C Stewart

Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity

This article seeks to clarify the concept of “historicity” and how it might guide ethnographic research. The argument is developed with particular reference to the eight studies of historicity in diverse societies ranging from the Pacific to North America contained in this special issue. The authors contend that the standard Western concept of “history” is culturally particular and not necessarily the best tool for cross‐cultural investigations. Western history is generally predicated on the principle of historicism: the idea that the “past” is separated from the present. People around the world, including Western historians, recognize, however, that the past, present and future are mutually implicated. The notion of “historicity” is intended to open out the temporal focus to a “past‐present‐future”. Studies of historicity address the diverse modes through which people form their presents in world societies.

Ethnographies of austerity : temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe

This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and re-fashioned under contracting economic horizons. We argue for the empirical study of crisis that captures the decisions or non-decisions that people make, and the actual temporal processes by which they judge responses. We conclude that modern linear historicism is often overridden in such moments by other historicities, showing that in crises, not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs.

Dreams of Treasure Temporality, Historicization and the Unconscious

This article observes that dreams of treasure may not only be about getting rich. In Greece, a country with an illustrious ancient past and a less glorious present, history represents a vital national resource and enduring topic of social concern, not to say anxiety. Dreams of treasure arise as unconscious by-products of this intense historical consciousness in Greece. The treasures considered here are secretions of history, deposited at the moments of rupture that historians subsequently use to demarcate historical periods. Drawing upon the formulations of Heidegger and Binswanger, I further view these dreams as apperceptions of the temporality of being. The dream of treasure involves a divinatory look into the future to discover a past that will enrich the present. The motivations of historicization and temporalization thus converge in this case to create the dream of treasure as a significant cultural phenomenon in Greece.

Introduction: Dreaming as an Object of Anthropological Analysis

This article introduces a special issue on anthropological approaches to dreaming. A running history of dreams in the field of anthropology serves as a device for contextualizing the articles. The narrative identifies perennial areas of interest such as the question of why some societies value dreams while others do not. Anthropological approaches have varied from Victorian evolutionism to contemporary psychoanalysis and reflexivity. Each new theoretical paradigm has pushed the study of dreams in different directions, led to the study of new aspects of dreaming, and, sometimes, guided the exploration of new dimensions of social life. The presentation of ethnographic case studies of dreaming in specific cultural contexts constitutes one of anthropologys strongest contributions to the study of dreaming. Copyright 2004 by the Educational Publishing Foundation.

Honor and Shame

Honor once defined northern Europeans, then it defined others on the margins of Europe, and now it is a problematic feature of others within Euro-American societies. This article traces honor and shame as paired concepts in social scientific thought beginning with their introduction by anthropologists of the Mediterranean in the 1960s. Men claimed honor through acts of bravado or violence that commanded social respect. Transgressions of a mans property, including his women, caused shame and required retaliation. Honor had been a familiar idea in medieval and early modern Europe, but it disappeared with the emergence of strong centralized states, and it became a fascinating anachronism in Mediterranean societies. Eventually it disappeared from the northern Mediterranean littoral only to resurface in the heart of modern Western societies among urban street gangs or in ‘honor killings,’ which have been on the rise in Europe and North America since the turn of the twenty-first century.

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness

ity. Evolutionary psychologists consider dreaming to have developed as a virtual mode in which our distant ancestors could practice their response to potential dangers such as sabre tooth tiger attacks.1 Even though life has become much more secure, a large proportion of dreams vestigially simulate threats; the majority of dreams, in this view, are incipient nightmares. The influential dream researcher J. Allan Hobson, on the other hand, considers dreams to be offline rehearsals for the mundane present; preparations for the assumption of everyday consciousness, much like a pilot testing systems before pushing back from the gate.2 Supermarket books on dream interpretation, by contrast, assume that dreams predict the future, thereby carrying on a tradition of dream interpretation popular since ancient times. And then we come to the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic traditions. Freud thought dreams concerned emotions from the past, stored in the unconscious and still troubling the present in disguised forms. While Jung saw dreams as emerging from an individual’s present, serving as guides to self-integration and personal fulfilment. Which are they then: the past, the future, or just the present? In my view, they are often all three at once. In this respect, dreams model the temporality of human consciousness as existentialist thinkers going back to Heidegger have described it. We exist in a situation of uncertainty and angst in relation to the future, yet this is necessarily the position in which decisions must be made. According to contemporary experts, anxiety is the most common emotion underlying dreaming. Existence involves operating in the face of this anxiety, emerging, as the etymological roots of the word “existence” (ex-sistere, “stand forth”) suggest, from the past into the future. As Foucault expressed it in his very first publication, a substantial preface to Ludwig Binswanger’s tract Dream and Existence: “In dreams he [a person] encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world.”3 This is not the form or foundation of every single dream, but it does have particular relevance for the analysis of dreams at moments of crisis. Consider, for example, the dream had by the nine-year-old Crow Indian Plenty Coups. In the mid1850s, as the Crow came under increasing pressure from the Sioux and settler expansion, he experienced a dream in which buffalo poured out of a hole in the

Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis

Contributors: Mariane Ferme, University of California, Berkeley David Guss, Harvard University Wolfgang Kempf, University of TUbingen Jim Kiernan, University of Natal, South Africa Klaus-Peter Koepping, University of Heidelberg, Birgit Meyer, Amsterdam School for Social Research David Mosse, University of Wales Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University, USA Charles Stewart, University College London Peter van der Veer, University of Amsterdam Richard Werbner, University of Manchester Lale Yalsin-Heckmann, University of Bamberg