Making the Archive, Animating It

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This summer I decided to devote time into putting some order to the pool of Greek American articles, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, posters, postcards, photographs, brochures, newspapers, community publications, catalogues, LPs, CDs, letters, announcements, and notes I have been accumulating through decades of research. This personal archive of largely public documents covers the recent past between the early 1990s, when I started graduate work, up to 2010 or so, when I started e-filing most of the relevant resources.

The sheer immensity of sorting through pile after pile of paper dwarfs me. Even this relatively small-scale archive looms as an overwhelming task. It does not help that I have no training as an archivist. I cannot devote myself full-time to this ordering either, as summertime is the time of the year calling for reading and writing.

But I persist toiling through amateurish methods. To add a layer of ordering I have even created the website Archiving Greek America featuring selective documents (https://wordpress.com/stats/day/archivinggreekamerica.home.blog).

The site provides motivation and meaning in turning a journey of private collecting into an act of public sharing. It is fulfilling to know that I contribute, albeit in a tiny way, to a larger archival project gaining momentum in Greek America.

Numerous archival initiatives, some funded by international foundations, others by prestigious national organizations, and some by local communities, are in full swing in Greek America. This institutional recognition of the value of the archive and the willingness to invest resources for digitizing it is gaining momentum, expanding and enhancing its public visibility. It preciously adds to the vast–and largely underresearched–available archive (www.mgsa.org/Resources/gkam.html).

***

Sorting through my documents has been far from a mechanical enterprise of neat arrangements. Like any archaeological excavation my delving into the disorganized, I admit, microcosm of paper chaos, holds the prospect of exhilarating findings. The randomness in the order in which some documents appear next to each other produce all sorts of delights (but also frustrating realizations). An editorial declaring pride in ethnic success next to an issue of a valuable magazine now defunct, unable to sustain itself. A document whose existence I had forgotten and so relevant to my current writings. Contradictions abound. Serendipity stretches itself in triumph. Unexpected connections call attention out of random juxtapositions.

The excavation of this material proves productive for bringing into fuller view several contours of Greek America, for making discernible some uncommon linkages.

I trace one contour along the lines of several magazines that left a considerable public imprint before receding from public view, morphing into something else, or ceasing to exist.

Another contour is barely perceptible, dotted by fragmented traces of conversations framed by volumes of silence. We know little if anything at all about the reasons why a cultural initiative which incited interest among some failed to animate interest among others, eventually fading away from contemporary concerns.

Yet another contour points to a well-marked line of interests that continues to make headlines in the popular media.

Through the practice of archiving, a seemingly amorphous terrain starts taking shape into a cultural space crisscrossed by identifiable continuities, recognizable shifts, or perceptible ruptures. And still, it feeds the imagination with a multitude of unknown recesses, unexplored areas, unrecognized resonances. Also, other angles and terrains that escape me.

My archive asserts a presence while making visible, alarmingly so, a gaping absence. I am overwhelmed by the realization, once again, that these documents (scattered but available in the public record) remain largely unexamined. For a substantial volume, if not for all, of this cultural network, there is absolutely no analysis; no scholarship; no public discussion. Consequently, there is no understanding of the processes through which certain projects gained prominence while others faded away. 

***

I return home from the office late at night, blanketed with a sense of dejection. Inevitably, or so it seems. Once again, the urgency to animate the archive presses itself.

To animate an archive, like any past, is to infuse it with another life: study it, circulate the findings, identify its contemporary significance, challenge and inspire researchers, contribute to cultural understanding. It is about linking the archive with the making of books, dissertations, articles, essays, reviews, blogs, commentaries, and documentaries that frame and reframe its significance.

Several dedicated archival activists, academics, researchers, and public intellectuals work intensely and intensively as we speak to materialize these linkages.

But it is not a secret, we all in the field of Greek American studies know what is missing. The critical mass of human resources necessary to fill the multiple gaps, to chart the multiplicity of connections in the record is not (yet?) available.

