The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani

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I THE

LAST WORD

C.

N AD IA SE RE M ET AKI S

THE

LAST

WORD Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani

T H E U N IV E RS IT Y 0 F C H IC AG 0

P R E S S · Chicago and London

CONTENTS

C. Nadia Seremetakis, born and raised in Greece, has been living in New York for over seventeen years. She holds degrees in both sociology (M.A.) and anthropology (M.A. and Ph.D), and has been teaching at New York University, and Vassar College as Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 6o637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1991 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1991 Printed in the United States of America 00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 54 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seremetakis, C. Nadia (Constantina Nadia) The last word : women, death, and divination in inner Mani I C. Nadia Seremetakis. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN o-226-74875-8 (cloth). -ISBN o-226-74876-6 (pbk.) 1. Funeral rites and ceremonies-Greece-Mani. 2. Women-GreeceMani-Social conditions. 3· Social structure-Greece-Mani. 4· Mani (Greece)-Religious life and customs. 5· Philosophy, Greek (Modern) I. Title. GT3251.A3M367 393'.9-de2o

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Photographs: C. Nadia Seremetakis

Dedication vn Acknowledgment vm On Laments and Transliteration Ix Maps x

1 Contexts 1 Fragments and Margins The Politics of Pain 3 Departures 5 Dutiful Ethnographer 7 Diachronic Death 12

2 Social History and Social Organization 16 Ecology and Topography 16 Settlement Pattern 17 The Village 22 Social Organization 2 5 Alliance 29 The War Tower 34 Social Stratification 35 The Economy and Division ofLabor 43

3 The ltamings 47 Multiple Entries 47 The Bird of the Dead 50 Apparition 52 Dreams 54 Low Voicing 56 Dream Codes 58 The Economy of Dreams 61

4 The Screaming 64 Death, Birth, and the Outside 64 High Voicing 72 The Silent and Naked Death The Good Death 76

5 The Appearance 82 On the Road 82 From Segmentary Kinship to Shared Substance 86 Center and Peripheries 95

76

VI

CONTENTS

6 The Ethics of Antiphony 99 Categories of Performance and Pain 99 Customary Law: The Women's Jury 101 Memorization 10 5 Polyphony and the Orders of Discourse 106 Incorporations or the Double Ceremony 107 The Counterpoint 112 The Breath 116 Sound and Violence 118 Truth and Pain 120 Truth, Pain, and Ethnography 12 3 Historical Context 124

7 Weaving Conflict 126 Men's Council I Women's Mourning Ritual 126 · Kalliopi's Story 129 Tracking Vangelio 144

9 The Second Body and the Poetics of Labor 177 Hertz and the New Body 177 The Maniat Double Burial 179 The First Facing or The Meeting of the Eyes 187 The Second Body and Its Reading 189 The Otherworld 19 5 , Death, Exhumation, and Women's Labor 201 ,

10 The Visible Invisible: Divination, History, and the Self 213 The Archaeology of Feeling 213 Shadows 218 Cynics and Others 220 Cosmological Construction 22 5 Dream Time, Labor Time, and Power 227 Dreaming in the Field 2 31

11 -8 Women and Priests, Voice and Text 159 Mourning Ritual versus Funeral 1 59 , Historical Context 169 • Procession and Burial 172 _

Eschatology 237

Shadows: A Photographic Essay, following page Notes 241 Bibliography Index 265

24 7

2 38

The Last Word is the reincarnation of multiple, very long dialogues. Its various parts stand as promises fulfilled, offerings to those friends, dead or alive, who can identify their tracks imprinted on its body. Yet The Last Word ultimately belongs to that one friend who shares with me its full pride.

