Contenu du sommaire : L'ethnographie / Grèce

The Ethnographic Text. An Argument. The purpose of this E.R's issue is to identify practices by which ethnographic texts are constructed and to examine recent innovations and criticisms in ethnographic writing. This argument extends the papers and discussions of a seminar which took place last year in Santa Fe, and focused on : the special rhetorics of cross-cultural description, modes of authority and narrative form, the ways oral discourses (including those of fieldwork) are inscribed in representational accounts, the means by which «objects» of description are classified and bounded, changing historical contexts of power and knowledge, disciplinary constraints, the shifting boundaries of ethnography and allied genres such as travel and field diaries, the novel, historical narrative, realist and modernist styles in the social sciences, literature, and cultural criticism. Especially, this argument tries to examine this ethnographic writing workshop and network, if not patchwork, through what we so call a self-ethnography or an ethnography of the modern world and culture.

From Text to Pretext : About Monographs in the European Field. Monographs characterize the output of ethnographic articles about modern societies. When they are handled by «new» ethnologists, they are transformed. Monographs used to ' cover vast territories and set a rigid frame of observation. Nowadays they concentrate upon a tiny field and are unique, singular, personal, qualities that have exposed them to criticism. It is said, for instance, that they are not representative. To deal with this criticism, the researcher must be concerned with totalization at the levels of observation and of analysis. However there are other epistemological problems to which little thought has been given. How is an oral discourse received and transmitted whenever it is produced in a literate society and it serves to write another text ? How can an ethnologist avoid the dual risk that he runs whenever he works in his own society: to talk about himself or to lose his self in a discussion about the Other ?

Transmitting Ethnological Know-How. Can one learn to «write» ethnography ? The answer to this question is sought through a review of the textbooks that are widely used by this discipline in North American universities. These books are of variable worth. Through their diversity, we immediately notice the many styles through which ethnographic information is presented publicly. However the deepest reflexions upon what happens whenever information is transcribed into an ethnographic account is to be found not in these textbooks but in the major «works» of the discipline, such as those by M. Mead or C. Geertz.

On Ethnography Considered as a Fiction. About Conrad and Malinowski. This essay explores the modem predicament of an « ethnographie » subjectivity, a self situated as participant-observer in specific cultural and linguistic systems. The similar experiences of Joseph Conrad and Bronislaw Malinowski — cosmopolitan émigrés struggling into English identities and, as writers, into the English symbolic world — are taken as paradigmatic. The « made up », fictionnal quality of their identities and images of cultural order is pursued through a close comparison of Malinowski's field diary (and Argonauts of the Western Pacific) with Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Present horizons for ethnographic writing are suggested as well as some historical limits on ethnographic irony, the anthropological culture concept, and related notions of language.

Ethnology and Literature : Gaston Lucas, serrurier. Adélaïde Blasquez, a writer, has published the account of the life of one of his neighbors, a locksmith, in the series Terre Humaine (Paris, Pion). This article is about the author's discussions with A. Blasquez during which the following principal points were raised : how to transcribe an oral account and change a dialogue into a monologue ? What power relationship exists between interviewee and interviewer ? Given the way this unique account has been put together without being submitted to any analysis, is it to be taken as a scientific study or as a literary work ?

Fantasia in the Library. Representations are social facts: Modernity and Postmodernity in Anthropology. Beginning with a detailed critique of J. Clifford's essay On Ethnographic Authority, the author moved toward a rejection of any kind of « textualist meta-anthropology », however dialogical or polyphonic its emphases. While he acknowledges the critical, genealogical importance of making visible the tropes of ethnographic writing, the author doubts the adequacy of esthetic or literary approaches to do more than analyze a crisis in representation. They cannot effectively generate social diagnosis or political solutions. He directs attention toward concrete, institutional analyses of the dynamics of interpretative communities. If power relations between ethnographers and the people with whom they work are now more visible, the micro-relations among the anthropological interpretative community have been less well studied. This general emphasis, which is explored at length, suggests the need for another approach focusing on the sociology of science and the institutional history of discursive formations.

