HERZFELD M. (Localism and Logic of Nationalistic Folklore. Cretan Reflections)

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections Author(s): Michael Herzfeld Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), pp. 281-310 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879317 . Accessed: 31/01/2014 06:20
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Localism and the Logic of NationalisticFolklore: CretanReflections

MICHAEL HERZFELD
DepartmentofAnthropology,Harvard University
THE NATIONAL AND THE LOCAL: FOLKLORE IN THE CROSSFIRE
The object of this articleis to explore a familiarparadoxof folklore studies:the promotionof powerfullylocalist readingsin the service of an inclusive national entity.In the logic of Europeannationalism,this might seem an irresolvable paradox.The object of the nation-stateis to unify all potentiallydivergentcultural and social entities within a single framework,so that localist sentiment ceases to representthe threatof political separatism.In some nation-states,the most harmonioussymbiosis of localism with nationalismappearsin those regions thatarestereotypically regardedas culturallyandpoliticallymarginaland areconsequentlysubjectedto the double-edgedopprobrium of being both"simple" and yet also corruptedby a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both A study of these tension-ladenmattersmust dodge culturally and "racially." among several levels in orderto go beyond the limitationsboth of purely local If the formertoo easily ocethnographyand of national-levelhistoriography. cludes the effects of largerevents on local perceptions,the lattercan, and often does, fail to accountfor the success of nationalistideologies in securingloyalty unto deatheven-or perhapsespecially?-from populationsthatarenotoriously unwilling to accept staterule in more mundanemattersof law and order. In Greece, Creteoffers an especially strikingcase in point. Here is an island, contemptuouslyknown within Greece for its endemic animal-theftand blood these feuds, for which it is despisedeven as the masculineethos thatundergirds practices also serves as a guaranteeof nationalheroism. Crete also rejoices in global fame for its distinctive Minoan civilization, which flourishedcenturies before the metropolitan Attic culturethat representsthe origins of civilization
Acknowledgments:I would especially like to express my appreciationto Beverly Stoeltje, who originally suggested thatI write this piece, as also to the editor and threeanonymousreviewers of ComparativeStudies in Society and History for theirconstructiveand interestingadvice. I am also deeply indebtedto the Departmentof Anthropologyat the Universityof Adelaide, SouthAustralia, where a three-weekfellowship in the fall of 2002 gave me the necessarycombinationof peaceful and stimulatingconversationto move this articletowardits final incarnation. surroundings 0010-4175/03/281-310$9.50 ? 2003 Societyfor Comparative Studyof SocietyandHistory 281
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for WesternEuropeans,and which is sometimes, if perhapsfor ratherunscholreasonsandin contrastto the sense of its morerecentpast, arly andEurocentric as site the of an early culturalvalorizationof women's place in sociregarded a learned Here, ety. recently pridein the achievementsof a deep antiquityconwith a much more verges deeply rooted pride in a very different image that from an Cretewas also home to the one masprings aggressive traditionalism. in Greece. Venetianrule, deof the Italian culture Renaissance jor flourishing the brutal also it that entailed, spite oppression broughtsustainedactivity in the visual and verbalarts;dramaticworks from the Venetianperiod on Cretehave achieved a certainvogue in the presentera. So illustriousa connectionwith the so-called high cultureof western Europe,especially in a form that blends the aesthetics of the latterwith obvious elements of local folklore in the verse traand-most famous of all-in a vernaculartraditionof dition, in architecture, icon-paintingculminatingin Michael Damaskinos, the teacher of the locally born El Greco (Domenico Theotokopoulos),allows local scholarsto claim for Crete a level of culturalsophisticationthat few other geographicallyoutlying areasof Greece can even approach. But it is the Minoanphase thatgives the Cretansa special edge in theircultural negotiations with the political and culturalcenter of modern Greece in Athens. Thereare serious questionsaboutthe origins of Minoancivilizationno trivial matter in a country where the well-documentedderivation of the Greekalphabetfrom Semitic (Phoenician)roots is aptto cause an outcryof nationalistic rage. The Greeknessof the prehistoriccultureof Crete is therefore fiercely defendedin the popularpress. AlthoughCretewas also an active center of culture and commerce during Classical, Roman, and Byzantine times (during which it was also occupied by the Saracens and devastated by the Byzantine reconquestof 961), it is today the Minoan period to which modern Cretanspoint when they wish to emphasize their island's particularcontribution to the glories of the ancient past, and the taperedrusset columns of Knossos are reproducedin certainhouses build after Sir ArthurEvans' excavations and reconstruction of that site. Only with the adventof mass tourism,with its of "Greek culture," do glossy stick-on Ionic columns begin generalization in their stead the entrancesof shops all over the island, draaround sprouting of fiercely indepenthe theme of article:the subordination this matizing key dent local pride to an all-inclusive and passionatenationalism. The Minoansarethus both emblematicof local prideandyet ultimatelyseen as forerunners of the greatestflowering of Greekcivilization, in the Athens of the fifth centuryB.C.E. In more recent history,the obvious signs of passage by non-Greekinvaders-notably Venetiansand Turks-remain sources of potenfare ratherbetter tial embarrassment, althoughthe Venetians,as "Europeans" in this sense thando the "Oriental" who sometimes are still hated)Turks, (and simply ignored:"Especiallyin Crete popularart presentsmany resemblances with thatof AncientCreteandbearswitness to the greatinfluenceof the Byzan-
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tine era, without,however, being completely absolved [sic] of the influence of the variousoccupiers,notablyof the Venetianperiod.Despite all these matters it clearly displays the vigorous preservation even while of the Cretancharacter undersubjugation" this The for source statement,a lec(Stavroulakis1964:2). ture on the correctproceduresfor collecting folklore on Crete, reinforces the argumentby reproducingan identical logic undermany of the special entries, notablywhere materialitems can be broughtinto suggestivejuxtapositionwith museum objects of known antiquityand provenance.For Cretanas for other Greek folklorists, local traditionsmostly "havean ancient Greek ancestryand bearwitness to the unbrokencontinuityof ournational[way of] life (Mitsotaki 1983:5). Such ideologically motivatedpreferences,which also affect the progressof historicconservationand tourism(see Herzfeld 1991), must featurestronglyin any critical examinationof localist folklore. In the process, we may hope to shed some light on the curioussense of paradoxthatCretegenerates.Islandintellectuals and peasantsalike aggressively claim culturaluniquenessfor Crete, which neverthelessremains firmly attachedin their writings and in everyday Greekness.The ubiquityof these stereotypesto the premise of its transcendent between a stereotypesmay surpriseobserverswho assume a clear demarcation literateintelligentsiaandthe rest of the population,'but the catalyticrole of local teachers-some of whom compiled exhaustive collections of local lorewas clearly instrumentalin forging a convergence between official ideology and local perceptions. The apparent contradiction between localist enthusiasmand nationalistpassion, while not unique to Greece, does display unique features that appearin especially strongform on Crete. In the attemptto homogenize Greece culturally, the island has been the site of some particularly painful reworkingof the ethnic landscape.The "Turkish Cretans"were Muslims; most, like their counterpartson Cyprus,spoke a form of Greek as their native language, and many historians assume that they were mostly descended from apostate Christians (see Kondilakis 1987 [1919]:132). Virtuallythe entireTurkish-Cretan population departedin 1924, althoughsome continue to preservetheir linguistic and folkloric heritageon the Asia Minorcoast of Turkey.2 the Christianpopulation thatstayedbehind,while accusingThe Christians fromAsia Minorwho replaced
1 For too heavexample, Bendix (1992:769) chargesearlierscholarswith having concentrated ily on the role of intellectualsin the constructionof nationalsentiment.While she is no doubtright in general terms, she assumes too hard-and-fast a distinctionbetween these levels-a distinction that teachers, themselves often of local (village) origin, interestinglychallenge. See also Noyes 1999, for a considerationof the role of local intellectualsin folklore collection today. 2 In the summer of 1990, I spent two weeks in the town of Ayvalik, talking with TurkishCretans(includinga high proportion of individualsbornin Turkey).My originalcontactwith these people came througha family in Rethemnos,Crete, who retainedties of kinship with the community because one of the family women had been a Muslim who convertedto Christianityat marriage.
