Sleep Around the World

Anthropological Perspectives

K. Glaskin, R. Chenhall, K. Glaskin, R. Chenhall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137320933
• eBook ISBN: 9781137315731
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although humans slumber for approximately one third of our lives, sleep itself is vastly understudied. This volume provides a comparative frame through which we can understand the myriad ways in which sleep reflects and embodies culture as contributors examine aspects of sleep in various countries and contexts.

Chapter 1

Sleeping among the Asabano: Surprises in Intimacy and Sociality at the Margins of Consciousness

Roger Ivar Lohmann

One by one people rise, replenish the fires anew which have been kept smoldering all night in lieu of a blanket. Sweet potatoes are peeled and cooked a bit near the flames until dry, and then buried beneath the ashes to cook. Myself and others were suffering from a stuffy nose due to the cold dampness of this high altitude . . . . Toward [the next] evening we returned, again at the noisy house I felt like I couldn’t deal and talk to people. Yarowat and Fugot returned very tired and hungry, and went to sleep shortly after arriving, and soon it was dark and I too went to sleep. At about 8:00 I was awoken by more talking as the workmen had awoken from their nap. Went back to sleep, babies quieter.

—Roger Lohmann, fieldnotes, 1994

The Anthopology of Sleep

The paired discomfort and exhilaration that ethnographers experience while immersed in foreign life-worlds throw into stark relief personal and cultural foibles, expectations, and limitations on both sides of the cross-cultural encounter. The more intimate the engagement the stronger the revelations it engenders. Sleeping together is among the most intimate of ethnographic exchanges. Taken with the facts that sleep is a form of social agency, and that its ideal, behavioral, and artefactual forms vary cross-culturally and over time, the study of sleep has much to offer anthropology.

Some of the best ethnography of sleep takes place in the company of others at everyday border crossings between waking and slumber: participating in sociality at the margins of consciousness. These are intimate moments of living in their world, when attention to our own comforts and discomforts present lessons about cultural ranges and frontiers. Beyond this, it provides an opportunity to contemplate humanity’s kinship to the many other living things whose lives consist of continual crossings between sleeping and waking, as well as those whose sleep is profoundly different and whose lives lack such a cycling (Lavie 1996, 99). Sleeping simultaneously unites and transcends humankind.

This chapter outlines a particular tradition of human sleep, in one society and one span of time, and through one ethnographer’s perspective. It surveys the changing culture of sleep among the Asabano, a small group speaking their own language and living in mountainous rainforest near the centre of New Guinea Island in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. The time period covered spans circa 1930–2007, from pre- to postcontact times. Beginning with an account of my culture shock when reconciling Asabano sleep customs with my own, I describe the timing, location, and social grouping for naps and nightly repose, and the activities before, during, and after sleeping. Holistic anthropological accounts of sleep traditions should include disposition of sleeping bodies in relationship to other people and artefacts, including active and passive temperature-control technologies, sleeping surfaces, and appropriate spaces for sleep. Accordingly, in addition to describing witnessed behaviors and artefacts surrounding sleep, I convey my informants’ accounts of past sleeping traditions, including the separation of men and women in gender-specific sleeping zones, the use of sleep deprivation in male initiations, and the liberalizing and individualizing changes these patterns have undergone in response to introduced architectural styles and Christianity.

