Eλληνική Λαογραφία. Κοινωνική Συγκρότηση (review)

Abstract

Reviews 283 ing valuable insights—sometimes his own and sometimes those from General Markos. It is a work of which historians of modern Greece should take notice. John V. A. Fine jr. University of Michigan Mihalis G. Meraklis, Ελληνική Λαογϕαφία. Κοινωνική Συγκϕότηση. Athina: Odysseas. 1984. Pp. 167. This book by Mihalis Meraklis, Professor of Folklore at the University of Ioannina, comes attractively packaged. The cover picture portrays a group of men sitting on chairs outside a kafem'on. The photograph is in black and white and has an antique feel. Is it the Athens of the thirties teaming with refugees and shady underworld manges? Or is it the Athens of yesterday? Difficult to say. In any case the photograph depicts urban romaiosyni. Cities in modern Greece have a short enough history, but this, if anything, is their look. One's eyes brighten in the expectation that Meraklis will analyze urban culture , a welcome departure for the staid field of Greek folklore which normally has a decisively rural focus. Below this picture is the title. "Greek Folklore" is unassuming enough, but the subtitle, "Social Gathering/Grouping," pulls one up short. The word synkrotisi is something of a red herring and it is difficult to match it with a corresponding English term. Perhaps "coordination" would be the best rendering. Nonetheless, it is suggestive of a social sciences methodology , another innovation. In the Introduction, Meraklis presents this book as only the first of a projected three volumes. The others, one on folk art and one on folk customs will follow shortly. He expresses the view that the "folk" should not be taken as just the rural peasantry, but as inclusive of all social classes. This is an extremely important step for folklorists to take considering the astonishing shift of population to cities in the last 20 years and besides, most of what was worth recording folklorically has already been collected from the villages. The way forward is to study urban phenomena and to describe and account for social change. He also espouses a social-historical approach which would explain (apparently strange) customs not as evidence of "survivals " but rather as the necessary offshoots of larger socio-economic structures which evolve over time (p. 120-21). His analysis of tsiflikia and then early cooperatives and their prohibition is interesting and incisive in this light. The development 284 Reviews from pre-capitalist to capitalist socio-economic structures happened at a stroke around the turn of the century and the reader is encouraged to grasp this as the transformation of a structure rather than as isolated events. Unfortunately the volume has no explicit, guiding hypothesis. The six chapters—Physical Space, Urban Development, Family, Wider Groups, Management, Production and Use of Goods—jostle uneasily next to one another and the presentation of the various themes is uneven. The discussion of population shifts, for example, mentions a few statistics on emigration and then reproduces a citation describing the Sunday goings-on at a rail station in some German Hauptstadt. In the second chapter long sections on squares, markets and graveyards serve to tell us, in the end, that these are places where people see one another. And the section on public baths remains a total mystery. Granted that such places have dropped from importance in present-day Greece, it remains to say at what cost and with what they have been compensated. In these instances Meraklis simply veers away from any analysis of the current situation in cities (or anywhere for that matter) and does exactly what he did not want to do: discuss the past without connecting it to anything in the present. There is no one overarching subject of Elliniki LaografÃ-a. It is neither wholly about urban Greece nor about rural Greece nor about the change from one to the other. One is presented instead with a series of pastiches and exposés, often of other scholars' material, and the book meanders as a series of diatribes and kouventes. All references are carefully cited at length in a section of notes which is roughly half as long as the main text. The author advises us to regard these notes as if they were a second book deserving of a...