Commentary

Commentary Jill Dubisch The anthropological focus on small communities has traditionally been both the discipline's weakness and its strength. The study of peasant communities has been especially problematic, for such communities are embedded in a larger social order by which they are both shaped and defined. In her pioneering ethnography, Vasilika (1962), Ernestine Friedl delineated some of the problems which anthropological fieldwork in such settings can pose. Although the focus of her study was one village, Friedl recognized the difficulty of studying a single community within a nation-state such as Greece, and the special problems faced by the anthropologist working in a society with an indigenous scholarly tradition of its own. In the process of addressing the issues raised by Friedl and others, and of attempting to move beyond the model of the peasant community as a self-contained and timeless whole, anthropologists have begun to transform the ways in which peasantry itself has been defined. While the community or village (often conflated but not necessarily the same) has been, and will undoubtedly continue to be, the focus of anthropological research and the core of anthropological analysis, the model of the community has altered, sometimes radically. Susan Sutton, for example, challenges the "taken for granted" status of the Greek village (horió), that unit so important to both Greeks and anthropologists. Rather than being a given, she suggests, the concept of the horió should itself be a subject of investigation. Such investigation reveals that the "traditionality" of villages may itself be a social construct, both for villagers and for urban Greeks (a theme echoed in Jane Cowan's paper as well). But these efforts to develop new views of the community also pose a challenge. How can anthropology, whose focus has been the intensive study of small social units, broaden that study without losing what gives the discipline its distinctiveness? And to what extent Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 6, 1988. 261 262 Jill Dubisch can greater breadth of scope be achieved with traditional anthropological methods and data and to what extent does it require an expansion of anthropological skills? The first four papers in this volume offer a variety of approaches. The first considers migration. The massive post-World War II movement of Greeks from rural villages to urban centers, and particularly to Athens, is a phenomenon which has attracted the attention of most anthropologists working in Greece, and has also provided one avenue for examining the articulation between rural and urban areas. A focus on migration, however, can lead into the trap of regarding rural communities as traditional, isolated entities which have only recently been thrown into the wider and dislocating modern world. But as Sutton's paper shows, Greek rural villages have in fact "been in motion for centuries," with new villages being founded, older ones depleted or abandoned, and people moving from one part of the countryside to another depending on the need for labor and the availability of land. And as both Costa and Sutton demonstrate , population shifts and movements in response to forces from the "outside world" have occurred historically in many, if not all, areas of Greece, even in ancient times, and this has in turn shaped the formation of "traditional" communities. An important additional point is that these multi-level relationships are never one-way. It is not the unidirectional effect of world markets which transforms local systems, but the responses of individuals and groups at the local level to the opportunities and problems which such markets pose. It is the special contribution of anthropology to our understanding of such forces to illuminate the responses made to them by individuals and groups, and to remind us, as Sutton does, that such responses have a long history among peasantries. Bennett's discussion of a localized class structure and its current transformations adds to this argument by showing in rural Greek communities, the shifting relationship in the relative values of land and labor in response to outside economic forces. Cowan's analysis points up another kind of integration between levels—the ideological. Her discussion of the complex interplay between local ritual and national folklore studies demonstrates how "tradition" itself is a present...