When ethnographers are guided by a cultural assumption that sleep represents a cessation of social activity, they may fail to dedicate much attention to sleeping. However, participant-observers can readily witness that sleeping is highly social and enmeshed in cultural models and scripts that are enacted by sleepers, as Toselli, Costabile, and Genta show in this book with their study of infant sleeping and waking in social interaction with mothers in Italy. Sleeping behaviors reflect choices that are channeled by ideals concerning what sleep is, with whom one should sleep, how one should prepare for sleep and recommence waking activities following it, and what one should expect to accomplish while asleep. Indeed, sleeping positions and somnolent movement are directly observable sleep behaviors. Ethnographic accounts of the variety of emic models of sleep also stand to inform a richer and stronger etic anthropology of sleep in the same way that faithfully documenting the emics of dreaming is a necessary step in constructing a rigorous science of dreaming (Lohmann 2007a). Culture and biology interact in sleep to such an extent that in some configurations, simply going to bed can kill, as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome among Hmong refugees in the United States strikingly illustrates (Adler 2011, 133). The ways sleeping and waking are defined, conceptualized, and practiced are subject to socially transmittable matrices of ideas, practices, and artifacts, which are influenced by historical change.

My own ethnographic work among the Asabano has included attention to reported memories of mental life in sleep—that is, dreaming—and how it contributed to the adoption and transformation of religious beliefs by instantiating them in personal experience (Lohmann 2000). As Katie Glaskin (this book) explores to profit, although dreaming and waking life do not occur simultaneously, they interpenetrate profoundly through memory. We know the dreams of others only through their reports; however, other aspects of sleeping are directly observable, including how people organize and orient their bodies, artifacts, and natural objects in space and time to accomplish culturally appropriate repose.

Beyond what people think and say about it, the biology and culture of sleep are expressed in proxemics and material culture. These dispositions of sleeping manifest as intimacy or isolation of sleeping bodies in a matrix of objects that underlie, divide, and cover humans and nonhumans in varying degrees of slumber. Proxemics refers to the “use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture” (Hall 1966, 1). This culturally conditioned use of social space follows implicit rules about how closely one should position one’s body to others to interact, be it for speaking or sleeping, and the subtle messages conveyed by the degree of closeness one chooses. Such spatial relations can differ depending on the categories of people involved, based on gender or other markers. Proxemic systems can vary tremendously in both ideals and outcomes cross-culturally, as several chapters in this book show (e.g., see Alexeyeff, this book).

Given familiarity with a specific culture’s proxemics, the relative placement of bodies for sleep can be “read” for the emotional and social content that they express (Musharbash, this book). The same distance between people signals different degrees of intimacy or intent, depending on one’s enculturation. These differences become apparent in cross-cultural contacts, taking the form of discomfort, as I found when I began sleeping among the Asabano. Artefacts, including architecture, are designed to accommodate idealized forms of sleeping. These objects can persist long after the behaviors that gave them rise have ceased. This enables us to extend anthropological research on sleep dispositions beyond the ethnography of present peoples to the archaeological past, to reconstruct the sociality of prehistoric sleep. For example, an early ethnographic report from the northwest plateau of British Columbia reported traditional sleeping areas to be at the edges of houses, on mats or elevated benches covered in grass and conifer boughs and needles. This enabled sleeping areas to be identified in the prehistoric pithouses of Keatley Creek, BC, by concentrations of fir needles and grass seeds on floors. Chenopod seeds in these concentrations indicated another plant material that had apparently been used for bedding (Lepofsky et al. 1995). The sleep of other primates, such as the great apes, is hemmed in by nest building and patterned spatiotemporal relationships among individuals that manifest sociality, including degrees of intimacy and privacy. “Social relationships and their influencing factors,” James Anderson (2000, 355) found among free-ranging anthropoids, “continue during the night, including dominance, kinship, affiliation and sex.” In all, the anthropological study of sleep dispositions, past and present, among humans and among our fellow primate cousins, reveals unappreciated ways in which sleep practices engage with the material world while influencing and enacting social life.