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the "TurkishCretans"of being "Turkishseed" (Tourkospori), has itself been viewed by many MainlandGreeks as a hopelessly mixed and taintedpopulation. Athenians,for example, are often quick to condemn what they see as an endemic Cretanproclivityfor violence, and attribute it to the island's long octhe Ottoman this is a effective cupationby Empire; very way of both sympawhile the thizingnationalistically expressing strongregionalprejudiceof which Cretansoften complain in Athens. Yet, at the same time, there is a grudging recognitionin MainlandGreece thatthe Cretanswere in fact valiantopponents of the Turksand otherinvaders,a recognitionthat localist historiansand folklorists have generallybeen quick to exploit as characterological evidence that the Cretansare, in fact, not only pure-bloodedand culturallyintact Hellenes, but thatthey are more so thananyone else: "If,however,our Race presentstradition with intensityin all places, a moreimpressiveglory is exhibitedin Crete, where it is preservedpure and untaintedin the soul, in thought,in speech, in the GreatIsdress, in dance, in song, in the house and in the village throughout land thatis the bearerof fine bravemen"(Nikolaos Sp. Voulgaris,in Papadakis 1975:9). If this may strike some readersas both bombasticand defensive, we would do well to rememberagain that Cretansdo face considerablecondescension from otherGreeks,notablythose of the capital.Indeed,it is often those who attackthe Cretansandother"akritic"3 populationsas culturallyor geneticallyimwho are in insistingthatall non-Greekpopmost adamant pure simultaneously ulations within the national borders should be exterminated or expelled. Official Greekwritings,reflectedalso in popularusage, generallyexhibit a unified image of the nationalculture,and express deep resentmentof attemptsto specify local or externallyderived culturalelements; some Greek commentators have worried,for example, thatmy own work on Cretemight foster an excessive sense of local autonomy,as I was once very secretively informed, or that it would embarrassthe nation through revelations of such disreputable practicesas animal-theft,or again thatthese practicesmight be held to militate against the fundamentallyEuropeanidentity that official ideology claims for the country.4 Thus, a massive homogeneityat the nationalideological level cobarons of theByzantine theextensive folklore themhasoftenserved about as thebasisof Empire; to create a post-Classical national See Herzfeld attempts 1982:120-21; 1987:104-6). mythology. 4 Thesearediagnostic of the defenseof cultural at the national level;see examples intimacy Herzfeld 1997:98-105. Hints that I wassuspected of fomenting reached mewhileI was separatism fieldwork on Crete; theembarrassment thatmy lecturing onreciprocal animal-theft in conducting causedthe Greekstudents whohadinvitedme to speak(and Englishat anAmerican university noneof whom hailed from canusefully becompared to theverypositive I received Crete) response fora similar lecture in Greek, attheRethemnos townhall.(Itmayalso givensubsequently (Crete) be significant thatCretans weregenerally less willingtojoinin thegeneral of local disparagement thattheverycharge of defensiveness ars,aware canitselfbe damaging to thenational have image, discussions of potentially latelyshownsignsof muchmorereadily welcoming embarrassing topics in international contexts. public
social practicesthat some media were pursuingat the time.) Increasingly,however, Greek schol3 The "akritic" regions are those of the nationalborders.The term evokes the akrites, border
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exists with fracturedlocalist perceptionsthat seem to infuse much local writing, including that of the schoolteachersto whom we owe the preservationof much Greek folklore ever since the middle of the last century.Instructionsto would-be collectors of folklore, many of whom were again to be schoolteachers working in strategiccooperationwith their pupils, specify that the task is part of a "more general National effort" (Stavroulakis1964:1), in which the specific objectof recordingCretanfolklore follows categorieslaid down by the toweringfigure of Greeknationalistfolklore, Nikolaos Politis (1909; see especially Kondilakis 1987 [1919]:140-42; Stavroulakis1964:10) and elaborated by his successors (e.g., Mazarakis1964; Spiridakis1962). How can we explain this apparent contradiction? The sense of paradoxis especially strongbecause has yet to acceptthe patternof culturalrethe encompassingGreeknation-state gionalization and minorityrecognition that seems to have become general in the othermember-states of the EuropeanUnion. In an extended earlier study of nationalism and folklore in Greece, I attemptedan initial accountof how Greekfolkloriststriedto resolve this tension between the goal of a national culture and their pride in local specificity (Herzfeld 1982). I argued,in effect, that the coexistence of localism and nationalismrevealed the intensely segmentarysocial logic of the latter:local authorsvied to representtheirrespectivehomelands(patridhes, a termthatis significantlyidenticalwith thatused of the nationalstate as a whole as well as, at the otherend of the spectrum,one's home villages) as the best exemplarsof the Classical Greek spirit.Thus, while they were in opposition to each other,they played by a single, unifying set of rules through which they ultimately exto the nationalidea.5When I wrote that pressed their collective subordination study, there was already a small corpus of researchon the links between nationalism and folklore, which emphasizedthe role of intellectualsin creatinga unified corpus (e.g., Oinas 1961; Dorson 1966; Wilson 1976). More recent work, some of it conducted in a more ethnographicspirit, has examined the of culturefor the purposesof local resistanceto dominantnareappropriation tional agendas (e.g., Badone 1991, on Brittany;Nadel-Klein 1991, on Scotland). One analyst has asked why, even given the obvious differences of lanfree guage and religion, state-localrelationsin Switzerlandappearremarkably of any tension at all (Bendix 1992:783). In recentyears, on the otherhand,such tensions have arguablybecome more visible in the EuropeanUnion's member states, as both historians(e.g., Applegate 1999) and anthropologists (e.g., Macdonald 1996) have noted. Greece is thus hardlyunique in the tension that it exhibits between the national and local levels, and this is reflectedin a surveyof the folklore literature. On the surface,Italianfolklore studiesin particular displaya similartensionbeas it was initiallypopularized (1940), andhave by Evans-Pritchard 5 I use the term"segmentary" triedto detachit conceptuallyfromits anchoringin patrilinealkinshipwhile showing thaton Crete, at least, it often is in fact deeply implicatedin a patrilinealideology. See Herzfeld 1985; 1987; 1997.
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tween the emergent and newly created national identity and those of the numerousregionalcultures.Yet the resemblanceis deceptive, and conceals a fundamentally different relationshipbetween center and peripheryin Italy and Greece, respectively.The folklore literaturereveals that these two states have drawnon local culturein radicallydivergentways, and with equally contrasted effects. Above all, whereas Greece presentsto the world a face of passionbut thatrarely ate nationalintransigencethatsometimesprovokesexasperation admits of any ambiguity,Italian attemptsto resolve the local-nationaltension do not seem to have enjoyed such political success except, perhaps,on the football field; Italy is today constantly beset by the powerfully centrifugalforces thatthe country'sfoundershad ruefullyacknowledgedfrom the start,with separatistmovementscommandingsignificantpoliticalimpactin severalof its culturallyand linguistically distinct regions. Even leaving aside the obvious case of the Lega Nord (NorthernLeague), which eventually sacrificedits demands for a completely independentstate called Padaniawith its capital in Venice as the price of enteringthe ruling governmentcoalition in 2001, Italy also has a capital city regardedas culturally and politically marginalby many citizens, home to a widely-despised local dialect that departsin significant ways from the nationallinguistic standard.That dialect is now the object of affectionate and energetic revival movements that recognize in it a way of life that meets the majorrequirementof culturalintimacy:a sense of disreputein the larger world, creatingsolidarityat the core of a collective identity.Not coincidentally, whereofficial Greekpolicy denies the existence of ethnicminorities,in Italy we find a rich arrayof minorityculturallife, includingsome minority-language media. Greece's official line-often echoed in the media and in conversational conventions--emphasizes a transcendenthomogeneity, whereas Italian politicians have little choice but to make their variousforms of peace with cultural and regionaldiversity.One only has to think of the geographicalfragmentation of Italian gastronomic exports and compare it with the more restricted roster of uncomplicatedly"Greek"goods in orderto understandhow deeply this contrastruns. The marginalityof the Italiannationalcapital,with its massive and continuing productionof local folklore scholarship (to which Athens has no correspondingcorpus afterthe mid-nineteenthcentury)exemplifies a powerful dynamic of cultural hierarchyand hegemony. Among the extremes of internal orientalismthat the Italiandynamic has produced(see Schneider,ed., 1998), northernstereotypesof Sicily, an island culturallynot unlike Crete in its patternof blood-feudsand "honorcrimes,"have provokedan especially powerful reaction.In the reactive localist ideology (sicilianismo), the institutionsof socially sanctioned violence are recast in terms of autonomy,pride, and selffor this ideologsufficiency (Schneiderand Schneider1994). The groundwork ical clash appearedearly in the twentieth century,as local folklorists-most notably Giuseppe Pitr--romanticized the island's peasantculturein increas-
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ingly idealistic terms and so detachedit from the sufferingsthat sprangfrom the no-less-deeply rooted social inequalities and associated violence (Cirese 1974:25). Here, the contrastwith Greece is telling in a furtherrespect. In Greece, the folklorists and historiansmountedwhat I have called a defense of "cultural intimacy"-essentially concealing the core of familiarculturethat would prove on an international embarrassing stage (Herzfeld1997)-by proclaimingas national traditions the songs thatcelebratedthose hardyguerrillafighters(kleftes, literally "thieves")who had struggledagainstthe Turks,allegedly for national independencebut in practicemore often for personalor at most local autonoof postmy, and by conceptuallydetachingthese guerrillasfrom the "bandits" independencechallenges (Herzfeld1982:60-70). In Italy,Sicilian romanticism became a means of defendingisland cultureagainstmainlandopprobrium, and the idea of mafia became a symbol of stalwarttraditionalism thatrespondedto Rome's threatsof bureaucraticinterference:the horizon of culturalintimacy was set at a local or regional ratherthan a nationallevel. In Greece, the local brigandsbecame nationalheroes instead;the only condition, and it was an inflexible one, was that they should henceforthcease and desist from their violent activities-a deal thatItaliangovernmentsnever achieved,and one that (if the anti-corruption prosecutorsareto be believed) they never had any desire to were many of achieve, so deeply and profitablyimplicatedin its perpetuation their leading figures.6 Strong culturalregionalism-not least in the form of insisting that Rome is in no way representative of the nation'sculture-has a long history in Italy.In the middle of the nineteenthcentury,for example, the JesuitAntonio Bresciani was claiming as Phoenician(and,by extension,Jewish) the peculiaritiesof Sardinianculture,while he also emphasizedthe uniquefeaturesof Romanfolk culture and attributed these to the powerful influence of Catholicism at its geoand graphical spiritual center-this, a scant nine years before Rome was wrestedfrompapalcontroland,over the objectionsof severalinfluentialpoliticians of the day, made the nationalcapital instead (see Cocchiara1981a:11012). The willingness to embracea Jewish pedigree for Sardinianlocal culture was perhapsnot as ecumenicalas it might seem, since Brescianicontrastedthe Jewish mode of singing with that of Arabs, Kurds,and other orientalpeoples, and suggests a political agendaof reinforcingthe Catholicchurch'scontinuing dominancethroughout thanthe attemptto claim Italy.Whatis moreremarkable externaloriginsfor aspectsof local or regionalcultures,however,is the absence of any attemptto arguethatthe latterwere realizationsof a specifically national culture.Indeed,Bresciani defends the local specificity of Romanlore-again,
6 While some local politicians were rumoredto be supportingprominentanimal-thievesduring the time of my fieldworkin highlandwest-centralCrete(1974-1981), to the best of my knowledge therehas never been any evidence of large-scaleinvolvementin organizedcrime at the local level by politicians of nationalimportance.
