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 The authors invariably refer to and engage with anthropological and social science concepts, some in vogue, others outdated: folklore, tribe, native, ethnicity, diaspora, and heritage, for example.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 Greek America have created a corpus of ethnographic texts—sometimes uncomplicated, often highly sophisticated, and invariably ideologically charged. The majority of these ethnographers have capitalized on the enabling conditions of multiculturalism. Their work has been supported by ethnic, national, and commercial institutions: festivals, academic and popular presses, universities, state cultural organizations, preservationist societies, community organizations, museums, and public television are among the institutional spaces that contribute to and even finance their production.
By way of introducing the complex ethnographic terrain of Greek America, I offer here the broadest possible historical survey of cross-fertilization between professional and popular ethnographies. In 1911, Henry Pratt Fairchild, a Yale-trained anthropologist, relied on social Darwinism and cultural evolutionism to deny Greek immigrants an immediate place in American modernity. His findings were confronted in the early 1920s by a self-reflexive popular anthropology generated by a Greek immigrant elite (see Anagnostou 2004a). Professional folklorist Richard Dorson (1977) argued that folk beliefs survived among Greek Americans during the nascency of multiculturalism in the mid-1950s. In contrast, popular folklorist Helen Papanikolas (1984) reached the opposite conclusion; she declared the total disappearance of Greek immigrant folk culture in post–World War II America. Feminist popular ethnographer Constance Callinicos (1990) drew on anthropological studies of gender in Greece and Greek America, including the work of noted professional ethnographer Ernest Friedl, to subvert ethnic patriarchy and reclaim tradition for Greek American women. In the process, Callinicos’s politics of transgression reproduced the evolutionist assumptions of Fairchild’s colonialist anthropology. More recently, in 2003, popular ethnographer Michael Kalafatas, an admissions officer at Brandeis University, conducted fieldwork on his ancestral island of Symi in order to examine the political economy of the sponge-diving tradition in Greece and in Greek communities in the United States and Australia. Well versed in the anthropology of Greece—carrying into the field, so to speak, Michael Herzfeld’s Poetics of Manhood (1985) and David Sutton’s Memories Cast in Stones (1998)—he advanced an allegorical reading of sponge diving.
Usable pasts are often produced through collaboration between—or juxtaposition