culture. The identity of Greek Americans as staunch individualists, an ideological claim in Greek America that I will discuss in chapter 2, is sustained.
This close reading of a specific juncture of popular ethnography and professional anthropology gives shape to a crucial contour of white ethnicity: the power of the immigrant past to constitute ethnicity. Instead of vanishing with the dissolution of the folk Gemeinschaft, as Papanikolas has elsewhere argued (see Anagnostou 2008a), ethnicity continues to exercise a powerful grip beyond the immigrant cohort, well into the second generation. In fact, in this instance, social discourse, namely nationalism, determines an ethnic reading of anthropological scholarship. Furthermore, the popular ethnographer approaches ethnicity in the same way that a nineteenth-century Greek nationalist folklorist would approach the nation, but with one crucial difference: if early Greek folklorists produced an idealized image of the folk for the purposes of nation building, Papanikolas faced a different predicament. As we will see in chapter 3, her narratives on folkness and the degree of her connection with the vernacular were mediated by her own social proximity to ethnic traditions, which induced her to draw rigid boundaries between herself and aspects of the immigrant culture. At the same time, as I will show, her experience created an ambivalent location of identification with and disassociation from the folk, furnishing the background of a popular ethnographer’s particular investment in the making of usable pasts.
Popular Ethnography and Ethnic Roots
The quest for ethnic roots in the ancestral homeland produces yet another nexus of popular ethnography, this time in the transnational plane of Greece, America, and Greek America. In surveying the accounts of “ethnic travelers” born outside Greece—Theodore Saloutos, a social scientist; Daphne Athas, a fiction and travel writer; and Elias Kulukundis, a writer—Yiorgos Kalogeras (1998, 703) identifies a profound identity crisis that defines the encounter with the preimmigration homeland in the 1960s. This anxiety arises when the returning ethnic subject experiences the site of travel as both familiar and alien, as both known and foreign. The discourse positing Greece as the origin of the West frames the cultural literacy of the ethnic travelers. What is more, their ethnic descent qualifies them to claim the ancestral culture as authentically their own. But the actual encounter generates the crisis. Everyday social realities are alien and alienating. They pollute the Western image of Greece, accentuating the distance between the ideal and the real. The travelers have arrived too late to partake in the genius of Greece and so suffer “the anxiety of belatedness” (705). Repatriation, therefore, foregrounds a crisis of identity; it triggers a reflective process about cross-cultural connection and the representation of otherness. Greeks through filiation and Americans through affiliation, the ethnic travelers negotiate the disorienting experience of Greece as a familiar alterity largely through the lenses of ahistoricity and Orientalism. The cultural distance between Greece as a literary and an ethnographic topos is understood hierarchically. The United States is seen as the pinnacle of progress and cultural completion, whereas Greece is seen as corrupt and irredeemable, generating contempt in the observers. Greece’s own distinct modernity is not recognized by the returnees and is therefore denied. The resolution of the crisis lies in the narrative identification of the travelers with the source of affiliation, with dominant narratives about what it means to be an American. The reinvention of identity, as Kalogeras argues, “implements neither the masking of a Greek American nor the expression of a displaced American identity; it simply consolidates their sociopolitical ‘reinscription’ in US culture” (721). “It should come, then, as no surprise,” he writes, “that ethnic writers so often … perceive that their political and cultural empowerment lies in their ties to the US, rather than in other spaces, even if they are designated as pre-American mother/fatherlands” (722). But still, the quest for roots yields alternative representations of peasant life in Greece. Visiting the ancestral village in the hope of discovering clues that could explain his grandfather’s life, James Chressanthis (1982) created a popular ethnographic documentary on the experience of those who never followed their immigrant relatives to the United States. The documentary’s stark realism records the annual cycle of economic activities as well as poverty, hardship, ritual, expressive culture, and narratives about loss and separation. But unlike the ambivalent ethnic travelers, the popular ethnographer turns into an admiring witness of human beings struggling to sustain meaningful lives amid adversity. It is more this focus on the present than the effort to retrieve fragments from the past that guides the concluding humanistic message, namely the praise of the village’s human vitality.
From this broad outline, Greek America emerges as a social field crisscrossed with transnational and intranational flows of people and knowledge, one replete with contradictions, competing interpretations of ethnicity, and intellectual affinities but also with significant disjunctures. This circulation relates to all sorts of all sorts of movements: the traffic of anthropological methodologies and knowledge between the academy and the public sphere; fieldwork and the international circulation of ethnographic texts; the appropriation of the politics of feminism for the purpose of representing gender and ethnicity; American multiculturalism and the quest for ethnic roots; preimmigration traditions animated through the work of ethnics-turned-ethnographers; and the work of scholars who translate academic concepts to ethnic constituencies. Though largely produced in the United States, this cultural archive has been the result of dense transnational permutations and the permeability of boundaries between specialized professional knowledge and generalized popular interpretation. This traffic of meaning has produced a true interpretive polyphony. At any one time, Greek immigrants have been variously represented as outside the boundaries of whiteness but also at the center of it; as vanishing but also enduring folk; as successful but also failed white ethnics; and as politically invested but also apolitical subjects. The ethnographic richness of the field of Greek America makes the reading of popular ethnography a fruitful point of analytical departure.
This proliferation of popular ethnography contrasts with the embarrassing dearth of academic Greek American anthropology and folklore. Whereas in Greece a vital political function turned folklore into a socially and politically instrumental and autonomous academic discipline (Herzfeld 1986a), anthropological and folklore studies in Greek America have never enjoyed the visibility and prestige of their transnational counterparts in institutions of higher learning. The reasons for such marginality in the academy are complex. They include historically variable academic ideologies of what counts as a legitimate ethnographic subject, the lack of economic and cultural capital that would have enabled early immigrants to gain access to the university and to dominant cultural institutions, and the immigrants’ instrumentalist view of education as a means for socioeconomic mobility. Until very recently, this investment in producing “professional entrepreneurs” resulted in a historical reluctance to invest in education in the social sciences and the humanities (Kourvetaris 1989, 125).15 On the other hand, the abundance of popular ethnography on Greek America can be explained in relation to histories of controlling matters of ethnic self-representation. As a group of internal Others within the United States who were subjected to negative representation by the mainstream, including disparaging anthropological accounts, the first wave of early twentieth-century Greek immigrants to the United States deployed their own narratives about the place of their traditions vis-à-vis the nation’s history. Lacking access to institutions of higher learning, they relied on their own intellectual elite, who targeted mainstream and immigrant audiences to articulate at a popular level a theory about ethnic origins, culture, identity, and belonging. The fact that such cultural politics of controlling self-representation proved an effective tool for acceptance, power, material gains, and prestige may partially explain the tradition of popular ethnography currently in full swing in Greek America, a tradition boosted, as I mentioned earlier, by the current fascination with ethnic identity and roots.
Metaethnography as Critical Intervention: Managing the Ethnographic Field
A vexing issue remains. How does one manage this metaethnographic field? More precisely, what kind of politics must guide one’s metaethnographic reading of the vast multitude of texts and practices that vie for inclusion under the rubric of popular ethnography? For in an era of blurred
