Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece

Charles Stewart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226425382
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

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.

Chapter One

Historical Consciousness and the Ethnography of History

THE TERM “HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS” opens fascinating vistas even when its precise meaning remains vague. In common usage it refers to the historical information that people know, the narratives of the past that they maintain in consciousness. Such stories can come from professional historiography or from communal traditions, personal memory, or imaginative speculation (taken seriously). These diverse sources can make historical consciousness an arena of contest in which rigorously documented histories joust against cherished opinions sometimes labeled “memory” or “collective memory”—names suggesting that they may lie outside the franchise of “history” (Seixas 2004: 10).

Historical consciousness can also refer to a set of general assumptions about the temporal relationship of events, a sensibility about how the past and time in general are organized. For example, current happenings may be seen as outcomes of prior events and present events as belonging to the past as time flows on. This is the logic of historicism, the paradigm governing academic historiography and widely shared as a form of common sense in Western societies. Historical consciousness is often conflated with this perspective, according to which the past is over and done with but recoverable as an object of research. Historical consciousness, in this usage, refers to a general opinion about the linear relationship holding between the past, the present, and the future. Consistent with Enlightenment ideas of causation and progress, professional historiography works according to a linear historical consciousness—a chronological view. The adage “Time is nature’s way of making sure that everything does not happen at once” generalizes a historical perspective that could be phrased: “Chronology is the historian’s way of making sure that everything does not happen at once.”

I proceed here on the assumption that the historical consciousness examined above is a culturally specific Western development that arose during a particular period in a certain area of the world. This historical consciousness could be considered one of the signature concepts of Western modernity: it seeks to understand and relativize the past rather than obey it (Gadamer 1979: 110). Yet linearity must be one of Western history’s “least intuitive devices” (Clifford 1997: 338). People the world over, including many living in the West, might find more resonance in Kierkegaard’s “Why bother to remember a past that cannot be made into a present?” (quoted in Chakrabarty 1998: 24). Modern Western historical consciousness arose as a novelty, circumscribed in its sphere of influence, but is now globally dispersed to the point of naturalization, as the adage about “time” shows. In this book, I take a step back and use “historical consciousness” to refer to whatever basic assumptions a society makes about the shape of time and the relationship of events in the past, present, and future. The particular form of historical consciousness in a given society is an open question, requiring empirical, ethnographic investigation.

World societies before the sixteenth century entertained various ideas about temporality, seeing it perhaps as a circle or a spiral or, as in the case of the Maya, an alternation between linearity and cyclicity (Farriss 1987: 568). During the Middle Ages, under the influence of Christianity, even Western historical consciousness was rooted in notions of eventual redemptive return to a paradisal beginning (Eliade 1971: 130) or hierarchical stasis (Fasolt 2004: 224). In contrast to the code of dates that structures Western history by linking events in series, Lévi-Strauss (1966: 263) identified a principle of timelessness by which small-scale, non-Western societies (my sanitization of his expression “the savage mind”) “grasp the world as both a synchronic and a diachronic totality” by means of “analogical thought.” The past, in these cases, may be activated in the present by means of affective images and symbols. Affective resonance rather than chronology holds various events together. Whereas archives and chronologies objectivize and fix the past, in these cases the feeling tone of the past, its mythic power, may be mobilized and reexperienced in the present. An example would be the Western Apache practice of describing landscape features in the course of everyday conversations as a way of evoking stories of the ancestors—histories—that impart moral direction and wisdom. A good narrator can cause listeners to see the past from the ancestors’ perspective and “perhaps hear [the] ancestors speaking. [A person] could reknow the wisdom of the ancestors” (Basso 1988: 110).

The Ethnography of History

This examination of a 180-year-old tradition of dreaming in the mountains of eastern Naxos takes on the task of investigating the historical consciousness of a particular community. On Naxos, dreaming has been a salient mode of producing historical narratives, thus affecting the field of historical consciousness in the simple sense of known stories about the past. Dreaming violates the historicist separation of past and present and offers temporal simultaneity or multitemporality. This raises the question, which will be considered below from various angles, of how such dreamt histories sat next to alternative histories produced according to other paradigms of investigation.

The opportunity presented by the Naxos dreams has enabled me to develop an anthropology of history¹ that asks what a society assumes the past to be (in relation to the present or the future) and investigates when, how, and why people produce stories about this past. What, in other words, is their idea of what we would call “history,” and what modes do they resort to in learning about and representing the past? I use “history” throughout in the sense of a category of knowledge production about the past and/or a specific example of this category such as a narrative, a book, a dream, or a dance. I distinguish “the past” (everything that happened in past time) from “history” (the representation of the past) (White 1981).

