Folk Truth: When the Scholar Comes to Carnival in a "Traditional" Community

Folk Truth: When the Scholar Comes to Carnival in a "Traditional" Community Jane K. Cowan In Greece, the relationship between folklorist and folk, between laográfos and laós, is historically specific. It is not the only place in the world where traditions of the peasantry were used to validate a new sort of political entity, the "nation." But the unique position of Greece—the imagined Greece of antiquity, the ancestral center— within Western European thought, has given that relationship particular nuances (Anderson 1983; Herzfeld 1982: 11). The institutional history of laografÃ-a, Greek folklore, has been enmeshed since its inception in the political history and rhetoric of the newly emerging Greek nation-state. The complexities of this historical relationship between folklore and the Greek state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are unravelled in Michael Herzfeld's Ours Once More (1982). Folkloric discourse of this period in Greece, he argues, cannot be understood except in this context of nationalism. Its institutional practices were oriented to the practical problem of political legitimacy. As elsewhere in the Balkans, claims to statehood relied on essentialist arguments of ethnic uniqueness and historical priority. Political legitimacy came to be argued primarily in terms of an authenticating past. Consequently, the rich traditions of the rural peasantry became both the source and the arena for arguments about the past and the present.1 This is not to say that Greek folklorists were the first to focus upon folk traditions as archaeological evidence of the past. Cultured European travellers had long peppered their descriptions of the peasantry with archaic terms and allusions. Moreover, both educated, bourgeois Greeks (many in the Diaspora) and Philhellenes similarly turned an archaeologizing gaze in Foucault's sense toward the folk. To many foreigners, traditions were reckoned significant Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 6, 1988. 245 246 Jane K. Cowan only insofar as they revealed cultural continuity with the contemporary Greeks' more ancient forebears. This attitude came to be adopted by many Greek folklorists, as well, particularly those subscribing to the "Hellenist" model, which was politically and academically dominant throughout the first century of Greek statehood (Fauriel 1824; Herzfeld 1982: 23). The folklorists' preoccupation with the past has had important epistemological implications. Insofar as "tradition" was examined in exclusively historical terms, the intentionality of contemporary actors could not be accomodated. Traditional practices were typically made abstract: the present was treated as a token of the past, the local as a token of "national" or "racial" phenomena. As long as legitimation was to be found in antiquity, what many "Hellenist" folklorists saw as the ultimate "significance" of a particular tradition was divorced from the real and changeable conditions of the contemporary actors (Danforth 1984). The notion of tradition as a creative process—one which incorporates present concerns as well as the past—was implicitly denied. Rhetorically, folklore set up a hierarchical opposition between folklorists and folk. In Politis' influential model, the folk "spoke" and "acted", and the folklorist "transcribed" what was uttered and "described " what was done (Politis 1909: 6).2 However, although initially giving tongue to songs and stories, folk interpretations of their own creations were, ironically, subordinated to the more authoritative pronouncements of the scholar. Rather, there was an implicit assumption that the words (and actions) of the folk "said" more than they could possibly know. Interpretively, the folk were silent, while the folklorist assumed the task of exegesis. Much anthropological work (past and present) also assumes these distinctions. But in the specific case of "Hellenist" folklore scholarship, the folklorist's concern with folk creations as relics of a glorious past gave to his hermeneutic role a definite didactic and moralizing quality as well. In the context of a broader examination of intellectual discourses (Fabian 1983, Foucault, 1970, 1972; Said 1978), in recent years various scholars have examined this folkloric discourse in Greece (Alexiou 1984-1985; Danforth 1984; Herzfeld 1982; KyriakidouNestoros 1978). Inspired by the insights of such scholars, this paper represents an attempt to take the examination one step further: to the local level. I try to show that folkloric discourse—a discourse oriented to the problems of national identity and legitimacy—enters in both direct and diffuse ways...