Researching Ekina ta Khronia [Times Past] in a Rural Greek Community

Abstract

This contribution addresses recent reconsiderations of the work of ethnographers working with regional archaeological surveys in Greece. It discusses the relationship of oral histories to historical documents as representations of the past, in the context of long-term ethnographic and archaeological research on the peninsula of Methana in the Peloponnese. It investigates the historicity of oral stories as genuine rememberings of life in the past, arguing that while recent studies have focused on how people remember, there is also value in exploring what they remember and the sorts of pasts represented. Recent publications emphasizing that the classical past and its monuments represent crucial cultural and symbolic capital resources for Greeks, present largely the views of the urbanized middle classes and intellectuals engaging with non-Greeks in presenting Greece's specialness in an increasingly culturally homogenized world. Methanites, excluded from such privileged positions and traditionally denigrated by Greeks closer to the centres of power, see their past(s) in a very different way. The pasts of this marginalized rural community incorporate many of the details of traditional agriculture commented upon unfavourably by critics of village ethnographies that were conducted in the context of regional survey.