Discovering Asabano Sleep

As a daily need, sleep is so very biological that it can come as a bit of a shock to find that sleeping, too, is subject to the vagaries of cultural variation. My initial discovery of Asabano sleeping practices occurred when my solitary sleeping habits clashed with the Asabano value of sleeping with others of one’s own sex, or family members of both sexes, for protection and companionship. When I first arrived for extended ethnographic fieldwork in 1994, fresh from my homeland of Wisconsin, United States of America, I was given a private room in one of the European-style houses in Yakob village until my own house was built. With permeable, woven bamboo screens for walls, and people occupying the other rooms, it was like a sort of hybrid between American standards of privacy and Asabano standards of company, for their precontact houses had no internal walls. The offer of a room of my own may have been a result of white people being known for keeping to themselves. Still, on my first night in the village, I was taken aback when Belok, a man of my own age, apologized for not being able to sleep with me that night because, he said, he had to sleep with his wife.

I had thought long and hard about what kind of sleeping arrangement to procure for what became a year-and-a-half sojourn, and, despite my ideal of complete submersion in native life, I had decided that my mental health required me to have a private retreat. So, with some regret, I decided against seeking accommodation in any of the sleeping venues of current local tradition. These included two altered survivals of precontact tradition, the “big house,” an open-concept, four-hearthed communal house, and a men’s house. I also rejected newer alternatives. I could have lived with a family in a one-room bush materials house of the type recently adopted from Telefolmin neighbors. I also rejected the most recent accommodation to introduced architecture, a multiroomed, hearthless family house of sawn lumber and corrugated metal, like the one in which I was first put up. Instead, seeking a compromise between traditions, I hired villagers to build me a personal house of bush materials, but with two rooms—a private sleeping and writing room in the back, and a public visiting and dining room in the front, with a traditional hearth for cooking.

After I moved into my new house, men began to visit me in a manner more intimate than the one I was used to. Simolibo, who had given me the right to occupy my homestead’s land and to use the materials from an old house that had stood there, began spending evenings with me and offered to sleep with me. Belok, who had rather attached himself to me, asked if he might begin sleeping at my house. To these offers, not knowing the proper response, I acceded but asked that they only sleep over occasionally, not all the time. I offered them floor space beside the hearth, rather than in the cramped but mosquito-net-covered bedding in which I slept in the back room. Belok commented that I should buy two mattresses for people to sleep on at my house. Finding myself annoyed (a first sign of culture shock) I said, “Maybe one.” More men began to tell me that they would sleep with me. On one of these early nights, Belok, Simolibo, and four boys slept on the floor in the front room of my house. They kept the fire burning all night while I slept isolated in my back room, zipped in my luxury mosquito net, annoyed at the smoke from the hearth fire.

Constrained as I was by my cultural comfort demands—and no doubt as were my hosts too—and wishing to be accommodating (it is supposed to be participant-observation), I allowed the overnight visiting to carry on, though my discomfort must have been plain. Belok and a teenager named Obai, doing their best to meet their obligations to their inscrutable guest, told me they would sleep at my house just occasionally and, that once my door could be secured with a lock, they would not worry about my sleeping there alone. At this, I felt a tremendous sense of relief, since the difficulty over sleeping arrangements was the first really challenging pressure I had faced in coming to terms with having to live for an extended time in this foreign culture. My bizarre compulsion to sleep alone would have to wait a little longer, though: that night Obai and Simolibo slept at my house.

Of course, I had learned valuable ethnographic lessons from these experiences. I soon found out that the main reason that my Asabano benefactors abhor sleeping alone, and felt obliged to protect their extended guest and ethnographer from sleeping completely alone, was the danger of witchcraft. Witches were known to be especially dangerous when one is alone and at night. It would not do for me to succumb to a supernatural attack on account of being left unprotected. Beyond this, sharing sleeping companionship was, in their practice, basic hospitality of the same order as providing shelter. Indeed, sleeping together is a kind of shelter, as Yasmine Musharbash (this book) shows in her account of group sleeping among Central Australian Aborigines. Similarly, Diana Adis Tahhan (this book) points to the comforting connection to one another and to the world around that physical intimacy in Japanese co-sleeping and co-bathing makes possible. Among the Māori, as Toon van Meijl (this book) shows, communal sleeping in ancestral meeting houses on ceremonial occasions provides participants with a sense of reconnection with their ancestors and their customs, in solidarity against threats to their cultural autonomy. The shelter that Asabano group sleeping provides against attacks is just as vital, in their view, as a roof is vital to keep off the nightly rains.