Perhaps this is what defines the experience of doing Greek American studies, a field that finds itself in lack of cultural and material capital. (Relative lack in some quarters, dire lack in others.) Practicing this field cultivates a heightened consciousness of incompleteness, a partiality in tension. On the one hand, the condition of an underresearched archive feeds the feeling of expansive prospects. On the other hand, the reality of resource scarcity, both material and human is limiting. In turn, it drives the urgent obligation to keep cultivating the archive for greater relevance, for the sheer determination not to allow it to wither; not to allow the displacement or silencing of certain histories and knowledges.

And hence the productive tension residing in the  coexistence between opening prospects and limiting aspects, offering, for me, an ethical and political purpose that makes the dust of the archive and the thrust of achieving its animation a well worthwhile project.

Yiorgos Anagnostou

June 6-8, 2019

Archive Building, Museum Making

A pioneer in archive building and museum making, Helen Zeese Papanikolas (1917–2004) never tired of encouraging Greek America to build its archives and make its museums. Late in her life, in fact three years before her passing, she took the opportunity of a talk sponsored by NYC's Greek-American Women's Network to urge Greek New Yorkers to create a museum in the city. The urgent call was made. The response, fifteen years later, still to come...

https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/archivinggreekamerica.home.blog/158

Building a Greek/American Archive

For researchers working on Greek American history and culture 

a new site contributes toward this archive

https://archivinggreekamerica.home.blog

Documenting and Understanding Greek America _ Interested?

Are you interested in Greek American history? Do you like reading reviews about the latest documentary or book about the Greek American experience? Or the latest cultural development? Stories about aspects of the experience that have been forgotten?

Are you inclined to read poetry or interviews about Greek American topics? Are you interested in Greek learning?

If this is the case, Ergon is your destination. Find us and read us online at http://ergon.scienzine.com

Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters is an open online journal that promotes knowledge about Greek America. 

Read us, support us!!

For more information please contact Yiorgos Anagnostou at anagnostou.1@osu.edu

Framing a Book Project, Bringing into Conversation Italian American and Greek American Studies

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Transcultural Encounters, Comparative Inquiries:  Italian Americans and Greek Americans

This volume contributes to American ethnic and immigration studies by bringing into conversation scholars working in the fields of Italian American and Greek American studies. The aim is to move beyond the “single group approach,” which privileges the study of ethnic singularity, to explore these two groups in relation to each other. We propose to bring into focus cross-cultural interfaces and to inquire comparatively about similarities and differences in cultural representations associated with these two groups. 


Our book project contributes to these developments from a particular angle, namely transcultural and comparative scholarship. We are interested in promoting the understanding of Italian Americans and Greek Americans through the study of their interactions and juxtapositions. 


Two perspectives organize this volume: First, we are interested in exploring Greek and Italian U.S. transcultural encounters. Italian Americans and Greek Americans have lived in the same neighborhoods, worked in the same workplaces, loved each other, married with each other, participated in labor strikes together. They play music together. Did they find inspiration in each other’s cultural expressions? What do we know about the fields of their interactions? They have certainly been classified under the same rubric as “white ethnics,” Michael Novak’s infamous PIGS (Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs), an ideological construction which was pivotal in the identity politics of the 1970s. But how did Italian American and Greek American lives intersect in everyday social life? How did they negotiate their mobility to the suburbs in relation to each other?


Second, we adopt a comparative perspective so that the practices of one ethnic group will illuminate the other, and vice versa. Both groups have built robust religious and various educational institutions. In what ways their adaptations and cultural expressions are similar, and in what ways are they different in specific contexts? How do we account for the similarities and differences? How have they been representing themselves, and in what manner have they negotiated representations of their identities construed by Others? All-in-all, in what ways did Italian American and Greek American histories and experiences converge or diverge?