C. Nadia Seremetakis New York, November 1989

ON LAMENTS AND TRANSLITERATION

During 1985-86, research for this book was supported by grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation I Charlotte W Newcombe and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Since both the laments and the oral histories are acoustic media, my transliteration privileges sound over spelling. Exceptions have been made in order to preserve the historical etymology of some words, e.g., moira (instead of mira), especially when these have been long familiar. Similarly, anglicized names of persons and places, e.g., Peloponnese, have been retained. I maintain a distinction between g and gh (y) and between d and dh (&), while x stands for f; (ks) and h for X (ch, kh). Maniat dialect varies from one area to another, and Maniats switch between their dialect and standard Greek depending on social context and situation and often mix the two codes together. The Maniat dialect deserves a study in itself. My simplified transcription intends only to give a clear sense of the rhyming scheme of the laments, not to illustrate all the particularities of the dialect. Accents therefore have been used to show where stress is placed in correct pronunciation, but no diacritic marks have been deployed. All laments and narratives are presented in my text as they were performed in the field during 1981 and 1988. Thus, not only have the new laments in this book been improvised but older laments too have received improvised modifications based on the particular performance and biographical position of the performer. It should be noted that some laments can be cross-referenced with variants in earlier collections (see, for instance, Kallidonis 1972; Kassis 1979, 1980, 1981a; Petrounias 1934). This book however is not an attempt to compile a collection of Maniat laments but rather to systematize the performative contexts of lamenting and thus provide an interpretation for decontextualized fragments previously collected in Mani, as well as for new compositions.

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1 CONTEXTS

The Last Word is about Inner Mani as a detached fragment of a global modernity and explores the internal margins that organize the relation of Inner Mani to that modernity. I follow women's cultural response to historical fragmentation as they weave together diverse social practices: dreaming, lament improvisation, care and tending of olive trees, burying and unburying the dead, and the historical inscription of emotions and senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the periphery. Here poetics communicates with the Greek concept of poesis, * which means both making and imagining. For the poetics of the periphery is always concerned with the imaginary dimension of material worlds, of things and persons made and unmade. In Inner Mani, this imaginary dimension emerges from the relation of women to death. The poetics of the cultural periphery is the poetics of the fragment. One thing must be made clear about the fragment. It may be marginal, but it is not necessarily dependent, for it is capable of denying recognition to any center. I am concerned with the global vision that emerges from the particular. To stand in the margin is to look through it at other margins and at the so-called center itself. The Last Word is about the historical condition of cultural peripheries viewed through the particular optic of Inner Mani.

Fragments and Margins This ethnography speaks to recent anthropological literature that pluralizes the concept and tangible practice of power by identifying strategies of resistance that emerge and subsist in the margins. 1 The construction of power by Inner Maniat women is a ritualized process concerned with the divination of cosmological truth and the presence of fate. Cosmology and fate enter the social domain as *Or poiesis.

2

1

CHAPTER ONE

fragments, in improvised mourning songs, dreaming, and exhumations of the dead. These divinatory practices are self-reflexive metacommentaries on social and cosmological order. Deployed by women both inside and outside mourning rituals, they can shatter normative surfaces of everyday life. The women's divinatory practices are instruments of cultural power. Their mourning ceremonies are transformative and not merely expressive performances. These transformative practices are grounded on material forces such as pain, the body, and pollution, and creatively interact with women's experience in the economic and domestic spheres of social life. If the poetics of women contain a rich repertoire of empowerment, it is because women have been targeted for colonization throughout Maniat history. Thus, the resistance of Maniat women is not a cultural practice that emerged with "modernity," nor does it necessarily end there. The institutions and instruments of internal and external colonization may have changed from one epoch to another, but the experiences of colonization and ongoing resistance by women constitute long-term structures. Rather than affirming the "powerless- ·'\ ness" of women's practices by depicting them as residues of destroyed totalities, this study asserts that it is the very condition of long-term cultural fragmentation and deritualization that renders the practices of death and divination all the more viable as vehicles of resistance. My concern is not only with the fragmentation of women's social experience but also with the reconstitution of experiential fragments into provisional, empowering wholes. Tfi~Saefine~ (de)rituali~;tion as-a~open-ended process, not a . terminus. It i;~y assertion that women's weaving of divinatory perception, symbolization, and performance mediates deritualization. 2 A group exposed to external and internal dominations (by men, church, the state, medical rationalities) experiences cultural fragmentation as the very condition of its existence. There can be no holistic experience in the margins, only the creation of refuge areas that provisionally assemble the holistic from fragments in order to intervene in the public structure of domination. The experience of discontinuity and break prevails in the margins. The myth of holism and continuity is the ideological creation of"centers" and of dominating groups.

