On Mediterraneanist Performances

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 1991. ISSN: 1016-3476. Vol 1, No 1: 141-147 ON M E D IT E R R A N E A N S PERFORMANCES M ichael Herzfeld Indiana University Margaret Kenna (personal communication, 22.xii.90) has most generously suggested that I might want to write a ‘reply’ to her thoughtful and challenging commentary. To do so in the ordinary way, however, runs the risk of being unwarrantably petty. Her remarks are constructive, cogent, and challenging, as well as appreciative in the fullest sense of that term. They do serve to highight common concerns, and inasmuch as they help to clarify these issues they deserve a response in the same constructive spirit. Let me begin, then, with her contention that my writing is itself a performance. She is indubitably right; indeed, the writing of every scholar is a performance. In my case, however, there is a technical sense in which Kenna is more than commonly accurate in this judgment. In The Poetics o f Manhood, I explicitly claim to have ‘deformed the conventional ethnographic layout’ (1985:xv). Deformation is precisely the aesthetic device that Roman Jakobson (1960), following the Soviet and Prague School traditions, identified as the ‘poetic function’, In The Poetics o f Manhood, I adopted this perspective to describe and analyze the various techniques of self­ presentation whereby Glendiot males drew attention to performances signifying their several, concentric identities. My own self-description in the prefatory observation just mentioned, then, points up an undeniable continuity between my own perform­ ance as a writer and the village rhetoric that form a major focus of my study. The parallel is also essential to my view that the villagers, no less perhaps than our observing selves, are theorizing actors. Whether consciously or otherwise, villagers and ethnographer alike play creatively—or, at least, as creatively as they are individually capable of doing—with the conventions of their idiom. The book is truly a performance, inasmuch as its peculiar way of playing with the conventions of ethnographic description gives emphasis—if it has succeeded—to certain features that have not been accorded much attention in the past. It is this aspect that distinguishes any ethnographic study, positively or negatively, from its precursors. First and foremost among my predecessors, of course, is John Campbell, whose discussions of ‘self-regard’ among the Sarakatsani constitute the starting-point for my own explorations of eghoismos. It is true that I have emphasized the actual performance of self-regard far more than Campbell did in his ethnography (1964). It is also true that this approach ‘deforms’ a well-tried model. Such deformation entails no disrespect. On the contrary, it depends on the possibilities already raised in the earlier work. I have already discussed the relationship between Campbell’s mono­ graph and Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) The Nuer (Herzfeld 1987:58). Copyright © 1991 Mediterranean Institute. Univ. of Malta Such textual deformation inevitably combines with other factors such as the exigencies of the field situation—including, certainly, the writer’s own interests and proclivities—to change the balance of topics. I have clearly reduced the weight given to economic and ecological topics in the earlier monographs. They, for their part, gave much less attention to questions of personal and collective style. I suggest that we should not judge the earlier ‘omission’, at least, as a ‘failure’. In my own work, I have chosen to single out aspects that interested me personally, for reasons that partly derive from the recent theoretical development of anthropology towards questions of social experience and performance. The narrative idioms and self-presentations that I describe are no less ‘ethno­ graphic’ than are more obviously material data. What is more, they are part of the material reality itself. By stressing the centrality of performance to the lives of Glendiot men, moreover, I tried to draw attention to something that is as much of a lacuna in the existing literature as ‘material concerns’ are in Poetics. What is more, this particular lacuna is embryonically present from the start. By explicitly ident­ ifying in Campbell’s analysis the prefigurement of my concern with the poetics of the aggressive male self, I also want to...