Taking cues from concepts such as contact zones and borderlands, we are interested in understanding the social dynamic–processes involving negotiation, conflict, cooperation, solidarity, love, cultural exchanges–that have marked these encounters. We are interested in identifying differences, similarities, and intersections across the historical experiences of these groups. We wish to map specific encounters and comparisons to find out what they tell us about American society as a transcultural terrain.


In addition, our proposed book contributes to the fields of transcultural and comparative studies. Our contributors will be reflecting on the practice of transcultural and comparative analysis they employ, and will be generating insights based on that analysis.


This proposed book is multi-disciplinary. It features scholarship from the perspectives of architecture, ethnomusicology, education, history, cultural and literary studies, film studies as well as whiteness studies. It examines the production of ethnicity in the context of American political culture as well as popular culture, both visual (Kojak, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck) and “low brow” crime fiction (Domenic Stansberry and George Pelecanos). It includes analysis of literature (Annie Liontas/Paola Corso; Elia Kazan, Eleni Sikelianos, Jeffrey Eugenides/Gay Talese, Gregory Corso, John Fante). It involves comparative work on religious architecture, transoceanic circulation of racialized categories (Australia, United States), translocal interconnections (Newark, NJ), the formation of pan-Mediterranean identities, and the making of the immigrant past in documentaries from Italian and Greek filmmakers. Although there have been a couple of books comparing European American ethnic and immigrant groups, notably in labor history and literature, this volume is the first of its kind, as far we can tell, for initiating a multidisciplinary transcultural and comparative study across European Americans.

This book then brings to the fore nationally recognized cultural texts, authors and artistic expression as well as lesser known texts and histories that mostly circulate in ethnic and diaspora contexts. Brought in transcultural relation and juxtaposition to each other, both visible and less visible cultural products widen our understanding of Italian and Greek ethnicities and the ways in which they negotiate their cultural presence in American culture via self-representation and engage with representations of their identity by Others. 

Written in a non-specialized language accessible to the general public, Transcultural Encounters, Comparative Inquiries: Italian Americans and Greek Americans is a book of interest to a wide range of publics: scholars in various academic fields, including American studies, ethnic studies, and diaspora studies. It will speak to Greek Americans and Italian Americans. It will also resonate with readers in Greece and Italy, who are increasingly interested in their diasporas. The book helps imagine new College courses in intra-ethnic European Americans, and new trajectories in European American scholarship. It is positioned to serve as a reference point in future discussion of transcultural and comparative ethnic studies.


This conversation is necessary for several reasons, one certainly in the context of a wider academic discourse that often tends to undervalue the study of European Americans. Seen as tenuously holding on to surface identities and largely assimilated into “whiteness,” Italian Americans and Greek Americans have been marginalized by a significant thread in the American academy. Italian American and Greek American studies have certainly been effective, the former more so than the latter, in bringing into focus the vibrant cultural production of their respective ethnic groups. Indeed, one might speak about a proliferation of research on food, community history, diaspora affiliations, transnational connections, literature and popular culture among others. Scholars have responded to the devaluation of their subject matter by performing its value. They bring to the fore the arts, cultural expressivity, and histories of these two groups, demonstrating how Italian and Greek American ethnicities keep shaping American society and their respective historical homelands.


This is rarely practiced in the scholarship of European Americans. We seek, as we mentioned, to initiate a broader conversation that moves beyond seeing ethnicity as singularity. In this move we come closer to ethnographic and historical realities where immigrants and individuals with hyphenated identities do not live insular lives, or negotiate solely in relation with American culture. They interact, collaborate, clash, and affiliate with each other in various modes and degrees. This fertile transcultural field merits that we place it at the center of analysis. The aim is to illuminate new and unexpected facets of Greek- and Italian ethnicity in the United States.

