The folkloric value of the family lay precisely in its porous boundaries. There was evidence in the immigrant narratives that despite acculturation and extended contact with American modernity, the male Coromboses still preserved a memory culture of meaningful folklore. For a scholar like Dorson, who was invested in showing the functional contemporaneity of folklore, this was a delightful discovery. It demonstrated the tenacity of folk culture among ethnics who had effectively adapted to American modernity. It furnished evidence for defending the terms “folk” and “folklore” as all-inclusive categories, a position that his trenchant critic Charles Keil effectively captured in the statement “We all need the folk because we are all folk” (1979, 209).2
But discovering folklore’s canonical subject in ethnicity is hardly an innocent enterprise. By underscoring the persistence of elements commonly associated with lower stages of cultural evolution—magic and superstitions—Dorson inevitably, though unwittingly, attached a dimension of primitivism to Greek immigrants. Dorson’s own discussion (1968) of Edward Tylor’s evolutionist work Primitive Culture (1871) underscores the hierarchical implications of his findings:
According to the doctrine of survivals, the irrational beliefs and practices of the European peasantry, so at variance with the enlightened view of the educated classes, preserve the fragments of an ancient, lower culture, the culture of primitive man. Consequently these survivals not only illuminate the past history of the race but also confirm the broad theory of development, as opposed to the theory of degeneration, which Tylor vigorously counters. While the main march of mankind is upward, from savagery through barbarism to ascending levels of civilization, relics of savagery, such as witchcraft, still survive among civilized peoples, and occasionally burst into revivals, as in the fad of spiritualism, a revival of primitive society. (Dorson 1968, 193)
“We have but to scratch the rustic,” said evolutionist and president of the British Folk-Lore Society Edward Clodd in 1895, in order “to find the barbarian underneath” (quoted in Dorson 1968, 250). In evolutionist thought, there lies behind the modern veneer of the Greek immigrant a functioning and inescapable layer of primitivism. The folklorization of the family makes Dorson an unintentional participant traversing a historical minefield, the representation of immigrants as primitives in our midst. Did the Coromboses represent primitive folkness, as the professional folklorist maintained? Or did they stand for something else, entirely missed by Dorson? To fully explore this question it is necessary to shift the frame of analysis from the folklorist’s conclusions to the statements made by members of the family—the textual fragments to which I alluded earlier—during the course of the ethnographic interview. The question “Who are the folk?” will yield unexpected insights once we foreground ethnic self-representations and situate them in relation to the practice of collecting ethnographic data and to historical discourses on national identity.
Who Are the Folk?
Viewed through the lens of the anthropology of Greece, the encounter between Richard Dorson and the Corombos family raises a number of key questions. What kind of cultural assumptions informed the family’s self-representation to the folklorist? Did the immigrants have prior knowledge about the place of the folk in Greek national history? If so, how was this expressed? Were they the functioning folk, as Dorson portrayed them, or were they self-consciously performing a specific kind of folkness, obliging the expectations of an educated outsider? If one member of the family exhibited “the broad insight of a folk historian” (Dorson 1977, 157), wasn’t this member also familiar—through exposure to mainstream as well as ethnic print media—with the history and politics of immigration? In my attempt to nuance Dorson’s conclusions, I turn to studies in anthropology and folklore, which have cast light on the complexities of doing ethnography with Greek people. In the context of Greek ethnography, Michael Herzfeld (1986b) has emphatically identified the ethnographic interview as a rhetorical construct. When he writes, “the villager’s ability to situate any ethnographer in a particular ideological framework must affect the recording of data” (222), he frames the problem in terms of a politics of ethnographic location. Similarly, Margaret Alexiou’s pioneering (1984–85) insight had earlier debunked the myth of pure ethnographic facts. “The ‘folk,’ however defined,” she wrote, “will often provide information they think is expected, or even deliberately mislead. Neither they nor we are ‘innocent’” (11).3
Following the internal development of folklore in Greece as a discipline “committed to the presentation of an idealized view of national culture,” the peasants expected folklorists to be urban, educated Greeks whose high position and perceived prestige “caus[ed] reluctance among rural informants to disclose their local traditions” (Herzfeld 1986b, 222). Through self-censorship, they sought to conceal those aspects of vernacular culture—obscene songs and ribald jokes for example—that would have compromised the idealized view of the folk promoted by official folklore. On the other hand, what were construed as ancient Greek (Hellenic) elements of folk culture were performed for the benefit of foreign anthropologists. The latter were seen as ideal interlocutors for whose benefit the peasants deployed the outward-oriented model that showcased the Hellenic dimensions of Greekness. “The Romeic model might have slipped through the crack,” Herzfeld notes, “had the ethnographers not been receptive to the often all-too-vague suggestions of its importance in the villagers’ own scheme of things” (221). Extending credit to the astuteness of anthropologists of Greek culture here safeguards the legitimacy of ethnographic knowledge.4
Herzfeld presents the peasants as being both fully aware of the debates on the place of the folk in national history and in a position to manipulate this knowledge. For my purposes, the question is whether the placement of Dorson in the rural taxonomy of ethnographers affected the ethnographic data and, if so, in what way. Undoubtedly, the family did not disappoint Dorson’s quest for ethnic folkness. It not only generously displayed its folk knowledge in narratives about the past, but it also performed tradition while hosting the folklorist. Because the male informants assumed center stage in the encounter—their wives appearing “timid and withdrawn”—we can safely deduce that the professional folklorist was accorded the gendered rituals of formal Greek hospitality. The “architectonic distinctions between formal/male and familiar/female” that organized social experience in Greece also informed the customary reception of the distinguished guest (Herzfeld 1987, 118). Paradoxically, the women, who function as guardians of ethnicity according to patriarchal ideology, are marginalized in this ethnographic encounter. They are twice removed from the center stage of knowledge production about the folk: once on account of the customary decorum of ritualized hospitality and again because of insufficient acculturation, their limited English language skills.
A crucial passage documented and reported by Dorson, however, complicates the performance of the Coromboses as folk subjects:
Besides their myriad accounts of saints’ legends and miracles and black magic, the Corombos brothers spouted forth lighter tales of entertainment from the old wonder stories to modern jests. A prize specimen from George showed an American veneer coating the venerable European tale of the valiant hero overcoming the stupid ogres. George introduced the story as an account of how baseball was invented in Greece two thousand years ago. Giants eight and ten feet tall then lived in Greece and from them the New York Giants took their name. A weak, lazy fellow joined the giants and outwitted them in trials of strength. When night fell he placed his overcoat