• 1 Jasanoff, 2004; Bennett, 2010; Latour, 2007; or, regarding the words of the Buddha on interdepende (...)

1When scholars attempt to understand the rapid changes of the 21st century they often speak about technologies as “co-constructed” or “mutually constitutive” or “interdependently co-arising.”1 A new technological application such as Speechify, the text-reading software I have on my phone and laptop, allows me to have Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice—or a digital simulacrum of it—read to me various websites, blogs, and pdf files, for example. I can now walk to work while doing work! This is both good and bad, for reasons not to be explored here. The point is that a technology can change the behavior of people who use it (such as neurodivergent Speechify users with dyslexia, who can more easily “read” texts by listening, and users like me, who want to be unchained from their sit-down computers). In turn, our collective feedback responses, along with many other environmental, social, cultural, and political factors, may further influence the technology. Technology is not determining of life conditions so much as facilitating.

• 2 The Hopi are the westernmost group of Pueblo Indians (also including Zuni, Tewa, Acoma, and Laguna (...)

3According to anthropologist Dorothy Eggan and psychologist Bert Kaplan, two mid-20th-century researchers involved in the project to memorialize Hopi dreams, collecting nighttime narratives from cultures not one’s own was especially urgent.2 If these could be from out-of-the-way, non-literate groups, all the better.

• 3 Self-description from a letter: Dorothy Eggan to “Everybody,” dated Oct. 22, 1945, Eggan Papers Bo (...)
• 4 She strikingly described dreams as giving access to the “television qualities of the nightlife of (...)

4Indiana-born and Michigan-raised, Dorothy Way Eggan dropped out of college as a young woman and married early to an architect husband who spent a lot of time in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1920s. Dorothy had the gift of conviviality and befriended many New Mexicans, Hopi and otherwise, during her time there, well before she imagined a future for herself gathering their dreams. When the couple returned to the American Midwest due to straitened finances in the 1930s, she got a job doing clerical work in the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, now befriending many anthropologists. (She felt fortunate to be perpetually “lucky […] where people are concerned,” as she once put it.3) As her marriage failed and divorce followed, Dorothy married an eminent anthropologist named Fred Eggan, who happened to be an expert in Hopi acculturation (as well as in the Philippines). Accompanying him on fieldwork trips to Hopi pueblos, Dorothy followed her own interests, which were in psychoanalysis and the dream life. Over the years, Dorothy collected an unmatched repository of dreams from Hopi people: over 500 dream accounts written down by the Hopi dreamer, and later typed up into transcripts, dating from the early 1930s through the late 1950s. She worked with five families, but eventually focused on one man, Don Talayesva, with whom she created a unique archive of around 300 of his dreams. Eggan, well versed in psychoanalytic concepts and often undergoing psychoanalysis, was unusually attentive to the use of dreams as data, and to the implications of looking at the technological side of dreams.4

• 6 Krupat, 2018.
• 7 “The tensions he [Talayesva] experienced cannot be overestimated,” writes Hopi historian Matthew S (...)

7Along these lines, certain Hopi individuals gave especially clear views of the dreaming dynamics. Don Talayesva, Dorothy Eggan’s primary subject, was one of them. Raised in the oldest Hopi pueblo of Oraibi (Orayvi), located on Third Mesa (part of the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona), he was sent at the age of 5 or 6 to a government school for Indian children at Keams Canyon and later to a boarding school in Los Angeles, California, the Sherman Institute. The Indian schools of the US and Canada, lately the topic of much scholarship in professional journals and horrifying revelations in newspapers, were places of forcible change, intended to strip native children of their given cultural traits and ways of speaking (and language), and render them fit for industrial labor or servant-level jobs. For many children they were sites of trauma, for example, the forced shaving of one’s hair and the refusal to call students by their given names, insisting instead that students go by Anglicized “regular” names and not speak the tongues of their parents.6 After graduating from the Sherman Institute, Don did not stay in southern California, nor seek a laboring job, but returned to Oraibi, where he began unpropitious farming and later married. More famously, he cultivated his identity as chief of the Sun Clan and reembraced a “traditional” way of life he felt had been taken from him. Beginning in the 1930s, he joined with anthropologists in their work, for rates around 35 cents an hour (at least, that is what Dorothy and Fred Eggan paid him; in purchasing power, this is the equivalent of around $7.50 USD in 2024). This supplemented and even overtook the meager earnings he made farming. Eventually, he became what could be called the most productive Hopi subject of all time, which in turn made him quite controversial among fellow Hopi, who accused him of selling vital secrets.7