In Inner Mani, the central sites for the production of women's discourse and cultural power are the mortuary ritual and related divinatory practices. From eighteenth-century traveler accounts to the rare social histories, folklore collec-

CONTEXTS

3

tions, and community studies in this century, observers have agreed on the ce11~ trality of death rites in th_eJegion and on the pivotal role of women in these p~rformances. This is a perspective with which Inner Maniats concur. The mor. tuary cycle is not simply one life cycle event among others (birthing, weddings, and ritual kinship) but the primary resource for the creation and dissemination c/ of aesthetic form (music and poetry), juridical discourse, gender identity, and indigenous oral history. Understanding death rituals is inseparable from understanding the Inner Maniat cultural imagination. For the Maniats, moirol6i (lament) connotes "crying one's fate." The lament is an improvised composition of stressed eight-syllable verses, often focused on biographical content. Inner Maniats differentiate the eight-syllable lament from the more "secular" and national fifteen-syllable folksongs and satires sung by men. The laments are considered distinct from the official church liturgy. They are seen as local and particular to the disc:()urse of women although some men in the past have been kn~;~ to compose laments in ex~eptional circumstances. The mourning ritual is embedded in polyphonic media: poetry, acoustic effects,-tecl1i1iques o{th~--body, vocal music, and the arrangement of physical artiTacfs-as material narratives. The centrality of polyphony and antiphony in this study cah be contrasted to the literary tendencies of earlier folkloric research which conflated the retrieval of the lament tradition with the extraction of a complete lament text traceable to an individual "author." In everyday life and in ritual performance, laments are rarely encountered in such pristine forms. Antiphonic reciprocity between women in the mourning ritual entails the intensive interpenetration of collective and individual poetic creation. In this framework, the lament performance, given the scope of its affective dynamics, cannot be treated only as an individuated psychological or litera?' artifact. !he co_11st~uc-}/ tion of self and sentiment in the lament performance IS an ongomg social pro- , --' cess.

The Politics of Pain Maniat mourning performances are concerned with the personal signification and social (interpersonal) validation of p6nos (pain). The Maniat concept of pain integrates physical and emotional conditions, individual and collective references, and mourning and jural discourses. Pain is crucial for the truth-claiming strategies of Maniat women when in conflict with various aspects6f the social s~Ihsco~iaer~d irioispensable to the legitimation of discourse in la-

CONTEXTS

4 CHAPTER

5

ONE

ment performances. How women weave the diverse elements of lament performance-pain, biography, gender identity, and truth claiming-into a single ritual will be one of the descriptive tasks of this book. Foucault (1979), Asad (1983), Scarry (1985), and Taussig (1987) have described at length various politicalc:ylt1.1res in which pain is a central social construct. Whether understooamTts emotional or physical dimensions, the social -z;~struction of pain has been treated by these theorists as a semiotic practice that -~fj-~~)tnd synthesizes ~Mional norms and individual sensibility. A rh;tin focus here has been the relation between pain and confessional discourse i'i1Cor1st;~~tin~ the truth claims of a dominant institution through the manipu- ® T1tion ~f try_e subject. Pain as an institutional, jural, and political idiom c~n­ ~structs a subject by fusingemofionallphysical states with the ideological organization ofthe social structure (Morinis 1985). - The above tlieorisfs are concerned with the domination of the subject by institutions. However, the use of pain by the subject in order to challenge and manipulate institutions points to the possibility of sociopolitical resistance. In this context, the techniques of domination and the techniques of resistance are characterized by the same problematic: the relationship between the force of!\ pain and the establishment of truth claims.