Contact information:

jmageo@wsu.edu

College Hall 224

509.335.7737

Overview

This collection features scholarly work by Jeannette Marie Mageo, professor in the anthropology department at Washington State University. Mageo is a psychological anthropologist. Her work focuses on dreaming and the self, on child development, and on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Since 1980, she has been involved in research and publication on Samoan culture, history, and psychology. In 2003, she began studying U.S. culture through dreams. In recent years she has turned to examine the collision of Samoan and European cultures and psychologies in the colonial encounter through performance art, historical photos, and colonial artifacts. Dr. Mageo has also researched and published on gender and sexuality, transvestism, prehistory, folklore, and spirit possession. She consulted for and appeared in a documentary made for Channel 4 in Britain, Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa, which is framed by her historical interpretation of Samoan transvestism. Mageo's research interests include: Psychological anthropology, self, dreams, cultural memory, historical ethnography, child development and attachment, gender and sexuality, art/artifacts and photography, Oceania and the US.