Performative Categories and Symbols of Passage in Rural Greece

Abstract

THE GREEK PATRIOT-SCHOLAR Spyridon Zambelios (?1813-1881) published a lengthy disquisition in 1859 on the origins of the demotic Greek word traghudho.1 This term is usually glossed as I sing, although the inadequacy of that translation will become all too evident in the present essay. Zambelios' treatise, which was presented as an attempt to establish ancient roots for modern usage, was not conceived as a purely disinterested work of scholarship. It combined a passionate ideological commitment to proving the Hellenic roots of modern Greece with the more personal goal of scoring points off the demoticist poet (and Zambelios' former friend) Dionisios Solomos. Its scholarly significance nevertheless transcends such particular disputes. As the first discussion of an indigenous performative genre and its terminology to appear in Greece, it remained unique beyond the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it represents one of the earliest studies of vernacular genre classification to appear anywhere in modern scholarship. Zambelios argued, not inaccurately, that traghudho was a derivative of the Classical Greek tragodia, tragedy. In a much more speculative vein, he further contended that this etymological relationship could only be explained as the surface effect of an indestructible historical fact: that the songs of the modern Greeks retained the spirit and essence of Attic Tragedy. As evidence of