Lee fails to consider the forces for conservatism operating in new-fangled America. A solid and cohesive Greek-American community takes root within the metropolis, buttressed by its Greek Orthodox church, parochial schools teaching modern Greek, Greek social and religious clubs, Greek language newspapers distributed from New York. Ties with the homeland remain strong and constant, a fact easily overlooked by the outsider…. In such an atmosphere, certain folk traditions endure and prosper. This was my discovery when I visited the Corombos family in northern Michigan one fall day in 1955. (1977, 155–56)
In this account, ethnicity fragments American modernity into coherent patches of enduring folk entities. Cohesive and deeply felt, interethnic ties operate invisibly in proximity to unsuspecting outsiders, as an alternative to modern anomie. The trained folklorist then identifies the folk in the city and reports a case of effective cultural transplantation. Dorson viewed ethnic communities as face-to-face organic entities that, along with transnational ties, assure ethnic traditionalism. Curiously, Dorson asserted the resilience of folk custom in the cohesiveness of the urban enclave but sought evidence of it among immigrants in the relative isolation of rural Michigan. This paradoxical shift impelled him to elaborate on the poetics of his quest for the folk.
“Insofar as one family can represent a national folk heritage, the Coromboses indeed qualify,” Dorson wrote. “In spite of their isolation in Iron Mountain, where no other Greek families live,” he assured his readers, their natal village of “Bambakou and the saints and the icons in Greece remain a powerful reality in their lives, to which they return on occasion” (164–65). Isolated in a remote small town, the family is seen as a carrier of national, regional, and religious folk heritage. For a folklorist who at the time of his fieldwork was keen on searching for functioning cultural remnants of a bygone past in the present, the Corombos family represented a “folkloristic gem.” In fact, the discovery of the Greek folk in rural America stands as an instance of “folkloristic surrealism,” the effect produced by “the gap between the folkloristic gem and the unlikely circumstances in which it is harbored” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 301). Though living in Iron Mountain, the family was foreign to it. Though a part of Greek America, it was far removed from Greek ethnicity’s customary site of social organization, the urban community. Dramatically alien to its surroundings, Greek immigrant folkness powerfully wrought its surrealistic effect.
Dorson refrained from representing the Greek immigrants as frozen relics of the past. His research was guided by the assumptions (1) that selective traits of the folk past can be found in the lore and activities of contemporary peasants and (2) that they furnish evidence not merely of the survival of folkness but of the vitality of its function in modernity. Dorson’s search for coherence, for a “typical form or theme” that defines a group or period, led him to the conclusion that “the epitome of immigrant folklore is the duality of Old Country mores in a New World context” (Ben-Amos 1989, 55). This analytical framework accommodated both the preservation of folklore in the tradition of romantic nationalism (Wilson 1989) and integration, which precluded the total folklorization of the family. Dorson represented the Coromboses as being partially folk and in a state of intergenerational flux. Its male members were described as mobile and acculturated, holding various degrees of attachment to folklore. The son, Ted, who was college-educated and “had taken a course in comparative folklore … handled Greek and English with equal facility, and [while] he listened with respect to the family tales … he could look at the traditions with some degree of detachment” (Dorson 1977, 157). His father and uncle, who had immigrated to America in 1903 and 1907, respectively, “spanned the two cultures, speaking fair and rapid-fire English, adapting themselves to American business ways, but withal respecting the old heritage” (ibid.). In contrast, “their wives, residing in the home and not meeting the public like their husbands, spoke only broken English, and appeared timid and withdrawn” (ibid.). Ted’s late grandmother “represented the fountainhead of ancient lore. When Ted was stricken by the evil eye, she knew the proper formula detecting the culprit” (156–57).
The folkloric value of the family lay precisely in its porous boundaries. There was evidence in the immigrant narratives that despite acculturation and extended contact with American modernity, the male Coromboses still preserved a memory culture of meaningful folklore. For a scholar like Dorson, who was invested in showing the functional contemporaneity of folklore, this was a delightful discovery. It demonstrated the tenacity of folk culture among ethnics who had effectively adapted to American modernity. It furnished evidence for defending the terms “folk” and “folklore” as all-inclusive categories, a position that his trenchant critic Charles Keil effectively captured in the statement “We all need the folk because we are all folk” (1979, 209).2
But discovering folklore’s canonical subject in ethnicity is hardly an innocent enterprise. By underscoring the persistence of elements commonly associated with lower stages of cultural evolution—magic and superstitions—Dorson inevitably, though unwittingly, attached a dimension of primitivism to Greek immigrants. Dorson’s own discussion (1968) of Edward Tylor’s evolutionist work Primitive Culture (1871) underscores the hierarchical implications of his findings:
According to the doctrine of survivals, the irrational beliefs and practices of the European peasantry, so at variance with the enlightened view of the educated classes, preserve the fragments of an ancient, lower culture, the culture of primitive man. Consequently these survivals not only illuminate the past history of the race but also confirm the broad theory of development, as opposed to the theory of degeneration, which Tylor vigorously counters. While the main march of mankind is upward, from savagery through barbarism to ascending levels of civilization, relics of savagery, such as witchcraft, still survive among civilized peoples, and occasionally burst into revivals, as in the fad of spiritualism, a revival of primitive society. (Dorson 1968, 193)
“We have but to scratch the rustic,” said evolutionist and president of the British Folk-Lore Society Edward Clodd in 1895, in order “to find the barbarian underneath” (quoted in Dorson 1968, 250). In evolutionist thought, there lies behind the modern veneer of the Greek immigrant a functioning and inescapable layer of primitivism. The folklorization of the family makes Dorson an unintentional participant traversing a historical minefield, the representation of immigrants as primitives in our midst. Did the Coromboses represent primitive folkness, as the professional folklorist maintained? Or did they stand for something else, entirely missed by Dorson? To fully explore this question it is necessary to shift the frame of analysis from the folklorist’s conclusions to the statements made by members of the family—the textual fragments to which I alluded earlier—during the course of the ethnographic interview. The question “Who are the folk?” will yield unexpected insights once we foreground ethnic self-representations and situate them in relation to the practice of collecting ethnographic data and to historical discourses on national identity.
Who Are the Folk?
Viewed through the lens of the anthropology of Greece, the encounter between Richard Dorson and the Corombos family raises a number of key questions. What kind of cultural assumptions informed the family’s self-representation to the folklorist? Did the immigrants have prior knowledge about the place of the folk in Greek national history? If so, how was this expressed? Were they the functioning folk, as Dorson portrayed them, or were they self-consciously performing a specific kind of folkness, obliging the expectations of an educated outsider? If one member of the family exhibited “the broad insight of a folk historian” (Dorson 1977, 157), wasn’t this member also familiar—through exposure to mainstream as well as ethnic print media—with the history and politics of immigration? In my attempt to nuance Dorson’s conclusions, I turn to studies in anthropology and folklore, which have cast light on the complexities of doing ethnography with Greek people. In the context of Greek ethnography, Michael Herzfeld (1986b) has emphatically identified the ethnographic interview as a rhetorical construct. When he writes, “the villager’s ability to situate any ethnographer in a particular ideological framework must affect the recording of data” (222), he frames the problem in terms of a politics of ethnographic location. Similarly, Margaret Alexiou’s pioneering (1984–85) insight