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it is worthemphasizingthatthis is the lore of the nationalcapital-by emphasizing thatevery regionalpeople (popolo) has its own ways of celebrating.One hardly discerns here the stuff of which nation-stateideology is usually made, with its attemptsto claim jurisdictionover "thepeople" and its territoryas the exclusive mandateof governmentlocated in a single, all-powerfulcapitalcity. Otherfolklorists were meanwhile developing theories that emphasized the north-south the northerners' culturalaffinitieswith neighdivide, underscoring traditions rather with those of their fellowthan boring Romance-language Italiansto the south (see Cirese 1974:20-21; Cocchiara1981b:337-38). This divisive perspective,moreover,which was groundedin assumptionsaboutthe racial basis of culture, perversely also invoked a survivalist assumptionthat northerners could no longer sustaintraditional folklore.We thus see reproduced within Italy a patternof culturalconsciousness in which a relatively prosperous northern region lords it over a despised south, much as has been observed elsewhere in Europe(see, e.g., Fernandez1983:166, for Spain) but that is notably absentin Greece. These differenceshave importanteffects on the treatmentof traditionin the variouscountriesconcerned.When Spanish southerners fight back, for examit is a folklore Collier ple, by recreating regional (see 1997:3-4) in ways that echo and invert the so ironically assumption, pervasivein Italy,that the southof that are the bearers of traditionat its most genuine, and that country erners when cease to consequently, they get it right, they are nothing at all. In Italy, moreover, unification-the most unequivocal expression of political modernism-has long been held to threatenthe traditionalindividualityof the regions, and especially of the south;collecting folklore thus emergedas a means of institutionalizing the complicit hierarchythatAntonio Gramscifamously labeled hegemony(see, e.g., Femia 1981). As a result, localism is trappedwithin the nation-state'sclaim to the modernistmantleof rationality;traditionand folklore arethe marksof a differencethatcan only be rejectedat the cost of losing the one feature in which peripheralregions can take pride, but that at the same time serve to debartheir carriersfrom fully modem status.7Scholarship was deeply implicatedin these culturalpolitics. The great Sicilian philologist and folklorist GiuseppePitre, for example, despite his interestin culturalbor7 Thisbitter infeststheacademic as muchas it doesits subjectof folklore paradox discipline matter. SeeAbrahams 1993foraninteresting to preserve a critical andreflexive folklore attempt fromthecondescending of its name.His attempt to pit thisnovelreflexivity implications against thepervasive "essentialism of thosewhowantto clingto theidealof thefolkcommunity andthe of wholeness andeternal return thatlive within sucha perspective" promise (Abrahams 1993:31), whilelaudable forits refusal of thehegemonic of a nostalgic traditionalism (see also implications Herzfeld in his ownandsimentailed 2003),ultimately exposesaboveall theriskof essentialism ilarattempts todefine a distinctive forfolklore. SeealsoNoyes1999foranamusdisciplinary space to my present thatfolklore as a branch of studymayultidiscussion, ingdemonstration, germane be bestunderstood as thelocalorregional intellectual voicethatreclaims theauthority to mately anddescribe tradition in thefaceof academic andbureaucratic of modernist represent impositions homogeneity.
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rowings from both within and far beyond the bordersof Italy,saw it as his fundamentaltask to preservethe individualityof Sicilian traditionagainstthe encroachmentsof a homogenizing metropolitanand nationalculture(Cocchiara 1981b:357). It is here, perhaps, that we see some convergence between the Greek and Italian situations,in that in both peripheralregions are associated with a traditionalism that serves to isolate them from the center's monopolistic grip on modernity.8 Bresciani'sfear of paganismand his intense Catholicismplaced the defense of churchinterestsabove all considerationsof national solidarity.In practice, however, this religious motivationwas not the driving force behind the emergent culturalfragmentationthat characterizedthe new Italian nation-statein general.Even the most anticlericalelements were often no more enamoredof the ideals of national unity than was the church;many Italians saw unity as nothing betterthan a Piedmonteseversion of admittedlymore variegatedforeign forms of dominationin the various parts of the countrybefore independence. In Greece, by contrast, Count Capodistrias(the first president of the country) seized the initiative by labeling locally powerful landowners who daredto resistthe centralauthority of the state,notablythe so-called "primates" of the Peloponnese(or Morea),as "Christian Turks"(Dakin 1973:60)-in other words, as the local enemies of a religious andethnic traditionthatcould only be defined as national. While locals sometimes resisted the central government's authority-this notably still happens on Crete (Herzfeld 1985a:19)andexpressedtheirdisaffectionby similarlyviewing the governmentin Athens as the Turks'successors in rapacioustyranny,they rarelyif ever opposed the nationalideal as such. Nor did they attackthe official nationalchurchexcept in the sense thatthey were generically anticlerical.Cretanvillagers, for example, characteristically chide priestsfor failing to live up to the principlesof theirreligion;they do not attackthe religion itself, althoughthey often expressthe suspicionthatits many restrictiverules were the priests'self-interestedinventions.On the official side, the specifically religious critique of paganism was muted by state control of churchinterests,and especially by the creationof an archbishopric of Athens that was independentof the Patriarchate in Istanbul.To be sure, Greekchurch leadersviewed the early attemptsat reconstituting the ancientroots of the modem statewith seriousmisgivings;they were especially unhappyaboutthe heavy emphasisplaced on folkloric practicesthat,with the greatereducationthathad led them to recognize pagan origins, they had in fact begun to expunge wherever they encounteredthem (see Stewart 1991:8-9). But religious opposition to the neo-Classical image of Hellenism did not come from the established
8 I develop this idea further in Herzfeld 2003, arguingthat the culturalintimacythat is defended in the name of "tradition" can only be understoodas the productof an unequalpolitical dynamic upholdingthe dominanceof what I have called "theglobal hierarchyof value."
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churchas much as from the moral authorityof the Patriarchate, which had not it the because had initially supported strugglefor independence, feared-rightly, as it turnedout-that the churchwould be blamedby the Ottomanauthorities.9 The nationalchurch,by contrast,was not going to expend much energy in criticizing the discursive survival strategies-essentially the claim on classical traditionandthus on the supportof the European powers-of the very enin tity that, the early decadesof independence,was committedto preservingecclesiastical authorityas one of the pillars of the new nationalidentity. The classicizing strategiesof early Italianfolkloristsdid not have either the unifying intent or the homogenizing effects of their Greek counterparts(see Cocchiara 1981a:90, 109, etc.). They were eclectic, drawingon Etruscanand Greek as well as Romanprototypes.Similarly,the attemptto explain away the enormousculturalvariety of Italy as the productof a transcendent nationalgenius would largelyhave to awaitthe arrivalof the fascists andtheirheavy handed managementof folklore exhibits (see, e.g., Bona 1940), althoughit was anticipatedearlyin the twentiethcenturyby a nostalgicfolklorediscoursethrough which "the 'myth' of the province constitutesan overcoming of the province" (Cocchiara1981b:354);a few shortyears afterWorldWarII, in 1948, we again find the greateremphasis being placed on regional distinctiveness--not least, in respect of the local culture of Rome, the nation's capital, and even at the hands of an authorwritingpartiallyin celebrationof the centenaryof unification (Toschi 1963:108-9). In Greece, the tendency to subordinatethe local to the nationalset in early in folklore studies. This precocious unity was predicatedon the projectionof Athens as the moral, spiritual,and political centerback onto an ancient world thatcertainlywould not have been unanimousin accordingit such primacy.For theologians as much as for the populaceat large, "thecity" remainedConstantinople/Istanbul,not Athens; but Athens, the nationalcapital-and, as such, a secular, neo-Classical, and pragmaticconvention-has remained effectively unchallenged.Despite the enthusiasmof its Catholic protagonists,Rome has never enjoyed such culturalauthorityover the country of which it is the administrative center;even amongits own citizens therearethose, still today,who would like to locate the capitalelsewhere.In Greece,even local enthusiastswho can claim an archaeologicalheritageand a recordedhistory older than that of Athens generally phrase their claims as those of precursorsof high (that is, Athenian)Hellenism ratherthan of a specifically local antiquityalone. Again, the apparent persistenceof ancient ritualdating back at least to the sixth centuryB.C.E. amongchildren'scarolingcustomson the islandof Rhodes was sub9 Moreover, the new state representeda Western-inspired and secular drive that threatened churchauthority. The criticisms have neverthelessshown a remarkable persistencewithin Greece, and have recently shown signs of permeatingthe majorpolitical parties despite the general tendency towardgreatersecularism;some theologians in Greece today even criticize the official national church,with its Athens bureaucracyand its rationalisticmodus operandi, as-in a recognizably Weberiansense-"protestant" (Yannaras1972; 1992).
