publishers, artists, and academics—who introduced and subsequently valorized the category of folk culture. Such a classification, Storey notes, extracted from the cultural complexity of peasant experiences an idealized version, which it subsequently posited as the authentic core, the essence of the nation. In this enterprise, intellectuals “discovered” the folk, not because ordinary people did not previously exist but because the learned classes attached to them a historically specific meaning as the embodiment of national virtues and used the state apparatus to disseminate it. By stripping peasants of the authority to function as guardians of their own traditions, the educated bourgeoisie assumed “control of folk culture on behalf of the nation” (5). In the context of a nationalist ideology that posited folk culture as an eternal spirit that connected the present with the authentic origins of the nation, such an appropriation enabled the middle class to assume sole guardianship of the national past. The British Folk Song Society, for example, included among its members distinguished artists, academics, and professionals, but it was not a place where one “could expect to meet members of the folk” (122). Peasants could be interviewed and observed, invited to perform and documented, but they were excluded from membership in prestigious institutions established to preserve folk heritage.
The process of peasant folklorization outlined by Storey underscores an issue central to this book, namely how the past is used to promote social and political interests. “The idea of folk culture was a romantic fantasy,” Storey writes, “constructed through denial and distortion. It was a fantasy intended to heal the wounds of the present and safeguard the future by promoting a memory of the past which had little existence outside the intellectual debates of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries” (13). The implications of such cultural engineering were far-reaching. Intellectuals conjured an idealized pastoral folk culture as an “alternative to the rather troublesome specter of the urban-industrial working class” (14). In the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the culture of the uneducated masses was seen in terms of a sharp duality. On the one hand, the positively valued folk represented a site of authentic unity and peasant conformity, now threatened by widening class distinctions and labor unrest. On the other hand, the expressive culture of the urban proletariat was stigmatized as vulgar and debased, a potent force that threatened the social order. Such a bifurcation in the meaning of popular culture served as a strategy to discipline the unruly working class. Folk culture, elevated to the status of national heritage, was seen as a pedagogical and political instrument to restore morality and to civilize the masses. It was embraced as a means of creating national unity out of class and cultural disunity. This portrayal of common people, however, bore no resemblance to the rural folk, as it said nothing about the social realities of the peasants. As Charles Keil insisted in his acerbic exchange with Richard Dorson (1978b) regarding the utility of the term “folk,” the process of “‘folking over’ people’s lives” (Keil 1978, 264) works as an ideological tool to “mystify the class forces and power differences that structure inequality (Keil 1979, 209). No one but the bourgeoisie and the folklorists need the folk, Keil continues: “[T]here were never any ‘folk,’ except in the minds of the bourgeoisie…. A world of misery and stolen pleasures can become a staged world of song and dance and ever so colorful costumes, … a fantasy, a lie, that the bourgeois world needs to believe” (1978, 263).
In this reflexive moment in the history of social sciences, academic folklore can no longer be defined descriptively, as a set of scholarly activities that record and analyze everyday activities—conversations, jokes, dance performances, superstitions, forgotten songs, tales about past heroic deeds. Rather, the discipline is understood as a practice that constitutes the quotidian occurrences that it documents as “folk.” In the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), folklore becomes a “mode of cultural production” that is actualized at the moment when “particular objects and behaviors come to be identified, and understood, as folklore” (305). This process of naming and classifying “create[s] our disciplinary subject, even if those caught in our disciplinary drift net protest” (ibid.). Here, the old metaphor of the ethnographic discipline as an ocean still holds: “Ethnology is like the ocean. All you need is a net, any kind of net; and then if you step into the sea and swing your net about, you’re sure to catch some kind of fish” (quoted in Clifford 1988, 134).
The folk are not, then, to be naturally discovered during a folklorist’s forays into communities, places of ordinary sociability, and sites of expressive culture. The category “folk” may be alien or irrelevant to the individuals who share a story, worship, or recall a proverb for the benefit of the visiting folklorist. They may manipulate or resist it. Aspects of the everyday behavior of people acquire significance as folklore through social processes often removed from their immediate social experience. It is the discipline of folklore that folklorizes the quotidian.
Producing Greek America as “Folk” (Mid-1950s)
The metaphor of a “disciplinary drift net” points to folklore as an ever-expanding academic field in search of disciplinary subjects. It was such a search that led Richard Dorson, a neoromantic folklorist vested in the function of immigrant folklore in American modernity (Del Negro 2004, 44), to direct his attention to Greek America. When Dorson made arrangements to interview the Coromboses, an extended Greek family that resided in Iron Mountain, Michigan, he was pursuing a lead he had discovered while teaching a folklore class at Michigan State University. As a site of folklorization, this course was crucial in encouraging Peter (Ted) G. Corombos, a student in the class, to recognize his ethnic family as folk and to contribute material on Greek tradition. The Corombos family was caught in the folklorist’s net. His interest sparked, Dorson took it upon himself to continue the process of folklorization through fieldwork. On a fall day in 1955, he set out on the five-hundred-mile drive to Iron Mountain for a pilot study of the family, which spanned three generations.
This field trip was part of a larger academic project. Dorson was invested in demonstrating the resilience and relevance of the premodern past in modernity. He polemically defended the position that urbanization and industrialization did not signal the extinction of this past, which he, like his fellow neoromantics, treated “as a discrete category of culture”—folklore (Del Negro 2004, 47). Maintaining that folkness endured because it functioned as a crucial source of meaning in an alienating modernity, Dorson organized his research around the question “Is there a folk in the city?” (1978a, 29). His fieldwork in rural Michigan was a precursor of future ethnographic work in urban settings, such as Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, where he pursued “the multigroup targets … [he] had aimed at in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a remote, rural, and small town situation” (ibid.). The emphasis was on ethnicity, and the thrust of the research was to explore how memories among ethnic people help elucidate “the relation of memory culture to New World hyphenated folk culture” (31). Discovering evidence of durable folk cultures was imperative, therefore, to lend credence to his project. To locate “folklore’s canonical subject” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 306) in Iron Mountain, that is, to show that the Corombos family had retained its folkness, would prove that premodern ethnicity represented a vital counterforce to modernity. Rather than being obliterated by modernity, immigrant folkways took root in the New World as vital living traditions.
Dorson surveyed major Greek American institutions—the church, the press, community language schools, and voluntary associations—from the position of an omnipotent observer. The circulation of printed material, the practice of institutionalized worship, and teaching in the classroom made Greek America a modern society only in appearance, he argued. Below the modern surface, the folklorist identified a vital folk community. For Dorson, ethnic communities acted as “forces for conservatism” (1977, 156) that enabled the preservation of folkness that he equated with tradition. As he wrote elsewhere, “layer upon layer of folk-cultural traditions lie heaped up in the metropolis” (1978a, 29). He then summarily dismissed as error a rival interpretation advanced by Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee’s “Folklore of the Greeks in America” (1936), a study of Greek immigrant acculturation in the Boston area. Responding to her argument that Old World culture was a functionless vestige of the past, already on the verge of being swallowed by modernity, he wrote:
[Demetracopoulou
