Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

by Charles Stewart

Overview

On publication in 2012, Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece quickly met wide acclaim as a gripping work that, according to the Times Literary Supplement, “offers a wholly new way of thinking about dreams in their social contexts.” It tells an extraordinary story of spiritual fervor, prophecy, and the ghosts of the distant past coming alive in the present. This new affordable paperback brings it to the wider audience that it deserves.
           
Charles Stewart tells the story of the inhabitants of Kóronos, on the Greek island of Naxos, who, in the 1830s, began experiencing dreams in which the Virgin Mary instructed them to search for buried Christian icons nearby and build a church to house the ones they found. Miraculously, they dug and found several icons and human remains, and at night the ancient owners of them would speak to them in dreams. The inhabitants built the church and in the years since have experienced further waves of dreams and startling prophesies that shaped their understanding of the past and future and often put them at odds with state authorities. Today, Kóronos is the site of one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the Mediterranean. Telling this fascinating story, Stewart draws on his long-term fieldwork and original historical sources to explore dreaming as a mediator of historical change, while widening the understanding of historical consciousness and history itself.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226425245
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/06/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Charles Stewart is professor of anthropology at University College London. He is the author of Demons and the Devil and editor of Colonizing the Greek Mind?
 

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition ix

List of Figures xiii

Transliteration xv

Preface xvii

1 Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History 1

2 Dreaming and Temporality in Greece 23

3 Dreaming of Buried Icons in the Kingdom of Greece 37

4 An Epidemic of Dreaming 67

5 A Cosmology of Discovery 109

6 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Emery 131

7 Dreaming Life, Living the Dream 143

8 Buried Objects: Dreaming, Excavating, and Imagining the Past 169

9 Affective History 189

10 Conclusion: Agency and Imagination in Historical Change 207

Appendix: Sample Dream Texts 219

References 227

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

Stewart provides a localized view of modern Greek history that gets at different epistemologies and ontologies that may remain barely covered over by modernist historicizing practices. Its implications for understanding similar practices elsewhere, however, mean that this book will resonate well beyond the anthropology of contemporary Greece.

Anthropological Quarterly

This book tells a great story, thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated, and touched with the author’s affection for the people of Naxos. It is a book about the social reality of dreams, about the building of community through shared miracles and revelations, and about the economic and political consequences of faith and hope, played out as a contest between the people and their Church. This is a Greece not advertised to the tourist and seldom visible to them. It is history as ethnography of the past, a tale of causes and effects, carried down to current realities.

James M. Redfield

"If you are interested in dreams, this book will be a wealth of information."

Mindfunda

In his extraordinary Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, Charles Stewart offers a wholly new way of thinking about dreams in their social contexts . . . and Stewart has a gripping story to tell.

Times Literary Supplement

It is hard to convey in brief the subtlety, delicacy, and care with which anthropologist Stewart pursues and historicizes the elusive treasures and dream-myths in which for two centuries the villagers of Koronos have invested so much. . . . His book is itself a treasure. Summing up: highly recommended.”
 

Choice

This is a magisterial study. As a contribution to a philosophy of history and an explanation of the meaning of dreams and the faculty of imagination it is a serious and profound book. It is a worthy successor to Stewart's earlier study of Greek religious cosmology.

Laurie Kain Hart

This illuminating study examines a group of documented social dreams on the Greek island of Naxos from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Some of their themes are correlated, strikingly, with the visions and discoveries recorded in the Book of Mormon...But they are also social reactions: to nationalization, economic depression, physical displacement...It is hard to convey in brief the subtlety, delicacy, and care with which anthropologist Stewart pursues and historicizes the elusive treasures and dream-myths in which for two centuries the villagers of Koronos have invested so much. As he concludes, they are, like too many of their countrymen today, 'rich in the imagination of that which they do not have and virtuosi at negating their benighted present.' His book is itself a treasure.

Choice - P. M. Green

This is an elegant, theoretically astute, and consistently engaging history of the historical imagination on a Greek island. Charles Stewart significantly advances our understanding of the ways that religion, dreaming, and historical consciousness can inform one another.

Michael Lambek

This important study is not simply a sophisticated, interesting, and extremely readable book on vernacular modes of historicization in Greece. It is also a profound inquiry on the links that connect dreaming, earth, material culture, and temporality. As such, it will be of direct relevance and benefit not only to social archaeologists, classicists, and scholars of modern Greece, but also archaeologists, material culture specialists, and heritage professionals, irrespective of their geographical interests. In this work they will find many insights that can help them rethink their conceptual schemes, and come to terms with a range of alternatives archaeologies outside the dominant paradigms of western modernity.

Yannis Hamilakis

In his extraordinary Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece, Charles Stewart offers a wholly new way of thinking about dreams in their social contexts...And Stewart has a gripping story to tell.

Times Literary Supplement - Peter Thonemann