REO FORTUNE'S PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF CULTURAL ...

Fortune’s Theory of Cultural Ambivalence
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images are spirits (cf. Lohmann 2003). Dobuans saw magical incantation as
the ultimate cause of successful outcomes, even inspiring love (Fortune
[1932a] 1963, 97). Some magic required dreaming: “In all love-magic the
spirit of the magician is exhorted to go forth in the night to influence the
spirit of the beloved” (Fortune [1932a] 1963, 237). A witch “does all of
her work in spirit form while her body sleeps, but only at the bidding of
the fully conscious and fully awake woman and as the result of her spells,
it is said” (Fortune [1932a] 1963, 150). Not only were attacks perpetrated
in (lucid?) dreams, but people experienced victimhood in their dreams as
well, as when a woman
would wake from a nightmare convinced that the flying witches
were chasing her spirit and were just outside baulked by her spirit’s
luck in getting home before them. Then the night would be
hideous with a ghastly yelling or alternate high and low shrieking,
expressing such fear in its very sound as to be contagious enough
to myself who knew its origin. (Fortune [1932a] 1963, 152)
Vivid here is Fortune’s portrayal of how social interaction and personal
experience, during both waking and sleeping life, led Dobuan people to
accept beliefs about dreams and spirits (cf. Lohmann 2000). This approach
is consistent with the themes of individual adaptation to surrounding
culture discussed in The Mind in Sleep. There is, however, no discussion
of Dobuan types of dream symbolism or how dream narratives might be
used as a window on contradictory beliefs of the individual struggling to fit
in with surrounding society. Instead, Sorcerers of Dobu is a description of
how the sociocultural system works.
Fortune ([1932a] 1963: 43–62) did not gloss over rough spots and
departed from ideal, synchronic images of social structure in his description
of the “functioning of the system.” The glitches he described show that the
social system did not purr along like a well-oiled machine, but was rather
embodied in individuals facing psychic and social ambivalences. Marriages
were seldom smooth and happy, and people were torn by conflict between
natal and affinal loyalties. Fortune also noted an inconsistency in the
creation myth and how people coped with this:
In the beginning of time various human persons emanua nidi,
changed into birds. Thus birds came to be. Inconsistently enough,
various birds hatched eggs from which issued the first human
beings upon earth.
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