4'Law" and "Custom": Ethnography o/*and in Greek National Identity1 Michael Herzfeld "LAW" AND "CUSTOM" AS IDEOLOGICAL SYMBOLS The conceptual opposition between law and custom has played an important role in the creation of sociocultural stereotypes of rural Greek society. Various segments of the ruling classes used it to create a sharp categorical distinction between their own social values and those of the rural population. They bracketed "law" and "custom" in what anthropologists technically call a "binary symbolic opposition " (e.g., Needham 1973; 1979). They used it, as they generally used the evidence of archaism in rural culture (cf. Danforth 1984), not only to reclaim the antiquity of the entire Greek people before the rest of the world, but also internally to establish a conceptual distance between "them" (the simple country folk who made up the vast majority of the national population) and "us" (the élite). In accordance with this strategy, they presented the "customs" of the rural folk as both archaic enough to justify their deployment in ethnological support of the official cultural ideology of neoclassicism, and outmoded enough to justify their administrative replacement in legal practice. They thus placed "custom" (or even "legal custom" [e.g., Mikhailidhis-Nouaros 1926]) on a pedestal where it not only could not threaten the rule of "law", but where, through an ironic twist of discourse, it served to reinforce the ideological basis of codified law. As a consequence of this double-edged attitude, some of what intellectuals and politicians regarded as the greatest testimony to rural "backwardness"—notably the progressive fragmentation of landholdings in transmission from each generation to the next—was allowed to persist with the least degree of alteration. The resulting literature is thus a discourse that encodes the ideological presuppositions of its authors, and suggests possible explana1I would like to thank Ernestine Friedl, Gregory Jusdanis, and Vassilis Lambropoulos for their critical comments on an earlier draft of this article. 167 168 Michael Herzfeld tions for present conditions. Through a semiotic treatment of that discourse—essentially by "decoding" it—we may be able to move beyond aridly nominalistic wrangling about the "correct" definition of the terms in question, and to examine instead how they were used rhetorically to promote a particular, politically dominant ideology of social control that materially affected the actual conditions under which people lived. My aims in this article are to some extent programmatic ; in addition to documenting the ideological underpinnings of the rhetoric, I suggest that these underpinnings have had material and social effects that deserve more detailed and critical research . The fulcrum on which the relationship between ideological rhetoric and social experience balances is that of identity, and more specifically that of the ways in which national leaders and villagers respectively fit the cultural values of the local community to nationalistic concepts of Greekness. Modern Greece is caught between conflicting ideologies that define the national culture as both belonging to and excluded from "Europe." The early folklorists attempted to define Greek culture as "European", thereby conceptually reproducing in cultural terms the political subordination of the rural population to an élite that was in turn beholden to Great Power domination. Later writers proposed an alternative viewpoint, one that subordinated the claims of neo-classicism to a more intimate concern with modern Greek culture. Filtered back to village society by teachers and priests, these debates generated a good deal of interest in cultural origins there also. The ambiguity of national identity is evident in the way in which people use the term Evropi as an evaluative term that variously includes and excludes Greece, according to the speakers' ideological persuasions and the exigencies of the conversational context. Models of social and economic behavior that appear in the early ethnographic literature, as well as in the everyday speech of rural Greeks, include concepts of individualism, self-regard, and mutual aid (αλ- ληλοβοήθεια), and it is these concepts that have played an especially prominent role in the unceasing search for a balance between the respective dictates of "law" and "custom". They are not objective representations of social actuality, but are themselves artifacts of the dialectic between competing stereotypes of Greekness. In everyday usage, no distinction is made between "custom" and "habit...
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Oct 1, 2014
Iwona Anna Ndiayea + 1
Open Access
