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IN SOME statements about the nature of culture, culture is characterized as being cumulative (Goldenweiser 1937:45; Hoijer 1953:556; Kroeber 1948:297; White 1949:374, 398). In other statements only certain aspects of culture are said to be cumulative-e.g., science and technology (Kroeber 1952: 151). In still other statements a distinction is made between "culture" and "civilization." According to this distinction, culture is usually considered to be subjective, unique, and noncumulative; and civilization is considered to be objective, cumulative, and irreversible (cf. MacIver 1931:227-28; Thurnwald 1950; Weber 1939:25-26). The differences in the foregoing statements indicate that the matter of cumulation in culture needs additional clarification.

IN THIS study the dreams of Navaho respondents were used as the basis for judgments of disturbance, which in turn were related to an independent criterion, participation or nonparticipation by the dreamers in the Peyote Cult. The present study represents a departure from the usual use of dreams in ethnological research. Most studies have focused on the content of dreams for the purpose of shedding light on personality and cultures. Thus Eggan (1949) analyzes the manifest content of one Hopi's dreams over a period of several years. In another publication (1952) she tabulates 302 of one dreamer's dreams by the various content areas represented and their affective quality. DuBois (1944) collected dreams from her eight Alorese informants from whom she collected extensive interview material and projective tests. Dreams were here used to fill out the personality picture, in some cases to add information about the relationship of the informant to the ethnologist. Roheim (1946) used Biaga dreams interpreted psychoanalytically to show that Oedipal processes occur in a society where there is no restriction of expression of infantile sexuality, thereby lending support to a theoretical point-here the dreams were not related to other material of the individual dreamers' personalities. In the research reported here, content was not the center of interest. For reasons outlined below, the general hypothesis was that disturbance would be greater among people who adhered to the Peyote Cult than among those who did not. In the matter of "disturbance," content figured only in breaking down the dreams into major categories within which judgments were made.