Dr Charles Stewart
Evans-Pritchard Lectures
Outline of Lectures
Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece
Synopsis: In his epoch-making book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reversed the dream
theory of the ancients. Dreams arose from past memories and traumas, he asserted. They did not
predict the future as Artemidorus had assumed. In these lectures I return to the Greeks to think
again about the relationship of dreaming to time. The villagers of Kóronos on the island of Naxos
still fervently debate and continue a tradition of dreaming of buried icons that began at the time of
Greek independence in the 1830s. The dreams gave villagers information on where to dig in order
to find the icons, and promised, in millenarian fashion, that their discovery would usher in an age
of tremendous prosperity. In this respect, the dreams pointed toward the future. As buried
objects, however, the excavated icons resembled archaeological finds and, as artefacts, they
raised unavoidable historical questions. Who made and buried these icons? Eventually, villagers
began to dream of encounters with the Egyptian Christians who putatively brought the icons to
Naxos in the fourth century. Village dreams thus concerned both the future and the past, indeed
the past offered the gateway to the future since by digging into the past the future could be
opened. All of these activities took place in a present and there are three presents at issue: the
1830s when the first icons were uncovered; the 1930s when an epidemic of dreaming broke out
among schoolchildren looking for yet another icon; and the last ten years as the villagers have
begun to build the large church foretold in earlier millennial dreams. I analyze the social,
political and economic situations of each of these periods in order to understand the sorts of
pressures the villagers faced, and their aspirations in the face of these challenges (as, respectively,
newly incorporated subjects of the Kingdom of Greece, emery miners facing the depression, and
as a village with a prosperous majority living outside the village). The dreams in each phase
articulated certain hopes. In order to put these pieces together we must dispense with a
polarization between past and future orientation. Neither Freud nor Artemidorus is adequate by
himself. The dreams are better theorized in terms of a phenomenological idea of temporality
where the past, present and future are all mutually implicated. Prophecy, in this scenario, cannot
be understood apart from historicization and vice versa. The anxieties and aspirations felt in a
present situation provide the impulse to begin to look into the past and future in order to change
the present condition. The Naxos dreams are existential dreams that arise from, and
imaginatively model, this temporality of being. The dreams assert an emotional interpretation in
uncertain times, and map a course of communal action. The ethnographic approach to historicity,
prophecy and temporality explored in these lectures extends current debates in anthropological
theory. Throughout the lectures seemingly idiosyncratic data are discussed in relation to cross
cultural and historical comparanda so that the Naxos data are immediately brought into dialogue
with larger debates and areas of inquiry
Lecture One: Neither Freud nor Artemidorus: Dreaming and Temporality in Greece
Lecture Two: Dreaming of Buried Icons in Independent Greece
Lecture Three: An Epidemic of Dreaming: Kóronos, 1930
Lecture Four: Dreaming in a Time of Financial Crisis: Emery Mining and the Depression
Lecture Five: Dreaming Life, Living the Dream, 1930 – 2010
Lecture Six: Buried Objects, Historicity and Fantasy: Dreaming and Historical
Consciousness in Island Greece