In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine 0691029687, 0691029679, 9780691029672, 9781400884414

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In a Different Place

PRINCETON MODERN GREEK STUDIES This series is sponsored by the Princeton University Program in Hellenic Studies under the auspices of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund. Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement by Loring M. Danforth Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit by Peter Bien Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece by jane K. Cowan Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses edited and translated by Edmund Keeley Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece edited by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town by Michael Herzfeld Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture by Charles Stewart The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Paschalis M. Kitromilides C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; edited by George Savidis The Fourth Dimension by Yannis Ritsos. Peter Green and Beverly Bardsley, translators George Seferis: Collected Poems, Revised Edition translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine by ]ill Dub is eh

In a Different Place PILGRIMAGE, GENDER, AND POLITICS AT A GREEK ISLAND SHRINE

]ill Dubisch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright© 1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dubisch, Jill, 1943ln a different place : pilgrimage, gender, and politics at a Greek island shrine I ]ill Dubisch. p. cm. - (Princeton modern Greek studies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-691-02968-7 -ISBN 0-691-02967-9 (pbk.) 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint-Cult-Greece-Tinos Island. 2. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages-Greece-Tinos Island. 3. Hieros Naos Euangelistrias (Tinos Island, Greece). 4. Tinos Island (Greece)-Sociallife and customs. I. Title. 11. Series. BT660.T48D83 1995 306.6'6304249585-dc20 94-39673 CIP Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Princeton Committee on Hellenic Studies This book has been composed in Sabon Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (Pbk.)

In Loving Memory of Vasiliki Tze She took two strangers into her life and made them ''otxot r:rJ~,,

We see the world not as it is but as we are. -Talmud

Contents

List of Plates Acknowledgments A Note on Transliteration

XI

xiii XV

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

3

CHAPTER Two

The Pilgrim and the Anthropologist

20

CHAPTER THREE

The Anthropological Study of Pilgrimage

34

CHAPTER FouR

Observing Pilgrimage: Churches, Icons, and the Devil

49

CHAPTER FIVE

Pilgrimage Observed: The Journey and the Vow

76

CHAPTER SIX

The Observer Observed

101

CHAPTER SEVEN

An Island in Space, an Island In Time

120

CHAPTER EIGHT

Writing the Story/History of the Church: The Panayia and the Nun

134

CHAPTER NINE

Of Nations and Foreigners, Miracles and Texts

156

CHAPTER TEN

Women, Performance, and Pilgrimage: Beyond Honor and Shame

193

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Virgin Mary and the Body Politic

