The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life

Wolf-Meyer (anthropology, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) explores the history and politics of sleep in America, including how medical and pharmaceutical communities have codified what constitutes normal and disordered sleep. He uses case studies to consider cultures of sleep—interactions between the individual sleeper and cultural institutions that require certain kinds of sleep and then (often unwittingly) punish those whose sleep habits do not fit neatly into their structures. One of the key issues for Wolf-Meyer is the necessity of medical/pharmaceutical intervention to produce a result that is essentially a cultural preference. He also discusses the extreme limits of sleep and human capacity, considering examples of criminal acts committed while sleeping and the military fantasy of soldiers who do not require sleep. His conclusion is the need for "multibiologism," or for our cultural institutions to make room for natural variations in human sleep habits.