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ordinatedto generic Greek notions of an ancient national culture cast in this same Athenocentricmold (see Herzfeld 1982:108). Even on Crete,wherelocal resistanceto the expatriation of Minoanantiquitiesto foreign museumshas become fiercely localist in tone (see HamilakisandYalouri1996:125-27), Athens remains the political center, the interests of which all claims to local cultural continuityultimatelyserve. It is true that Cretanshave long emphasizedthe "Doric"aspect of their ansense of gravity(see, e.g., Marancestry,with (they maintain)its characteristic dis 1973, a work completed in 1925). This, however, seems little more than a device for claiming a segment of the collective Hellenic past without in any sense challenging the political authorityof Athens, which itself claimed partially Doric connectionsin ancienttimes. Rather,what we are seeing is the projection of a segmentarypresent onto the ancient past, which is then brought back in circularfashion to legitimate local pride within a nationalcollectivity. It is a device thatlives on, no doubtnurtured schoolroom by dimly remembered history, in everyday conversation, as when a proud Sfakian from southwest Creteclaims thathis Dorianancestryendows him with a purersense of warrior pride than that of the allegedly "Minoan"animal-thievesof Mount Ida further to the northeast(Herzfeld 1997:160-61)! Ideas like these, which occur repeatedly throughoutthe writings of folklorists, pervadethe public imaginationandinspirea mobilizationthatis at once nationalistic and localistic, and that feeds on the aggressive performanceof the most vostereotypicalidentities;it is no coincidence that,in Rethemnos,10 ciferous advocateof organizinga battalionof volunteersto fight for the Greek cause in Macedonia, a tall, elderly man with bristling white whiskers and a measuredstep, always dressed ostentatiousstooped carriagebut dramatically ly in a Sfakiancostume with high white boots and a black knittedturban.There is a tight logical convergencebetween these admittedlyratherextremeexpressions of patrioticsentimentand the structureof ideas that informsthe collecting and publishingactivities of folklorists.Within Greece, so the local Cretan folkloristshave often argued,the nationalideal reachesits apogee:"InourCrete ... passed on from generthings are still more beautiful.... Ourgrandfathers ation to generationthe diamantinewealth of Greektraditionsthat became the unquenchablehearththat held in its core the flame of our National traditions and the proof of our continuousdescent from our glorious Ancient ancestors" 1925:5; my emphases)."1Many of those who Cbl(Lambithianaki-Papadaki
1OI use the local form of the town otherwise variously spelled (in English) Rethymno(n)or Rethimno. I conducted fieldwork there principallyin 1984, 1986-1987, 1992, and 1993-1994, while in earlierresearchI focused on a mountainvillage in the prefectureof which Rethemnosis the capital (especially in 1974-1975, 1976, 1977-1978, and 1981). I have also conductedfield re-
see Herzfeld 1985; 1987; 1991; 2003. 11 As I have noted elsewhere (Herzfeld 1985:35, where a fuller quotationis given in the context of showing the convergencebetween village and scholarlyperspectives),the more obviously segmentarypartof this passage was apparently copied directlyfrom an earlierwork (Frangaki1949:4).
search onRhodes in 1973-1974.Forfurther information about details, including funding support,
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lected local folklorein the nationalcause were local teachersandwho published locally so thatthey, too, "couldadd a small stone to the greatwork of our Folklorists" (Oustayannaki-Takhataki 1976:9). TeachersthroughoutGreece have served as a conduit for the flow of ideas between local communitiesand official and academicdiscourse,and the process has not developed in only one direction. Teacherswere important Europedurearly collectors of folklore throughout ing and beyond the nineteenthcentury.Nevertheless, the juxtapositionof ethnographicvignette and folklorists' texts that I have just presentedsuitably introduces what makes the Greek case so different from the Italian. Italy at unificationhad thrownoff the controlof a variedgrab-bagof powers; it faced no seriousrisk of overallreconquestby these or otherneighboringstates,whatever tensions may have continuedto subsist in specific borderzones. Its prehistoric, medieval, and Renaissancehistories emphasizedlocal autonomyand internalculturaldifference,as well as a continuingengagementwith, and participationin, the "highculture"of WesternEurope.For Greece, a much smaller countryfaced with the single butrealdangerof reabsorption into the Ottoman Empireand despised as a mere relic of its glorious past now deeply tarnished by the years of Ottomanrule (see St. Clair 1972:18-19), culturalhomogeneity was a crucialgoal of nationalconsolidation.Folklorestudies played a remarkably consistentand active partin sustainingthatgoal. While local teachersand otherswere encouragedto gatherfolkloricmaterialsandpreservethe traditions of every region or district,as employees of the state they were expected to do so in ways that reinforcednationalunity. Localism was an affirmationof national unity,not a challenge to it. While occasional separatistmutteringshave been heardin Crete and the Dodecanese, they have been rare and short-lived exceptions to a strikinglyconsistent patternof a passionatenationalsolidarity thatin practiceoften farexceeds whatone ordinarily encountersnearerthe capital itself.
THE CRETAN CASE: PATRIOTIC LOCALISM
The usefully extreme example of Crete-one of the more recent additionsto the Greek national territory(1913)-dramatically suggests that three factors convergedto invest the projectof nationalunity with imperativeurgencyat the
Ratherthanseeing this as plagiarism,I suspectthatits logic was so self-evidentto local Cretanwriters that the passage in questionmust have seemed proverbialandpublic ratherthanthe productof a particular author'spen. In any event, Frangaki(loc. cit.) voices her own sense of this segmentary relationship:"Wouldthat others, too, will do this, both Cretansand people from the other Greek so thatthis priceless komboloi[stringof worrybeads-a telling termin thatit evokes borderlands, cultureand its TurkishandGreekOrthodoxratherthanclassical connections] images of vernacular that is called GreekFolklore might be filled out."In the same passage, she also expresses enthusiasm for what othersmight have regardedas a form of culturalcontamination-the spreadof folksongs among the variousGreekregions: "ButI find thatbeneficial too. I thinkthatit demonstrates the ethnic unity of the Greeks."
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local level in ways that simply did not happento the same degree-and rarely happenedat all, except in the fascist era-in Italy. These factors are: (1) the confusion of religious and ethnic modes of identity,especially with respect to the "Turks"; (2) a strongmodel of social segmentation-allied, on Crete,with clear and locally potent emphasis on patrilinealkinship;and (3) a belief, successfully fosteredby successive centralgovernmentsandarguablybased on the realities of international politics, that Greece was extremelyvulnerableto foreign attack.Greece's experienceas a client state of variousunreliableWestern powers has shown that, in the military and political domain, there are good groundsfor uncertaintyabout the degree to which the countrycan depend on international guaranteesin the event of attackfrom the northor the east. This unease is matchedin the culturalsphere by the expectation-again based on experience-that these same powers, having demandedthatthe Greeksadhere to a highly selective model of neo-Classical identity,will nonetheless ridicule them as obsessive for their insistence of "threethousandyears of history"and will deride them mercilessly for their alleged failures to behave like Pericles. While, therefore,Greek nationalismcan, like all the modes of culturalfundamentalism (Stolcke 1995), take unpleasantforms, Greekcharges of hypocrisy againstthe EuropeanUnion and the United States cannotbe dismissed as mere defensiveness.The current Balkanclimateprovidesbothelaborateexcuses and, I suggest, entirelyplausiblereasons for both intransigenceand fear. It thus transpires thatGreeknationalismmust fight on two fronts simultaneously. These two fronts- stereotypicallythose of the fanaticallyIslamic East and the secularist-humanist West, a binarismthat continuesto have tragic currency in world affairstoday and in which Greek political discourse is heavily implicated-effectively collude in the humiliationthat Greeksexperience;for Westernpowers have often used the presence of the East (or of some hypothetical Balkan atavism)in Greek cultureas an excuse for not treatingGreece as a full partner eitherculturallyor politically.Indeed,the dynamicsof this double and curiouslyconsistentthreathas preservedand generatedan emphasison culturalunity in the face of undeniableculturaldiversity and of equally undeniable political factionalism. The peculiar circumstancesof Greek nation-stateformation,with an interof social and culturalrelations, has thus, for nally segmentaryunderstanding the entiretyof post-Independence Greekhistory,been subjectedto constantexternalpressureboth from an allegedly expansionistTurkeyto the east (and by otherpotentiallyinvasive countriesto the north)and a culturallyand economically tutelaryWest. Indeed,these two pressuresform twin aspects of the same or "European" of "Western" culture, problemfor the Greeks:held to a standard of which they are cruellyregardedas at once the primevalancestorsandthe inept modernimitators,they can affordneitherto tolerateinternalseparatism(itself allegedly a sign of "non-Western" fractiousness)nor to concede any coninfluence to the Turks,Albanians,or Slavs (which, in the languageof tributory
