Baipurangi’s dreams: The interface between ethnography and psychoanalysis in the work of Lucien Sebag

Lucien Sebag’s “Analysis of the dreams of a Guayaki Indian woman” appeared in Les Temps modernes  in 1964. Never before translated into English, and never reprinted even in French, it marked a unique effort to combine ethnography among the Aché people of Paraguay with structural theory and psychoanalysis. This essay is an attempt to help orient the reader of Sebag’s work by sketching its context in the theoretical conjuncture of the times, in Sebag’s life and the body of his work, and in the history of the Aché people.