Yiorgos Anagnostou

For a volume to be co-edited by Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Theodora Patrona

Giannis Antetokounmpo

Giannis is mobilizing a community, we are witnessing the performance of U.S. Greek identity in a place and scale that was probably thought unlikely outside festivals and parades: the NBA arena. If the fostering of ethnic identity in children requires some kind of identification with a positive role model, Yannis delivers just that. But he reinforces Greek identity beyond biology (ethnicity) contributing to a sense of post-ethnic Greek American identity.

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/22339864/greece-appreciates-giannis-antetokounmpo

Louis Tikas: Cretan and Greek Identities in Poetry and History

For some time now I have been working on a book chapter that explores the ways in which David Mason’s narrative poem Ludlow: A Verse-Novel (2007) fictionalizes Louis Tikas, an immigrant from Crete and a union organizer, who was brutally murdered in 1914 during the labor strike at Ludlow, Colorado. As a narrative that intertwines poetry with history, Ludlow prompted me to undertake extensive research on the cultural and political context that shaped the trajectory of Tikas’s real life, both in Crete where he was born as Ilias Anastasios Spantidakis in 1886, and his early years in the United States, where he immigrated in 1906, before joining the Union late in 1912. Given the scarcity of the archive, research on the context within which Tikas negotiated his identities presents itself as one of the few available routes scholars have in the effort to understand Tikas’s pre-American life. I did so of course with Zeese Papanikolas’s (1982) pioneering work on this topic as a compass. I have now completed the work, tentatively entitled “Poetry Traversing History: The Making of Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow.” It is forthcoming in a volume exploring intersections between poetry and history.

In this posting I share research that was left out from the soon-to-be published work. It is about a question that I sought to answer regarding Tikas’s Cretan and Greek identities. Given the power of regionalism in the Greek-speaking worlds of the 19th century and its antagonism with Greek national culture, I needed to understand how Tikas might have negotiated this set of identities. In what follows I closely read the poem’s evocation of Tikas’s regional and pre-American identities in relation to the available evidence regarding his practice of identity as well as the cultural discourses that defined these identities at the time. I observe that Ludlow’s poetic evocation of Tikas produces a historically and sociologically credible reconstruction: A co-existence between his Cretan and Greek identities.
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Writing about the regional identities of U.S. Greek immigrants in the early 20th century, historian Yannis Papadopoulos (2010) notes that for populations from areas outside the Greek kingdom at the time, “attachment to Greek state institutions and solidarity with Greeks from other provinces of Greece and the Ottoman empire were not self-evident” (14):

"The Greek- or Turkish-speaking Orthodox emigrants from Asia Minor and Thrace did notnecessarily identify themselves with the irredentist policy of the Greek state. Greek diplomats considered the immigration experience to be a way for immigrants to assimilate the dominant discourse of the “Great Idea” through social intercourse with Greeks from mainland Greece'' (13–14).

Does this situation apply to the historical Tikas? Not necessarily. Oral accounts–the best evidence in our possession–attest to his Greek national identification prior to his emigration in the United States. Local memory places the nineteen-year old Tikas wrapped up in national fervor and participating in the 1905 local revolt against the Great powers protecting the island’s autonomy from the Ottoman empire (1898) and toward Crete’s unification with Greece. This constitutes an expression of political activism contributing to his reputation in the village “as a guerrilla fighter” (Papanikolas 1982: 262). These accounts cannot be readily discounted, given the robust operation of Greek nationalism on the island throughout the nineteenth century, as I will show later in the discussion. Ludlow registers this act of national identification during the revolt–an identification that performs Tikas’ Greek identity–and further follows speculations that have this figure joining the national fervor sweeping Greek immigrants on the occasion of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913): “It is hard to think of that ardent young man, Louis Tikas, not being in the crowd that cheered the special [train] going east,” Papanikolas writes (44). (fn.1) The poem echoes this sentiment: “He joined those marching in the big parade/who would stay behind but wished their brothers well,” (53). The historian and the poet are in tandem in recognizing the power of nationalism to shape this historical figure.