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the West'sabilityto reconfiguregeographyto suit its culturalprejudices,would be taken as evidence of "non-European" identity). Unlike the Italians, whose claims to be partof Europeanculturaland political history are groundedin the Renaissanceratherthanin Classical antiquity,and whose own occupiers since medievaltimes were virtuallyall European powersthemselves,the Greekshave had to defend their cultural always identity againstthe crudestforms of orientalism (in Said's [1978] sense). The Greekelite, privy througheducationto some at least of the trappingsof occidental cultural identity, then used the same judgmental stick to beat the provincial peasantry.One effect of this process has been the removal, in the name of a doubtlessperfectlysincererespectfor local formsbutalso surelymotivatedby a desire to maintainthe distancebetween elite and rurallaity, of linof folk guisticallyarchaicandformalelements,not only fromoldermanuscripts verse, but also in at least one instance (Tsouderos1993:8), from the published Cretanversifiers-an inversion of the earlipoetic offerings of contemporary er tendencyto "cleanse"all local texts of dialectalidioms in orderto lend them panhellenicrespectability(see Kondilakis1987 [1919]:140-41). The effect of such moves was to disenfranchise local discourse even while localist discourse-the rhetoricof a more formallyeducatedsegmentof the populationsought legitimacy at the nationallevel. As a result, there virtually never emerged an intellectualrepresentationof peasantvalues such as might have challengedthe hegemony of the state. The elite had as profoundan interestin maintainingexisting inequalitiesas did the foreign powers.As a result,what in Italy has become the materialbasis of centrifugal culturalclaims worked in the opposite direction in Greece: the very threatof being exposed as more Turkishthan Greekwas sufficient embarrassment to keep the provinces in line, and the very relativityof culturalidentity within Greece fed the insecuritythat still fuels the rhetoricof infrangibleunity-a rhetoric,groundedin claims to a common heritage in the ancient past, that seeks to placate a critical internationalaudience. Thus the more outlandish-conceptually and geographically--a provincial culturewas seen to be, the more energeticallyit could be forced to vie for the mantle of Hellenic perfection,and the less easily it could proclaimany form of culturalindependence from the metropolitancenter.Crete approximates a fairly extremepoint on this scale of marginality. is the extent to which the Perhapsthe clearestevidence of theirpredicament Cretansengage in special pleadingby arguingthat,loyal as they are to the national cause, they are the best and perhapsthe only Greekswhose traditionsof bellicose heroismcould save the entirecountryfromits externalenemies. These are claims often heardin everyday discourse. Indeed, in the last decade of the twentiethcentury,the formationof a volunteerbattalionof Cretansto fight in defense of Macedoniaif called upon andthe dispatchof humanitarian aid to the this last Bosnia "Serbian brethren" of underscore Orthodox (i.e., coreligionists)
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aspect, and suggests ways in which fierce agnaticclan ideology and the sustenance of a belief in "hereditary enemies"(i.e., the Turks,here an inclusive term for Balkan Muslims of all varieties) can coalesce in a united front surprising only because Cretansare, by their own stereotypicaladmission, highly prone to factionalism,localism, and the pursuitof personal and familial interests.12 There have been spasms of separatismon Crete from time to time, and the general view seems to be thatAthens is an ungratefultyrantand morally not better than the OttomanSultanate.Even these sentiments,however, arguably have moreto do with claims thatthe Cretansarethe best Greeksof all thanwith any desire, such as has manifesteditself in Cyprus,to dissociate the island politically or culturallyfrom the highly centralizedsystem of the Greek nationstate. Thus, Cretansare always more wary of the centerthan of any otherpart of the country,for it is to the center that the case for culturaland patrioticsuperioritymust always be made. This bias has unambiguouseffects on the practices of popularfolklore scholarship.To local writers,there is nothing incongruous in the idea of celebratingthe Cretanmandinadha[assonantdistich] as a local folklore idiom that speaksto the Hellenic genius of the "simplepeople" of the villages, while totally ignoring the existence of exactly the same song on several other, genre, with exactly the same name and formalcharacteristics, Greek islands. important If the mandinadhais an idiom of relatively benign social contest in which versifierscompeteto best each otherin wit andingenuity,waris literallya matter of life and death. Much Cretanfolklore boasts a rich vocabularyand imagery of violence, and the theme-though mediatedby considerationsof patriotic propriety-colors much of what local folkloristshave had to say about the island's culture.Yet much of the violence in question is illegal. For rural males, at least, the explanationis simple: they do not always accept the state's moralprimacy(see Campbell 1976; Herzfeld 1985a). For folklorists,who saw their task as one of recordingthe essentially Hellenic genius of these people as a testimonyto nationalunity, such subversiveattitudesrepresenta dilemmaof no small magnitude,and a particularlyserious challenge to their ability to deploy local fractiousnessin supportof the image of nationalunity. It may thus be useful to open this partof the discussion with an example of such writing:it exemplifies the paradoxwith which we began, and typifies the way in which thatparadoxgets pragmatically resolved. I take as the importanceof examining Methodologically, my starting-point folklore texts as a source of informationabout educated(scholarly and political) constructionsof popularculture.This in turnallows us to identify elements of a common logic, sharedby scholars and lay people alike, and even to see how these ideas areworkedout in the practiceof nationalandinternational pol12 It is less surprising,however, when we apply the model of segmentation,which-at least in Evans-Pritchard's (1940) formulation-allows for processes of "fusion"as much as of "fission."
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itics-always to some degree dependent,especially duringthe early years of consolidation, on securing the active approvalof the populace in the task of It is certainlynot my intentionto suggest thatthe folkloristsin nation-building. question were major trend-setters.On the contrary,their ratherhumblerrole thanthat.They were largely followers of may have been much more important of lothe dominantideology and, as such, were crucial cogs in the articulation cal sentimentwith the discourse of nationalredemption.By treatingtheir discursive practicesas a set of conventions(while recognizing some degree of internalelasticityandnegotiability),we can identifytheprincipalpresuppositions that informedtheir methods.It becomes clear that they were an importantcatelite on alyst in the mutualrecognitionbetween an educatedand often arrogant the one hand, and a largely powerless peasantryon the other,that was so necessary to the success of the integrativeprojectof nationhood.
OF LOVE AND WAR
Let us then first turn to a short piece writtenby a philologist, himself (as his surnameshows) connectedby patrilinealkinship to one of the more peaceable villages of the generallybellicose UpperMilopotamosdistrict.This fluent narrative incorporatesa scheme of collective, culturalself-justificationthat underscoresthe reasons why folklore data were collected and classified in specific ways. on Crete) (Dafermos 1951) is an TheAbductionof Persephone (A Wedding accountof how a young woman was abductedby a relativelypoor suitor.Such events are far from uncommoneven today, and, in thatthey are often contests between patrilineagroups as much as between prospective son- and father-inlaw, they reproducemany of the symbolic featuresthatone can also discernin other arenasof masculine self-display in the mountaincommunities(Herzfeld 1985a:52; 1985b). It is not clear whetherthe name of the heroine given in title and text, Persephone,was her real one, or whetherthe writerintroducesit to sound the appropriate Classical parallel;indeed, the two possibilities are not mutuallyexclusive. The only aspect that seems somewhatunusualaboutthis documentis that it records,in print,a type of activityover whichUpperMilopotamites professgreat before the wider world. Given the likely origins of the author, embarrassment however, it seems likely that his intendedaudience was not a foreign one so much as the superciliouselite to which he, as an educatedman, could claim admission. This is confirmedby a key passage (Dafermos1951:4-5) in which he attributes the despised and violent practicesof the villagers,not only to the culturaland moraldeprivation thatrepeatedwars and foreign occupationsbrought upon the hapless villagers (as he representsthem), but also to the repressive practices of the urban center. Indeed, in a sentence (Dafermos 1951:5) that stronglyrecallsvillage discourse(see Herzfeld1985a:22,107), he castigatesthe political establishmentof extractingvotes from the villagers on the basis of
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promisesneverto be realized:"and[thevillager's]education[is] such thatit enlarges the cunning that he has already inheritedin infinite measure from his mother'swomb, and gives him the abilityto bargainover his vote with the parliamentarycandidatewhom he only ever sees on the eve of elections."Daferclearthathis motive in writingthis accountis to make mos makesit abundantly sense of what to urbanGreeks would appearthe very antithesisof decent and bearsa strongresemblanceto the civilized behavior;his decodingof "otherness" But his account,unlikeanthropological concernsof anthropologists. writings,is a view bothfrom andfor the regional,if not the national,community. Thanksto this revealing instanceof internalsegmentation,we can see more clearly thanwould otherwisebe possible how the internalbellicosity of a clandividedpopulationcould graduallybe absorbedby the rhetoricof nationalunity. Moreover,the descriptionof the village girdingup for the pursuitof the abductorand his potentiallydishonoredprey-the consequences of his refusing to marryher would have been a cry for total and final vengeance on the abductorand perhapsfor the young woman's execution as well (see also Campbell 1964:172)--directly invokes the nationaland statistparallel:"Knivesand pistols were slipped out of their storage cases. Warhad been declaredbefore the diplomats had withdrawn,as we say ... Total war, as military language would have it" (Dafermos 1951:2). The narrativeis divided into two parts. The first is an account of the abduction and its aftermath,and it is here that the rhetoric of collective selfjustification occurs. In the second half, the authorexplicitly explains his decision to describethe wedding itself as an attemptto lend weight to his theme of unity out of disunity.This theme does not only reproducea common aspect of ruralGreek social relations (see Campbell 1964:125); it also matches a peculiarly local set of practices-including that of formalreconciliation,which he also mentions (Dafermos 1951:7-8)-to the encompassingimperativesof national integration.This dual format, along with a persistentplay on the relaaggressivenessto which tionshipbetween patrioticvalor and the insubordinate the villagers have allegedly been condemnedby theirhistoricalcircumstances, together suggest a formula in which official rhetoricechoes and absorbsvillage values: as feuding leads to alliance (especially through marriage),war leads to peace. It is perhapsnot surprising,in this light, that a very large number of Cretanworks on folklore have had marriageas their majorfocus (e.g., Dafermos 1961; Frangedakis1961; Lambithianaki-Papadaki 1972; Papadakis 1975). Among these, one early essay standsas a landmarkof local scholarship 1972:3) (Vlastos 1893).At least one of the laterworks(Lambithianaki-Papadaki of the two a distich about through patrigoups particularlyhighlights joining marriage;that same work also describes Crete itself as "the beautiful, sweet, calm bride of the Mediterranean" (Lambithianaki-Papadaki 1972:[7]). In the cultureof the Cretanhinterland,marriageis often the only possible barrierto the continuationof a feud.