Pandora, the Jar and Hope. What is the meaning of Pandora's first gesture, the opening of the jar, in Hesiod's two poems, Theogony and Works and Days ? The Utopia of the Golden Age vanished, and the degradation — sickness and toil — of the Iron Age began with the first woman. Why was a jar used as an image ? For a farmer poet like Hesiod, it was a way to express to two functions of Panfora's belly: its voracity for food and its appetite for sex. This image has its roots in the use of the jar in relation to the seed (spérma). Hope, imprisoned in Pandora's belly, is, if Zeus wills, the promised child.

The Wager of Yannis and the Sun. The theme of the wager of Yannis and the sun, which has often been confused with scenes of oppression during the Turkish period, does exist in a pure form. In this case, the wager is not only a mortan man's overweening act. In neo-Hellenic mythology, as in others, the sun is a « psychopomp murderer » (Eliade), very much like Charos. The song about the wager is an original form of the theme about the fight between Digenis and Charos. The valences have been reversed: the psychopomp is solar whereas Yannis (Digenis) is chthonian. However the characteristics of Digenis and Charos often reverse and overlap. The solar nature of Digenis comes from his predecessor in popular Greek accounts, namely Alexander the Great, the solar hero par excellence. The song of Yannis proves the vitality of the sun cult, as do modern poets such as O. Elytis and A. Embiricos. This song and those from the Digenis cycle are purely mythical and have nothing to do with the Acrites. Nevertheless, the meaning of the wager has been forgotten. The scenes of oppression mainly have an etiological value. Since the 13th century, popular poets have used history to explain any incomprehensible ill.

The Dead Brother's Journey, or the Marriage that Kills. Maniot variants, collected in South Peloponnisos, are contrasted with other Balkan versions, whether Greek or not, of a legend that has spread over many areas in southeastern Europe. This comparison provides new evidence of a specific ethnic fantasy that, according to the results of previous field work by the author, locally characterizes (at any rate by its intensity and recurrence) traditional Maniot culture. These variant tales express the very strong tensions produced by dangerous marital alliances between groups who still oppose each other, openly or latently, as in the extreme case of the famous Maniot blood feuds.

Love, Marriage and Magic in Neo-Hellenic Literature at the Turn of the Century. The themes of love, marriage and magic are studied in four pieces of neo-Hellenic literature from between 1890 and 1910. An analysis both of the narrative structures and of the relationship between the real and fictive statuses of heroes leads to a sociological interpretation of Greece at the beginning of the century. The type of representation tends to bring to mind European influences whereas a critical understanding of social reality through these writings tends to constitute one of the dominant aspects of Greek realism. By combining these two tendencies, the neo-Hellenic novel set out on the way to modernization. At the same time, it plunges the reader into a critical relationship with sociopolitical reality.

Questions about Vampirism. Travel accounts from the 17th century, which sketched a detailed picture of vampirism out of information from South Greece emphasized religious aspects while neglecting one of the most important (if not the essential) definitory traits : proximity. The complicated nature of this trait, which native beliefs expressed especially but not exclusively through spacial metaphors, is reexamined. Given the oppositions that constitute the vampiric nature — oppositions borrowed from oral literature, rituals and commentaries — we can grasp the qualitative importance of the various social groups that beliefs bring into play. The belief in vampires «talks» about social violence in terms such that the negative character of the violence never be absolute.

Social Banditry and the Pastoral Imagination in Greece (from the 19th to the Early 20th Century). Social banditry continued the long tradition, from the Ottoman period, of the clephtes and armatoles. Like these, its ambition was to obtain hegemony but over local areas and not over the whole of continental Greece. From the founding of the Greek state to the early 20th century, social banditry came to embody two conflicts. In the one between the logic of the centralizing state and the ancient order of communal autonomy, the bandit leader became the legitimate defender of the latter owing to the solidity of his local base, his hoplitic power and his renown, which came from his role in irredent movements till after the First World War and from his image as a renderer of justice among the masses of oppressed peasants. The second conflict set transhumant agro-pastoral societies — the best recruiting grounds for banditry and also the best host community — at odds with large landowners or with public authorities about access to pastures and national land reserves. The agro-pastoral world was linked to banditry by several functional complementarities and structural homologies that could be seen in terms of ways of life, the relationship to space, the cultural as well as moral practices, and the principles of internal organization. The pastoral imaginary realm found expression through several saracatsan songs about the fore- mentioned conflicts as well as through the social values that shepherds and bandits shared.