• 8 Leo Simmons was an anthropologist (1897-1979) interested in life histories; he worked with Don Tal (...)
• 9 Mischa Titiev (1901-1978) was a Russian-born anthropologist who worked as a professor at the Unive (...)
• 10 Talayesva, 2013. (Note that the first edition [1942] does not feature Talayesva as the author, but (...)
• 11 Soleil Hopi appeared in the French Terre humaine series with a preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The (...)

8A heady combination of “specialness” in both its senses—from childhood and later at school, when Don was told he was both more and less than a Hopi—likely prepared the way for his comfort with and embrace of a succession of visiting anthropologists. Working with the Yale ethnographer Leo Simmons8 in the 1930s (alongside other well-known ethnographers such as Mischa Titiev9), Talayesva became sole subject of an “as-told-to” life history, the popular Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian.10 The role brought attention, even renown. French-, German- and Slavic-language editions followed, graced by his visage and adorned (as it was not in the United States) by his name as author. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote the preface to the French edition of Soleil Hopi and spoke about Talayesva on television in 1959.11 Don described the first stirrings of all this acclaim in a 1941 letter to his brother Honweseoma, where he expressed both his hopes for acclaim and his intention to remain modest:

• 14 A projective test is a type of psychological test that aims to capture the inner subjective workin (...)
• 15 Emphasis added. Eggan 1957, 15. “In this man's dreams, and to a lesser extent in many Hopi dreams, (...)

9After the autobiography, Don continued to work with anthropologists. He gave interviews, took the Rorschach test and other projective tests, and wrote down his dreams to hand off to Dorothy.14 Of Don, in turn, Dorothy wrote that he “...is far from an average Hopi, but neither is there justifiable evidence for the assumption that he is an unique one; certainly there is no evidence that he is in any degree psychotic. But precisely because his needs were greater than average in some ways, he is an active dreamer who uses culturally provided sanctions in his dreams to reinforce his ego, and it has proved useful to examine configurations of Hopi behavior in [an] exaggerated form so that similar processes in less vivid presentations are not so easily overlooked.”15 Hopi dreams were exaggerated in their adherence to surface intelligibility, Eggan maintained, and the dreams of the Sun Chief (the title was sometimes attached to Don Talayesva due to his role in the Sun Clan) exaggerated this trait further, but without thereby marking him as un-Hopi, or Kahopi.

• 16 Scholarship on Talayesva’s life history includes that of Clyde Kluckhohn, David Aberle, and Robert (...)

10In what follows, I delve into a previously undiscovered (or unremarked on) aspect of the relationship between the Oraibi-based Hopi chief Don Talayesva (1890-1985) and the Chicago-based dream collector Dorothy Way Eggan (1901-1965). Although existing scholarship describes Talayesva as (variously) a traitor, a hero, and a culturally confused person, the work of Eggan is largely absent from either historical scrutiny or even memory, and few have explored their respective views of dreams as part of the dynamic of their relationship.16 My aim is to describe the way that his dreams functioned in their work together, cementing a surprising mutual marginality.

• 17 Dorothy Eggan, “Cultural Factors in Dreams”, paper for A.P.A. Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 1958, Bo (...)
• 18 Ibid.

