“will often provide information they think is expected, or even deliberately mislead. Neither they nor we are ‘innocent’” (11).3
Following the internal development of folklore in Greece as a discipline “committed to the presentation of an idealized view of national culture,” the peasants expected folklorists to be urban, educated Greeks whose high position and perceived prestige “caus[ed] reluctance among rural informants to disclose their local traditions” (Herzfeld 1986b, 222). Through self-censorship, they sought to conceal those aspects of vernacular culture—obscene songs and ribald jokes for example—that would have compromised the idealized view of the folk promoted by official folklore. On the other hand, what were construed as ancient Greek (Hellenic) elements of folk culture were performed for the benefit of foreign anthropologists. The latter were seen as ideal interlocutors for whose benefit the peasants deployed the outward-oriented model that showcased the Hellenic dimensions of Greekness. “The Romeic model might have slipped through the crack,” Herzfeld notes, “had the ethnographers not been receptive to the often all-too-vague suggestions of its importance in the villagers’ own scheme of things” (221). Extending credit to the astuteness of anthropologists of Greek culture here safeguards the legitimacy of ethnographic knowledge.4
Herzfeld presents the peasants as being both fully aware of the debates on the place of the folk in national history and in a position to manipulate this knowledge. For my purposes, the question is whether the placement of Dorson in the rural taxonomy of ethnographers affected the ethnographic data and, if so, in what way. Undoubtedly, the family did not disappoint Dorson’s quest for ethnic folkness. It not only generously displayed its folk knowledge in narratives about the past, but it also performed tradition while hosting the folklorist. Because the male informants assumed center stage in the encounter—their wives appearing “timid and withdrawn”—we can safely deduce that the professional folklorist was accorded the gendered rituals of formal Greek hospitality. The “architectonic distinctions between formal/male and familiar/female” that organized social experience in Greece also informed the customary reception of the distinguished guest (Herzfeld 1987, 118). Paradoxically, the women, who function as guardians of ethnicity according to patriarchal ideology, are marginalized in this ethnographic encounter. They are twice removed from the center stage of knowledge production about the folk: once on account of the customary decorum of ritualized hospitality and again because of insufficient acculturation, their limited English language skills.
A crucial passage documented and reported by Dorson, however, complicates the performance of the Coromboses as folk subjects:
Besides their myriad accounts of saints’ legends and miracles and black magic, the Corombos brothers spouted forth lighter tales of entertainment from the old wonder stories to modern jests. A prize specimen from George showed an American veneer coating the venerable European tale of the valiant hero overcoming the stupid ogres. George introduced the story as an account of how baseball was invented in Greece two thousand years ago. Giants eight and ten feet tall then lived in Greece and from them the New York Giants took their name. A weak, lazy fellow joined the giants and outwitted them in trials of strength. When night fell he placed his overcoat over a pile of stones, to simulate a man sleeping, and hid in the hills. The giants attempted to kill the little fellow by pounding his bed with an ax. But in the morning the youth, whom they had presumably chopped in a thousand pieces, reappeared, complaining that the bedbugs had been scratching him all night long. Impressed and overawed, the giants named him captain. And thenceforth carried out his orders. The Americans picked up baseball from this adventure, and the New York Giants began swinging bats two thousand years after the Greek giants had swung axes. (1977, 164–65)
To recognize the irony in Dorson’s interpretation of the Greek claim to the origins of baseball, we must place this narrative in the historical context of Greek identity. The folklorist bypasses the national significance of the narrative, treating it as a “lighter tale.” From his longstanding interest in motif analysis, he draws on “comparative folklore theory” (Georges 1989, 7) to place the narrative on the origins of baseball in relation to the European tale tradition. But had Richard Dorson read the work of Nikos Politis (1852–1921), the founder of the discipline of folklore in Greece, that knowledge would have constrained him to interpret the interview material differently.5 Folk references to Hellenes, a giant race of mythical ancestors of superhuman size and strength, served for Politis as irrefutable evidence of the continuing use of the word as a term of national self-ascription, a name that he favored over that of Romii. Whether these references in popular tradition “represent the survival of a true self-designation” or whether they “may be metaphorical in origin” is a moot point (Herzfeld 1986a, 127–28). Of relevance here is the realization that popular circulation of Hellenic markers of identity cannot be treated as evidence of an authentic folk knowledge but only as a site of cross-fertilization between popular and literary sources (Herzfeld 1986a, 125; Alexiou 1984–85, 20). This realization shifts the analysis of folk tradition from “pure orality” to “literary orality,” toward the contextual analysis, that is, of the interaction between the textual and the oral (ibid.).6
Dorson’s folk historians appropriated an item of popular and literary tradition to create a usable past in the context of the ethnographic encounter. I suggest that the narrative on the Greek derivation of baseball functions to inscribe the ethnic folk within American modernity, not outside it. Establishing the modernity of the folk in turn averts the hierarchical impulse to classify ethnics as less modern and, by implication, less American. The narrative does not merely claim ethnic origins for a quintessentially national (American) pastime. The Greek invention of an American sport additionally works as a claim to beginnings, in the sense that it views the Greek past as an active cultural force that shapes the present (see Said 1975). The national past of the folk is afforded supreme value in that it functions as a model worth emulating. This narrative of beginnings establishes continuity between the Greek past and the American present as it underwrites Greek cultural authority over a quintessential American pastime, baseball. It collapses the distinction between the premodern and the modern, the ethnic and the national. It therefore authorizes the family to identify itself as authentically Greek (by virtue of ancestry) and American (by virtue of shared culture). If the interview points to the family’s folkness, the narrative decidedly illuminates the family’s Western (and by implication white) pedigree. It deflects, therefore, the Orientalist and primitivist gaze that any reference to irrational beliefs ostensibly invites. To put it differently, if the ethnic family is indeed premodern by the virtue of its beliefs in superstitions, so is the entire baseball community, a network of players, coaches, and audiences who thrive on the practice of superstition (Gmelch 1984). As popular theoreticians, the Coromboses shatter the hierarchical dichotomy between ethnic folk and modern national subjects.
The Coromboses responded to Dorson’s romantic nationalism with a folk version of its Greek counterpart, one that reverses the historical devaluation of the immigrant folk. The fact that immigrants indeed possess folklore makes them neither alien primitives nor devalued Orientals, but equal participants in America. The ethnic folk and the inquiring folklorist inhabit a common temporal civilizational plane; a claim to origins establishes a fundamental coevality between the family and their prestigious visitor as it simultaneously subverts the structural hierarchy between the educated academic and the ethnic folk.7
To fully grasp the implications of the story’s claim to beginnings, we must place it in relation to Greek immigrant negotiations with American modernity. Neither an idiosyncratic nor a merely creative cultural appropriation, the narrative about the Greek invention of baseball belongs to a foundational identity narrative. In fact, the text produced by the Coromboses constitutes a component of early immigrant historiography, which located Greek America within “the ‘illustrious’ history of Classical Hellenism attributing a semi-divine origin to Greek Americans” (Kalogeras 1992, 17). These historical narratives are in turn part of a wider social discourse that encompasses them. Whether claiming Greek ancestry for Christopher Columbus, as historian Seraphim Canoutas did in Christopher Columbus: A Greek Nobleman (1943), or whether designating Greek immigrants in America
