Dreams:  So, do you see or have a dream?  When you "see" a dream, it comes to you. If it comes to you, it is not yours alone. It has volition and its own territory. Since Freud, we "have" dreams; we own them, or as the dream doctor might correct, the latent Repressed has us. In this globalized world, even those who "see" dreams also "have" them. Most of the world carries on in an imbricated modernity. There is not a single modernity, but multiple modernities as many scholars now tell us.  Charles Taylor distinguishes between a modern buffered self, and a porous self that hosts "dreams that come from outside". I am interested in the latter and epiphany dreams, where a deity or significant figure appears to the sleeper to offer guidance or demand a divine task.
 
Research The larger study considers interventions through apparition, dreams, statues, or amulets in four displaced communities. It is not intended to be a comprehensive ethnography. Rather, I consider that since the conflicts in religious lifeworlds occupy multiple realms, peacemaking must be approached with a wider and more creative arch of analysis.

In Cambodia, my project is called “Rescuing the ‘gods’: Dream knowledge and overlapping ontologies”. I study four cases where spirits appear in dreams to ask humans to rescue their Buddhist, Hindu and Catholic statues from a river, cave, and rice field.

Dream epiphanies led to the recovery of two Roman Catholic statues from the Mekong River in Cambodia.  The first is of St. Francis who appeared in a dream and was then, as a statue, rescued by a Khmer man during the Khmer Rouge years. Most Khmer are hostile towards Vietnamese settlers; Roman Catholic Vietnamese are a particularly isolated community in Cambodia. Does this rescue a link the two differing faith ethnic communities as the Vietnamese Catholics suggest? Current relationships between Vietnamese Catholic and Khmer Buddhist communities at Wat Champa are strained. This is evident in different interpretations of the guardian statue that we continue to investigate. With the help of Vicith Keo, I interviewed Khmer leaders in the Wat Champa community adjoining the Vietnamese village and will continue in 2014.
 
Almost thirty years after the Khmer Rouge era, a statue of Mary was fished out of the Mekong River at Areykasat, a Vietnamese fishing town across the converging rivers from Phnom Penh. This statue, Our Lady of Lourdes, was found during Khmer New Year in 2008.
 
Four years later during the 2012 ASEAN meeting in Phnom Penh, a another statue of Mary was recovered, this time with the infant Jesus. In this case, a Buddhist Vietnamese fisherman in Areykasat was instructed in a dream to fish out a statue. Both statues are greatly venerated and draw weekly busloads of pilgrims from Vietnam.
 
In 2013, I interviewed key Catholic priests associated with both Wat Champa and Areykasat, attended the large celebration Mass of the first Mary on Cambodian New Year, April 16, returning several times after this.
 
My preliminary research project shifted dramatically to include two dream recoveries of Khmer statues. My colleague in this research is Mr. Samnang Seng, a well known peace activist in Cambodia who has designed and directed interfaith projects.

The two Khmer incidents of dream-inspired rescues occurred within a month of each other, the first on Cambodian New Year in Stung Treng, close to the Lao border. Stung Treng was originally part of two Lao kingdoms before the French ceded it to Cambodia. A 14 year-old poor settler dreamed that two monks guided him to a nearby cave to rescue statues. He found seventy-one small Buddhas high on a ledge in the cave’s interior. Though he had strict orders from his dream visitors to “take the statues to the royal palace,” the statues languish in the Stung Treng Provincial museum.
 
Fourteen days later on tngai sel, Buddhist new moon day, a rice farmer was told in a dream to “take them out”. He went to his rice field in Banteay Meanchay, the far west of Cambodia and discovered two 12th century Bayon-era Hanuman statues with their pedestals. The dreamer and his wife were escorted to Phnom Penh by Venerable Monyreth, a high-ranking monk to deliver the statues to the Deputy Prime Minister.  Since then, the family has been deeply embedded in the Hanuman myth, particularly Mr. Lim’s son and sister-in-law, who have themselves become conduits for transmitting Hanuman’s wishes to the Cambodian people.

Mr. Seng and I visited Stung Treng and Banteay Meanchay several times since the initial meetings in May and July. Mr. Seng has returned to both sites to meet with family and government officials. In November, we met with other key figures in the Hanuman story in Phnom Penh and Banteay Meanchay. The stories continue to unfold. We are consulting with Dr. Greene whose knowledge of Khmer cosmology, its relationship to kinship and the body exceeds my own.  As a scholar of Cambodia in residence, she writes, “I can assert with confidence that Dr. Poethig is pushing the boundaries of a breakthrough field of theory that is already troubling the status quo in the study of “religion” across disciplines.”
 
These five incidents of statue-rescue share several attributes. They occurred through dreams on auspicious days. The dreamer was not a religious specialist but a poor member of a marginal community. The dream recovery affected the dreamer, their family and community, affixing them to the mythic narrative of a statue rescue. That these statues are Catholic, Buddhist and Hindu, and the dreamers Khmer and Vietnamese offers an intriguing oneiric ecumene (cf Hannerz 1989) of cosmological détente. This oneiric ecumene recognizes that humans and spirits are both necessary for rescue of the statue. But it also contributes to a cosmopolitics of constructive trespass in which gods themselves violate cosmological allegiances, and humans are instructed to cross social and political divides. One wonders, what do the gods really want?
 
