In this reflexive moment in the history of social sciences, academic folklore can no longer be defined descriptively, as a set of scholarly activities that record and analyze everyday activities—conversations, jokes, dance performances, superstitions, forgotten songs, tales about past heroic deeds. Rather, the discipline is understood as a practice that constitutes the quotidian occurrences that it documents as “folk.” In the words of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), folklore becomes a “mode of cultural production” that is actualized at the moment when “particular objects and behaviors come to be identified, and understood, as folklore” (305). This process of naming and classifying “create[s] our disciplinary subject, even if those caught in our disciplinary drift net protest” (ibid.). Here, the old metaphor of the ethnographic discipline as an ocean still holds: “Ethnology is like the ocean. All you need is a net, any kind of net; and then if you step into the sea and swing your net about, you’re sure to catch some kind of fish” (quoted in Clifford 1988, 134).
The folk are not, then, to be naturally discovered during a folklorist’s forays into communities, places of ordinary sociability, and sites of expressive culture. The category “folk” may be alien or irrelevant to the individuals who share a story, worship, or recall a proverb for the benefit of the visiting folklorist. They may manipulate or resist it. Aspects of the everyday behavior of people acquire significance as folklore through social processes often removed from their immediate social experience. It is the discipline of folklore that folklorizes the quotidian.
Producing Greek America as “Folk” (Mid-1950s)
The metaphor of a “disciplinary drift net” points to folklore as an ever-expanding academic field in search of disciplinary subjects. It was such a search that led Richard Dorson, a neoromantic folklorist vested in the function of immigrant folklore in American modernity (Del Negro 2004, 44), to direct his attention to Greek America. When Dorson made arrangements to interview the Coromboses, an extended Greek family that resided in Iron Mountain, Michigan, he was pursuing a lead he had discovered while teaching a folklore class at Michigan State University. As a site of folklorization, this course was crucial in encouraging Peter (Ted) G. Corombos, a student in the class, to recognize his ethnic family as folk and to contribute material on Greek tradition. The Corombos family was caught in the folklorist’s net. His interest sparked, Dorson took it upon himself to continue the process of folklorization through fieldwork. On a fall day in 1955, he set out on the five-hundred-mile drive to Iron Mountain for a pilot study of the family, which spanned three generations.
This field trip was part of a larger academic project. Dorson was invested in demonstrating the resilience and relevance of the premodern past in modernity. He polemically defended the position that urbanization and industrialization did not signal the extinction of this past, which he, like his fellow neoromantics, treated “as a discrete category of culture”—folklore (Del Negro 2004, 47). Maintaining that folkness endured because it functioned as a crucial source of meaning in an alienating modernity, Dorson organized his research around the question “Is there a folk in the city?” (1978a, 29). His fieldwork in rural Michigan was a precursor of future ethnographic work in urban settings, such as Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, where he pursued “the multigroup targets … [he] had aimed at in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in a remote, rural, and small town situation” (ibid.). The emphasis was on ethnicity, and the thrust of the research was to explore how memories among ethnic people help elucidate “the relation of memory culture to New World hyphenated folk culture” (31). Discovering evidence of durable folk cultures was imperative, therefore, to lend credence to his project. To locate “folklore’s canonical subject” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 306) in Iron Mountain, that is, to show that the Corombos family had retained its folkness, would prove that premodern ethnicity represented a vital counterforce to modernity. Rather than being obliterated by modernity, immigrant folkways took root in the New World as vital living traditions.
Dorson surveyed major Greek American institutions—the church, the press, community language schools, and voluntary associations—from the position of an omnipotent observer. The circulation of printed material, the practice of institutionalized worship, and teaching in the classroom made Greek America a modern society only in appearance, he argued. Below the modern surface, the folklorist identified a vital folk community. For Dorson, ethnic communities acted as “forces for conservatism” (1977, 156) that enabled the preservation of folkness that he equated with tradition. As he wrote elsewhere, “layer upon layer of folk-cultural traditions lie heaped up in the metropolis” (1978a, 29). He then summarily dismissed as error a rival interpretation advanced by Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee’s “Folklore of the Greeks in America” (1936), a study of Greek immigrant acculturation in the Boston area. Responding to her argument that Old World culture was a functionless vestige of the past, already on the verge of being swallowed by modernity, he wrote:
[Demetracopoulou Lee’s essay] errs in its gloomy forecast for the ancient legacies. Lee fails to consider the forces for conservatism operating in new-fangled America. A solid and cohesive Greek-American community takes root within the metropolis, buttressed by its Greek Orthodox church, parochial schools teaching modern Greek, Greek social and religious clubs, Greek language newspapers distributed from New York. Ties with the homeland remain strong and constant, a fact easily overlooked by the outsider…. In such an atmosphere, certain folk traditions endure and prosper. This was my discovery when I visited the Corombos family in northern Michigan one fall day in 1955. (1977, 155–56)
In this account, ethnicity fragments American modernity into coherent patches of enduring folk entities. Cohesive and deeply felt, interethnic ties operate invisibly in proximity to unsuspecting outsiders, as an alternative to modern anomie. The trained folklorist then identifies the folk in the city and reports a case of effective cultural transplantation. Dorson viewed ethnic communities as face-to-face organic entities that, along with transnational ties, assure ethnic traditionalism. Curiously, Dorson asserted the resilience of folk custom in the cohesiveness of the urban enclave but sought evidence of it among immigrants in the relative isolation of rural Michigan. This paradoxical shift impelled him to elaborate on the poetics of his quest for the folk.
“Insofar as one family can represent a national folk heritage, the Coromboses indeed qualify,” Dorson wrote. “In spite of their isolation in Iron Mountain, where no other Greek families live,” he assured his readers, their natal village of “Bambakou and the saints and the icons in Greece remain a powerful reality in their lives, to which they return on occasion” (164–65). Isolated in a remote small town, the family is seen as a carrier of national, regional, and religious folk heritage. For a folklorist who at the time of his fieldwork was keen on searching for functioning cultural remnants of a bygone past in the present, the Corombos family represented a “folkloristic gem.” In fact, the discovery of the Greek folk in rural America stands as an instance of “folkloristic surrealism,” the effect produced by “the gap between the folkloristic gem and the unlikely circumstances in which it is harbored” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 301). Though living in Iron Mountain, the family was foreign to it. Though a part of Greek America, it was far removed from Greek ethnicity’s customary site of social organization, the urban community. Dramatically alien to its surroundings, Greek immigrant folkness powerfully wrought its surrealistic effect.
Dorson refrained from representing the Greek immigrants as frozen relics of the past. His research was guided by the assumptions (1) that selective traits of the folk past can be found in the lore and activities of contemporary peasants and (2) that they furnish evidence not merely of the survival of folkness but of the vitality of its function in modernity. Dorson’s search for coherence, for a “typical form or theme” that defines a group or period, led him to the conclusion that “the epitome of immigrant folklore is the duality of Old Country mores in a New World context” (Ben-Amos 1989, 55). This analytical framework accommodated both the preservation of folklore in the tradition of romantic nationalism (Wilson 1989)