Let us turn to Tikas’s regional identity. The poem unequivocally underlines the solidity of his Cretan filiation under conditions of migrancy. Early on in the narrative, it posits the power of the natal village as a source of deep belonging: “home was Loutra, poverty, the house, the olive press, his father serving coffee” (Mason 2007, 47). The speaker has Tikas assert a primary identification with the culture of his early childhood socialization: the Cretan dialect, the family’s agrarian and small shop economy. This is sound, sociologically. It is the habitus of local culture, in other words the “system of durable” predispositions” that structures deep attachment to a place and social practice (Bourdieu 1977: 72). The poem construes Tikas via the sociological recognition of the power of habitus as a mode of enduring belonging. Tikas’s cultural past enters the American present in a moment of personal crisis. When confronted with alienating roles and rules associated with Americanization, the speaker construes Tikas seeking solace in the intimacy of the internalized familial and local identifications. The enduring diasporic identification lies with the embodied habitus of the regional.

Particularly visible in the archive is what appears as a marker of regional affiliation. There are images of and eye witness accounts about Tikas sporting the traditional costume of Crete. This is what he opted to wear in the highly symbolic photograph he posed for before emigrating to the United States in 1906. But was he wearing it during everyday activities as well, an ordinary practice that reflected habitual usage instead of a conscious display of identity? This is also the costume he would keep wearing during the strike, “among the Ludlow tents on holidays,” before the flames in the camp erased it from the record (Papanikolas 1982: 266). In the multiethnic camp that costume would have been seen as a marker of difference, certainly a meaningful connection with the pre-American past.

Tikas’s powerful regional identification presents a tantalizing route of inquiry. Is it possible perhaps that his attachment to rural Crete placed him in an antagonistic relation with national culture, imposed by the Greek state during the island’s period of autonomy (1898-1913)? The vast cultural distance between the local vernacular and the official national, coupled with Cretans’ well-documented animosity toward state-imposed bureaucracy could have ruptured Tikas’s national identity as Greek. Lack of identification with national culture coupled with active resistance against it, would have rendered him a lesser Greek, a Greek in fact, if we follow national stereotypes, whose vernacular culture exhibited tainted proximity with Ottoman elements (Herzfeld 1999), as I will explain. Is this possible lack of identification with the national what informs the poet’s decision to render Tikas as partially Greek? To explore this further let us take a close look at the multitude of contradictory social worlds that enmeshed Cretan life at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The clash between the state-sponsored national culture and regional social practices at the time of Tikas’s upbringing–a time of dramatic political and cultural flux–helps us situate this historical plausibility. Modernization in Greece, Gregory Jusdanis writes, “entails the formation of a national culture to replace the ethnoreligious identities of the stratified system” (1991: 49). “The introduction of the European model” of national uniformity from above “led to ideological turmoil that polarized Greek culture along a series of antimonies” (43), including the one between modernity and tradition. As a result, the national and the regional clashed. As a result, the national and the regional clashed. Dimitris Tziovas shows that national culture represented the centripetal forces of “modernization, Europeanization, and standardization” (1994: 104). It was generated by an elite in the context of forming a capitalist, industrial, and bureaucratic society, and was disseminated through the institutional mechanisms of education, the army, and the jurisprudence. Social cohesion was seen as a function of cultural and linguistic uniformity. Regional identity, on the other hand, represented the centrifugal forces of “customary law, communalism, regionalism, and linguistic plurality” (104). Social cohesion was sought through interpersonal and familial obligations, local values, and customary law in a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial setting. The national and the regional represent two cultural worlds at odds with each other and therefore antagonistic in the context of nation building. The historicity of Ludlow’s claim on Tikas’s Greek identity lies in this tension between the national and the regional. From this macro-perspective, one could pose the reasonable hypothesis that Tikas–as a subject who is embedded regionally–could be seen as “almost a Greek” from the point of view of modernizers; as someone who represents the centrifugal presence that counters the homogenizing orientation of national culture. Because Crete was a province of the Ottoman empire until 1898, Tikas was not subjected early on in his life to the full range of the social mechanisms that the Greek state deployed to instill national culture within the kingdom. Still, parallel to the pull of the local, he must have been subjected to Greek nationalism hailing Cretans to identify with the nation. He must have been institutionally, at least, exposed to the ideology of Greek national identity, as the Greek state’s “national educational networks” (Şenişik, 2011: 57)–schools, consuls, patriotic organizations–were an integral part of Ottoman Crete–including rural areas– in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cretan-born teachers, educated at the University of Athens, were the primary agents of cultivating national consciousness among rural Christian peasantry, in “new elementary Christian schools” (46) appearing throughout the Cretan countryside. This could explain why the speaker has Tikas denounce a Roman/romios identity. The nation was transforming the Orthodox Christians subjects of the Rum millet into ethnoreligious, Greek Orthodox national subjects shifting the primary identification and loyalty of these populations from Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul toward the Greek kingdom and the nationalized Orthodox Church of Greece.

