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  • Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece by Charles Stewart
  • Daniel M. Knight (bio)
Charles Stewart, Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xviii + 259. 32 figures. Cloth $65/£48.95/€58.50.

New York, 1823. A farmer dreams of an angel directing him to a golden book holding the secrets of distant ancestors. An ancient text is discovered, and the Mormon Church is founded. A decade later, on a rocky outcrop on the Greek island of Naxos, poor farmers experience a series of dreams and visions in which the Panagía (Virgin Mary) urges them to dig for her icon. In 1836, several icons are unearthed, breathing life into a new cult of the Panagía. In the 1930s, there is a new bout of dreaming and prophesizing on Naxos. Dreams quickly become part of the local imaginary, setting people against the religious authorities, the state, and official history. Dreams produce histories, presents, futures (xvi). Throughout his masterful example of how to blend delicate, often emotive, ethnography with trailblazing theoretical nous, Charles Stewart explores how dreaming “violates the historicist separation of past and present and offers temporal simultaneity or multitemporality” (3). The construction of alternative imaginations of how the past connects to the present and future affects local historical consciousness and, in turn, requires the reader to question Western assumptions of time and history as linear, neatly flowing in one direction.

Anthropology is undergoing a temporal turn. The global financial depression has provoked people to reassess their consumption patterns and ask whether bountiful futures, once perceived as a birthright in the neoliberal West, will turn out as promised. The usual belief in a temporal trajectory moving toward a more prosperous future is being replaced by the feeling that eras of past poverty and suffering are being relived (Knight 2015; Knight and Stewart 2016); or, perhaps worse, of sensations of being stuck in the never-ending spin-cycle of the “uncanny present” from which there is no escape, no direction, no emergence (Bryant 2014, 2016). There is the reassessment of capitalist timescapes in an era of austerity (Bear 2015), triggered by the realization that the gap between rich and poor continues to grow (Haugerud 2013). When taken alongside other pressing social issues, such as the unprecedented influx of refugees to European shores, experiencing an elongated period of liminality, and fears about climate change and the future of sustainable energy provision, it is clear why studies of how people understand [End Page 438] social change through grassroots processes of historicizing, presentifying, or futurizing have bubbled to the fore of the field of anthropology. In his body of work on temporality that cumulates in this study, it often seems that Stewart is way ahead of us.

Calling on an “existential temporal unconsciousness” that responds to emerging situations of threat and precarity, Stewart shows how the unconscious can fuse the past, present, and future to provide solutions and courses of action (216). Representing the next stage of his long-term intellectual project to explore the anthropology of history and building on previous work on historicity (Hirsch and Stewart 2005), Stewart elegantly illustrates how Western historicism is “but one specific and recently developed principle … with peculiar ideas about linear temporal succession, homogenous time units … causation, and anachronism” (197). Indigenous versions of invoking the past, including dreams and visions, create pools of inspiration from which local people create novel historicizations (203). Villagers from Kόronos actively synthesize selective pasts, compressing multiple events sourced from disparate points on the chronological timeline into meaningful narratives in the present. People actively contribute to the continuous reconstruction of the past and present with reworked accounts eventually constituting a tangible part of local affective history (189).

In Western societies, historical consciousness—the accumulation of known historical information sourced from historiography, local stories about the past, and personal memory—is usually understood as linear, chronological, and “consistent with Enlightenment ideas of causation and progress” (1). Here, Stewart makes an admirable, and ultimately successful, attempt to overcome the assumption in academic historiography that time is linear, flowing from a past that holds events, the basic units of history, that are recoverable as objects...

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