Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece by Charles Stewart (review)

The term “historical consciousness” has become part of the anthropological lexicon over the past 20 years as anthropologists became interested in societal orientations toward the past. Such orientations often take non-narrative form. In my own research on the Greek island of Kalymnos, I argued that the explosion of dynamite bombs was one of the key ways that islanders engaged with unresolved aspects of their relationship to outside rulers and to the modern Greek state, even if they did not narrativize or express these notions in fully conscious forms. The notion of bombs exploding seemed an instantiation of Walter Benjamin’s line about grasping history: “as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (1968:255; see Sutton 1998). Charles Stewart’s Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece engages with a different type of materiality: that of objects buried in the ground on the island of Naxos. On Naxos—and specifically in the mountain village of Koronos—Stewart focuses attention on a series of practices involving dreams, their interpretation, and subsequent human actions in searching for and revealing these buried objects. Like dynamite throwing, these practices also seem to represent moments of danger or crisis, and by examining dreams and their associated actions, Stewart is able to convey indigenous responses to and engagement with historical practice at such moments. In doing so, Stewart also provides a model for understanding the ways that local traditions of historical consciousness provide a challenge to mainstream “linear” history, through an engagement with a sense of “multitemporality” that eschews any strict separation of past and present action.

Stewart draws on various traditions of dream interpretation, including Freud, Heidegger, and Artemidorus,¹ in making the case for a view that sees dreaming as central to understanding the “temporality of being” (9). Such a perspective on dreams incorporates Freudian insights that dreams engage with our past with the longstanding Greek view that dreams actually predict the future. Thus, the question he was confronted with by his ethnographic subjects: “Do you believe in dreams?” (23). Stewart does not dismiss such a view, but instead uses it to suggest a Heidegerrian approach that sees Being as “constantly rac[ing] ahead of itself in to the future…From this bearing it bounces back to the past to find models for action and into the present, carrying the resolve to do something now” (14). This is one sense in which dreaming is multitemporal—in constantly moving between past, present, and future. However, a second key way that Stewart explores the multitemporality of dreams is in tracing the palimpsests of history created through the dreams of the villagers of Koronos, which integrate many different historical periods in a single dream image. Stewart explores the development of one key dream image, what he calls a “myth-dream,” in several critical periods: in 1830, when the island had just been involved in the events of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottomans; in 1930, in the midst of a crisis brought on by the Great Depression; and in the 1990s, during the period of his fieldwork. Finally, dreams of treasure buried in the earth form an indigenous archaeological practice, allowing Naxiots to engage with an understanding of the actions of past inhabitants and to interpret their significance for the present.

Stewart begins the story of Koronos’ relationship with the buried past with historical research into a series of dreams, visions, and possessions that occurred among villagers throughout the course of the 1830s, which lead to the unearthing of bones and a number of religious icons. In most of these dreams and visions, villagers are directed by the Virgin Mary or her mother to search for the icons and, on finding them, to build a new home for them, i.e., a church or other place of worship. A key part of the dream vision is when the Virgin explains that the icon was buried in the rocks (of the mountainside) when an Egyptian family fleeing persecution from iconoclasts had...