In order to capture indigenous histories and historical consciousness I have found it necessary to define “histories” very generally as “representations of the past” or even “communications of the past,” since in dreams and other altered states of consciousness the past may at first be sensed nonobjectively. The essential criterion for a “history” is communication about the past. It need not necessarily be “true” in the sense of “verifiable by Western canons of evidence.” If history were restricted to work done within the paradigm of Western historicism, alternative forms such as the Naxos dreams would simply be dismissed as “fantasy,” “fiction,” “religion,” or irrelevant. This is the traditional dividing line between “myth” and “history” (Stevenson 1975: 3). The former are “false” according to the standards of the latter. Yet, myths may be true in their poetic coherence even if they do not correspond entirely with external facts. They may capture the affective quality of a past event or impart moral truths and thus motivate and guide people as they proceed to make the events of recorded history. The communication of historical episodes such as the battle of Gettysburg or the Alamo can have affective resonance or deliver moral meaning that performs roles other than the provision of factual information about the past. The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the long march of the Mormons are both history and myth.

The Naxos story of finding icons, aspiring to build a church, and entertaining prophecies that life would be transformed show the interplay of myth and history and the power of dreams to sustain a “myth-dream” (an idea taken from the study of millenarian movements in Melanesia and elaborated in Chapter Four). This study works in the mode of “mythistory” (Mali 2003) to capture the compelling truth of the myths and dreams that the villagers of mountain Naxos have “lived by” (Samuel and Thompson 1990). The salient feature of myth is that it need not—indeed, should not—be submitted to verification. Myths often structure thought and feeling without explicit recognition, in which cases they merge with what might be termed “cultural ideology.” It is precisely the capacity to formulate and impart guiding truths—in a range of forms or modes extending from narrative and art to bodily states or the internal imagery of dreams or other altered states of consciousness—that characterizes myth. A myth need not be an elaborated sacred story. It is, rather, a shared formulation of how to understand the world or how to proceed in the face of perennial human experiences.

The ethnography of history identifies forms of historicization that have become invisible to the trained Western historicist eye. In the process it rejects the dichotomization of societies into “hot” and “cold,” those with and without history. All societies have histories even though they do not share the Western version of historicism. The word “historicization” becomes important in this study as a substitute for “historiography” that allows the recognition of history production.² In Sakalava (Madagascar) spirit possession séances, spirits from different historical epochs simultaneously possess several different specialist mediums and debate with each other the merit of current community initiatives, as if they were at a town hall planning consultation. This is a dramatic, performed history. Precolonial indigenous spirits swilling alcohol to mark their historical epoch argue with reserved French-speaking spirits representing the colonial period. As Michael Lambek (2002) contends, these possession rituals do not just perform history as a form of entertainment; they are an unscripted form in which the past, mediated by the body of the possessed specialist, comes into the present. These dramas create novel understandings of the past, present, and future. Such séances are a culturally accepted epistemology that yields valid information for decision making.

Greece is a European country in which one might be surprised to find evidential value being given to dreams as late as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-Cartesian reasoning clearly did not eliminate oneiric historicizing and prophesying on the eastern border of Europe.³ The Naxos case offers particular insight into the collision between these two distinct paradigms of historical consciousness. The Naxos villagers of 1830 were embedded in an Orthodox Christian (Romeic)⁴ historical consciousness rooted in Byzantium and maintained through the period of Ottoman domination (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries). They conceived time as cyclical (on a long plan), with a golden past returning in scenarios of various magnitudes such as the defeat of the Turks and the return of Byzantium or the Second Coming. From the eighteenth century up to the eve of the Greek revolution in 1821 the inhabitants of Greece spent considerable energy prophesying and looking for signs of their impending deliverance (Clogg 1988: 263; Politis 1998: 2). With independence came Bavarian rulers who brought with them tenets of rational progressive government, a plan to lessen the influence of mystical Orthodoxy, and a model of linear historicism imported directly from Prussia, where the discipline of history was assuming its modern form. The first dreams thus occurred at a moment of transition in national historical consciousness.

This is not the first ethnography of historical consciousness. Michael Lambek’s (2002) exemplary study has already been mentioned, and G. P. Makris (1996) has shown how the tumbura spirit possession cult in Omdurman (Sudan) activates a historical consciousness of enslavement and transportation to the North. In contrast to these African cases, the apparent “burden” that motivates oneiric expressions of historical consciousness on Naxos is the future, not the past. In keeping with the stream of Romeic redemptive thinking identified above, people were looking forward, trying to divine what might be to come, while also taking steps to ensure that this would be beneficial. Historical consciousness followed hard on the heels of a futuricity. Both of these temporal vectors of thought arose from a present situation and ultimately fed back into it.

