Carrette’s questions over the absence of content in the practices investigated by Foucault, particularly about Christianity, echoes Robbin’s recent questions over the general distinction anthropologists make between form and content to overemphasize form above content. In reference to Comaroffs’ work on missionaries in South Africa in the 19th century (1991, 1997), Robbins argued that: ‘by defining Christianity as content […] the Comaroffs decidedly direct attention away from it […] in terms of which Christianity can never be cultural’ (Robbins 2007: 8). The general lack of attention to the impact of Christian thought in daily life in terms of its meaning, which was observed by several writers (Robbins 2003: 192, Cannell 2006: 8, and Coleman 2008: 41, among others) is further illustrated by the general lack of ethnographies coming from Christian monasteries. The latter were also conceived as separated but also familiar worlds, perceived as if they are institutions unchanged by time:
Ethnographies have said little about monastic life, partly, we suspect, because the convents and monasteries are removed from the communities they study. The institution’s absence” from village life, owing its physical distance from it, has meant that its conceptual importance has gone relatively unremarked
(Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991:16)
The absence of ethnographies focusing on both Christianity, and Christian monasteries, is especially evident in the area of the Mediterranean in which ‘village communities’ were presented as if they were separated from the real world. Isolation is a pre- condition of ideals of purity. Du Boulay in her ethnography of a Greek ‘mountain village’ noted that the structure of her book ‘represents on the whole a static pattern which is based on respect of traditional knowledge and an unquestionable acceptance’ (1974: 257). Consequently, any changes in the structures of the ‘traditional’
communities were seen as ‘a threat to the security of traditional thinking’: ‘all the pressures and attractions of the modern world have combined to undermine the villager at what is now his weakest point –his lack of understanding why’ (Ibid). Such a
conclusion inevitably raises questions of agency, historicity, and moral dilemmas regarding the changes taking place in ‘village life’, such as the introduction of new technologies, telecommunications, imports and exports, tourism, and so on: ‘Any rigid rural/urban split is a presupposition that ignores the history of the Mediterranean’ (Seremetakis 1991: 6, my emphasis)23; and similarly: ‘dichotomies of the
traditional/modern kind encourage a static view of tradition’ (as in Kapferer 1991: xv). However, as Kapferer (1991) and Seremetakis (1991) have shown in their respective ethnographies: in practice, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity does not exist, because it is our invention. This is evident, for instance, in the public
performance of rituals, such as songs of lamentation, as they were studied in Greece by Danforth and Tsiaras (1982), Caraveli-Chames (1980, 1982), and Seremetakis (1991),
23 In the past, there was an effort to theorize the area of the Mediterranean, focusing on the values of
‘honour and shame’ (Campbell 1964, Peristiany 1966 and 1976, Pitt-Rivers 1966, Davis 1977,
Boissevain 1979, Herzfeld 1980,Gilmore 1987, Peristiany and Pitt-Rivers 1996, among others). Honour and shame, which I argue are strongly associated with the value of virginity in terms of the honour of the family (as also implied in Goddard 1996a), became ‘the moral values of Mediterranean society’,
suggesting ‘a pervasive archaism’ (Herzfeld 1987: 11). It was a ‘massive generalization’ (Herzfeld 1980: 349) falsely implying a ‘supposedly homogeneous Mediterranean moral system’ (1987: 69). The homogeneity given to the field implied that the honour code is itself static, although subsequent studies showed variety and change in its conception and application. Still, this early emphasis on a specific element of ‘culture’ tended to reproduce notions of ‘a people without history’ (as in Campbell 1964: 6). Thus, such a homogenizing approach to the area was inevitably found wonting as an a-political, superficial, and above all, a-historical approach (Goddard 1996a: 171-172).
respectively. While Danforth’s (1982) ethnography, and Tsiaras’s photographic
material that accompanied it, focused exclusively on funerals, Caraveli-Chames (1980, 1982) expanded on lamentation at home, in the fields, in the company of other women and alone. In this way, she approached the traditional practices of lamentation as ‘an avenue for social commentary on the larger world’, and a form of ‘social protest [...] against the practices of official Christianity’ (Ibid: 191). Seremetakis (1991) further developed Caraveli’s theory, arguing that the practice of mourning among the women of Mani in southern Greece, offers ‘an arena of contestation[...] a space where
heterogeneous and antagonistic cultural codes and social interests meet and tangle’ (Seremetakis 1991: 15).
The thesis will show how the ‘sacred tradition’ (iera paradoseis) is an open arena for innovation and competition, taking even the form of rivalry between the two
neighbouring monasteries I visited. It is used as a ‘pliable entity, inevitably subject to interpretation and contestation and a vehicle for claims and counter-claims regarding power and authority’ (Goddard 2000: 7). This definition of ‘tradition’ includes the present ‘history’ of the monastery, as narrated by the monks who live in it; and it is a matter of agency and power, because of its flexibility and ever-changing nature. Local ‘histories’ are fused with ‘tradition’, and vice versa, in a dialectic relationship, which leaves them open to various interpretations. In this sense, Stewart (1991) argued that the ‘group style’ (‘yphos’ in Greek) of narration of folklore stories about the devil in Apeiranthos on the island of Naxos are ‘formed and recognized in relation to the styles of other groups’ (1991: 122), inculcating ‘a sense of participation and belonging’ (Ibid: 125). The ‘style’ of narration reflectively reveals the principles of a collective identity, which is left open to contestation. Thus, the claim for ‘tradition’ is in itself a strategy of an emergent hegemonic position in reaction to rival groups or individuals.