a) Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Anagnostou, Yiorgos. Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.
This book “explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.”
Anagnostou, Yiorgos. “Against Cultural Loss: Immigration, Life History, and the Enduring Vernacular.” Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity. Ed. Katerina Zacharia. London: Ashgate, 2008. 335+.
An anthropological reading of Helen Papanikolas’s Emily-George that concentrates on the biographer’s oscillation between her certainty and her doubt that the past can be accurately reconstructed, and argues that the notion of a disappearing or a retained Hellenism in the diaspora must be viewed through ethnographic micro-contexts where immigrants and their descendants perform their identities.
Christou, Anastasia. Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity: Second Generation Greek Americans Return Home. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Georges, Robert A. “Greek-American Folk Beliefs and Narrative: Survivals and Living Traditions.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University (1964)
Gizelis, Gregory.“The Use of Amulets among Greek-Philadelphians,” Pennsylvania Folklife 20:3 (1971): 30-39.
Gizelis, Gregory. “Narrative Rhetorical Devices of Persuasion in the Greek Community of Philadelphia.” Ph.D. diss. University of Pennsylvania (1972)
Kindinger, Evangelia. “ ‘Only Stones and Stories Remain’: Greek American (Travel) Writing about Greece.” COPAS Vol. 12 (2011).
King, Russell, Anastasia Christou, and Janine Teerling. “‘We Took a Bath with the Chickens’: Memories of Childhood Visits to the Homeland by Second-generation Greek and Greek Cypriot ‘Returnees.’” Global Networks 11, 1 (2011): 1–23.
Leontis, Artemis. “Greek-American Identity: What Women’s Handwork Tells Us.” Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity. Ed. Katerina Zacharia. London: Ashgate, 2008. 379+.
Referring to narratives collected as part of research for an exhibit of 1994, “Women’s Fabric Arts in Greek America, 1894-1994” (Columbus, Ohio), the article explores how Greek women in America identify themselves in relation to the Greek-American household, the space where immigrant women tacitly accepted the mandate to recreate a miniature Greece in America, and finds opposing centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, the one crystallizing identity around a shared immigrant language, religion, customs, race, the other wishing to flee from that center.
Nevradakis, Michael. “From Assimilation to Kalomoira: Satellite Television and its Place in New York City’s Greek Community.” Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition 4.1 (2011): 163-78.
Papailias, Penelope. “America Translated in a Migrant’s Memoirs.” Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 179-226.
“Papailias turns her attention to the notebooks of an obscure Peloponnesian villager and his travails in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. As with the first three case studies, the life story of one Yorgos Mandas poses questions regarding the relationship between “History” and ‘istories’ (personal travails), between heady metanarratives and the kind of microhistories that seek legitimacy as pasts worth remembering. In this case the voice does not seek association with larger (national) historical narratives? Mandas says little about his personal experiences as a soldier during the Balkan Wars, for example, or to buttress the familiar ‘rags to riches’ line of most emigrant stories. Rather, his is a didactic study of endeavor and failure, a struggle that speaks for a vast constituency without history.”
Petridou, Elia. “The Taste of Home,” in Home Possessions: Material Culture behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 87-106.
An ethnographic study of the foods that Cypriot university students in the UK bring from home or have their parents send by mail. Examines constructions of home in a diasporic university setting.
Stewart, Charles. “Forget Homi! Creolization, Omogeneia and the Greek Diaspora.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. Vol. 15, Issue 1 (2006): 61-88.
Abstract: “An early colonial model of creolization asked whether migrants to the New World underwent such drastic denaturing as to no longer be considered trustworthy compatriots. Homelands and their overseas colonies actively debated the moral meaning of change. In this essay, this structural model of creolization is applied to understand the relationship between the Greek state and its diaspora in the United States. That relationship has been governed by the ethno-nationalist concept of Omogeneia, which means “of the same genos or ancestry” but also “homogeneity.” In the twentieth century, Omogeneia referred mainly to ethnic Greeks born and raised abroad and not possessing Greek citizenship. The idea of ethnic homogeneity became increasingly hard to sustain as Greek-Americans lost linguistic and cultural competence. The structural model of creolization guides the exploration of Greek homeland-diaspora negotiations of cultural and linguistic change in the American case. Greek-Americans are both ethnic Americans and diaspora Greeks at the same time. Although hybridity and creolization have been held up in postcolonial studies (e.g., Homi Bhabha) as productive of creative political agency, this study reveals a troubled dimension of creolization in the Greek diaspora. Omogeneia has implicitly become an othering term for those who are not linguistically and culturally competent according to homeland models and standards. A word that initially extended a welcome to ethnic Greeks left behind in Ottoman lands at independence in 1832 is now crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.”
Sutton, David E. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. Sutton challenges and expands anthropology’s current focus on issues of embodiment, memory and material culture, especially in relation to transnational migration and the flow of culture across borders and boundaries. The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where Islanders claim to remember meals long past — both humble and spectacular ñ provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Despite the growing interest in anthropological accounts of food and in the cultural construction of memory, the intersection of food with memory has not been accorded sustained examination. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in specialty cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the ‘anthropology of the senses’. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations.
Sutton, David E. Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks. Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living.
Teske, Robert T. “The Eikonostasi Among Greek-Philadelphians,” Pennsylvania Folklife 23:1 (Autumn 1973): 20-30.
Teske, Robert T. Votive Offerings among Greek-Philadelphians. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Teske, Robert T. “Votive Offerings and the Belief System of Greek Philadelphians.” Western Folklore 44 (1985): 208-224.
Pioneering work in Greek-American ethnography, carried out in 1974 PhD thesis at the Department of Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania. Examines the role of votive offerings placed by parishioners on the icons of Philadelphia’s Greek Orthodox churches
b) Anthropology and Cultural Studies – Book Reviews
Doumanis, Nicholas. Review of “America Translated in a Migrant’s Memoirs, by Penelope Papailias.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Vol. 25, № 1 (2007): 141-143.
Papailias, Penelope. Rev. of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America, by Yiorgos Anagnostou. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 30.1 (2012): 144-7.
Tricarico, Donald, Robert Viscusi, Phylis Cancilla Martinelli; Yiorgos Anagnostou reply. Roundtable review of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America, by Yiorgos Anagnostou. Italian American Review 3.1 (2013): 52-61.
Zervas, Theodore G. Rev. of “The Greek American Community of Essex County, New Jersey”, by John Antonakos. Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 38.1-2 (2012): 132.