An Ethnographer's Lament: A Reply to Lambropoulos's "Modern Greek Studies in the Age of Ethnography

I feel an obligation to reply to Vassilis Lambropoulos’s essay, “Modern Greek Studies in the Age of Ethnography” (1997) because I fear that it may be read as a serious critique of the work done by anthropologists in the field of Modern Greek Studies.

Although he claims to be using the term “ethnography” in an “epistemological”—not a “disciplinary”—sense, Lambropoulos refers to anthropology as the “dominant discipline” in “the age of ethnography” and as ethnography’s “paradigmatic discipline” (1997:198–199). While I agree with Lambropoulos that Greek ethnography has often failed to pay sufficient attention to important work in Greek literary studies and that some recent ethnographic writing has been carried to the extreme of narcissistic autobiography, I think that on several counts his critique of ethnography is inaccurate, inconsistent, and unfair.

When Lambropoulos claims that it would be impossible to “name a single character made famous by ethnography . . . because this inquiry does not believe in character” (1997:203), Ishi, the last Yahi (Kroeber 1961), Nisa, a !Kung woman (Shostak 1981), and Esperanza, a Mexican peddler (Behar 1993), all characters “made famous by ethnography,” come immediately to mind. When Lambropoulos criticizes ethnographers for adopting a stance of benevolent tolerance and moral relativism toward the people they study and claims that no ethnography “can take a negative, let alone adversarial, attitude to its informants” (1997:202), I think of counter-examples such as Crapanzano’s (1985) portrait of white South Africans under apartheid, Dworkin’s (1983) feminist account of “right-wing women,” and my own study (1995) of the Macedonian Question, which has been criticized (Argyrou 1996) precisely for not adopting a sufficiently tolerant attitude toward the Greek nationalists who served as my “informants.”

More general evidence that many anthropologists are no longer the moral relativists Lambropoulos thinks they are is the recent establishment by the American Anthropological Association of a Committee for Human Rights committed to promoting and protecting human rights throughout the world. While criticizing ethnographers for being moral relativists, on the one hand, Lambropoulos seems to contradict himself by simultaneously criticizing them for documenting the human rights abuses of minorities, on the other (1997:200). Careful and balanced scholarly analysis of the treatment of Macedonians or Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Greek state hardly constitutes what Lambropoulos calls “an open season against the Greeks” (1997:200).

I am surprised by Lambropoulos’s charge that

ethnography is not interested in building solidarity with a field or area studies. It simply visits, records, and reports—it does not stay or care long enough to develop any commitment. It can change location, people, language, and topic at a whim, following the dictates of personal taste or academic fashion.

This is also apparent in the incidental or subordinate ways in which Greece and the Greeks are taught in its courses. (1997:203).

While it is true that many anthropologists who work in Greece (like many historians, political theorists, and economists) may have a primary commitment to their discipline (theoretically defined) rather than to their geographical area of study, and while it is also true that they may teach courses on religion, folklore, or gender in which the ethnography of Greece does not occupy a central position, it is simply unfair to characterize the people who have written the ethnography of Greece as having “no expressed and consistent commitment” to modern Greek culture (1997:203). The careers of anthropologists/ethnographers such as Peter Allen, Jill Dubisch, Ernestine Friedl, Michael Herzfeld, Renée Hirschon, and many others cannot be dismissed in such a cavalier fashion.

I am also uncomfortable with the “institutional [as opposed to intellectual?] perspective” (1997:197) that Lambropoulos adopts when he expresses concern for enhancing the “eminence or popularity” (1997:200) of Modern Greek Studies and earning “the support of a dean for a new Modern Greek program” (1997:204). In this context Lambropoulos claims that ethnographic writing does not encourage tourists to visit Greece (1997:201) and points out that studies of fascism and the Mafia do not inspire people to finance Italian Studies...