Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou

laments in Greece, collaborated with professional and nonprofessional folklorists to bring to fruition “Scattered in Foreign Lands: A Greek Village in Baltimore” (1985), an exhibit on the transnational circulation of tradition. The now defunct periodical Laografia: A Journal of the International Greek Folklore Society regularly published articles on Greek folklore by both professional and popular ethnographers. Ethnographers have contested one another’s interpretations, as well. For example, professional historian Theodore Saloutos (1956) conducted a popular ethnography among repatriated immigrants, traveling throughout Greece to collect oral accounts about the experience of repatriation between 1908 and 1924. A respected scholar in the American academy, Saloutos identified but never resolved the methodological challenge of establishing the reliability of the information he collected. Dully noting the partiality of the data, he nevertheless showed no hesitation in drawing authoritative conclusions about the negative consequences of what he saw as underdevelopment in the lives of the repatriated immigrants. Yet he abstained from claiming to a total truth, “trust[ing] that future scholars” would build on his findings and “adduce new information to provide the fuller story” of the repatriated immigrants (xv). Almost half a century later, professional anthropologist Penelope Papailias (2005) cast an entirely different methodological net through the archive of immigrant repatriation to reach a conclusion contrary to that of Saloutos. In her ethnography on the poetics of historical production in Greece, she analyzed the writing, circulation, and reception of a diary written in 1951 by a certain Yiorgos Yiannis Ilias Mandas, an immigrant who ultimately returned to Greece in 1922 after a painful working-class experience in the United States. In her analysis of this account, written by a subject who might well have served as the historian’s informant, Papailias questioned Saloutos’s underdevelopment thesis. The professional historian-cum-popular ethnographer had posited underdevelopment in Greece as the source of alienation and disenchantment among repatriated immigrants. In contrast, the professional anthropologist pointed to the contingencies of history, specifically the German occupation and the Greek Civil War, as the causal factors disrupting the socially and politically meaningful life of a repatriated immigrant.

      The more closely one examines the ways in which popular ethnography intersects with professional anthropology, the richer the implications about their convergences and divergences become. Take, for instance, a specific textual example, Papanikolas’s (2002) reading of Herzfeld’s (1986a) analysis of Greek folklore as a national institution. Here one witnesses how a nationalist reading of Greek identity overdetermines the popular ethnographer’s reading of the professional anthropologist, whose analysis she closely follows and generously quotes:

      “Folklore studies” in other countries “played an important part” in forming a national identity “before statehood,” but “the Greek scholars were unusual in having folklore studies virtually forced on them by events” [Herzfeld (1986a, 12)]…. The Greek folklorists were intent on showing that classical Greek civilization was the foundation of European culture and that contemporary Greek culture was directly descended from ancient Greece. They set out to prove Greeks were European, not Asiatic as was commonly believed. (47)

      Such a reading comes close to recognizing Herzfeld’s main thesis, namely that folklorists work ideologically and that the folk are a social construct rather than the embodiment of a national essence. But, in fact, Papanikolas reads the professional anthropologist’s analysis literally, as an objective datum that validates the idea of a racially inherent national character. This is made clear once we juxtapose Herzfeld’s point about the folkloristic construction of Greek individualism with Papanikolas’s interpretation of it:

      Stressing the ethnic purity of the Greeks, she [folklorist Dora d’Istria] argued that this was revealed in a unique combination of heroism and, as the quoted passages show, individualism. (Herzfeld 1986a, 59)

      The remarkable folklorist Dora d’Istria, a Romanian princess of Albanian origin, said the ethnic purity of the Greeks was “revealed in a unique combination of heroism … and individualism” (Herzfeld 1986[a], 59). (Papanikolas 2002, 49)

      The two quotes are brought to bear on two divergent understandings of folklore. For Michael Herzfeld, the writings of Dora d’Istria drew selectively upon nationalist folklore and misconstrued indigenous cultural categories to present the Greek folk as unadulterated heirs of the ancient Greeks. Such a construction made d’Istria—whose work on Greek folklore gained her “Hellenic nationality by a special decree of Parliament” (55)—the ideological kin of nineteenth-century Greek nationalist folklorists. For these scholars, discovering expressions of individualism among the folk meant that this trait, which was seen as the defining attribute of Homeric heroes, had persevered as an essential element of the Greek race and, therefore, as pure national character, in spite of foreign occupations. Individualism functioned as a mirror of racial continuity that reflected the Hellenicity of the peasants (laos). Moreover, its relative abundance or lack established proximity or distance from a prized, authentic European connection. Hence Greek folklorists established a hierarchical scale of Balkan individualisms, in which the Greeks were accorded the crown of its most genuine, pure form. Because Greek individualism signaled identification with ancient Hellas, and Hellas, in turn, was “the cultural exemplar of Europe” (5), the survival of individualism underscored the Hellenic origins of European civilization. “If Greece had been the fons et origo of all Europe,” Herzfeld (1986a) writes, “then Greek folklore would enshrine the quintessence of the European spirit” (55).

      In contrast to the social constructivists, Papanikolas (2002) reads Herzfeld’s quote of d’Istria as a literalist would, as evidence that Greeks are in fact individualists “to the depths of their being” (49). Ironically, an analysis that aims to expose the constructedness of national character is relied upon as evidence that substantiates that character. In this instance, the nineteenth-century folklorists become the ideological ancestors of a twentieth-century popular folklorist in Greek America. In this model, the immigrant folk are natural heirs of undiluted Hellenic 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