Lienhardt on the Dinka

“The Dinka have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of the ‘mind’, as mediating and, as it were, storing up the experiences of the self. There is for them no such interior entity to appear, on reflection, to stand between the experiencing self at any given moment and what is or has been an exterior influence upon the self. So it seems that what we should call in some cases the ‘memories’ of experiences, and regard therefore as in some way intrinsic and interior to the remembering person and modified in their effect upon him by that interiority, appear to the Dinka as exteriorly acting upon him, as were the sources from which they derived. Hence it would be impossible to suggest to Dinka that a powerful dream was ‘only’ a dream…They do not make the kind of distinction between the psyche and the world which would make such interpretations significant for them.” 

-Godfrey Lienhardt (1961:149)