11Dorothy Eggan treated her datasets of Hopi dreams to different kinds of analytical approaches. She sequentially numbered dreams that had been collected in the 1930s and 1940s, and these dreams eventually fed an experimental microcard archive in the 1950s and early 1960s. Each of her subjects, from five Hopi families, generated a series of dreams marked in the order they dreamed them. She took these numbered dreams and created sorting lists (looking for thematic threads), and “series” (temporally arranged). Arraying dreams in charts, she discerned patterns through the “massing of items.”17 Such devices as lists and synoptic charts, she argued, were useful for “massing evidence in readily available form.”18 Making lists of dreams, grouping them in batches, looking for patterns—these may seem like simple acts, but they had rarely been done. The list, as Jack Goody once observed in “What is a List?”, is a form of writing that offers ordering advantages, and this helps to explain why early writing specimens often took the form of lists:

• 20 Müller-Wille and Scharf, 2009, 4-5.

12Lists are paper technologies, then, with a long history, as historians of list-making have shown. In one example, Staffan Müller-Wille and Sara Scharf describe the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus’s lifelong struggle to construct a system both flexible and expansive for containing his taxonomies. Faced with “the first bio-information crisis,” he published at the age of only 29 an initial listing of 935 plant genera (in the 1737 first edition of Genera plantarum), followed by seven expanding editions. He then struggled for fifty years to invent the index card, or something that functioned very like it, to make his lists adaptable and useful, via a “long and tortuous route” that was anything but the easy and “natural” process a current-day onlooker might be likely to imagine. Linnaeus’ innovative ways of keeping lists turned botany into a “fact-gathering, collective, and cumulative science.”20

• 21 For a history of the card file as “universal paper machine” (non-electronic data processor, a Turi (...)
• 22 Bowker and Star, 2000, 18.
• 23 Psychologists Mary Calkins, “mother of the statistical study of dreams”, and Lydiard Horton pionee (...)

13As science studies scholars Geoff Bowker and Leigh Starr showed for more modern sciences, those apparently “faceless lists” that seem to reek of bureaucracy and dullness—for example, the International Disease Classification (IDC) compendium or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in its iterations—in fact encapsulate elaborate and powerful forms of classification.21 Lists operate to classify, telling the reader (as well as the classifier) what is what, and what is not. Making lists may “appear to be to us a comparatively straightforward task” but it is one that involves a lot of epistemological jockeying.22 Eggan’s list making was a way of self-consciously embracing the advantages of these paper-based ordering systems, and in so doing Eggan, following in the footsteps of statistical pioneers Mary Calkins and Lydiard Horton, was pushing dreams into the realm of orderly and ordered “items”—that is, using her own term, data.23 Lists were only one of the ways she did this nudging. (See figure 2)

• 24 “Psychoanalysts are interested,” Eggan observed of her dream collection, “but they want me to try (...)

14Considering the inadequacy of either a strictly Freudian or strictly cultural-anthropological approach—just as many Freudians neglected cultural and environmental factors, quite a few anthropologists sidestepped a real understanding of personality dynamics—the situation called for “experimental methods” even of the tentative variety.24 Searching for a method that could be standardized, Eggan next constructed a synoptic chart of 254 dreams of Don Talayesva (out of the 300 total collected by 1952). Each element of the man’s sequentially numbered dreams she distributed among one or more of fifty-five horizontal columns: the column headings included popular Freudian symbols, Hopi symbols as discussed in dream interviews, and personalities, situations, and concepts of particular interest to Hopi—the dreamer’s family members, supernatural beings, accidents, conflict, or danger. For example, the category of security reinforcement was divided into support of whites; personal strength, wisdom and bravery; guardian angel; and miscellaneous. Each column permitted an initial or word to signify the exact nature of the support (for instance, under miscellaneous, we find the following notations: “dead mother,” “hawk,” “young girl,” and the like). Of 254 dreams, 169 bore surface elements of persecution or conflict, for example. Another section recorded the dreamer’s physiological reaction on awakening (tears, ringing ears, laughter, sweating) and his own classification of the quality of the dream (good, bad, or indifferent).

• 25 Eggan, 1952, 477 (“social security”), 484.

16It is also self-evident that when handling a large body of data, the various units of which are frequently closely related to others widely separated both by time and numbers, it is difficult to discover, and to hold in mind, relationships between the components without the aid of some mechanical device such as the chart described. Yet it is precisely these patterns in dreams which are useful to the social scientist. In the chart, then, we see emerging, in a graphic arrangement that tends to reduce unwarranted inferences by massing evidence in readily available form, an additional technique for the consideration not only of individual personality, but of such concepts as “basic personality,” “areal personality,” and “the determinants of personality formation.”25

• 26 Dorothy Eggan, “Cultural Factors in Dreams”, art. cit., 12.

