always practiced in the present, not because the past imposes itself but because subjects in the present fashion the past in the practice of their social identity” (141).
Who are the white ethnics here? Individuals committed to the realist representation of the past, or those determined to silence aspects of the historical record? Those who invest in exhibiting the past, or those who threaten to censor it? The public controversy over the proper display of immigrant ancestors reveals that there can be no single answer to these questions. By no means a transparent social category, white ethnicity is a construct of social practices and narratives that compete over the significance of the past in defining contemporary identity and the ways in which this identity is portrayed in the public. Of course, the idea of ethnicity as “invented, imagined, administered, and manufactured” (Bendix and Roodenburg 2000, xi) is a truism in critical scholarship, antagonizing the popular—and even sometimes academic—view of ethnicity as biologically innate and therefore immutable. Consequently, the critical responsibility becomes to investigate how pasts are made to matter in the production of ethnic meanings today: who produces usable ethnic pasts, how, and for what purposes?
In the remainder of this introduction, my task is to probe the production of usable pasts as a process crucial for identity making but also as an instrument for containing difference. I discuss this dual function in relation to white ethnicity, pointing out how the immigrant past is deployed as a resource not only to construct identity but also to sustain racial hierarchies. The discussion moves on to identify the analytical focus of my work—namely Greek America—the textual corpus that enables this analysis—popular ethnography—and my methodological locus—a metaethnography of the politics and poetics of these ethnographic texts. In the process, I map the broad contours, past and present, of Greek American popular ethnography and its relation to professional anthropology. The conclusion lays open my politics of interpretation, outlining the aims of my interventionist scholarship.
The Significance of the Past: Making Difference and Similarity
The past has emerged as a crucial social and political resource in the making of contemporary ethnicities. Ethnic pasts are politically charged because they are invariably deployed to legitimize collective belonging. Claims to identity, cultural ownership, and in the case of nationalism, territory, all build on arguments about common ancestry, heritage, tradition, and indigeneity.6 Status and prestige hinge on the possession of glorious pasts. The controversy over the right to own the Elgin Marbles—a legacy that is both Greek and global (Lowenthal 1996, 244)—for instance, rests on a logic that equates the past with biology, “heritage with lineage” (200). From the Greek perspective, if one wishes to appreciate this global heritage, one should do so in terms dictated by those who claim a pedigree from the classical past: visit Athens, not the British Museum, where they are currently exhibited. Possession of a past anchors claims to identity. Even in the most visible cases of constructed panethnicity in the United States, that is, when distinct ethnic identities submerge themselves in politically and socially expedient collectivities, the past continues to mark cultural specificity. Such was the case during the inaugural festivities of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004 at the Smithsonian Institution. In celebrating the establishment of this panethnic museum, commemorative events stressed a history of European-inflicted persecution and loss shared by all native people in the Americas; at the same time, the narrative of cultural perseverance necessitated the highly visible performance and exhibit of an astounding native cultural heterogeneity. Dances, music, dress, and crafts differentiated the Aztecs from the Cherokees and Potawatomis; the Otomis (central Mexico) from the Chippewas (Lac du Flambeau band, Lake Superior Chippewa in Wisconsin); and the Cheyenne River Lakota Akicitas (South Dakota) from the Seminoles (Florida), to mention a few. Rather than eclipsing specificity, the celebration of a common pan-Indian history brought it to the fore. Discourses on and performances of ethnic pasts bring about a dazzling proliferation of identities; their particularizing function counters the homogenizing processes of globalization.
But even as heritage and tradition communicate distinctiveness, they have also turned into venues that, paradoxically, spread global uniformity.7 Ostensibly staged to showcase ethnic particularity, heritage sites such as the genre of the ethnic festival in the United States, a commodified performance of urban ethnic tourism, tend to homogenize the global experience of ethnicity. The rhetoric of difference often produces a flattening uniformity as to what merits display and preservation. A brief survey of ethnic spectacles in the United States illustrates the unfailing predictability of what counts as a valued past in the multicultural agora. Can there be an American ethnicity without food, dances, music, costumes, or personal research into roots and family genealogy that offers recourse into an ethnic past? Polka and kalamatianos may differ in style and symbolically differentiate the Poles from the Greeks on the dancing stage, yet both function as indispensable markers of respective ethnic identities. Cultural commodification reduces ethnicities to selectively predictable expressions, applying a hue of aesthetic diversity and exoticism over routinely enacted uniformity. Belly dancers in Cairo, Istanbul, and Athens; Zorba-dance in Crete and ethnic festivals in Columbus, Ohio. Sameness is showcased as an emblem of ethnic distinctiveness for the benefit of international and domestic tourism. As the past is commodified, cultural standardization contains diversity; increasingly, local heritage circulates across national borders in a prepackaged uniformity.
Worldwide homogeneity now extends to the realm of values and ethics, a phenomenon contributing to what Michael Herzfeld (2004) calls the “global hierarchy of value” (2). Globalization in this formulation entails “the hidden presence of a logic that has seeped in everywhere but is everywhere disguised as difference, heritage, local tradition” (ibid.). Adopted globally by states, elites, and the bourgeoisie, a set of values “such as efficiency, fair play, civility, civil society, human rights, transparency, cooperation and tolerance” is normalized via an “increasingly homogeneous language of culture and ethics” (ibid.). As Bonnie Urciuoli (1998) argues, the cultural definition of the model ethnic American citizen resonates with this universalizing process. Immigrant and ethnic traditions are given premium value insofar as they contribute to what is seen as the moral betterment and socioeconomic mobility of ethnic subjects (178). “‘Family solidarity,’ ‘work ethic,’ ‘belief in education,’” she writes, “provide the moral wherewithal” that meets the culturally entrenched requirements of Americanization: in the age of multiculturalism, immigrants are classified as desirable Americans-in-the-making, and racial minorities are ethnicized on the basis of middle-class criteria, achievement, and progress. Those attributes serve as a powerful instrument of social control, given that the “worth of one’s ethnicity hang[s] in the balance: good Italian-American or low-class Sicilian? Hardworking African-American or undesirable black?” (179). Morally upright, family-centered, and successful Greek American or lazy, morally corrupt Greek immigrant (Karpathakis 1994)? Such a model, Urciuoli comments, sanctions specific forms of “acceptable difference” (1998, 178), “mak[ing] it easy to imagine that, despite categories of difference, the same embracing social truths must hold for everyone” (179).8 As American society celebrates the diversity of ethnic identities—“it has become almost a civic duty to have an ethnicity as well as to appreciate that of others,” writes Robert Wood (1998, 230)—the past is contained, and the centrifugal tendencies associated with the proliferation of specificities is managed.
The ideology of the model American ethnic sustains racial and ethnic hierarchies based on what anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo (1998) calls an ethnic report card: the positive valuation and public flaunting of those traits that are seen as leading to mobility. Such a “report card mentality,” di Leonardo writes, explains class divisions in terms of “proper and improper ethnic/racial family and economic behavior rather than by the differential incorporation of immigrant and resident populations in American capitalism’s evolving class structure” (94). The explanation of prosperity merely in terms of ethnic propensity for entrepreneurship or for hard work, for instance, denies the function of economic policies to sustain stagnation or bring about downward mobility. In this instance, ethnicity works as a mystifying process, allowing ubiquitous political and economic policies responsible for the plight of the poor
