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Women, Men and Pre-Lenten Carnival in Northern Greece: An Anthropological Exploration of Gender Transformation In Symbol and Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Jane K. Cowan
Affiliation:
School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.

Extract

My very first encounter with Sohos, a small market and agricultural town in the mountains northeast of Thessaloniki, a few days before the start of Lent in 1976, is recorded in a set of black-and-white photographs. Their harsh contrasts evoke the chill bleakness of late winter while the images tell a story of social marginality. To my eye, as a young female American university student exploring the central marketplace, men and youths were visible everywhere – in the streets, the shops and restaurants – yet women and girls were difficult to find. My camera captured them hovering at the margins: leaning out of windows or standing in doorways.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1. The gender associations of food and drink, and of sites of consumption and sociability are explored in Cowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton, 1990), pp. 6488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Such notions are widespread in Greek society: see also Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra, ‘Exclusion and Unity, Retsina and Sweet Wine: Commensality and Gender in a Greek Agrotown’ in Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra (ed.), Alcohol, Gender and Culture (London, 1992).Google Scholar

2. On shepherd's bells as symbols of masculinity see Herzfeld, Michael, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar and Stewart, Charles, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton 1991), p. 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Cowan, Jane K., ‘Folk Truth: When the Scholar Comes to Carnival in a “Traditional” Community’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 6(2), 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cowan, Jane K., ‘Japanese Ladies and Mexican Hats: Contested Symbols and the Politics of Tradition in a Northern Greek Carnival Celebration’ in Boissevain, Jeremy (ed.) Revitalizing European Rituals (London, 1992).Google Scholar

4. Noteworthy amongst many examples are Danforth, Loring, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, 1982)Google Scholar; Seremetakis, C. Nadia, The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar; Stewart, Charles, Demons (1991).Google Scholar

5. Caraveli, Anna, ‘The Bitter Wounding: Women's Lament as Social Protest’ in Dubisch, Jill (ed.), Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar; C. Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word.

6. Cowan, ‘Japanese Ladies and Mexican Hats’.

7. See Cowan, , Dance and the Body Politic, pp. 134–87.Google Scholar

8. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1984).Google Scholar

9. There has been a long debate within anthropology on how to interpret rituals involving reversal and inversion: see for example, Babcock, Barbara, The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, 1978)Google Scholar; Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution (London, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gluckman, Max, ‘Rituals of Rebellion in Southeast Africa’ in Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1969).Google Scholar For an excellent summary of the use of rituals and symbols of reversal (including ritual transvesticism) in political protest in Britain, see Howkins, Alun and Merricks, Linda, ‘Wee be Black as Hell: Ritual, Disguise and Rebellion’, Rural History 4, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. See for example Dawkins, R.M., ‘The Modern Carnival in Thrace and the Cult of Dionysus’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 26, 1906CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dawkins, R.M., ‘A Visit to Skyros’, Annual of the British School at Athens 11, 19041905Google Scholar; Gilmore, David, ‘Carnival in Fuenmayor: Class Conflict and Social Cohesion in an Andalusian Town’, Journal of Anthropological Research 31, no. 4, 1975CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Supek, Olga, ‘The Meaning of Carnival in Croatia’, Anthropological Quarterly 56, No. 2, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wace, A.J.B., ‘North Greek Festivals and the Worship of Dionysus’, Annual of the British School at Athens 16, 19091910.Google Scholar

11. This term was by the mid 1980s very rarely used. It derives from the South Slav language, which locals call ‘Vulgarika’ (but non-Greek linguists call ‘Macedonian’) spoken by the majority of Sohoians before Hellenisation in the early part of the twentieth century. Representatives of the Greek state have been attempting to wipe out the use of the language for many years, with substantial (but not total) success.

12. Ekaterinides, Yiorgios, ‘Ta Karnavalia tou Sohou Thessalonikis’, Praktika tou Tritou Simposiou Laografias tou Vorioelladikou Horou (Thessaloniki, 1979).Google Scholar

13. Generally speaking, most of the songs and stories, if historically locatable at all, evoke the Ottoman period, with images of ‘Beautiful Turkish Girl(s)’ (a song), bandits and thieves, and Ottoman officials who could nonetheless be bribed and tricked. Some Sohoians suggest, for example, that their forefathers concocted a Christian origin to the ‘merio’ so as to be left alone to celebrate in peace, as the Ottomans were normally tolerant of the ‘religious’ observances of their Orthodox Christian subjects.

14. Konsola, D., ‘Decentralisation and Cultural Policy in Greece’, Papers of the Regional Science Association 64, 1988.Google Scholar

15. On the relationship between politics, nationalism and the thesis of survivalism, see Danforth, Loring, ‘The Ideological Context of the Search for Continuities in Greek Culture’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 2, no. 1Google Scholar and Herzfeld, Michael, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, (1982).Google Scholar

16. See Cowan, , Dance and the Body Politic, pp. 144–6 and passim.Google Scholar