Efpraxia Pollatou Phd Thesis

INTRODUCTION. A moment of revelation: “the ideal event” February 2005. On a very cold mid-week evening, at kiria Sula and kirios Makis’ house in Argostóli, capital of the Greek island of Cefalónia, a group of people come together. I rush to get there early so I can see all the people arriving and experience what would later become my moment of revelation; I did not want to miss anything. I had been looking forward to this gathering for a while now. I first met the group in 1999, when I was invited to join their performances and had immediately ‘fallen in love’ with the atmosphere. This time, however, things were different as I was attending the event as an ethnographer, participating, observing and recording it. This group of people is what Cefalónians call “ a maskaráta ”, a carnival masquerade group. Comprising some thirty men and women in their forties and late fifties, they have been performing for twenty around years. Ties existed prior to the establishment of the group with some folk having known each other since high school. They have remained good friends since and these people constitute the nucleus of the maskaráta : kirios Makis is founder and leader of the group, together with his wife, kiria Sula. The second important couple are Kirios Makris and kiria Erithra, with kirios Avgustatos and kiria Maria completing the nucleus of the maskaráta . They were all at kirios Makis’ house that cold February day along with the other members of the group. Kirios Avgustatos sat next to me and teased me. I had been working with him for five months and ongoing teasing relations had been established. He knew I was always in the mood for teasing and that I would laugh. He would make me laugh and attract the attention of other members when they heard me. He keeps talking with a deadpan expression on his face and points to something on a piece of paper: “what is this thing on the drawing, my lady? Is it a spot (bAfA 1)? Do you honestly want to have this as your carnival costume? Maki, come have a look at this! Here! She says she wants this dress for Carnival!” He sounds like a reprimanding father, yet I know he is joking. Kirios Makis turns his head, smiles and says nothing; or, at least I can’t hear anything because I am laughing loudly, and I can’t see anything. As soon as kirios Makis and kirios Makris ask us to sit down and discuss ideas on costumes, kirios Avgustatos moves to another seat. He sits across from me, next to kirios Makris. Other people sit around the big sitting room. During the discussions and the final decision on the subject, kirios Avgustatos keeps silent. Kirios Makris elaborates on costumes, colours and textiles and the ladies add comments according to their tastes, as do the men when it comes to their costumes. I try observing everyone while enjoying the festive atmosphere where there is no room for seriousness. Besides, the chosen topic is for more laughter: “…it can 1 I use capital letters here to convey the performer’s special tone. Kirios Avgustatos stressed both As making the vowels sound very open. 1 even pull a boat”2. The main idea revolves around women’s special skills to manage and manipulate men. Kirios Avgustatos is still silent, his head lowered. He looks as though he has not been following any of the commentary, as if immersed in his own world. However, some minutes later, he lifts up his head, turns towards kirios Makis and standing says: “Maki, here is how the parláta 3 will go: “A 4 boat has just anchored 1. Down there at the port And all people rush All around it. They want to find out 5. All these people who look at it How does it sail by itself Without its machines 5”. He cites the first two stanzas of the parláta that he is composing for the performance. Everybody is silent and listens. Speechless, I realise the importance of the moment, and that I am witnessing an “ideal event”, an event that includes different types of satirical talk, exactly what I have been looking for. As soon as kirios Avgustatos finishes citing his verses that he composed while listening to the background commentary, most people burst into exclamations and laudatory remarks: “how did he come up with this!”, “he is amazing” and “How quickly did he prepare the verses”. The leader, kirios Makis, is better at verbalising such remarks, including his own: “he has that Devil inside him, who is teasing him” ( ehi to djiaolo pu ton pirazi ). It sounds to me like these words are uttered as if they are the most natural thing in the world. No special intonation or high or low pitch is indicated. Compared to the exclamations made by the group members, these words lack any special features. And yet, they could stand up for themselves and accomplish something else. They represent the epitome of relations existing between a satirist and his audience and accord the audience a specific vantage point from which to look at the satirist and evaluate his performance. Kirios Makis has elevated kirios Avgustatos to the utmost level a performer can reach. Kirios Avgustatos is not possessed by any demon. On the contrary, he demonstrates his skills which appear to be different from the skills of the other folk present. The “devil” is to acquire a new meaning and signify distinction, a most desired and laudable distinction. 2 “Serni karavi” is the Greek title. Sexual innuendos underline this. The dots at the beginning of the Greek title refer to vaginas: they are so powerful that they can dictate orders to men regardless of rank and status. 3 A parláta is a satirical poem composed for the purposes of a carnival performance. The word is Italian in origin: the verb parlo, which means to speak. People use the poem to speak their minds in terms of the presented topic. 4 The Greek verses read as follows: “Ena paporo eftase /sto porto apokato/ke eftasan oli trehontas/ trigiro apo dauto. Thelune gia na mathoune/oli i thavmastes tu/pos taxidevi mono tu/horis tis mihanes tu.” 5 Reading the final version of the poem at kirios Avgustatos’ shop on the Saturday preceding the Carnival performance, in order to recite it the way he wanted me to, I was asked to stress the words how (line 7) and without (line 8). Special intonation thus lays the ground for what will be presented in the verses that follow the first two stanzas: the poet further justified women’s power over men. 2 I thought this to myself and was unable to follow the progress of the discussions. I was struck by the event and my thinking about the event made me realize that I had experienced my own striking revelation. This thesis regards ‘satire’ as a local construction and thus the term ‘satiricity’ (satirikótita ) is advanced with a view to setting the stage towards what I call “the anthropology of ‘satire’”. ‘Satire’ is treated not as “a literary genre” but as an event. Here, it is examined through a speech event and is called teasing event –píragma- in Greek and this occurs at rural and urban sites. Further, local people interpret, respond and frame the teasing, occupying different positions or shifting between positions in the teasing. Finally this is circumscribed firstly as their own exclusive feature and then to differentiate themselves from other Greeks. From this perspective I examine the main components of a teasing event and present the talk that either precedes or follows the event and this is termed metacommunication. The role of metacommunication is thus an indispensable part of satiricity. Fieldwork on the Greek island of Cefalónia lasted some fifteen months with Argostóli, the capital of the island, and Kondogenada, a small village to the north west of the island, as my main field sites. In order to incorporate ‘satire’ in ‘satiricity’, participant-observation was the main research method and this oscillated from simple observation to full participant- observation, depending on the situations and the people I worked with. I also used semi-structured interviews and transcribed parts of the recorded events as well as consulting a small part of the special collection that the Korgialenios Library in Argostóli. Part of this collection is presented here as well as an extensive separate bibliography. This attitude to the object of study is integral to anthropological research which is where I situate myself. Following Mannheim and Tedlock in that “cultural events are not the sum of the actions of their individual participants, each of whom imperfectly expresses a pre-existent pattern, but are the scenes where shared culture emerges from interaction 6” , I thus situate myself in dialogic anthropology. As such this research contributes to studies on Cefalónia and forwards the contribution of anthropology to local studies. This thesis, then, attempts to include dialogues among different categories of local people (migrants, ‘natives’, local scholars, villagers and urbanites) as well as between locals and the ethnographer, between the ethnographer and her ‘self’, and between an anthropological approach to local practices and other approaches, like philology, folklore and history. As a result, satiricity as language and culture arises as a constellation of voices. 6 Mannheim and Tedlock 1995:2. 3 CHAPTER OUTLINES CHAPTER ONE Cefalonia: an introduction. Chapter one introduces the island of Cefalónia from the perspective of an outer landscape. 7 I present the island according to people’s views and follow particular features mentioned about the island.

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