19The question Eggan was asking dreams to answer, nonetheless, remained a live question: “To what extent then, may the ‘private world’ of the sleeping mind—including the emotions involved in its action—be equipped or limited, or even used by a specific society to maintain equilibrium?”26 Data from non-literate dreams could be used to answer it, to find the functions of dreams. They had a “television quality” best seen in the dreams of the relatively primitive (“non-literates” or “pre-literates”). But, of course, only for a little while longer.

• 27 Chad’s Dream #7, in Eggan, 1961, 8-9.

20The “salvage” view of anthropology, in which Eggan’s analysis participated, has received thoroughgoing criticism over the past four or five decades. To some extent, the idea of salvage and the “disappearing old ways” was a construct that some Hopi shared: in Chad’s dream #7, which took place after the abandonment, apparently forever, of a traditional ceremony, the Flute Dance of the Rain Clan, the dreamer (Chad) finds himself in Old Orayvi but it is “not exactly like it” and it is “like the houses at a ruin.”27

• 28 Dorothy Eggan, “Notes and Comments on Don”, October 1941, [remarks delivered in?] Room 224 Social (...)

22Scores of others with whom Dorothy worked or befriended, “even including such well educated and effective younger men as Fred Kabotie and Jean Fredericks,” also had experienced non-reservation education, and some even higher education, and yet all “are ‘more Hopi’ than Don,” Eggan opined. Yet his dreams showed ambivalence, anxiety, and insecurity. In dreams he was often arrested by the police. He hoped to prove himself to his people. At fifty he dreamed of wanting an education “so I can defend my people.”28 When he finally told off a Mennonite missionary who had long interfered in, and stolen from, Hopi ceremonies, he carried out the tongue-lashing in Hopi. In Eggan’s opinion, this act lacked courage, for Don was not able to insult a notorious interloper in English. But whereas Dorothy saw this as an example of shrinking, in contrast, the Hopi scholar Matthew Saskatewa Gilbert, in his 2013 Foreword to Talayesva’s life story, characterizes this as a moment of great clarity and courage.

• 29 Ibid., 3.
• 30 Don Talayesva quoted in Dorothy Eggan, “Notes and Comments on Don”, art. cit., 3. Eggan notes that (...)
• 31 Dorothy Eggan, “Notes and Comments on Don”, art. cit. 13. A marginal man was, Park wrote, “one who (...)
• 32 Other scholars of the time, such as Robert V. Hines in the first foreword to Sun Chief, described (...)

23Consistently and in detail, Eggan portrayed Don Talayesva as nowhere at home. A portrait of insecurity is filled out by the detail that Don had trouble sustaining prolonged eye contact, reminding Eggan of the down-and-outs on relief in depression-era Chicago (Eggan was chief statistician of the Cook County Bureau of Transients for some of those years).29 This shortcoming was seemingly at odds with the fact that Talayesva himself placed a high value on the ability to “look him straight in the eyes.”30 In Dorothy Eggan’s portrait at least, Don was a man contaminated by whites, and jealous of them, and dependent on them, and conflicted about them. Borrowing the Chicago sociologist Robert Park’s term, she characterized him as a “marginal man.”31 Eggan drew such conclusions almost instantly on meeting him, and these initial observations, she felt, received repeated confirmation in the decades to come.32 In short, he was and remained an informant although they grew close over the years, as her archives with their overflow of handwritten loquacious letters he wrote her testify. Nonetheless, she seemed to disdain him as uniquely neither here nor there, not quite Hopi and never un-Hopi.

• 33 Letter dated March 4, 1956 to Bert Kaplan from Dorothy Eggan; Dorothy Eggan Papers Box 3, Folder 3 (...)
• 34 The colloquium on “Le rêve et les sociétés humaines,” sponsored & organized by the Near Eastern Ce (...)