229

CHAPTER TWELVE

Epilogue: In a Different Place

250

Notes

259

References Cited

287

Index

309

Plates

1. Pilgrims lining up on the steps at the Church of the Annunciation, waiting their turn to enter the chapel

27

2. A small roadside shrine dedicated to the Panayfa

63

3. The miraculous icon of the Annunciation, housed in an elaborate icon stand and covered with offerings

70

4. Pilgrims line up in the main street on the Day of the Annunciation, waiting for the icon to pass over them

71

5. Pilgrims on their knees ascending the steps to the church

77

6. Women fulfilling vows by ascending to the church on their knees. The standing woman carries lambddhes

85

7. A stand displaying tdmata, lambadhes, and bottles for holy water

88

8. Gypsy pilgrims with sheep and lambddhes

92

9. St. Pelayia. Icon in her chapel at the Church of the Annunciation

152

10. The icon carried in procession on the Day of the Annunciation (August 15)

171

11. A poster depicting a jet flying over Tinos and proclaiming August 15 as the Day of Military Strength

171

12. Mausoleum below the main sanctuary of the church, commemorating the sinking of the Elli

172

13. Some of the many votive offerings in the shape of ships

176

14. Official ritual: Gypsy children watch the procession of the icon with its military accompaniment

222

Acknowledgments

TliiS BOOK has been many years in the making, and during its long evolu~ tion I have had invaluable assistance from numerous friends and colleagues. I would first like to thank Ray Michalowski for his constant encouragement and for his intellectual and psychological support in all phases of my research and writing. It is not always easy living with someone who is working on a book-or living apart from someone who is doing fieldwork-but his support has been constant and unflagging. I would also like to thank my friends from Tinos: "Marina," "Marcos" and "Eleni," "Nikos," and all the others who gave me their time and their friendship and let me intrude into their lives. I am also grateful to the many pilgrims whom I observed, and to whom I spoke, for making this book possible. A number of friends in Athens also played a part in developing my ideas and giving me insights through conversations, observations, and critiques, among them Akis Papataxiarchis, Deanna Trakas, Rorn Gudas, Manos Anglias, and Marina Iossafides. I also wish to thank Mari Clark for letting me visit "her" village to speak to people there who had been to Tinos. Others whose insights and company proved valuable include Peter Alien, Ken and Ellen Robertson, and Tom Weisner. I am also grateful to George Moutafis and Vasiliki Galani-Moutafi, whom I visited on Mitilini, for their hospitality and for their help with my research there, as well as to various faculty and students at the University of the Aegean for a number of stimulating conversations that helped to spark my own thinking. I also owe a great deal to the Women's Studies Program and the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW) at the University of Arizona for awarding me a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, which allowed me to spend the academic year 1988-89 at the university and to begin work on my book. It is difficult to imagine that I could have completed this work without the "jump-start" that this stimulating year provided. In addition to the Rockefeller Fellowship, I have also received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Northern Arizona University for the various trips to Greece upon which much of this research has been based. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their many helpful comments and corrections, as well as those who

XIV

·

Acknowledgments

read various drafts of chapters in progress, including Peter Loizos, Michael Herzfeld, Mari Clark, Susan Phillips, and Liz Kennedy. And finally, I would like to thank Julia Clebsch, graduate assistant and friend, for her tireless pursuit of articles and interlibrary loans, as well as her proofreading, photocopying, and bibliography work. Without her efforts, this book would undoubtedly still be in manuscript.

A Note on Transliteration

THERE IS no single system of transliteration that is accepted by all scholars of modern Greek, and the system I have employed here will certainly not please everyone. My aim, however, has been to present Greek terms in such a way that they may be pronounced reasonably correctly by non-Greek speakers while at the same time be recognizable to those familiar with the Greek language. To that end, I have employed forms with which not everyone would agree, and which, moreover, are not always entirely consistent (in those cases in which consistency would not lead to the best pronunciation by English speakers). Several notes about specific transliterations: I have used dh for the Greek 8 (pronounced like the th in the). I have also used kh in certain situations for the Greek x, but only when this seemed to provide the best rendering into English phonology. In cases in which the Greek word already has a common transliteration into English, I have generally kept that form to avoid confusion. Hence, while I have rendered the name of the island on which I did research as Tinos (rather than Tenos, a form found mostly in older writings about the island), I have used the more common English forms for places with which English speakers may be more familiar: hence Mykonos (rather than Mikonos), Delos (rather than Dhilos), Aegina (rather than Ayina). In addition, when the name of a specific person has been transliterated from the Greek (as in the case of a Greek author whose work has been written in, or translated into, English), I have used the form employed instead of following my own system (e.g., Kharitonidou rather than Haritonidhou). In cases in which I have done the transliteration myself, however, I have been consistent with my own system. And finally, any transliterations found in direct quotes have been left in the form in which the author has rendered them.

In a Different Place

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

THIS BOOK rs, first of all, a book about a pilgrimage site, the Church of the Madonna of the Annunciation (Evangelistria) on the Aegean island of Tinos, Greece, where I have been conducting research since 1986.1 My account, however, is more than a simple ethnographic description. Indeed, in the context of contemporary anthropology, one would be hard put to maintain that any ethnographic description is ever really simpleor that any ethnography can be simply description. Acknowledging this, I seek here to experiment with several types of what might be termed "ethnographic exploration" in order to pursue the aims I have in writing this book. First among these aims is the presentation and interpretation of the material on pilgrimage I have collected in the course of my research. This task-at first a seemingly straightforward one-has become, in the course of my writing, increasingly complex. This complexity is in part inherent in the subject matter I have chosen, that is, the topic of pilgrimage itself. But it is also the result of current intellectual challenges within anthropology and of developments in my own thinking, both of which in turn have influenced my relationship to the material with which I have been working. This leads to my second goal, which is to explore certain facets of my own experience as a "participant observer." This exploration includes not only an examination of my experiences "in the field" but also a consideration of certain elements of my biography that are relevant both to my choice of study and to my theoretical perspective and that have affected my responses to the fieldwork "encounter." Gender is one such important biographical element that has shaped my work, but there are others as well, including my previous fieldwork experience and my personal experience with chronic pain. In exploring the impact of these elements on my work, I draw on current anthropological debates about reflexivity and about the necessity for understanding the anthropologist's place in relation to those whom she studies, especially in a postcolonial (and postmodern) world. As Myerhoff and Ruby put it, "to be reflexive is to be selfconscious and also aware of the aspects of self necessary to reveal to an audience so that it can understand both the process employed and the resultant product" (1982:6). I will consider the dimension of gender relevant in two domains of anthropological experience, to being "in the