Within Greek ethnography, David Sutton’s (1998) Memories Cast in Stone opened the way for the study of unconscious modes of historicization. Without directly asking the residents of the island of Kalymnos for their versions of “history,” Sutton observed how people deployed key words such as “tradition” and “modernity” in everyday discussions concerning values and acceptable practices. His account of their historical consciousness thus emerged from a deep immersion in local culture and careful collation of oblique statements and actions that revealed the people’s suppositions about the past and its relation to the present and the future.⁵ Granted the risks, Sutton’s islanders wondered whether it was still acceptable to throw dynamite sticks at Easter. This practice celebrated brave sponge divers who used to harvest unexploded bombs on the seabed to be used as fireworks that might annoy Italian colonizers. The explosions evoked this past, yet such explosions also killed four people in 1980. By throwing dynamite they were communicating history to each other through profound concussions comprehended by the body. The islanders wondered, however, whether they could live with their customary form of historicization.

Sutton traced the impetus to study “non-literate, or non-articulated historical consciousness” (1998: 14) to John and Jean Comaroff, who, in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992: 157ff.), challenged researchers to discover modes of historical production in other societies that do not take the recognizable form of Western historiography. This idea was explored earlier still by Michael Taussig in “History as Sorcery” (1984), in which he contended that the spirits of the subjugated and brutalized Huitoto Indians (Colombia) marshaled in shamanic rituals could be considered historical interventions. In an analysis illustrating Lévi-Strauss’s idea of timelessness, he described them as “mythic images reflecting and condensing the experiential appropriation of the history of conquest, as that history is seen to form analogies and structural correspondences with the hopes and tribulations of the present” (1984: 88). Taussig considered such cases to exemplify an embodied, active historicization that does not pass through rational formulation but “flashes up in a moment of danger,” as Walter Benjamin expressed it (quoted in Taussig 1984: 88). He argued that these historical flashes produced enigmatic, powerful “picture puzzles” (Freud’s term for the manifest content of a dream) that shocked and compelled attention—images of past violence, the undead, became sources of power in the present (Taussig 1984: 89).

Powerful imagery of the past, then, may barge into consciousness and create affective tensions and identifications between the past and the present. This can be invited, as in the warrior dance of the Ohafia Igbo (Nigeria), who establish in this dance a linkage to past warriors in an alternative epistemology that cannot be reduced to words (McCall 2000: 7–8), or cultivated, as in the dance of the Tumbuka healers (nchimi), which prepares them for dreams in which “future, past and present are collapsed” and they achieve “access to a wider and deeper world than that of their fellow human beings” (Friedson 1996: 27) and the ability to understand the historical causes of illness. In Zanzibar, as in Madagascar and Sudan, Larsen (1998) found spirit possession to be the mode in which people addressed their past. At the time of her research, the country was following a policy of Africanization that sought to hybridize the diverse strands of Islam, Christianity, and African culture. The possessing spirits belonged exclusively to one or another of these historical pasts, and the policy forced people to reconsider their discrete, sectarian identities in the present. Pious Muslims possessed by Christian spirits had to rethink their positions and acknowledge a Christian dimension to their past. For Cubans, the past is brought into the present via ghosts such as Tomás, a slave from the nineteenth century seen hovering behind the anthropologist Stephan Palmié while he conducted fieldwork in Miami. Rather than dismiss such phenomena as irrational, Palmié asks if we should consider them as “pertaining to a discourse on history merely encoded in an idiom different from the one with which we feel at home” (2002: 3).

These examples show that (1) people may gain knowledge about the past via epistemologies that diverge greatly from the protocols of evidence and objective scrutiny enshrined in Western historical research and documentation; (2) they may produce histories in forms quite different from Western historiography, which presupposes verbal representation, whether oral or written; (3) they may not consciously and willingly enter into these historicizations (they may be possessed by a spirit or haunted by a ghost without wanting to be); and (4) the acquisition and representation of information about the past may take place in altered states of consciousness.

Labeling these productions “histories” takes seriously the variety of modes in which people learn about and represent the past. It enables a deeper appreciation of these practices as parallel to Western historical practice rather than sectioning them off as categorically different (myth, ritual, dance, etc.) or exotic. If such alternative histories can be found in Greece, they may be found everywhere. This book thus offers an example that increases understanding of such heretofore-unnoticed modes of historicizing.

The cross-cultural diversity of assumptions about history has already intrigued Western historians (Rüsen 2002, 2007). Archaeological and historical studies of how past societies understood the past (Burke 1969; Mayor 2000; Bradley 2002) necessarily venture into the methodological territory of this book, the ethnography of history. The discoveries made need not be taken as a postmodern or relativist subversion of the rationalism of professional historiography; rather, they are an invitation to expand its sphere (Chakrabarty 1998). This involves not just the appreciation of the way things are done elsewhere but the recognition that comparable alternative histor...