24Yet Eggan was herself marginal. She had no education beyond high school, no college degree, no advanced training. Although she continued throughout her life to lack a college degree, much less a doctorate in anthropology or any other subject, and would sometimes irritably chastise those who insisted on addressing her as “Dr. Eggan” (“I am not ‘Dr.’ —I told you that before”, she admonished one of her correspondents33), she became prominent in high-level anthropological and psychoanalytical circles. Toward the end of her life, she traveled to France as an honored participant in an international colloquium, “Le rêve et les sociétés humaines.”34 Her work was anthologized in the 1966 The Dream and Human Societies, edited by Gustave Von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois. Even as she rose to high and even dizzying echelons of scholarship, she never held an academic job, to say nothing of a tenured position. No less a figure than Clyde Kluckhohn lauded her work, and the public intellectual and famed sociologist Riesman sang her praises, writing her collegial “fan mail.”

• 35 John and Beatrice Whiting, Robert and Sarah LeVine, George and Louise Spindler, Renato and Michell (...)

25Remarkable as her rise to influence was, Eggan remained distinctly on the sidelines of her fields. She insisted on her lack of credentials, or at least on not being attributed further status than she had. She was woman in a field where, at the time, it was standard to gain standing through husband-wife pairings, in which the work was perhaps equally shared but the credit given was not. There were many such couples, from the Whitings to the LeVines to the Spindlers to the Rosaldos.35 To maintain professional standing, the male member could successfully remarry but often the female could not. This stood true, remarkably, in a field well known for promoting several prominent mid-20th-century female practitioners such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who were both professors at Columbia University, and (in a qualified way) Zora Neale Hurston, who trained at Columbia University’s anthropology program, undertook field trips collecting folk-songs in her native Florida, and became one of the most powerful voices in American 20th-century literature. In the case of the Eggans, it was somewhat different because she lacked a formal degree. Fred and Dorothy did fieldwork together but they were less of a package.

• 36 Ishii, 2010; Joseph, 2018; Garcia, 2011; Reed, 2021. See also the work of non-Hopi scholars Justin (...)

27In the 1970s, after decades of being anthropologized and historicized by others, Hopis themselves began more frequently to enter doctoral programs (in history, anthropology, and many other fields) and to author their own accounts of Hopi life and meaning. Frank C. Dukepoo in 1973 was the first member of the Hopi tribal group to receive a Ph.D. (in biology, studying birth defects among Hopi of northern Arizona); he went on to become a professor at the University of Arizona. Scholarship such as that of historian Lomayumtewa Curtis Ishii in the 2000s explored the concept of “scientific historicide” in the telling of Hopi history. In the 2010s and 2020s, younger Hopi scholars Darold Harmon Joseph and Jeremy Garcia work on Hopi-based special education and disabilities-aware curricula while legal scholar Trevor Reed has endeavored with the Hopi Music Repatriation Project (HMRP) since 2010 to return Hopi ceremonial songs to their original provenance from the ethnomusicology collection at Columbia University, where they have been stored for decades. With possible relevance to dream ownership, Reed recently argued that Fair Use law can obscure the continued misappropriation of Hopi creative goods such as songs, music, and rituals. But dreams seem to fall in an unknown area.36

• 37 In an undated letter written to anthropologist Jules Henry when she was sick in the hospital, Egga (...)

28Eggan’s conception of Talayesva as a “marginal man” within traditional Hopi society in turn obscured her position as a “marginal woman” within dominant American anthropological and psychoanalytical circles. While Eggan insisted, in some contexts, that dreams needed to be added up, listed, analyzed by patterns, and synoptically viewed, to further future research, she herself outlined a book she hoped to write on Hopi dreams that would begin with the question, “How great a continuity is there between the experience of wakeful and dream life?”37

• 38 Dorothy Eggan, “Cultural Factors in Dreams”, art. cit., 10.

29Yet in the meeting place of their mutual if sometimes un-named marginal status, an unusual dream project was begun, if not finished. To suggest what that project might be, it is worth noting that (as Dorothy pointed out), Don did not refer to his dreams as data; rather he called his written productions “dream stories.”38