4

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Chapter One

field" in the sense of research among people of another culture and to being "in the field" in the sense of working within the field of anthropology itself. Gender, "the field," and considerations of self and other, are in turn related to a third area I seek to explore: the forms and process of ethnographic writing, and, beyond that, the act of writing itself. This is a topic that has received a good deal of critical attention recently in anthropology. Rather than being viewed as a "transparent" medium that simply "describes" another culture, ethnographic writing has come to be recognized as a literary genre with its own techniques for establishing authenticity and authority. 2 The deconstruction of anthropological writing has led some anthropologists to experiment with new forms of ethnography that seek to break with former conventions and assumptions. In my writing I have attempted to move away from the sort of "realist" account of "objective" facts recorded by an omniscient and invisible observer that was the characteristic mode of much of "traditional" ethnography (a mode still dominant when I began my career in anthropology). Instead I punctuate my account with analyses of my own writing as I experiment with different modes of presentation for different ethnographic purposes.3 In addition, I seek to analyze the significance of writing in the relationship between the anthropologist and the people she encounters, and to use different forms of writing to subvert the normal anthropological presentation of that relationship.4 SELF-CONSCIOUS EXPERIMENTATION AND NECESSARY UNCERTAINTY

My experiments with ethnographic forms introduce an element of uncertainty, or at least indeterminacy, at various points in my account as I move through different modes of writing and through a range of different perspectives. Such indeterminacy is not unique, of course, to my account but is common to many "experimental" ethnographies. Nor should such a mode of writing be seen as a completely radical break with past ethnography. Debates over whether anthropology is humanistic or scientific, and over whether or not anthropology can be truly objective, have a long history in the discipline and prefigure the current postmodern critiques (Caplan 1988:8). And the technique of combining "objective" description with personal narrative is also not an entirely new one but rather may be inevitable in anthropology "because it mediates a contradiction within the discipline between personal and scientific authority," a contradiction that may be inherent in fieldwork (Pratt 1986:32). In addition, the blurring of boundaries that is taken as emblematic of postmodernism (see Pool1991:313) may also be seen to some extent as inherent in anthropology insofar as "participant observation or fieldwork blurs the bounda-

Introduction

· 5

ries of the personal and professional, between subject and object" (Hondganeu-Sotelo 1988:611). Or as Hastrup puts it, "Fieldwork is situated between autobiography and anthropology. It connects an important personal experience with a general field of knowledge" (Hastrup 1992a: 117; see also Okely 1992). What distinguishes the current experiments in ethnographic writing, however, is the deliberate questioning of the necessity to maintain boundaries between different modes of writing, and between the perspectives they represent, within the ethnographic account itself. No longer is the personal inevitably isolated within an introduction describing the "conditions of fieldwork," but rather the "I" of the anthropologist tends to wander freely throughout the ethnographic narrative, blurring the boundary between "personal" and "objective" and reflecting a greater self-consciousness about the anthropologist's own position vis-a-vis those of the culture being studied."S Boundaries also may be blurred in other ways within these "experimental" ethnographies. One such blurring occurs in the freer movement between different realms of experience and different times and events within the ethnographic narrative structure. Such a method challenges the "traditional" form of the ethnography, a form that has generally been determined by a conventional set of assumptions regarding the ordering of material. 6 Some argue that such a break with conventional narrative structure is a better method of doing anthropology generally. Renato Rosaldo, for example, suggests that "social analysts should explore their subjects from a number of positions, rather than being locked into any particular one" (1989: 169). Part of the stimulus for employing such multiple positions in my own narrative was the subject of pilgrimage itself, a subject that continually challenged conventional ethnographic narrative structure and the ways in which fieldwork is carried out. I found that I required a variety of strategies in order to arrive at any sort of understanding of, or feeling for, that which I was studying, whether it was the experiences of pilgrims, the politics of pilgrimage, my own reactions to pilgrimage, or the notion of history as embodied in a pilgrimage shrine. In addition to seeking to break with conventional narrative forms, many contemporary ethnographies reflect a certain self-consciousness about the act of writing. Among the ways in which this may be manifested is in the deliberate use (and self-conscious acknowledgment) of literary tropes, as well as in the manipulation of a variety of writing styles. Again reflecting the postmodern breaking down of disciplinary (and other) boundaries, inspiration for these new forms of writing is often drawn from other disciplines, especially literature (Fernandez 1986), and sometimes from the cultures being studied (e.g., Herzfeld 1985). Thus in

