"This book was originally published by the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, in their series Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings"
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.
This book presents a social and cultural history of collective memory in modern Greece during the first century of state independence, contributing to the debate over the relationship between memory and identity. It discusses how modern Greek society commemorated its distant and recent pasts, both real and imagined, namely antiquity, Byzantium, the Greek Revolution and the Asia Minor Catastrophe; how cultural memory was shaped by the various war experiences (victory, defeat, mass death and mourning, refugeedom); and how memory politics became arenas of social and political strife. Historical painting, monuments, historical pageantry, tableaux vivants, national anniversaries, performances of ancient drama and revivals of ancient games are analyzed as instances where the past was visualized, represented, performed and "consumed". An explosion in public history has taken place over the last decades around the world, with a veritable flood of commemorations, anniversaries and "memory wars". As more and more social groups claim the "right to remember", public discourse and polemics have arisen at the same time that traumatic memory has become a field of international academic research. In the arena of public history, historical memory is being constructed through the sentimental, irrational reception of mythological narratives told through images.
This book examines some of the oldest preserved texts on dreams, such as Artemidorus' Oneirocritica, Sigmund Freud's favourite ancient dream theorist, and dream books by Aristotle, the grandfather of modern dream theory.
This book presents new directions in contemporary anthropological dream research, surveying recent theorizations of dreaming that are developing both in and outside of anthropology. It incorporates new findings in neuroscience and philosophy of mind while demonstrating that dreams emerge from and comment on sociohistorical and cultural contexts. The chapters are written by prominent anthropologists working at the intersection of culture and consciousness who conduct ethnographic research in a variety of settings around the world, and reflect how dreaming is investigated by a range of informants in ever more diverse sites. As well as theorizing the dream in light of current anthropological and psychological research, the volume accounts for local dream theories and how they are situated within distinct cultural ontologies. It considers dreams as a resource for investigating and understanding cultural change; dreaming as a mode of thinking through, contesting, altering, consolidating, or escaping from identity; and the nature of dream mentation. In proposing new theoretical approaches to dreaming, the editors situate the topic within the recent call for an "anthropology of the night" and illustrate how dreams offer insight into current debates within anthropology’s mainstream. This up-to-date book defines a twenty-first century approach to culture and the dream that will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as other disciplines such as religious studies, the neurosciences, and psychology.
Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society. This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past. The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.
In Visions of Statesmanship: A Statesman’s Imagination and Autonomy, David Hansen provides a critical examination of the figure of the statesman as it has been presented in the philosophical reflections of three key thinkers: Plato, Yannis Markrygiannis, and Cornelius Castoriadis. In the course of the analysis, the chapters broadly investigate and assess the complex reception history that obtains among this particular configuration of intellectual history by offering authors, activists and texts linked to critical, political, and social theory in German, French, and Anglo-American contexts. The focus falls on the imagination (variously conceived) and notions of autonomy, and how these ideals potentially confront specific conditions of political and social reality. What emerges across the millennia, is an episodic account of dialectical encounters between freedom and unfreedom, how philosophical endeavors discern alternatives that raise consciousness of societal possibilities that challenge realities with the aim of changing practices of domination, oppression, and exploitation. Rather than regard intellectual and literary labor as ideological reflections of the material base, Hansen considers to what extent these free works of the imagination offer concrete visions that would increase justice, communal harmony, and global peace historical contingencies and limitations.