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For Dafermos, the image of reconciliationthroughthe eventual staging of the abductor'smarriageto his victim-even though it is here ruefully attributed to the assuaging power of the cash that an agnatickinsman living in the United States contributedto the poor suitor's cause (Dafermos 1951:7)-provides proof of the ultimatevirtueeven of these poor, benightedmountainCretans:"Thetheft had been purified.The sinnershad been made innocent [or,acquitted]"(Dafermos 1951:16). In the context of linguistic and ethnic purism, such total absolutionof the wicked abductor(kleftis,literally "thief") encompasses also that of the entire nation whose nationalrevolutionwas spearheaded by guerrillasthemselves subsequentlyand categoricallycanonized as kleftes (again, literally,"thieves").In this way, folkloristicwriting serves the cause of dispelling culturalembarrassment at the level of community,region, andnation.13 The example I havejust examinedshows how sensitive Greekwriterscan be to any imputationthat their ruralcompatriotsmight be less than Europeanor "civilized,"and how tightly they calibratesuch judgments to statist and West Europeanvalues. Once again, the contrastedexample of Italy is instructive.In the absence of political considerationsthat demandednationalself-abasement as the price of even nominalindependence,Italianfolkloristscould not invoke the specter of Westerndisapproval-so strikinglyparallel,in the Greek case, with the usual local-level attentionto appearances(e.g., du Boulay 1974:20113; Friedl 1962:83)-in orderto marshallocal supportfor the project of national cultural integration.While Italians certainly express stereotypical anof the south, and while Romansin particular ofguish aboutthe "Africanness" ten seem to cast themselves in ruefuloppositionto an idealized "Europe" much as do Greeks in general, these are discourses aboutlargely internaldynamics. Greek politicians worry much more about external appearances,which they view as crucial to maintainingthe legal integrityof the nationalterritory: this is why successive Greekgovernmentshave systematicallydenied Macedonian andTurkishminoritydemandsfor self-determination, arguingthatthese moves claims by aggressive neighbors.Here, paradoxicalmight legitimateterritorial ly, Western(and global) disapprovalcounts for much less, and occasions more resentmentthanfear,as does the apparent inabilityor reluctanceof WesternEuropeans-Italians prominentlyincluded-to understandwhy the Greeks appear to be so fiercely nationalistic. Rome's agendawas neverthatof Athens.Rome was not answerableto a tutelary West bent on casting it in the role of heroic ancestorfallen on dispiritingcan "13As I found (see note 4), speakingin public in the United States aboutCretananimal-theft Greekswho feel thatsuch things undercuttheirnationalreputation. annoy (especially) non-Cretan Cretansappearto have a much less defensive reaction, and, within Crete and when the lecture is given in Greek, seem instead to welcome such discussion. This is necessarily an impressionistic comment,but it does, I think,illustratethe segmentarydynamicsof what I am here calling cultural embarrassment.
FOLKLORE299 OF NATIONALISTIC LOCALISM AND THELOGIC ly grubbytimes. While Romansknow thattheirfellow Italiansderidetheirsupposedly uncouthways, they largely rejoice in the paradoxicalmarginalityof a city that also has claims to be the center of the (Western)world, and also seem Fromthe start, confidentof keeping the culturalrespectof the rest of Europe.14 Athens far moredesperatelyneededits folklorists'effortsto createbridgeswith high antiquity,in orderto garnerthe West's grudging, often ungenerous,and usually tardysupport.Ironically,then, as I have just indicated,it seems to have been precisely this bullying overlordshipthat gave Greece the unity that Italy lacks. It is also this sense of an externalenemy (or at least critic) who must be placated at all costs-not the stereotypicallyevil East but the hypocritically moralisticWest-that allows Athens both to treatthe provinces with the same kindof disdainas it experiencesfromthe otherWesterncapitals,and,at the same time, to expect from those same provinces a high degree of categorical loyalty despitethe widely acknowledgedexistence of an almostequally high degree of situation-specificsubversion.No partof Greece reproducesboth aspects of this dual dilemmain quite such an extremeform as Crete,which both marshals volunteer forces for a potential war over Macedonia and yet continues-admittedly with unofficial but highly placed political support1"-to entertain such dramaticallyanti-statistactivities as the stockpiling of weapons, animaltheft, and the pursuitof clan vendettas. Such bellicosity forms a centralfocus of Cretanfolklore studies, largely beverse. Local-level conflicts and cause it generateda rich traditionof celebratory animal-theft,of which there are occasional hints in this literature(e.g., Romanias 1965:97 [tune 87, song 10]), are largely screened out. A lengthy poem about a "battle"narrowlyavertedbetween two Milopotamosvillages, for example, would have createdembarrassingtestimony to disunity within the island andthe nation.I rememberplaying the recordingof a song from one of the Khaniavillages to a local expert in 1967, only to be told that this was merely about a local matterand was thereforeof no interest. When texts are vague aboutthe frameof reference,or when nonverbalmaterialsare underconsiderto the nationalstruggleagainsta common enation,they can all be adumbrated emy. Thus,in a particularly engagingexample,Romanias(1965:69) arguesthat the sirtos ("shuffling")dance was named thus "becausethe warriorsdragged [esiran] the whole people off to the revolution, while the pendozalis ("fivestep"), with its characteristic pause after each fifth step, expressed the historical experience of national resistance: "the revolution would make five steps [forward],the Turkswould [then]strikeagainstit, [and]stoppedit, andit made
in Romein 1999-2000and2001, whichaddressed account of my fieldwork 14 Foran initial someof theseissues,see Herzfeld 2001. 15 It is of course details of justhoweffective difficult to get specific extremely patronpolitical
age really is in securing the release of convicted animal-thievesfrom jail. My sense is, however, thatthe wide rangeof narratives on this theme bearwitness at least to a recognizablepattern,however extensive or otherwise it may be at present.
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a pause ... Thus, the national dance of Crete has this meaning" (Romanias 1965:67). Folklore scholarship"entextualizes"dance,16placing it within the tight semanticconstraintsof an ideologically motivatedsegment of discourse, idiom into a tightly referentialtext. As a reand turnsits richly nonreferential sult, conflict at the local level is representedas war at the national,so that the idea of a "national" Cretandance, far from suggesting a separatiststance, implies the full conflationof Cretansentimentand nationalpatriotism. Moreover,this explanationeven incorporatesinto the theme of all-out war thatotherdimensionof Cretanfolklore thatlocal scholarshave emphasizedso strongly,the theme of love (alreadyseparatedfrom the wider context of sexuality throughthe folklorists'strictself-censorship[e.g., Th. Detorakisin Kondilakis 1987 [1919]:14-157]). 7 "The old Cretans, however, did not forget woman, that is [sic] physical love [erotas], affectionatelove [aghapi], or reproduction[anaparaghoyi].That is to say, with dance they wanted to bring But thereis a danwomancloser to manthroughdance,throughmerrymaking." of women, ger in giving in too easily to the lure of love and the fatal attractions culture.While the organization in the ideology of this powerfully androcentric of the sirtos, in which (so Romaniasclaims) the groom and bride, the matchmaker,andthe fathersof the newlyweds dancedin a row,is readhere as a translation of the warlikependozalis into the (social) expressionof love, it is for this reason,we aretold, thatthe often pro-Turkish largelandownerswantedto make the sirtos the nationaldance of Crete,in the hope thatthe Cretanpeople would forgetthe struggleswhich it had carriedout againstthe Turks-and againstsuspected collaborators--for its freedom (Romanias 1965:70). The fundamental war was the encompassingtransnotwithstanding, importanceof reproduction lation of local identityinto nationalsentiment.To thatsentiment,ordinarypeoTurks(thatis, ple suspectedthe big landowners-who hadbeen predominantly Muslims) until the end of the nineteenthcentury,and whose Christiansuccessors are still regardedas no less rapacious-of being faithfulonly when it suited them. When Capodistriasaccused the Peloponnesianlandownersof being he was voicing a widespreadattitudethatlingers to this day "Christian Turks," on Crete,the one partof Greece thatalso still maintainsthe patrilinealkinship ideology and the practices of reciprocalanimal-theftthat appearto have informedthe social lives of the heroic guerrillasof the strugglefor independence. Indeed,the warlikeaspectof Cretancultureoccupies a focal position in most local writing on Cretanfolklore. Waroffers this discourse both opportunities and risks, for it is here that the violence of patriotismand the violence of in16 On entextualization,see the collection by Silverstein and Urban,eds., 1996, and, for a disrelevanceto the uses of folklore, Raheja 1996. cussion of particular 17 Greek distinguishes between aghapi (affective love; cf. New Testamentagape) and erotas (sexual love). Since aghapi seems to be the basis of elopements,and since the language in which it is celebratedis often highly physical, it is not clear thatthe distinctionis as clear-cutas the Classical Greek contrast between agape and er-osmight lead one to expect.
