Robert Ford Campany is Professor of Asian and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China and Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China.
While the book is written for an academic audience, the writing is
wonderfully engaging. In the end, it challenges us to revisit our
assumptions about dreams: what can and cannot be known about them
and how much is a product of cultural context. -- Leanne Ogasawara
* Asian Review of Books *
[Campany's] approach to the study of Chinese dreams and dreaming is
expansive without falling into the comfortable universals afforded
by the perennialism that often creeps into modern studies on
dreams. In fact, Campany takes issue with all 'isms.' According to
Campany, the reification of traditions into monolithic belief
systems (e.g., 'Buddhism' and 'Daoism') only muddies our
understanding of these traditions, diverting our attention away
from the plurality of information that makes up complex cultural
phenomena such as dreams and beliefs. While the book sometimes
dwells too long on the critical theory underpinning it, these
theoretical forays are for the most part done to great effect. This
book is a big and much-needed step forward not only in the study of
dreams and dreaming in China but also, more generally, in the
fields of religious studies and social history. -- Nelson Landry *
Religious Studies Review *
[The Chinese Dreamscape] delivers an admirable synthesis of
past and present oneirological research, in the Chinese context and
cross-culturally, while also presenting a compelling new
application of the analytical toolkit that Campany has been honing
over his last 25 years of scholarship (such as notions of
cosmography, discourse communities, and the performative and
semiotic functions of storytelling). Moreover, the author's
recognition of dreaming as an embodied process, and of the complex,
recursive interactions between dreams, bodies, and cultures,
clearly informed his decision to cite relevant theories and
examples from across the social scientific corpus (e.g.
anthropology, history, psychology). This resulted in a laudably
interdisciplinary study, equally relevant to sinologists and
oneirologists. -- Christopher Jon Jensen * Bulletin of the School
of Oriental and African Studies *
Dreamscape makes major contributions to the field...[It]
provides an unparalleled assortment of many facets of dream life;
we see sophisticated taxonomies, dream analyses (based variously on
wordplay, spoken and written; hexagrams from the Book of Changes;
and Chinese medicine), and extensive translations of biographies of
elite diviners...'Seminal' long ago became an overused
characterization in academic book reviews, but one can easily see
this work, the product of many years of research, inspiring many
future studies to further investigate this fascinating, vital
subject. -- Mark Halperin * History of Religions *
Campany's sixth book, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800
CE, builds on materials, themes, and arguments that Campany has
been exploring over his previous five in expanding our
understanding of early medieval Chinese religious worlds.
Chinese Dreamscape is just as generously spirited, combing
through scholarship external to Sinology and religious studies for
relevant comparative cases and methodological insights, and then
devising novel frameworks for his readers to better elucidate
phenomena in their own fields of study, Asian religious traditions
or otherwise. It is always pleasurable to consume Campany's unique
scholarly voice-at turns cautiously exhaustive, insistently clear,
and playfully poetic-for the space of another book. And Chinese
Dreamscape might also represent Campany at an especially
self-reflexive moment, as the uncanny nature of dreams themselves
continually challenge human attempts to render them sensible. We
witness the author in the act of growing and reshuffling his
theoretical repertoire to better capture the foreignness of the
beings early Chinese people met when they were asleep. -- Alexander
Hsu * H-Net Reviews *
Should prove invaluable to scholars interested in traditional
Chinese literature and culture as well as comparative studies as
diverse as psychology, theology, and literature. -- Kenneth
DeWoskin * Journal of Chinese Studies *
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