 

Sochea, at the mouth of the cave. I have been in the cave myself with his story and this summer, we need to retrieve these treasures and set them out. 

http://readinglists.ucl.ac.uk/lists/78388AD4-DD65-17CD-8BA0-3EEE7C6EACFE.html​Notes from the story of the Boy who finds the Buddhas

The search
This is a story of discovery, a story seeking the child, the dreamer.  We are at Hotel Anise in Phnom Penh talking about statues, and Samnang offers me an adventure I can’t resist – go up to Stung Treng to find the boy. He puts this together. He gets us the tickets, meets me at the bus station early the next morning. I was just down from Siem Reap that weekend, so I wear the dress I brought to Phnom Penh.
 
The bus takes ten hours.  Stung Treng is in the wild northeast, the edge of the world, at the covergence of rivers, as the Mekong swings down from Laos. Next day, we bargain for a ferry across the confluence of rivers to the far side,  On that side, find a group of guys hanging out by the port, waiting to take riders. Motodops are motorcycle taxis.  Samnang bargains again.  We hoist up on the backs of two and buzz off. All we have is a name and a place,  no address, no number, no other information. But Samnang is calm and confident.
 
We travel the red-dust highway, a new national construction project that will spin a trail of concrete across northern Cambodia.  In the meantime, red dust plumes with every passing motorcyle and gravel flings up at us.  One in a while, we come to a construction team pouring concrete.  For the hour both sides of the highway reveal acres of clearcut land, only stumps, sad grass.  It is a devastation. 
 
After a hot, dusty hour, pit-marked by gravel,  we moto into the town.  It's a new frontier town, popped up along the hiway with housing that uses all that fresh wood.  New roads, new settlers who have moved north. We go to a family the motodops know.  They don’t have any idea about the family.
We try the neighbor, No.
We stop a driver, who does know the family – over there through the path.
Down over the cropping, onto a hard clay path through the fields.
Along the way, fields have been razed by settlers. The stumps smolder.
Here is a new generation of colonization.
 
The discovery
We find them, then, in their own home on settled land.  Sochea comes with his father and brother, and uncle. After some urging by his mother, he tells his story. He's shy, quiet, guileless. His mother, not so much.

Her version:
Sochea wakes when it is still dark, his mother is already cooking rice. He asks for his sling shot and heads out. His mother thinks he is checking the traps he leaves for birds and small animals. But he doesn't return until 11am, and then he shows her a small statue of the Buddha. Stricken with fear, she says, she beats him - where did he get it, did he steal it? There is nothing like this for miles. There is not even a wat in their village, and anyway, it's too far to walk there.  No, he says, he found it from his dream.  So he tells her.

Sochea:
After New Year's night (April 16), they sleep, all 7 of them, together, and he dreams that two monks wake him, tell him to follow them, and lead him to a cave in Peacock mountain. It's easy to find now that all the trees are cut.  (Before, says a neighbor, two naga - snakes - protected the cave and people were afraid to go. Also because the forest, prei, is a wild place full of neak ta prei, forest guardians.)  He follows them into the cave, scrambling the stones. They turn and tell him to take the statues to the Royal Palace. Then they show him a small space in the rock and he crawls through into a high small white-stone chamber. They point up, on the right. They disappear. He wakes up, asks for his cham peam, his sling shot, and walks out in the dark along the rutted moto path before the dawn arrives, retracing his dream to the cave. 

Mine:
Maybe there is a slight bird song as he walks. Maybe he feels light weaken the thick dark, maybe he's walking the dream, we don't know.  But we do know that when he reaches the mouth of the cave, it is full of light (like day, he says) all the way to the chamber. And once in the chamber, light pours down from one indentation high above. He climbs the calcium carbonite encrusted wall that hides a small loft and yes, it is littered with small buddhas - some on a chearng pean, a ritual portal, some in two jars, some on the floor. 
 
We know he was gone for five hours. We wonder what he did there.

The interval

This is my public record of the pain of writing about immaterial things that matter. It's rife with uncertainty. How do statues cajole humans to rescue them? What's the exchange?

What is the social world within which these two interact?

Latour has "reassembled" the social. In his controversial critique of the fundamental basis of sociology, he defines the social as “not as a special domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (2005, 7).  For Latour, the social is a basis for associations. It does not exist a priori to that exchange and is not limited to humans. Latour's "critical sociology" has three traits: 

1.  it doesn’t only limit itself to the social but replaces the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations;
2. it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors who need to live under the illusion that there is something ‘other’ than social there; and
3.  it considers that the actors’ objections to their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations are right.” (9)

 Here's a course that lists sources like this for more explanation of ANT.

Bjørnar Olsen, proponent of ‘nonanthropocentric’ archaeology takes Latour, among others, as a reference point  In Defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects.  Objects and humans operate not as separate entities but assemblages.  I find this theorizing on the part of archeaologists helpful on new ways of tracing the life of strange objects, tracking entities to heterogenous worlds that are hidden, not (yet) visible.  If entities are actants, I track statues seeking to be found from the water, mud and mountains,  who use intermediate realms for a human-entity détente. 

Latour offers five sources of uncertainty, controversies about the social realm that I will reconstruct later. In sum:

First Source of Uncertainty:  Groups: If we reassemble the social so that group formation are constructed by actors reports, then groups confirm to a  "performative definition” (Latour 2005, 34).

Second Source of Uncertainty: Actions:   “Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (Latour 2005, 43). 

Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects: They have agency too, so we diversify the types of actors in any social event.
 
Fourth Source of Uncertainty:  Nature of facts: Matters of fact vs. matters of concern.

Fifth Source of Uncertainty:  How to study the science of the social if we aren't clear what we mean by empirical. Such that writing is a risky account, and there are already so many uncertainties.   But the purpose of this risky account is, in Latour’s words to “extend the exploration of the social connections a little bit further” (Latour 2005, 128).


References

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olsen, Bjørnar  2010,  In Defense of things. Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: Altamira Press.