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subordination and subversioncome most obviously into juxtapositionand the for conflict between two differentkinds of loyalty becomes most obpotential vious. Against whom do Cretanmountainvillagers beararms-each other,the state, or the enemy outside? Otherness,it transpires,is always relative to the situation.The songs, narrativepoems, and even love distichs are full of references to collective violence in variousforms. To admitthatsuch violence is diin defiance rected both againstthe officers of the state and, more particularly, of their attemptsat control,would go againstthe grainof most folklorists'ideological convictions. To see it both as the productof long-termoppressionby the hated Turksand as the most valued ingredientof the nationalfight against them, on the otherhand,resolves the potentialdilemmain a most efficient manner.It is the Turks'faultthatCretansmust resortto such disreputableand "unwildness, whereasit is the Cretans'virtueto have deployed it in the European" nationalcause.This is the clearcorollaryof the Cretanvillagers'own frequently expressedview thatthe politiciansin Athens are virtualTurksthemselves, and thatit is up to the pure-minded and warlikeCretansto bail them out of the conof their effete while continuingto exploit the venalitysequences corruption in the especially delicately negotiatedtradingof votes for protectionfrom the of consequences illegal actions-that this corruptionsustains. What we are confronting here, as I have remarkedelsewhere (Herzfeld 1987:154-57), is a patternof segmentaryrelations,in which the regional subunits of the nation-statereproducein theirrelationswith the centerthe latter's relationshipwith the externalpowers on which it depends.Moreover,there is a remarkable positivism thatunderconvergencebetween the German-derived girds Greek legal practices on the one hand (see especially Pollis 1992), and popularmorality on the other, in their sharedfocus on categorical ascription ratherthan specifically individualrights and obligations:identity is never admitted to be a matterof choice. This curious but powerful convergence contributesto the Greeks' amazementthat the world seems unable to understand why they do not wish to countenanceethnicminoritieswithintheirborders,despite the prevalenceof a highly relativisticway of dealingwith social relations. Categoricaltermscarryspecific moralcharges.Thus, while it is perfectlyposas a co-villager and sible to be a dhikos/-i mas (insider,thereforetrustworthy) a ksenos/-i (outsider,thereforean object of suspicion) as a non-kinspersonat the same time, it is inconceivable that one should be both a Turk(categorically defined as the memberof anothernationalentity) and trustworthy(i.e., unTurkish)at the same time, and this exclusionaryperceptionis in perfect harmony with the legal insistence thatminoritiesare defined by theirinstitutional (ratherthan self-ascriptive) status. In this reading, in which statist discourse perfectly matchesthe values of a markedlyantistatistpeople, one cannothave a religion without a church, and one cannot have an ethnic identity (ethniki taftotita)withoutbeing in some sense a memberof a non-Greeknation(ethnos) as defined by its own statehood-and so being always potentiallyan enemy.
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Thus,collective experiencecolludes with official discourseto providean especially profoundsensitivity over any externalthreatto the idea of Greek cultural unity, the diachronicexpression and validation of which lies in Greek claims to direct links with classical antiquity.To this day, relatively unlettered Cretanvillagers will often talk aboutwhetherparticular words are "Greek"or not, so effectively has that ideological premise penetratedthe popularimagination. There are even songs that, presumablyunder the influence of local teachers,recall an ancient past that less than a century and a half earlierhad been unknownto most peasants(e.g., Romanias1965:110 [tune38, song 2]; cf. Pashley 1837:267-69). Today,therecan hardlybe a single adultCretanof even minimal educationwho is unawarethat Crete was the legendarybirthplaceof Zeus. As one ruralversifierput it: "TheParthenons[sic] andDelphi andthe national path [poria] take their starting-point from the island of Crete"(Kanakis Yeronimakis,quoted in Khandambakis1986:145). Thus claims to the Classical past have given distinctivecolorationto a conceptualsystem in which center and peripheryboth accept a tense but infrangiblesymbiosis. The phenomenon of proghonopliksia("being ancestor-struck"), a recurrentplaint in Greek social criticismandconventionalwisdom alike,palpablyoverdetermines Greek national self-perceptions,but in a mannerthat supportsthat symbiosis rather than feeding the impetus of separatism.
HISTORY THROUGH CATEGORIES
These apparentcontradictionsare especially evident in virtuallyall discourse that deals with the unavoidableevidence of strongTurkishinfluence on Greek culture.The distinctionbetweengenetic descentandculturalheritageis one that has little place in official discourse-social anthropologyis a relatively novel discipline in Greece'"-and as a result, coming to terms with the clear marks of Turkishnessat the local level provokescertainconceptualmoves thatreveal the logic of this symbiosis. By way of an introductory comment,let me remark that it is often those same people who decry the apparentlygreaterdegree of Turkishnessin outlying areasof the Greek-speaking world (Crete,Cyprus,the Pontus) who also make the most romantic claims about the purity of their Hellenic heritage and the directness of their descent from even pre-classical Greeks. Such attitudesrepresentthe extreme culturalexpression of power over the in the presentcontextto bearin mind outlyingruralpopulations.It is important thatthis in itself partlydisposes of the sense of paradoxdescribedhere. It is the ability of the centerto monopolizethe termsof nationalself-definitionthatalso
18 Social anthropologyonly began as a universitydiscipline in Greece with the founding conference of the appropriate of the Universityof the Aegean, Mytilene, in 1986. More redepartment cently, the PandioUniversityof Social and Political Sciences in Athens has begun a program.Both are expandingrapidlyandthe subjectseems to be highly popularwith studentsinterestedin the social sciences.
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allows it, in effect to provokethe peripheryinto an exact replicationof the center's defensive adoptionof "European" identity.The centerdecides what is really Greek and dismisses as corruptbut also as quaintlybelonging to another age (see Danforth1984; Fabian 1983) every attemptthat the peripherymakes to claim a pure Classical heritage.This institutionalizedcondescension has as one resultthe defensive local productionof nationalvirtueandnationalhistory. Two examples will illustratethe point clearly.First, Cretanchildrenlearnin school that the characteristic black Cretanmale headdress(saric'ior bolidha) owes its color to the Cretans'mourningfor their dominationby the Turks.The evidence for this is at best questionable,especially given the existence of similar kinds of headgearin otherculturesof the region, and the use of black may movements that also well have arisenfrom the puritanicalnineteenth-century dulled the brilliantcolors of female finery-a form of dress, incidentally,that has been broughtback into use as an official folklore idiom. The other example is especially illustrativefor our presentpurposes. Children are taught that the characteristicCretan surnameending in -akis (e.g., Theodorakis,Hadjidakis),which is the masculine form of the standardGreek diminutiveending -aki (neuter),was imposed on the Greeksby the Turksas a collective humiliation.This is why, in the Upper Milopotamosregion, so few surnameshave the ending; the area was allegedly never fully conqueredby the Turks.If this were a valid explanation,however,it would be difficultto ex(names like plain the prevalence of such names both among Turkish-Cretans Kounelakisare found still among families of Turkish-Cretan origin in the Dodecanese) and in Sfakia, the other region where the Turks supposedly never gained an effective foothold. (In fact, both of the supposedly"free"zones seem to have been underfairly directTurkishcontrolfor most of the period of Turkish rule; see Damer 1988). What is odd here is that a far more plausibleexplanationis readily available to the Cretansfrom their everyday experience. This is the common practice, when a new surnameis createdout of a nickname (as often occurs especially in the pastoralcommunities),of adding the -akis suffix to the surnamefor the bearer'ssons to create terms of both addressand reference.This usage, which carries the approximatemeaning of "young X," is exactly parallel to that of -poulos suffix in the Peloponnese (a region that, like Crete, though less so in the present,was once markedby a strong emphasis on agnatic kinship as the basis of association). It is also extremely common. When I first realized that this was an everydayusage that everyone seemed perfectly able to understand in these terms, I was very puzzled by the Cretans'insistence on the "official" explanation.That puzzlement disappears,however, once one realizes that the Cretanshave thereby translateda standardidiom of social ascriptioninto the patriotic expression of adhesion to a national history of suffering under the in that the "Race"(fili or ratsa) of Turks.This device is especially appropriate all personsof Greekdescentis usually conceptualizedin agnaticterms:descent
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in the male line is what guaranteesnationalidentity.This is a strikingexample of the phenomenonmentionedabove, whereby the emphasis on variouskinds of categoricalascriptionat the local level fits perfectlywith the logic of Greek claritythe translation legal and political discourse.It illustrateswith particular of segmentarythinkingbetween a local level where it is still closely tied to a particular(unilineal) mode of kinship reckoning to a national one where the only permissibleexpression of disunitylies in vying with otherregions for the mantle of patriotic valor and ethnic purity-a contest orchestratedfrom the Atheniancenter. of the concept of One aspect of this categoricalprocess is the disappearance "GreekMuslims"as a possible option. While all CretanMuslims were known was not a nationin Greekas Tourki in the nineteenthcentury,the term"Turk" al or ethnictermin Turkeyitself until afterthe collapse of the OttomanEmpire. It is thus an irony of history that it was to be the newly secularizingTurkish most of whom were speakersof varistate to which most "Turkish-Cretans," ous Cretandialects of Greek,found themselves displaced,for it was theirreligion that got them there. The few so-called Muslims who succeeded in remaining on Crete did so throughbaptismor throughmarriageto Christians,a circumstancethat unequivocallyhighlightsthe substantivelyreligious basis of this identity and reveals religious affiliation(thatword is peculiarlyapt here!) as a sort of higher-order or fictive patriliny.These complexities of the definiin the Cretancontext also have importantechoes in the collection of "Turk" tion and classification of folklore.
TEXTS OF COMMUNITY AND DIFFERENCE
The lack of fit between the actualdevelopmentof Turkish-Cretan identity and the achroniccategoriesof official discourseleaves a strongmarkon the scholarly treatmentof folklore. It is not my intention here to attemptan extended analysisof the historyof TurkishconquestandIslamicproselytizationof Crete. Suffice it to say that, by the time Cretebecame at least nominallyautonomous Otin 1899, very large numbersof so-called Turkseven in the predominantly tomancity of Resime (or Rethemnos)spoke CretanGreekas theirprimarydomestic language. This they carriedwith them to the Turkishcommunities in which they were placed, notably afterthe compulsoryexchange of population between Greece and Turkeyin 1924. Indeed, on a 1990 field visit to Ayvahk (GreekAfvali or Kidhonies;"place of quince-trees"in both languages), I encounteredone octogenarianwoman whose knowledge of Turkishwas limited to a few greetings only, while I still recall in the early 1970s encounteringin Kermete (Platania),a Turkishvillage on the island of Kos (the local Greek Christiansstill called it TurkishratherthanMuslim at thattime) a woman who had grown up in a village on Crete and who spoke fluent CretanGreek, quite Greekor the Dodecanesiandialectto be heard unaffectedby eitherthe standard all aroundher.
