In The Desire Of Others, anthropologist Hanna Limulja offers a fascinating gateway into the Yanomami world through the profound realm of their dreams. What do they dream about? What does it mean to dream, and why is it so deeply important? Among the Yanomami, dreams are not merely the unconscious desires of the individual, as Western psychoanalysis might describe them. Instead, to dream is to physically and spiritually inhabit other worlds, to encounter other beings, and, in these extraordinary encounters, to be mobilized by the desires of others.

When shared socially, dreaming acquires essential practical functions and plays a highly political role in the daily life of the community. Dreaming of an enemy serves as a warning to guard the communal house the next day; if someone appears richly adorned in a dream, as if they are already in the realm of the dead, the community must fiercely protect their safety to keep them anchored in the living world. While everyone dreams, the shamans are the true masters of this realm. Through dreaming, they travel, open themselves to alterity, and explore the unknown. As Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa powerfully asserts, the white people do not know how to dream—they only dream of themselves and their private worries. Published around the 30th anniversary of the demarcation of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, this vital ethnographic work invites readers to finally "dream of the forest" and learn from a deeply interconnected way of being.