Contours of White Ethnicity. Yiorgos Anagnostou
production, a human practice,” white ethnicity must be seen in terms of texts and practices that contribute to its making. And white ethnicity cannot generate a single, authoritative interpretation of the past: “because different meanings can be ascribed to the same thing, meaning is always the site and the result of struggle” (ibid.).
I have already identified my object of analysis: popular ethnography. As interpretive descriptions of social life, these ethnographic accounts conveniently offer an opportunity to explore the multilayered contours of white ethnicity. In reading ethnographies, I do not assume that these texts offer transparent reflections of reality, faithful mirrors of the worlds they depict. As foundational work on the politics and poetics of ethnography has shown (Clifford and Marcus 1986), ethnographies are narratives that rest on rhetorical strategies of persuasion to establish authority and to produce convincing representations of social life. What this means, of course, is not that ethnographies are lies—and therefore illegitimate sources of knowledge about white ethnicity—but that they tell only partial truths (Clifford 1986a). I draw from this anthropological tradition the insight that attention to how ethnographies make meaning is of particular analytical value in the textual production of usable ethnic pasts. This method of reading becomes useful for interrogating narratives that claim absolute truths about Greek America or white ethnicity. I also use it to recover textual ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and the muting of alternative meanings within a text. Thus, I am interested in the manner in which the politics of ethnicity intertwines with textual poetics. My compass includes the interests that texts serve and the ways in which textual meanings are made rhetorically in the first place. I undertake all this with the goal of writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991), that is, disrupting tendencies to represent white ethnicity as a unified whole, a single demarcated culture.
I do not merely analyze texts. Ethnographic truths are embedded in broader impersonal structures and must be situated in relation to wider social discourses. I consider, therefore, textual politics and poetics as well as discourse and history. Attention to history and discourse allows me to conceptualize the terrain of ethnicity not in terms of a neatly delineated and already known past. Pasts are not natural facts; instead, they entail knowledge produced at specific moments in history. It becomes of primary analytical importance, then, to identify the specific political and cultural geographies where pasts were created, where they took root or were rerouted, were rejected or revived, were activated or silenced, at any given point in time. In other words, we must carefully scrutinize how tradition or heritage traveled across specific social fields and through identifiable historical moments. For the “recovery of discarded areas, or the redress of selective and reductive interpretations [of tradition]” has little value “unless the lines to the present, in the actual process of selective tradition, are clearly and actively traced” (Williams 1977, 115).
This mapping is necessary if we wish to understand the current modification, preservation, elimination, valorization, or deprecation of the past as a historical process. It is an enormous task, this comprehensive excavation of a multitude of relations, and it lies beyond the scope of this book. I merely make a gesture toward initiating this project; I start mapping only some dimensions of this process. In this chapter, for example, I enter this terrain through the analysis of selective representations in which claims about the past intersect with discourses and power relations to produce the meaning of ethnicity. I discuss four key, yet arbitrarily selected, historical moments of ethnic representation.1 First, I reflect on an ethnographic encounter between a folklorist and a Greek American family in 1955. I move on to analyze a public performance of Greek immigrant identity from a few decades earlier, as captured in a photograph taken during a national commemorative event in Washington, D.C, in 1917. I then discuss a 1907 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle that situated Greek immigrants in relation to racial categories in the United States, in order to reflect on the racial politics of that era vis-à-vis southeastern Europeans. And I continue with an autobiographical narrative by an ethnic intellectual in the 1970s that gave voice to the descendants of southeastern European immigrants in the context of white ethnic revival in America during the civil rights era.
My discussion of these representations demonstrates the utility of combining textual, historical, and discourse analysis to illuminate the complex interrelationships among various discrepant historical constructions of Greeks in the United States as ethnic, folk, white, and white ethnic. I begin this discussion by exploring how, in a specific historical moment and in the writings of a specific scholar, the discourse of folklore constituted Greek ethnicity as folkness. The text here is an extract from an ethnographic depiction of a Greek American family by folklorist Richard Dorson. It comprises excerpts from interviews that members of the family granted to the visiting folklorist. These textual fragments stand as a nascent popular ethnography, neither fully fledged nor textually autonomous. But once they are situated in relation to history and discourse—a task that I undertake in detail below—they foreground the idea that folklorists may miss or misrepresent the perspectives of the people they study.
Ethnicity as Folkness? Academic Constructions
Intellectuals and academics function as crucial agents in assigning significance to the culture of common people—their dances and riddles, songs and lullabies, jokes and celebrations. In fact, as John Storey (2003) shows, they have been instrumental in constituting the categories of the “folk” or “popular.” In the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, for example, it was the learned middle class—book editors, collectors, publishers, artists, and academics—who introduced and subsequently valorized the category of folk culture. Such a classification, Storey notes, extracted from the cultural complexity of peasant experiences an idealized version, which it subsequently posited as the authentic core, the essence of the nation. In this enterprise, intellectuals “discovered” the folk, not because ordinary people did not previously exist but because the learned classes attached to them a historically specific meaning as the embodiment of national virtues and used the state apparatus to disseminate it. By stripping peasants of the authority to function as guardians of their own traditions, the educated bourgeoisie assumed “control of folk culture on behalf of the nation” (5). In the context of a nationalist ideology that posited folk culture as an eternal spirit that connected the present with the authentic origins of the nation, such an appropriation enabled the middle class to assume sole guardianship of the national past. The British Folk Song Society, for example, included among its members distinguished artists, academics, and professionals, but it was not a place where one “could expect to meet members of the folk” (122). Peasants could be interviewed and observed, invited to perform and documented, but they were excluded from membership in prestigious institutions established to preserve folk heritage.
The process of peasant folklorization outlined by Storey underscores an issue central to this book, namely how the past is used to promote social and political interests. “The idea of folk culture was a romantic fantasy,” Storey writes, “constructed through denial and distortion. It was a fantasy intended to heal the wounds of the present and safeguard the future by promoting a memory of the past which had little existence outside the intellectual debates of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries” (13). The implications of such cultural engineering were far-reaching. Intellectuals conjured an idealized pastoral folk culture as an “alternative to the rather troublesome specter of the urban-industrial working class” (14). In the context of rapid industrialization and urbanization, the culture of the uneducated masses was seen in terms of a sharp duality. On the one hand, the positively valued folk represented a site of authentic unity and peasant conformity, now threatened by widening class distinctions and labor unrest. On the other hand, the expressive culture of the urban proletariat was stigmatized as vulgar and debased, a potent force that threatened the social order. Such a bifurcation in the meaning of popular culture served as a strategy to discipline the unruly working class. Folk culture, elevated to the status of national heritage, was seen as a pedagogical and political instrument to restore morality and to civilize the masses. It was embraced as a means of creating national unity out of class and cultural disunity. This portrayal of common people, however, bore no resemblance to the rural folk, as it said nothing about the social realities of the peasants. As Charles Keil insisted in his acerbic exchange with Richard Dorson (1978b) regarding the utility of the term “folk,” the process