6

·

Chapter One

addition to seeing pilgrimage itself as metaphoric, I have used, among other metaphors, those of text (chapter 9) and performance (chapter 10). These are part of my own "persuasions and performances" (Fernandez 1986), part of my mode of argumentation to the reader of my narrative. Indeed this introduction serves to prepare the reader for what follows by using some of the devices (such as movement back and forth from the personal and experimental to the theoretical) that will be used in the chapters that follow. Thus this chapter serves as a "frame" (in Bateson and Goffman's sense), telling the reader how to think about what follows (Birth 1990; Turner 1988). Although the account that results from these efforts has at times a highly personal dimension, the result is not intended as autobiography 7 or confessional but rather as an elucidation of the relationship between the anthropologist and the field situation on the one hand, and the anthropologist's relationship to the theory and practice of anthropology on the other. Both of these relationships affect our understanding and portrayal of other peoples. In this respect my approach can be deemed "interpretive," insofar as interpretive anthropology, according to Marcus and Fischer, "operates on two levels simultaneously: it provides accounts of other worlds from the inside, and reflects about the epistemological groundings of such accounts" (1986:26). 8 At the same time, I am aware of some of the problems inherent in all forms of generalizing, including interpretive generalizing about meaning, and of the ways in which generalizations constitute "part of a professional discourse of 'objectivity' and expertise" and are "inevitably a language of power" (Abu-Lughod 1990:150). As part of the blurring of boundaries, and because I believe that emotions can be a valuable source of insight in the practice of anthropology (seeR. Rosaldo 1989:172), and that "the personal is theoretical" (Okely 1992:9), I have sought to use emotion-both my own and others'-in my narrative. Thus I have not isolated my own responses and experiences from other kinds of "data," but rather have sought to integrate them in a way that I hope will allow them to serve as a "window" for the reader as well as a pathway to theoretical insights. Such an approach gives fieldwork itself a central place in the development of anthropological theory. As Okely has pointed out, "The fieldwork experience is totalising and draws on the whole being. [But] it has not been theorised because it has been trivialized as the 'collection of data' by a dehumanised machine" (1992:3). In addition, because one of the aims of the experimental ethnography is to break down, at least to some extent, the distance between the observer and observed, my own placement at the scene-to use another metaphor-may help the reader vicariously to play a role in the drama as well.

Introduction · 7 "UNBOUNDING" THE PILGRIMAGE SITE

All of my experiments, however, are ultimately directed toward the goal of presenting to the reader a place and a way of life as experienced in the particular set of activities that cluster around a pilgrimage site. 9 This site is, in turn, a vehicle that I use for seeking to understand larger social, cultural, and political processes within contemporary Greek life, for no study of pilgrimage can ever be just about a particular pilgrimage "site." The site can be understood only as a setting for a wide range of behaviors, embodying multiple meanings and goals, and as both a part and a manifestation of many other aspects of a society-historical, social, political, economic, and religious. To some extent, of course, this is true of any anthropological field site. Indeed, as Clifford notes, in the contemporary world, with its complex political and historical relations, "'the field' becomes more and more evidently an ideal construct" (1990:64). But the difficulties of delineating "the field" are particularly evident in the study of a pilgrimage shrine such as the Church of the Annunciation of Tinos. Both the pilgrims and, to some extent, those who serve them are a shifting population of diverse origins, participating in a repeated yet at the same time highly varied series of events. These events take place within a particular local context, but also within the context of a national-and international-religious tradition, and in a political environment that is both reflected in and shaped by events that occur at the place of pilgrimage. Because all of this makes it exceedingly difficult to draw boundaries around "the field," I have used a variety of sources in addition to my own firsthand observations at the Church of the Annunciation. These sources include my earlier fieldwork in a more "traditional" village setting on the same island (see chapter 2), visits I have made to churches and pilgrimage sites in other areas of Greece, conversations with Greeks about Tinos and religion that occurred in a variety of settings (including a bar in Athens) 1 0 and not just in "the field," and the writings of numerous other anthropologists who have worked in Greece and elsewhere. In addition, I have drawn-perhaps somewhat eclectically-on a variety of other materials, particularly materials in Greek, including "local" writings on history and religion. Thus this book, although stemming from fieldwork done at a particular place, is more broadly "about" Greece and Greeks-or at least about certain facets of Greek society, history, religion, and world view. And perhaps more important, it is also about "Greekness," the frequently contested process of its definition, and its significance for particular individuals and groups within present-day national religious and political discourse. This book is hardly unique in drawing on ~uch a range of material, nor