Still, the scale of experiential identification weighted more on the side of the regional than on the national. The considerable distance between national culture (the high register idiom of the purified language, bureaucratic and capitalist relations, modernization) and the regional one (linguistic vernacular, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial interpersonal relations) posed several borderlines which marked the distance between the local and the Europeanized national, a dramatic cultural gap which in the eyes of the westernized elite would have rendered Cretan “folk” less than “European Greek,” “almost Greeks.” Contemporary Athenians, Herzfeld notes, “are often quick to condemn what they see as an endemic Cretan proclivity for violence, and attribute it to the island’s long occupation by the Ottoman Empire” (2003: 284). They have been seen by many “Greeks as a hopelessly mixed and tainted population (284 my emphasis). Would Tikas have been similarly viewed as a “lesser Greek” by mainland Greeks?

But when the question comes to the historical Tikas’ own self-identification, a reconciliation between the regional and national identification could apply as a sound historical plausibility. It is indeed feasible once we examine it through the lenses of ethnohistory in the context of the clash between the regional and the national. The implementation of the legal system of the Greek metropolitan center to the island during its period of autonomy (1898-1913) provides evidence of how Westernization in jurisprudence introduced new legal practices in direct collision with local social practices. In his study of property transfer documents in the town of Rethymnos, in 1900, Michael Herzfeld brings to our attention the sharp disjuncture between the town’s social and moral universe and the cultural orientation of the Greek (European-derived) laws when comparing the latter with the island’s pre-autonomy Ottoman legal codes. Greek law introduced far reaching changes, beyond the expected linguistic ones. The laws were written in the high registered, purist Greek–a “super-purist legalese that was already the bane of the metropolitan center” (1999: 224)–at a time when Cretans “spoke the local form of Greek by preference” (227). Herzfeld shows how the property documents expressed a new bureaucratic ethos, a high degree of precision that was in odds with Ottoman law but also, crucially, from the way locals, both Christians and Muslims, at the time made sense of place, identity, and economic transactions. The Greek code, for instance, required information about the place of residence and the identity of the property owner illustrates this disjunction. Whereas the neighborhood was the local category of reference to orient oneself in the town’s spatial geography, it was now the locally alien address and number of a residence that legal documents utilized to regulate that geography. The local “ethos of imprecision” (235) was supplemented with the bureaucratic innovation of detailed and specific information. The impact of this innovation, Herzfeld shows, introduced a rupture on the ordinary social practices and the moral and economic ethos attached to them in the region, an ethos which Ottoman legal documents came closer in recognizing. Herzfeld aptly condenses the cultural gap between the regional and the externally imposed national:

"Ottoman documentation had not departed significantly from popular usage: the use of patronymics and andronymics as sufficient qualifying marks of personal identification, the naming of neighbours to determine the boundaries of real estate and the absence of a detailed prior history as a precondition for the recognition of current ownership (and hence the right to sell) are all features of the everyday, informal management of property relations to this day" (226).

