rewrites pasts as contemporary resources that inspire commitment to social justice, drive an ethic of care, shape meaningful lives, counter amnesia, and inform creative performances of identity. As they do so, they convey a powerful critique, expressed as structure of feeling that interrogates the relegation of ethnicity to the realm of a cultural wasteland. Certain popular ethnographers writing within Greek America caution us that histories of assimilation and cultural caricaturing jeopardize the obligation of ethnics to remember historically, urging us not to forget that dominant groups crush minorities and exclude the most vulnerable of the population. And the ethnographers powerfully feel that this act of domination must not be repeated in the present, now that white ethnics are perhaps closer than ever in their aspiration to hegemony.
CHAPTER ONE
The Politics and Poetics of Popular Ethnography
Folk Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racial Pasts in History and Discourse
We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented … in such works.
—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism
IN THIS SCHOLARLY intervention, I rely neither on statistical data to tabulate objective patterns of cultural retention or loss nor on interviews and surveys to identify degrees of subjective attachment to ethnicity. The aim is not the collection of statistically significant evidence that disrupts conventional interpretations of white ethnicity. Instead, I build on the close reading of texts. I undertake the critical reading of a selected corpus of popular ethnographies to examine how ethnic meanings are produced and what this production tells us about white ethnicity. In other words, I explore how and why these ethnographies construct ethnicity by asking the following broad questions: Who defines usable pasts, where, for what purpose, and under what conditions? What are the uses of the past in each case, and how do they reproduce or contest ethnic whiteness?
I analyze this textual corpus by foregrounding ethnicity as a heterogeneous social field defined by similarities but also by internal differences, conflict and consensus, consistency and contradiction, resistance and accommodation, negotiation and consent. That is, I offer a venue to investigate ethnicity not as a shared culture, but as a field of contested meanings. Here I draw on a particular Gramscian thread of cultural studies that examines culture as a field “marked by a struggle to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate particular meanings, particular ideologies, particular politics” (Storey 2003, xi). If “[m]eaning is always a social production, a human practice,” white ethnicity must be seen in terms of texts and practices that contribute to its making. And white ethnicity cannot generate a single, authoritative interpretation of the past: “because different meanings can be ascribed to the same thing, meaning is always the site and the result of struggle” (ibid.).
I have already identified my object of analysis: popular ethnography. As interpretive descriptions of social life, these ethnographic accounts conveniently offer an opportunity to explore the multilayered contours of white ethnicity. In reading ethnographies, I do not assume that these texts offer transparent reflections of reality, faithful mirrors of the worlds they depict. As foundational work on the politics and poetics of ethnography has shown (Clifford and Marcus 1986), ethnographies are narratives that rest on rhetorical strategies of persuasion to establish authority and to produce convincing representations of social life. What this means, of course, is not that ethnographies are lies—and therefore illegitimate sources of knowledge about white ethnicity—but that they tell only partial truths (Clifford 1986a). I draw from this anthropological tradition the insight that attention to how ethnographies make meaning is of particular analytical value in the textual production of usable ethnic pasts. This method of reading becomes useful for interrogating narratives that claim absolute truths about Greek America or white ethnicity. I also use it to recover textual ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and the muting of alternative meanings within a text. Thus, I am interested in the manner in which the politics of ethnicity intertwines with textual poetics. My compass includes the interests that texts serve and the ways in which textual meanings are made rhetorically in the first place. I undertake all this with the goal of writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991), that is, disrupting tendencies to represent white ethnicity as a unified whole, a single demarcated culture.
I do not merely analyze texts. Ethnographic truths are embedded in broader impersonal structures and must be situated in relation to wider social discourses. I consider, therefore, textual politics and poetics as well as discourse and history. Attention to history and discourse allows me to conceptualize the terrain of ethnicity not in terms of a neatly delineated and already known past. Pasts are not natural facts; instead, they entail knowledge produced at specific moments in history. It becomes of primary analytical importance, then, to identify the specific political and cultural geographies where pasts were created, where they took root or were rerouted, were rejected or revived, were activated or silenced, at any given point in time. In other words, we must carefully scrutinize how tradition or heritage traveled across specific social fields and through identifiable historical moments. For the “recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations [of tradition]” has little value “unless the lines to the present, in the actual process of selective tradition, are clearly and actively traced” (Williams 1977, 115).
This mapping is necessary if we wish to understand the current modification, preservation, elimination, valorization, or deprecation of the past as a historical process. It is an enormous task, this comprehensive excavation of a multitude of relations, and it lies beyond the scope of this book. I merely make a gesture toward initiating this project; I start mapping only some dimensions of this process. In this chapter, for example, I enter this terrain through the analysis of selective representations in which claims about the past intersect with discourses and power relations to produce the meaning of ethnicity. I discuss four key, yet arbitrarily selected, historical moments of ethnic representation.1 First, I reflect on an ethnographic encounter between a folklorist and a Greek American family in 1955. I move on to analyze a public performance of Greek immigrant identity from a few decades earlier, as captured in a photograph taken during a national commemorative event in Washington, D.C, in 1917. I then discuss a 1907 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle that situated Greek immigrants in relation to racial categories in the United States, in order to reflect on the racial politics of that era vis-à-vis southeastern Europeans. And I continue with an autobiographical narrative by an ethnic intellectual in the 1970s that gave voice to the descendants of southeastern European immigrants in the context of white ethnic revival in America during the civil rights era.
My discussion of these representations demonstrates the utility of combining textual, historical, and discourse analysis to illuminate the complex interrelationships among various discrepant historical constructions of Greeks in the United States as ethnic, folk, white, and white ethnic. I begin this discussion by exploring how, in a specific historical moment and in the writings of a specific scholar, the discourse of folklore constituted Greek ethnicity as folkness. The text here is an extract from an ethnographic depiction of a Greek American family by folklorist Richard Dorson. It comprises excerpts from interviews that members of the family granted to the visiting folklorist. These textual fragments stand as a nascent popular ethnography, neither fully fledged nor textually autonomous. But once they are situated in relation to history and discourse—a task that I undertake in detail below—they foreground the idea that folklorists may miss or misrepresent the perspectives of the people they study.
Ethnicity as Folkness? Academic Constructions
Intellectuals and academics function as crucial agents in assigning significance to the culture of common people—their dances and riddles, songs and lullabies, jokes and celebrations. In fact, as John Storey (2003) shows, they have been instrumental in constituting the categories of the “folk” or “popular.”
