privilege to become complicit in the subordination and exclusion of nonwhites becomes of paramount importance. On the other hand, white ethnics are represented as the apotheosis of ethnic celebrationism, parading their distinct hyphenated ethnicities in public and treasuring them privately, albeit in a fleeting, superficial manner. While neither of these accounts is incorrect, one is confronted with an urgent question: is that all there is? If we uniformly hold white ethnics hostage to the notion of oppressive whites or, alternatively, treat them as innocuous ethnic caricatures, we simplify a heterogeneous constituency and neutralize its progressive politics. For, although assimilated into whiteness to a large degree, segments of these populations have not ceased to contest racial oppression or to create culturally textured worlds.12 White ethnics creatively explore their past, define their values, perform their culture, contest or reproduce whiteness, and seek connections with ancestral homelands. Still, academic writings often represent them as lacking enduring cultural moorings; they are increasingly dismissed as superficial and trivial and are relegated to the sphere of leisure and consumption. The complex web of embodied practices that organize individual action is ignored, not because of inconsequentiality in an individual’s life but because of the lack of an adequate model to accommodate their complexity and relevance.
It becomes imperative, then, to undertake a critical project that takes into account multiple facets of white ethnicity and to address their social implications in the present through an explicit politics of knowledge. This includes the interrogation of academic work that culturally caricatures and imposes an unfounded homogeneity on white ethnicity. Long overdue is a critical study of texts and practices that engages with often-cited academic topoi of white ethnicity: identity as choice, cultural superficiality, panethnicity, assimilation, and antiminority politics. Such a critical venture must undoubtedly contest white ethnic constellations that, under various guises and emerging configurations, have a negative effect on vulnerable collectives. It must expose and criticize white ethnic narratives that explicitly or implicitly contribute to the devaluation and domination of racial minorities. But such a scholarly project should not conveniently forget to identify instances in which those who have been already inscribed as whites interrogate the category from within and imagine alternative social futures for themselves and others.
White Ethnicity through the Lens of Popular Ethnography
In this work, I explore white ethnicity in a specific site of cultural production, popular ethnography. I closely analyze texts and practices whose authors, all nonacademics, deploy idioms and build on methodologies associated with the academic discourses of anthropology and folklore. For their data collection these authors depend on ethnographic methods of documentation: participant observation and interviewing. Drawing material from autoethnography and family biography is common. The authors invariably refer to and engage with anthropological and social science concepts, some in vogue, others outdated: folklore, tribe, native, ethnicity, diaspora, and heritage, for example. Their analytical concerns resonate with the ethnographic interest in local culture, transnational ties, personal testimony, and identity politics. Though interdisciplinary in scope, the body of works that I consider exhibits the ethnographic imagination to translate social realities—in this case ethnic, immigrant, or preimmigrant pasts—in terms meaningful in the present.13
None of the authors whose work I analyze are professional anthropologists or folklorists, though some style themselves ethnic historians-cum-lay-folklorists and are recognized as such in academic and professional circles. Others situate themselves as feminists, or pilgrim ethnographers. They initiate oral history projects, publish essays on immigrant folklore, curate exhibits of material culture, or even undertake fieldwork and write popularly and academically acclaimed ethnographies. Their work reaches wide-ranging audiences—both the lay public and scholars—through a wide variety of publishing venues and genres of writing—journal articles, monographs, popular essays, academic and popular books, documentaries, and museum exhibits.14
Its accessibility to wide audiences makes popular ethnography of particular analytical importance. The extensive circulation of popular accounts is in no small measure due to the saturation of the public sphere with ethnic commodities targeting niche audiences, a process that I discuss in chapter 2. Public sites of multiculturalism—including ethnic festivals or parades, children’s entertainment, museum exhibits, television programs, films, documentaries, the ethnic studies section in bookstores, as well as ethnic studies programs in universities—bring ethnicity into national consciousness. Ethnic marketers and producers are in a position to reach consumers of ethnic products in the “sacred” space of middle-class life, the entertainment center. Under these conditions, popular ethnographies become key texts through which the public encounters and acquires knowledge about ethnic and immigrant Others. They also work as venues through which audiences may reflect on practices, ideas, and images of ethnicity and race. As Anna Karpathakis and Victor Roudometof (2004, 279) report, Helen Papanikolas’s family biography Emily-George shapes how Greek immigrants in New York City explain ethnic mobility and race-based socioeconomic stratification. In the “age of ethnography” (Lambropoulos 1997, 199), market forces and the ideology of multiculturalism intersect to intensify the valence of popular ethnography about ethnicity in the American public sphere. Therefore, popular ethnographies urgently demand scholarly attention precisely because of their capacity to bring ethnicity deep into the cultural fabric of the nation.
In the broadest terms, my work examines how popular ethnography produces accounts about ethnicity in relation to immigrant pasts. I engage with this production and circulation by asking how popular ethnography intersects with the transnational and intranational movement of people, values, and ideas. I am interested in analyzing how nonprofessional ethnographers map the specific political and social geographies where cultures take root or become rerouted, are dismantled, reworked, or revived at given historical moments and under identifiable relations of power. In other words, how does popular ethnography produce ideas and traditions that have traveled across space and through time—specifically across transnational fields, through generations, within immigrant collectivities, or in the psychic and social worlds of individuals—and beyond the boundaries of ethnicity in conversation with dominant discourses, all in identifiable historical moments.
Popular Ethnography and Professional Anthropology: Flows and Circulations
Popular ethnographies are venues through which American ethnics imbue the past with value and make or unmake whiteness; they therefore lend themselves to addressing the central question of this book, namely the manner in which the production of usable pasts illuminates contours of white ethnicity. To investigate this process, I turn to a social space widely perceived as white ethnic, Greek America. A complex, variegated terrain, Greek America resists a single definition. Since its formative years, arguably in the early twentieth-century mass labor migration, Greek America has built upon a variety of pasts for different purposes. At various times, institutions or individuals have appropriated the past to accommodate both progressive working-class politics and middle-class conformism; radicalism as well as political conservatism; pioneering, boundary-crossing gender activism along with gender oppression; model ethnic success together with social failure; advocacy on behalf of minority interests alongside practices of antiminority politics; dense transnational connections with preimmigration regions of origin and Greece as well as patterns of reorientation away from the ancestral homeland.
Popular ethnography is a convenient point of entry into Greek America. The cultural archive facilitates inquiry because individuals variously connected to it have long been taking the interpretation of ethnicity into their own hands. They translate the current fascination with memory, roots, identity, and personal testimony into a rich ethnographic record. These authors regularly enjoy participation in mainstream institutions and access to academic knowledge. They exploit folklore methods to collect and analyze oral histories, to script and produce nationally circulated documentaries, to curate exhibits, and to write their own ethnographies based on long-term participant observation. Educated and attuned to the cultural politics of ethnic representation, nonprofessional ethnographers of