This volume centers on dreams in Greek medicine from the fifth-century B.C.E. Hippocratic Regimen down to the modern era. Medicine is here defined in a wider sense than just formal medical praxis, and includes non-formal medical healing methods such as folk pharmacopeia, religion, ’magical’ methods (e.g., amulets, exorcisms, and spells), and home remedies. This volume examines how in Greek culture dreams have played an integral part in formal and non-formal means of healing. The papers are organized into three major diachronic periods. The first group focuses on the classical Greek through late Roman Greek periods. Topics include dreams in the Hippocratic corpus; the cult of the god Asclepius and its healing centers, with their incubation and miracle dream-cures; dreams in the writings of Galen and other medical writers of the Roman Empire; and medical dreams in popular oneirocritic texts, especially the second-century C.E. dreambook by Artemidorus of Daldis, the most noted professional dream interpreter of antiquity. The second group of papers looks to the Christian Byzantine era, when dream incubation and dream healings were practised at churches and shrines, carried out by living and dead saints. Also discussed are dreams as a medical tool used by physicians in their hospital praxis and in the practical medical texts (iatrosophia) that they and laypeople consulted for the healing of disease. The final papers deal with dreams and healing in Greece from the Turkish period of Greece down to the current day in the Greek islands. The concluding chapter brings the book a full circle by discussing how modern psychotherapists and psychologists use Ascelpian dream-rituals on pilgrimages to Greece.
A diverse group of scholars charts new paths in the quest for the historical Jesus. After a decade of stagnation in the study of the historical Jesus, James Crossley and Chris Keith have assembled an international team of scholars to envision the quest anew. The contributors offer new perspectives and fresh methods for reengaging the question of the historical Jesus. Important, timely, and fascinating, The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus is a must read for anyone seeking to understand Jesus of Nazareth. Contributors Michael P. Barber, Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology, United States of America Giovanni B. Bazzana, Harvard Divinity School, United States of America Helen K. Bond, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom James Crossley, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Norway, and Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements, United Kingdom Tucker S. Ferda, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, United States of America Paula Fredriksen, Boston University, United States of America, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Deane Galbraith, University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand Mark Goodacre, Duke University, United States of America Meghan R. Henning, University of Dayton, United States of America Nathan C. Johnson, University of Indianapolis, United States of America Wayne Te Kaawa, University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand Chris Keith, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, Norway John S. Kloppenborg, University of Toronto, Canada Amy-Jill Levine, Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, United States of America, and Vanderbilt University, United States of America Brandon Massey, University of Münster, Germany Justin J. Meggitt, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Halvor Moxnes, University of Oslo, Norway Robert J. Myles, Wollaston Theological College, University of Divinity, Australia Wongi Park, Belmont University, United States of America Janelle Peters, Loyola Marymount University, United States of America Taylor G. Petrey, Kalamazoo College, United States of America Adele Reinhartz, University of Ottawa, Canada Rafael Rodríguez, Johnson University, United States of America Sarah E. Rollens, Rhodes College, United States of America Anders Runesson, University of Oslo, Norway Nathan Shedd, William Jessup University, United States of America, and Johnson University, United States of America Mitzi J. Smith, Columbia Theological Seminary, United States of America, and University of South Africa, South Africa Joan Taylor, King’s College London, United Kingdom Matthew Thiessen, McMaster University, Canada Robyn Faith Walsh, University of Miami, United States of America Matthew G. Whitlock, Seattle University, United States of America Stephen Young, Appalachian State University, United States of America Christopher B. Zeichmann, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Antigone Kefala is one of the most significant of the Australian writers who have come from elsewhere; it would be difficult to overstate the significance of her life and work in the culture of this nation. Over the last half-century, her poetry and prose have reshaped and expanded Australian literature and prompted us to re-examine its premises and capacities. From the force of her poetic imagery and the cadences of her phrases and her sentences to the large philosophical and historical questions she poses and to which she responds, Kefala has generated in her writing new ways of living in time, place and language. Across six collections of poetry and five prose works, themselves comprising fiction, non-fiction, essays and diaries, she has mapped the experience of exile and alienation alongside the creativity of a relentless reconstitution of self. Kefala is also a cultural visionary. From her rapturous account of Sydney as the place of her arrival in 1959, to her role in developing diverse writing cultures at the Australia Council, to the account of her own writing life amongst a community of friends and artists in Sydney Journals (2008), she has reimagined the ways we live and write in Australia.