny Ewing and Steven Feld. The editor and the translators wish to thank the Comité du Film Ethnographique, Enrico Fulchignoni, and Jean Rouch for their kind permission to publish this interview in English.     

From Vues to Ethnofiction: French Ethnographic Filmmaking in Africa before Jean Rouch

This article offers an overview of the very substantial body of films of ethnographic interest produced by French filmmakers working in Africa before Jean Rouch arrived on the scene. It identifies a number of genres. For the first two decades this work largely took the form of short films of reportage, mostly shot in North and West Africa by anonymous operators working for newsreel agencies. Then, in the 1920s, longer and technically more complex films based on transregional and even transcontinental expeditions began to appear. Films offering an inventory of cultural traditions in particular French colonies also emerged in this decade. Also to be considered are films based on extended field research, from the 1930s onwards. We conclude with a brief analysis of the originality of Jean Rouch as he developed a new form of ethnographic filmmaking in the late 1940s.     

Dans le bain avec Rouch: A Reminiscence

This issue's Visual Anthropology Section is a tribute to anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004). In nine brief articles, authors discuss the impact of Rouch's pathbreaking career on ethnographic and documentary filmmaking and his contributions to our knowledge of postcolonial Africa. The authors demonstrate the significance of his work for the larger discipline of anthropology, and commemorate Rouch with personal reflections of their time working with and learning from him.     

Exotic Dreams: A Cross-Cultural Study

The purpose of this study was to identify exotic (i.e., puzzling, unusual, extraordinary, anomalous) dreams in a sample of 1,666 dream reports from six countries, and to make gender comparisons as well. Research participants were members of dream seminars that one of us conducted between 1990 and 1998 in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Only one dream report per participant was utilized, 910 dream reports from women and 756 from men. Scoring criteria were determined in advance for creative, lucid, healing, dreams within dreams, out-of-body, telepathic, mutual (and shared), clairvoyant, precognitive, past-life, initiation, and visitation dreams. When a dream fell into two categories, it received a score of 0.5 for each of the categories, rather than a score of 1.0, awarded when a dream represented a single category. In the sample of 1,666 dreams, there were 135 (8.1%) exotic dreams. Female dreamers reported 77 (8.5% of all female reports) exotic dreams, while male dreamers reported 58 (7.7% of all male reports), the difference was not statistically significant. The country with the highest percentage of exotic dream reports was Russia (12.7% of the total number reported by Russian seminar participants), followed by Brazil (10.9%), Argentina (9.0%), Japan (8.1%), Ukraine (5.9%), and the United States (5.7%). When chi square statistics were applied, it was found that Russian dreamers reported significantly more exotic dreams than dreamers in Ukraine or the United States.     

The Words of Adolescents' Dreams: A Quantitative Analysis

This research detects the most common words recurring in 326 adolescents' dream language. The analyzed dreams have been previously recorded and then transcribed. Grouping words, we obtained the frequency of the main parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and pronouns). Among the nouns, far more frequently represented are terms that refer to important objects of an affective relation. Other significant nouns relate to objects linked to both familial and extra-familial environments. Words related to family relations declined in frequency as age increased and were substituted by terms that refer to relations among friends and to the external world and its objects. Some of these results can be usefully compared with the conclusions derived from the application of other methods of content analysis. This method using dream language analysis could be applied to research concerning dream content, also through specific dictionaries (groups of words defined and classified in relation to a certain theme).     

Dreams and revelations: A critical look at Kelsey.

After a seven-century lull in Christian scholarship about dreams, the mid-Twentieth Century saw the beginning of a growing effort to convince Christians dreams are a significant means of communication with God. This essay summarizes and criticizes Morton Kelsey's central argument concerning the Christian significance of dreams in his God, dreams, and revelation (1991). Kelsey's is a thoughtful version of the argument common to his colleagues. As such, it displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of the general position. It correctly reminds Christians of dreams' significance in their past. But if Kelsey means to offer a fully supported logical argument, that argument is not clear and even the most sympathetic restatement of it leaves it unsound. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)