The Irony of Stereotypes: Toward an Anthropology of Ethnicity

Abstract

"Greek" is a ubiquitous stereotype in the discourse of Greek Americans. They know "Greek" reflects on themselves, though they are sometimes puzzled by the "Greek" component of their identities. Constructing these identities is problematic for them principally because there is no single "Greek" identity. "Greek" is refracted by various images and tropes, or figures of speech, each operating in different structural settings. My argument here is that this simple observation about tropes in American talk about ethnicity opens up a new way to think about ethnicity in the United States. My aim is to pose the problem of ethnicity at home in radically cultural terms. My examination of the operations of one trope-irony-on ethnic stereotypes in Greek American talk leads me to suggest that an anthropology of ethnicity must take note of irony and, more, may use it to make a new beginning in the analysis of systems of meaning. Ethnicity belongs to that assortment of cultural operators (Boon 1973) with which anthropology has made distinctive contributions among the social sciences and humanities to understanding social life: the rendering of complex cultural processes as cultural (rather than psychological or economic). This anthropological collection houses les pensees sauvage of tricksters (Beidelman 1980), totemism (L6vi-Strauss 1963, 1966), animal categories and verbal abuse (Leach 1964), food (Douglas 1975; Feeley-Harik 1981), rites of affliction (Turner 1968), and more. However, since they are not exotic, each is a worker that engages the fundamental and fundamentally social tasks of fitting the categorical around the situational. All are transformers in cultures-hence they are moral, as emphasized by social anthropologists-and rendering their powers makes the theoretical enterprise of anthropology worthwhile. But the lessons of the cultural operations of ethnicity abroad have never been brought home. Drummond (1980), for example, observed that a "creole" ethnic intersystem is not a static structure, but variant possibilities connected by transformations in a continuum. The inconsistencies and contradictions in everyday use of ethnic and racial categories in Guyana are products of shifting within a continuum. He writes, "Internal variation and change are methodologically and