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

Before the birth of the modern Greek state and the corresponding inception of a worldview based on rationality and scientific fact, there was a time when most island villagers thought about the world through the lens of popular religion and considered history to be a series of cyclical events in which they were situated. Stories in this vein about disruption of indigenous modes of thinking by Western civilization are quite familiar to anthropologists and cultural historians, but studies that systemically chronicle ways that communities perpetuate local traditions across centuries are less familiar. Charles Stewart, a reader in anthropology at University College London, provides one such study.

Using an expansive body of data he collected through a decade of ethnographic and archival research on the Greek island of Naxos, Stewart describes a type of religious “myth-dream” that has come to serve as the basis for a collective historical consciousness present on the island. Stewart defines historical consciousness as the “basic assumptions a society makes about the shape of time and the relationship of events in the past, present, and future.” To trace the development of the particular Naxiote historical consciousness, Stewart touches on three “moments” occurring across two centuries.

While the villagers he writes about—who narrate time as cyclical, sometimes recursive, and usually at the mercy of divine powers—may not conform to the dominant Western paradigm of linear time, Stewart is bound to by the conventions of academic writing. Thus, he begins with the first of these moments, which occurred in the 1830s, as Greece was emerging from its war for independence against the Ottomans. A Catholic Bavarian monarch, Otto, had been placed as the head of state, a new Greek Orthodox Church had been established to separate Greeks from control in Constantinople, and heads of state were pushing the country toward a new “Hellenic” identity.

In the shadow of these macropolitical events, several shepherds from the Naxiote village of Koronos began to have dreams and visions of the Madonna, in which she urged them to search for a buried icon depicting her image and to build a new church in her name where it was found. They began to dig, along with a growing number of enthusiastic villagers, and did discover several icons. Villagers rejoiced that a miracle had occurred, and people began to make pilgrimages to the mountainside site. But as Stewart describes, local and national leaders saw these folk notions of miracle, cult, and pilgrimage as an affront to the new state and church, which were emerging in the post-Enlightenment tradition of rationalism. Authorities attempted to prosecute the visionaries for falsifying their dreams and going against church law, and they later confiscated the icons.

Though the myth-dream never disappeared from the local cultural context of Naxos, it made an astounding resurgence in 1930 with the recovery of an icon that was previously thought to have been lost after confiscation. The icon was found following reported dreams of a young brother and sister, and it sparked a practice of daily meetings among schoolchildren, their teachers, and supporters to recount and record dreams in journals and drawings. The narratives that these dreams and their interpretations took on became complex, often referencing each other, foretelling discoveries that would be made and promising rewards to those who remained faithful to the visions, particularly to the island’s emery miners as a reward for redirecting their efforts toward digging for icons. The possibility of the spiritual or material rewards of found icons was an alluring tale of hope to miners whose incomes were compromised by the Great Depression and the invention of synthetic emery.

The third “moment” in the tale of the myth-dream occurs much closer to the present day, the mid-1990s, as an enormous church was built on the site of the original icon discovery. The construction was supported by a large number of villagers and emigrants who contributed everything from money...