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Resistance, Misrecognition, or Identity? Images of Rural and Urban in Three Recent Greek Ethnographies

1998; George Washington University; Volume: 71; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3317442

1534-1518

David Sutton, Nadia Seremetakis, Neni Panourgiá, Vassos Argyrou,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. NADIA SEREMETAKIS. Chicago IL University of Chicago Press. 1991, xi + 275 pp. Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography. NENI PANOURGIA. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1995, xxiv + 242 pp. Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle. VASSOS ARGYROU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996, x + 210 pp. Since its beginning the ethnography of Greece has struggled with the relationship between the rural and the urban. In a country that has suffered extreme rural depopulation since the time of its brutal civil war (1945-49), which was largely fought in these villages, anthropological concern with rural communities has seemed to some particularly misplaced. Yet as a recent documentary on Greece points out, rural depopulation is somewhat of a facade, as many nouveau and even long-time urbanites continue to register for voting purposes in their home villages and return for festive occasions (Triffit 1993). When you ask a Greek are you from? the response will only elicit the further question where is your village? Even the first studies of Greece carried out in the late 1950s and early 1960s recognized some of these tensions. Campbell's (1964) study of Sarakatsani transhumant shepherds focussed in large part on the patronage networks that connected them to the centers of power. Friedl's (1964) model of got anthropological thinking going on the processes by which rural villagers were made to feel backward by their urban cousins, and thus were willing to sell off their land to buy apartments in Athens as dowries to attract high-status urban grooms. The lagging emulation thesis was picked up by Stewart (1991). He updated Zeno's paradox in showing how rural villagers who have rejected superstition as part of their quest for modernity have once again fallen behind their urban cousins who have now embraced astrology, tarot readings, and other revamped signs of the West. Others, such as Herzfeld (1987), argued for the centrality of the rural in Greek national ideology, and thus showed how economically marginalized Greek villagers have tried to use this national discourse to claim political and ideological power as representatives of true Greek virtues. More pragmatically, Buck-Sutton (1988), foreshadowing transnationalist discourse, posed the question what is a village in a nation of migrants? examining how village identity is reconstituted by urban-based migrant associations. And Hirschon (1989) challenged the distinction between rural and urban identities in her work on the role of religion and ritual in a community of Asia Minor refugees in urban Piraeus. My own field research on the Dodecanese island of Kalymnos also touched on issues of the rural and the urban. I first came to Kalymnos in 1980 on a study-abroad program for American students. Kalymnos had been chosen by the director of the program in part because he believed that it still retained many of the traditional aspects of Greek life that had been lost in Athens and other regions overrun by tourism. But if my early experience of Kalymnos was as a repository of I also was attracted to the cosmopolitan outlook of Kalymnians. This perhaps reflected the fact that Kalymnos's rocky environment never supported much agriculture, and thus Kalymnos has long been primarily oriented toward seafaring: from the legendary sponge divers to fishermen and sailors. My own research, however, was shaped by my attraction to the Geertzian experience-near approach as well as a Foucauldian concept of discursive practices. This led to a focus not on how Kalymnos was a repository of traditional Greek lifeways, but rather on how Kalymnians used the categories tradition, custom, and history in negotiating their identity in relation to a number of key others: from neighboring islanders living off the fat of the tourist boom, to corrupt Athenians, modern Western Europeans and innocent Americans (Sutton 1998). …