ABSTRACT
Prospective dreaming in Greece is part of an operant divinatory complex. Dreaming is a territory that most eloquently challenges scientism; it is the territory of divination, ritual and magic in anthropology that reinforced the discipline’s discontent with realism and marked the self-reflexive turn in and of the field. Dreaming speaks to the social construction of a submerged counter-memory that runs in a discontinuous fashion alongside sanctioned official public memory. Dreaming speaks to and challenges recent trends to salvage or safeguard everyday intangible cultures — a concern also of institutions and organizations such as UNESCO. There is an economy of dreaming formed by a relation of debt and payment that links the message of the dream to its actualization in social life. Dreaming presents a challenge to the taken-for-granted voluntarism in the ethnographic practice, as much as it confronts the therapeutic or cathartic ethic proposed by psychological perspectives for the dreaming or mourning experiences in non-Western others.
