Gender and Power in Rural Greece (review)

Reviews 285 Meraklis' book may be taken as a sign of the current aporia in Greek folklore studies generally. The traditional object of study is disappearing and folklorists are justified in attempting to expand and redefine their subject. Yet folklorists in Greece have not been innovative methodologically. They have steered clear of theories which would account for phenomena in terms of ideology or socio-economic structure and thus they are in a weak position to account for change. Moreover, their technique of collection and description offers little in the way of understanding what various customs actually mean for the people who practise them. With some notable exceptions they continue to operate along the taxonomic and compartmental lines established by Politis in the early part of this century. Meraklis explicitly acknowledges this view as the motivating concept behind his projected three volume study (p. 12). Finally, the threatening idea which lurks in the shadows of Elliniki LaografÃ-a (p. 118nl) is that ethnology is spoiling to absorb the discipline of folklore wholesale . This book, with its curious subtitle, proposes the counter-argument that folklore studies are already sufficiently sociological. Charles Stewart Oxford University Jill Dubisch (editor), Gender and Power in Rural Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1986. Pp. xvii + 258. $40 (cloth), $9.95 (paper). The nine essays in this volume, all based on field research in contemporary rural Greece, examine aspects of gender in specific rural settings. Nearly all of the essays deal primarily with women's roles in the domestic sphere and include a great deal of fascinating ethnographic detail about various facets of Greek women's lives. The two essays opening and closing this collection together offer an especially interesting illustration of the development of the anthropology of gender over the last decades and of the crucial role of Greek ethnography in this process. Each proposes new and stimulating ways to think about both gender and Greek society. The first essay is a republication of Ernestine Friedl's groundbreaking 1967 article, "The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality. ' ' Drawing on Greek village data, Friedl argues that patterns of power distribution cannot necessarily be read directly from public 286 Reviews behavior alone. Specifically, she shows that although high public prestige is associated with the domains and activities of Greek village men, this does not mean that women in this setting are as powerless as they might appear. On the contrary, Greek village women have considerable power over key areas of domestic life. Because "the family is the most significant structural and cultural element of the Greek village" (pp. 42-3), the power wielded by women in this domain is highly consequential. To overlook or understate it is to seriously misunderstand the nature of Greek society. With this insight, Friedl rendered the issue of social power distribution much more problematic, and investigation of domestic life much more interesting , than had previously been the case. Although her position may almost be taken for granted by now, it was highly original 20 years ago and prompted just the "more careful investigation" of informal behavior and private domains for which she calls, not only in the ethnography of Greece, but in studies elsewhere as well. The last essay in the collection, Michael Herzfeld's "Within and Without: The Category of 'Female' in the Ethnography of Modern Greece," provides a good illustration of how far gender studies have come since 1967. Herzfeld's analysis depends on the accumulation of a large store of information since that time (by himself and others) on modern Greek men and women in both private and public arenas. He imaginatively makes sense both of particular ethnographic facts and of ways in which they fit into a larger, specifically Greek picture. Like Friedl—but operating now in an altogether different intellectual context—he develops a conceptualization which might be profitably applied elsewhere. He begins with the notion that "male" and "female" are highly charged symbolic categories, manipulated by villagers and politicians, anthropologists and folklorists , and potentially available to express or represent any number of ideas. Careful examination of the construction of gender ideologies and symbolism, and of the uses to which they are put in a particular setting, then, may...