How did the local Cretan Christians feel about this state-driven imposition? We will never know with absolute certainty. It is instructive at this point to take heed from Herzfeld’s allowing in the context of his discussion for “sceptical application of presentism” (236)–the cautious evocation of the present to project a relative understanding of the past–in the specific context of reading these property documents. Skeptical presentism presents itself as the best option we have to at our disposal to reliably reconstruct Tikas under the circumstances of a scarce archive.

Given the well-established Cretan hostility, even resistance, to external cultural impositions, including those by the Greek state, throughout history, it is most plausible–almost certain–that the islanders resented and attempted to undermine the new laws. Still, following Herzfeld, they may have also opted to strategically manipulate it to serve their own interests, particularly at a time when property document transfers were of particular significance in the midst of major population displacements, namely the fleeing of Cretan Muslims from the island. We must also take into account that resistance to the Greek legal practices did not mean repudiation of Greek national identity. At the rhetorical level today, the opposition to the state does not compromise loyalty “to the conceptual unity of the Greek nation” (1985: 19). Opposition to the bureaucratic state underlines an ethos of independence against state-imposed rule and buttresses the claim of the Cretans’ self-professed “moral excellence above all other Greeks.” In this rhetoric, aggressive traditionalism and regional pride for the island’s uniqueness subordinate themselves to the national while at the same time positing the local as the moral exemplar of the nation, positing the moral superiority of the local and the regional; making Cretans more Greek than mainland Greeks. This seeming paradox, the co-existence of strong localism and powerful national identity, in fact represents the power of nationalism to reconcile the two in the “integrative project of nationhood,” a project of particular urgency for nation-building in the area (Herzfeld 2003: 296). “Island intellectuals and peasants alike,” Herzfeld writes, “aggressively claim cultural uniqueness for Crete, which nevertheless remains firmly attached in their writings and in everyday stereotypes to the premise of its transcendent Greekness” (283).

Notably, as I have shown, the historical Tikas identified with the national cause calling for the island’s unification with the Greece at a time when cultural modernization was making inroads in the island. Though it is almost impossible to know how his family and him personally negotiated the importation of national culture, the latter did not deter him from identifying with the nation. It is not historically unlikely, following skeptical presentism, that Tikas followed the concentric model of identity, a model of powerful endurance in the island’s history. Opposition to the bureaucratic state does not preclude “an essentially segmentary view of the world” (Herzfeld 1985: xii), which accommodates a simultaneous village, regional, and national identity. Based on this logic, the clashing encounter between the local and the national in the formatting years of the autonomy period did not seemingly cast doubt in Tikas’s national self-definition. It did not necessarily make him feel less Greek.

Notes

1. An estimated 20,000 “Greeks from the United States went back to fight in the Balkan Wars” (Georgakas 1987: 22).


Works Cited

Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Georgakas, Dan. 1987. “The Greeks in America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, XIV (1&2): 5–53.


Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton University Press.


-----------------. 1999. “Of Language and Land Tenure. The Transmission of Property and Information in Autonomous Crete.” Social Anthropology October Vol. 7(3): 223–237.


-----------------. 2003. “Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections.” Comparative Studies in Society and History April 45(2): 281–310.


Jusdanis Gregory. 1991. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.


Mason, David. 2007. Ludlow: A Verse-Novel. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press.


Papadopoulos, Yannis G.S. 2010. “The Role of Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Class in Shaping Greek American Identity, 1890–1927: A Historical Analysis.” In Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Assaad E. Azzi, Xenia Chryssochoou, Bert Klandermans, Bernd Simon, eds., 9–31. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.


Papanikolas, Zeese. 1982. Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre. Foreword by Wallace Stegner. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.


Şenişik, Pinar. 2011. The Transformation of Ottoman Crete: Revolts, Politics and Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century. I.B. Tauris.