the peasants into a crucial component of national history must be seen in relation to political contingencies associated with the foundation of the modern Greek state early in the nineteenth century. “Only after the establishment of the Greek state, was the word laos used increasingly to mean ‘people’ in the Herderian sense of Volk, as carriers of the eternal spirit (pneuma) of the Greek nation (ethnos), whose values are transmitted ‘in the blood’” (14–15). The performance of immigrants posing in folk costumes constituted a modern folkness embedded in complex political histories and struggles to establish a nation-state and nationhood. It is necessary, therefore, to situate the representation captured in the photograph both historically and in relation to social discourses on Greek identity. In what follows, I will take a brief detour to discuss how the academic discipline of folklore construed the place of folk culture and the classical past in narratives of national identity and, in turn, how these narratives sought to contain the variability that defined peasant cultural expressions.
In the context of nineteenth-century Greek nation building and European power relations, turning the folk into national subjects served key political purposes. This explains the ideological significance of Greek folklore as a national institution whose production of truths about ordinary people was placed at the service of the state’s cultural politics. The systematic study of peasant culture was politically crucial at the time because it sought to legitimize the newly established nation-state. Greek folklore scholarship was staunchly empirical, yet ideologically invested in establishing an uninterrupted continuity between the ordinary people of the Greek countryside and ancient Greece. Selective customs and folk beliefs became the functioning link between the so-called golden past and the present, the latter envisioned by Western-trained Greek intellectuals and statesmen as a resurrection of the former. Long scorned and derided by the urban bourgeois, the practices of the folk, the laos, served as irrefutable evidence of racial purity, a sign that the spirit of Periclean Athens was transmuted into the greatness of folk poetry and song. Hence the name of the new discipline, laografia, the study of people (the Volk), instead of ethnografia, the study of the ethnos (the nation). As Michael Herzfeld (1986a) points out in his groundbreaking work on the politics of Greek folklore studies, it was necessary for the new discipline to prove that the folk constituted an organic part of the nation, that they “indeed belonged to the Hellenic ethnos” (13). “The ethnos,” Herzfeld writes, “did not need a branch of study of its own: it was one of the eternal verities, an absolute moral entity against which the laos could be matched and measured” (ibid.). By establishing the Hellenicity of the peasants, folklore scholarship legitimized the claim of the Greek nation-state to the cultural and intellectual legacy of ancient Greece. Such reasoning carried far-reaching political implications. If Hellas stood “as the cultural exemplar of Europe” (5), to claim that modern Greeks were racial and cultural descendants of ancient Greece was to declare their access to an Ur-European identity. The prestigious pedigree of the peasants carried inherent political implications. “Against the background of the Greeks’ dependence on European patronage” (6–7), Herzfeld writes, the claim to racial and cultural ancestry substantiated the European identity of the Greeks and made them eligible for European political and material support.
Seen against this historical background, the photograph testifies to the power of the discourse of Western Hellenism to shape the national and transnational expression of Greek immigrant identity. But it also demonstrates the immigrant performance of a larger, preemigration process of cultural containment. In nineteenth-century Greece, the state-sponsored nationalization of folk culture assaulted regional variation in order to domesticate its fragmentary potential.11 It imposed homogeneity in yet another sense, when it purged vernacular practices that deviated from the construction of an ideal, virtuous folk. Thus, the photograph’s orderly symbolic arrangement edits out the variability and messiness of the social realities that defined the lives of immigrants who were fleeing the poverty of the Greek countryside for the promises of material prosperity in the United States.
Enabled by the labor demands of transnational capitalism, the movement of poor peasants to the centers of American industrial production set in motion the mass flow of immigrant vernacular cultures.12 Greek immigrants imported to the New World highly variable folk practices consisting of multilayered secular and religious elements. On the broadest level, staples of the immigrant vernacular included, among others, storytelling, songs and dances, ritual laments, hospitality, traditions and beliefs associated with Orthodoxy, superstitions, folk healing, oral poetic traditions, and divination. The vernacular offered a rich, culturally expressive repertoire of oral genres that reproduced central community values. Didactic folk practices savored proverbs and tales that communicated moral values and folk wisdom. On the ethnographic level, the cultural field was crisscrossed by regional, class, and gender variation. Certainly, tradition functioned ideologically to reproduce the moral order. Patriarchy loomed large, expressed in vernacular forms, including proverbs, that represented women as weak and sexually vulnerable and that regulated their spatial and social movement in everyday practices. Socially constraining customs often sanctioned violence, most paradigmatically honor crimes, to enforce the traditional order.
But the vernacular also provided a venue for subversive language and activities resisting, to the degree possible, domestic centers of power as well as the encroachment of state structures and peasant exploitation.13 Anthropologists and folklorists have documented powerful subversive elements among the folk. Jokes challenged the authority of the priests (Orso 1979). Peasant protests challenged and ridiculed the landholding class and the authority of the state (Gallant 2002). Ribald jokes told within the intimate social circle of relatives and female friends challenged the stereotype of female timidity in rural Greece (Clark 1983). And vernacular poetry, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, was deployed in local struggles against the intrusion of capitalism.
Furthermore, the vernacular never represented an insulated, singular culture. As historical anthropologist Thomas Gallant (2001) points out, “The view of the Greek village as isolated in space and frozen in time … at best is misleading and at worst inaccurate” (97). This observation is supported by a regional approach in scholarship that examines villages in relation to the histories and the political economy of their surrounding settlements and that challenges the assumption of Greek villages as fixed, stable, and uniform entities. The emerging consensus represents settlements in the Greek countryside as fluid and dynamic social units (see S. Sutton 1994) characterized by outward movements of seasonal emigration, networks of social relations in the context of regional festivals, and flows of repatriated immigrants. Moreover, rural populations were differentially exposed to modernity and urban lifestyles because of the uneven modernization of the Greek countryside and each group’s relative geographic proximity to or distance from towns and cities. Peasants therefore are best understood as national subjects enmeshed not only in a local symbolic universe and moral order but also in national discourses of identity and citizenship, the flow of extralocal symbolic resources, material culture, and economic networks of transnational capitalism in the industrial periphery.14 What is more, Greek-speaking refugees who fled Ottoman Turkey because of nationalist conflicts in the region (culminating in the 1923 compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey) represented a heterogeneous population, sectors of which were cosmopolitan and appreciative of high culture. Their presence in Greek America adds yet another layer, one largely unexplored, between the rural and the urban, and between the popular and the elite cultures, where the illiterate, the literate, the vernacular, and the literary intersected.15
The foregoing discussion helps me position the staged performance of identity at the U.S. Treasury in terms of transnational negotiations over the signifiers of Greek identity. The photograph captured a scripted presentation: it sought to synthesize the Hellenic and Romeic aspects of Greek identity in a highly stylized form for the immigrants’ nascent public presentation of the ethnic self to the American public. But it also signaled, as I have already pointed out, a moment of discontinuity. It announced a process in which the definition and expression of Greek vernacular culture were increasingly understood as a negotiation between ever-vigilant immigrant constituencies and the cultural and political demands placed upon them by their hosts. In other words, the