8

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Chapter One

do I claim it to be. We are past the days when anthropologists could describe small communities as if they formed self-contained units for analysis. Indeed the best ethnographies today are no longer ethnographies in the local, narrow sense often exhibited by conventional ethnographies of the past. Several recent anthropological works on Greece illustrate this quite clearly. Loring Danforth's Firewalking and Religious Healing (1989), Jane Cowan's Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (1990), C. Nadia Seremetakis's The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (1991), and Michael Herzfeld's A Place in History (1991) all describe the complex interactions between the local, national, and even international dimensions of social life and ideology in Greece, while at the same time offering vivid and dynamic portraits of particular communities. The pilgrimage site that is the focus of my study thus serves as a means for exploring a number of topics-including religion, gender, performance, and the nature of Greekness-as well as a means of examining issues of anthropological fieldwork, reflexivity, the nature of anthropological writing, and intimately connected to all of these, issues of being both a woman and an anthropologist. The topics I have chosen and my approach to them reflect the influence of two major intellectual currents of our time: postmodernism and feminism. FEMINIST ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND POSTMODERN FEMINISTS

The term postmodern has a number of different meanings, perhaps almost as many as there are postmodernists. 11 Micaela di Leonardo suggests that "postmodernism" can have at least three different referents. One can speak simply of a "postmodern era" as a descriptive term for the current period in which postmodernism's challenge to the assumptions of modernity has been an important intellectual force. Or postmodern can refer to a "research stance, a set of tools for ground-breaking, perspective altering work." Or it can refer to an intellectual approach that seeks "to destabilize received conceptions of science, order, society, and the self" (di Leonardo 1991:24). In the first sense contemporary anthropology is of necessity postmodern insofar as it is practiced in a postmodern world. An anthropology that is postmodern in the second two senses, however, reflects at least a degree of commitment to a self-conscious and critical perspective, which, among other things, questions the neutrality and objectivity of science (indeed of all forms of knowledge), the universality of reason and "truth," the transparency of language, and the existence of a coherent stable self (Flax 1987:624-25), as well as the rejection of "metanarratives." Postmodernism also seeks to dissolve disciplinary and other boundaries, which may account in part for postmodern anthro-

Introduction · 9 pologists' renewed interest in fieldwork and the fieldwork experience, an area in which boundaries are inherently blurred. Although a number of anthropologists have critiqued postmodernism, especially for its antiscience stance and its presumed abdication from political struggle, 12 postmodernism has had a significant impact on both the theory and practice of the discipline. At the very least, it has become increasingly difficult for anthropologists to write in a manner that unselfconsciously assumes that all that is necessary in an ethnography is an exposition of anthropological "facts" objectively gathered and presented by a self-effacing observer. Even if one still believes this to be possible, it is a stance to be defended rather than assumed. Postmodernism, then, has demanded that a more critical eye be cast by anthropologists upon what we do and how we do it, and even postmodernism's opponents feel compelled to speak to at least some of its arguments. Feminism is the other intellectual current affecting anthropology that has been influential in my work in a variety of ways, including both my choice of issues for study and my critique of anthropology. Yet the relationships between feminism and anthropology on the one hand, and feminism and postmodernism on the other, have not been entirely comfortable ones. There are those who maintain that feminism is inherently postmodernist in its