Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (review)

Reviews 149 tingency, makes it possible to argue that much of the work here, like most of that invoking "the Mediterranean," is in one sense decidedly "pre-modern. And this also implies that the concept of "the Mediterranean " as unified culture area is itself a pre-modern construct, with its emphasis on determined meaning and its basis in the traditional half of that dichotomy. Certainly the political and analytic problems of "the Mediterranean" can also be found in this volume. Any post-modern position—be it neo-pragmatist anti-foundationalism on one hand or an Adorno-influenced critical marxism on the other—would necessitate the questioning of basic analytic categories and oppositions, like male and female "identity," honor and shame, public and private, rural and urban, and "the past" and "the present" themselves. Reliance on a Braudelian ecological determinism (which is precisely what I would argue "the Mediterranean" does, in the guise of a cultural unity which is "discovered" in the positing of ecologically determined, atomistic kinship patterns in still—"traditional " units of analysis) would give way to historical comparison, and the theoretical prison-house of "the Mediterranean" would be replaced by new, and one hopes more heuristically valuable, theoretical and comparative frameworks. These frameworks, if rid of the essentialism and ahistoricism that are at the basis of both "the Mediterranean " and "modernity," might be better able to address the political concerns that the authors in this collection share. In the absence of a modernist and Mediterraneanist paradigm, a feminist theory of social interests could no longer be content to represent "the woman issue" but would have to rethink, and reconceptualize, all aspects of social identity—gender among them—and present political programs that related to whatever were the salient social constructions in particular historical situations. Most of the research in this volume carefully details complex, contradictory, and overdetermined social categories and realities, and the task ahead for all of us is the development of equally complex social and feminist theory. Joanne Passaro Duke University Charles C. Moskos, Greek Americans: Struggle and Success. Second Edition. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 1989. Pp. χ + 204. $18.95. Some scholars today read ethnicity as cultural work. In this frame of analysis actors struggle for and with terms with which to situate their activities. They produce and reproduce meanings about cultural 150 Reviews differences in which to live their lives. For scholars, this analytical stance means that accounts of ethnic experience, and very often scholarly canons, must be decentered by reading between stories, between institutions, within silences. Charles Moskos' book must be read in the context of this movement in the study of ethnicity. The first edition of Greek Americans: Struggle and Success was published in 1980. The second edition (1989) includes two new chapters — one on Greek-American life in the 1980s and one on the political rise of Dukakis. The author has also added an appendix on modern Greek and Greek-American studies and an expanded bibliography. The book thus continues Moskos' narrative about Greek-American life begun in the years that celebrated the U.S. Bicentennial and saw the fluorescence of stories of ethnic experience. Moskos' account centers on institutional life interspersed with tales of individuals' struggles and accomplishments that he has distilled from published research, his own recollection of "growing up Greek American," his extensive listening in his travels and teaching, and his collection of "Greek Americana ." The family, the Church, politics, the press, lodges, and the arts, are some of the stages upon which the struggles he describes took and are taking place. Three choruses of voices, principally masculine, are heard in this book: those of two immigrant generations that came, respectively, at early and mid-century and those of the American-born, who themselves now span three generations. Moskos narrates lively and sometimes contentious conversations among them. Some resonate with stories I was told during my field work with Greek Americans two decades ago—stories of immigrant fathers' arduous labors at making lives and at building institutions and their successes at not a few of these, and of their sons' and daughters' own labors at career-making and, importantly, culture-making (ethnogenesis, p. 148). We hear relatively little in...