Over time I was able to observe and participate in local practices, when sleeping with others in people’s houses and bush shelters, or when daytime sleepers napped in the same rooms in which I was socializing with others. I learned something about the ways the Asabano sleep, a living tradition with elements from indigenous and exogenous sources, including the proxemics of sleep and the material culture associated with sleeping. My initial encounter with Asabano sleeping was self-centered—the ways it impinged on me were what caught my attention and provided fodder for analysis. After settling in to an ethnographic field site, one can step back and observe a bigger picture.

I have elsewhere characterized the products of agency as creations, which can manifest in three forms: mental representations, behaviors, and artifacts (Lohmann 2010b). Recognizing human sleep as a form of culturally informed agency rather than passivity, anthropologists can study sleep in any of these forms. For example, Rachel Morgain (this book) shows how Pagans of the Reclaiming community on the American West Coast experimented with sleep ideals, practices, and physical settings that are intensely social and culturally creative.

The most immediately and continuously observable manifestation (or consequence) of human sleep is the artefacts that people make to facilitate and represent optimal sleep as they understand it. Second, the behaviors that express sleeping itself and its ideals can be witnessed and experienced during the periods when they occur, perhaps with greatest facility during the waking moments bracketing sleep, before the ethnographer drifts off in slumber. Finally, the mental experiences and ideals of sleep are reconstructed from the sensory evidence of the artifacts and behaviors that manifest them, including our informants’ narratives, enhanced by our own fellow-human, native-in-training sleep experiences and ideas, which enrich our empathy to those of our subjects. I approach Asabano sleeping from each of these three perspectives in turn, though by necessity discussion of one requires discussion of the others.

Artifacts of Asabano Sleeping: Pagan and Christian

Asabano architecture, and the proxemic association of sleeping and waking bodies that it facilitates or restricts, have changed since first contact with the Australian administration in the early 1960s. Postcontact changes in sleeping patterns include the introduction of separate bush-material “kitchens” paired with sawn lumber and metal-roofed “cold houses” that are subdivided into several padlocked, private rooms containing foam mattresses, mosquito nets, blankets, and sheets. I consistently observed that Asabano people prefer repose in physical contact with the new bed gear that could be purchased in towns. When lacking such luxuries, indigenous sleeping technologies must be employed. These include substrates of bark or thick tapa cloth spread on the floor, or bare floors, occasionally with a half log, polished from use, for a pillow. Those beside the hearths often put their feet up on rattan fireguards that are tied to the hearth’s four corner posts to protect children from falling into the fire (Figure 1.1). People sleep near one another as needed for warmth in the cool mountain air. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction   Sleep Around the World: Anthropological Perspectives
• Chapter 1   Sleeping among the Asabano: Surprises in Intimacy and Sociality at the Margins of Consciousness
• Chapter 2   Embodied Meaning: Sleeping Arrangements in Central Australia
• Chapter 3   Sensuous Connections in Sleep: Feelings of Security and Interdependency in Japanese Sleep Rituals
• Chapter 4   Envisioning Sleep in Contemporary Sleep Science
• Chapter 5   Infant Sleep and Waking: Mothers’ Ideas and Practices in Two Italian Cultural Contexts
• Chapter 6   Sleeping Safe: Perceptions of Risk and Value in Western and Pacific Infant Co-sleeping
• Chapter 7   Māori Collective Sleeping as Cultural Resistance
• Chapter 8   Navigating Inspiration, Intimacy, Conflict, and Sleep in a Pagan Community
• Chapter 9   Sleep Deprivation and the Vision Quest of Native North America
• Chapter 10   “In Their Dream They Go”: Sleep, Memory and the Metaphysical
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index