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Moreover, the common culturalframeworkwas not solely linguistic. The mandinadhaidiom was certainlyfound in both confessional communities;in Ayvahk, I heard several mandinadhesfrom a Muslim woman who described herself as being fromKhania(one of the majorcities of Crete)althoughshe herself had been born in Turkey.I mention these facts in orderto underscorethe close symbolic association often made between this verse-and-songgenre and Cretanidentity,andits persistenceamongeven the uprooted"Turkish-Cretans" of today. This evidence of a commonheritageis handledin very gingerlyfashioneven by quite recent scholars.Thus, TheokharisDetorakis,in publishinga long-fornineteenthof folklore materialsassembledby the important gotten manuscript mandinadhes of the three off marks Cretan novelist Yannis Kondilakis, century in the collection as 487 Cretanmandinadhes,distinguishingbetween the majority as "genuinely Cretan"and the small set of three as "Turkish-Cretan" (Kondilakis 1987 [1919]:14). The implicationsof this brief notationare enormous. When one examines the three texts in question (Kondilakis 1987 [1919]:56), which are placed in a separatespace from the others, one does indeed see thatthey all containreferencesto Turkishnames or Islamic terminology. But does Turkishterminology,especially in this linguistically hellenized form, necessarilymean thatthe singer was a Turkor even an islamized Greek? In 1967, I heardwhat I believe to be a common enough distich in a village of in which the apostrophe the Khaniaprefecture, nouri mou ("mylight")-a term of Arabic derivation-served as an endearmentoffered to the listener. Of course any allusion to Rabi, a term of address for Allah, implies a Muslim texts suggests a singer;but the starkseparationof so-called "Turkish-Cretan" than was editors modern in minds of of the cultural greaterdegree separation becultural the in time whose relationships perhapsexperiencedby Kondilakis, tween the two confessional communitieswere not always hostile and entailed an enormous amountof mutualvisiting, sharedfeasting, and amicable greeting-a circumstancethat the oldest refugees in Ayvallk still recalled. Indeed, it was the mandinadhathatespecially confirmedthe common groundbetween two religious groups separatednot only by theirbeliefs and ritualpracticesbut also by a powerfullydifferentiated relationshipto the locus of political authorrule. under Ottoman ity It is important to rememberin this contextthatwhereverMuslims andChristians sharedthe Greek languagethey were apt to share also the expressive devices that gave form to their social and historicalexperiences.Althoughwe do not have comparable data from Crete, we do know, for example, that the laments for the fall of a citadel were sharedby the Muslims and Christiansof the Peloponnese, so that-no matterwho was the aggressorand who the victim-the frameworkof collective tragedy appearsto be remarkablyconstant given the alleged mutualhostility of the two groups(see Herzfeld 1982:63; see textual materialsin Passow 1860). The point of the mandinadhais precisely
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that it provides both a common frameworkand, ipsofacto, a basis for the expression of difference. This is what makes it an ideal vehicle for verbal duelor "coupling"(verbteriazo) such mandinadhes is an artwhich, ing: "matching" in a society where verbal skills are viewed as a markof aggresappropriately sive masculinity,implicitly (and sometimesexplicitly) parallelsverbalwit with sexual contest. Perhapsinadvertently, the folklorists' taxonomic habits reproduce this logic of differencewithin a sharedidiom. Thus, theirpracticeof premandinadhesas examples of the genre, but as differsenting "Turkish-Cretan" entiatedfrom those thatarejudged to be "genuinelyCretan," does in the realm of expressive genres what the rereadingof the -akis surnamesuffix does in the realm of social relations:it recasts a recognizablylocal and non-ethnicidiom in the terms of the Eurocentricnation-state.This observationtakes us beyond the usual pieties aboutthe importanceof looking at folklore genres in theirperformativecontext, for it shows us thatacademicentextualization is itself a kind of performance,one that makes far better sense when it is lined up for direct comparisonwith the local comparisonsit has been designed to engulf. What is more, the suppressionof social and performativecontext is itself a common academicandnationalisticstrategy.It has allowed editors,then andnow, to present as categorical and exclusionary a social and religious division that also served at feasts, at which Muslims and Christiansonce apparentlyexchanged these poetic complimentsand insults, as a basis of communication.It takes the socially relative and rendersit culturallyabsolute. The rejectionof the Turksas "genuine" Cretansillustratesthe extentto which Cretanfolklore studies have been cast in terms of nationalcategories and ideof descent (usually by "blood"and in a patriology. Symbolic representations lineal idiom) are still often, and dangerously,conflated with religious categories, with the result that non-Orthodoxaffiliationcan lead to official doubts about the genuineness of one's Greek ancestry(Eleftherotipia1993). The Orthodox churchhas mounteda sustainedand effective resistanceto the removal of religion as a compulsorycategoryof identityon nationalidentitycards.Once again we see how Greek culturalclassification representsa convenient match between legal and popularcategories.The niceties of technicaldistinctionsbetween "Turk" and "Muslim"are as irrelevant to the concernsof most Greeksas is the distinctionbetween culturalandgenetic heritage.As long as the Turksremain the definitive enemy, such conflationof blood and belief continuesto reinforce pan-Orthodox sentimentsfavoringthe Serbs in the Bosnian conflict as much as anti-Muslimattitudesat home.
DIVERSITY AND HOMOGENEITY
Thus, a segmentaryperceptionof social and culturalrelationsdoes not necessarily conflict with the unifying demandsof statistideology. On the contrary, as in any segmentarycontext, unity is always thinkable,even if it is not always translated into practiceas obedience to centralauthorities.The externalthreats
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of tutelaryphilhellenismin the West and aggressive expansionismin the East, whetherreal or imagined, are sufficiently consistent with Greekexperience to exert a stronglycentripetaleffect on the expression of localism. served Folklore,ever the sourceof historicistaccountsof nationalidentity,19 and at distinctive the promotionof this perspective admirably.Both strongly the same time groundedin recognizablypan-Greekculturalforms, Cretanfolklore provideda useful set of materialsfor objectifyingand conceptualizingthe complex tensions that subsisted in the fractious,disobedient,but overwhelmingly loyal island. The expulsion of the Turksin 1924, partof a process of mutual "ethniccleansing"to which GreeceandTurkeyagreedin the Treatyof Lausometimes sanne,simplifiedmattersconsiderably. Although"Turkish-Cretans" much as their make sentimentalpilgrimagesto their ancestralhomes on Crete, the neither Christiancounterparts visit theirown places of originin Asia Minor, of that authoritiesnor civilians are today confrontedwith the embarrassment categoricalanomaly,the "GreekMuslim."That,in turn,enormouslysimplifies the business of reclaimingCretefor Hellas, while at the same time claimingthe best of Hellas for Crete;both, in concentricfashion,reclaimthe ancestryof Europe. It is hardly a matterof surprise,then, that Cretanshave professed themselves incapable of understanding why the EuropeanUnion should be in the business of supporting,as they saw it, the outrageousand intrusiveclaims of Bosnian Muslims on what is, afterall, Europeansoil. The success of the official discoursein exploiting local-level ideas aboutsofactorin the ultimatelycentripetal cial andculturalidentityis anotherimportant directionof localist sentiment.We shouldnot be too surprisedat this. The principles of legal positivism, while claiming objective status,appearto be grounded in a symbolic value system that was probablyof enormousantiquityin Europe and beyond long before the invention of the nation-stateas we know it today.The conflationof intellectualrationalityandpopularcommon sense produces a powerful device for suppressingdissension in the matterof ethnic and local identity.That it is nonetheless ultimatelya symbolic system, ratherthan the productof some culture-freerationality,should be clear from the extent to which the folklorists sought to bring all their materialsinto line with the taxonomy, ratherthanthe otherway around.When we study academicclassifica19 For an early example of the analysis of nationalistconcerns with folklore, see Wilson 1976, on Finland.Such studies have proliferatedover the years, as interestin the "inventionof tradition" (Hobsbawmand Ranger 1983)-an elitist model to which much of the nationalistfolklore literature fits well-has grown. Many of the early folklorists were teachers and governmentofficials, and their involvement in the spreadof literacy confirms the importancethatAnderson(1983:4749) attributesto "printcapitalism";their attemptsto create what Andersoncalls "imaginedcomand less psychologistic adjective) are munities"(although"imaged"might be a more appropriate groundedin the principleof iconicity; culturaldifferences separatingthe modernpopulationfrom its newly constitutedprecursorsare groundedin a carefully constructedsense of cultural,linguistic, and even phenotypicalresemblance,all marshaledin the service of collapsing historicaltime into the image of eternity (as in the slogan "Macedoniawas, is, and always will be Greek")and nostalgic identificationinto hermeticidentity (see also Herzfeld 1997:64, 72).
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tion in the same terms as we would examine folk classification-when, indeed, we treat the scholars as "folk" in their own right-we take their claims of cultural membership seriously by challenging their claims of intellectual hegemony over, and separation from, the people they so condescendingly call "simple." At that point, it becomes clear that the underlying assumptions of the folklore they have studied also guide their own reactions to the national and international crises of their time. The local-level mode of segmentary feuding on Crete translates with remarkable ease into the nesting of local pride within the production of an externally unified and culturally homogeneous patriotism. In these circumstances, there is no practical contradiction between that patriotism and the most aggressive pride in the local culture of Crete.
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