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

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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-

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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-

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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. <=---Any discussion of the idec;logicaJ;;;.ganization of pain should take into account those frameworks that deal with the emotions as embodied, conceptual, moral, and_ideational constructs that place the seiCin a dynamic relation to sociaf~t~~ture (Rosaldo 1983; Lakoff 1987; Abu Lughod 1986; Lutz and White u}86). Lutz and White refer to situated emotional expression as "languages of the self" which generate or actively reproduce specific social structures and ideatlon~f configurations (see also Appadurai 1985; Bailey 1983). Emotional signification is both formative and effiCacious and can be included in that repertoire that Foucault terms "techniques of the self" (Martin, Gutman and Hulton 1988). The social impact of individual emotional communication is based on moral inferences shared by social actors (Lutz 1987; Abu Lughod 1986). Such ;h~;~d inferences are activated by the fusion of affective force and prescribed communicative media. The latter provoke validating responses and emotional , reciprocation from others, a process of consensus building, communicative and 1 emotive exchange, that Brenneis (1987) terms conarration. It is my suggestion that such emotional, experiential, and semiotic configurations are integral to the cultu""farconstruction of truth. · ~Truth claiming through the force of emotion and shared moral inference often occurs when the subject is in conflict with the social order. It is in this

type of situation that the validation of truth claims turns to media outside the official jural forms. The personal communication of pain, synthesizing emotional force and body symbolism, can vividly dramatize the dissonance between self and society. This discontinuity can attain a collective dimension by exploit- ·i!: ing the moral capacity of emotional inference to generate affective enclaves, i.e., ' :· communities of pain and of healing (Comaroff 1985; Taussig 1987). Composed of-entire 'categories of pe~sons in conflict with the social structure, such communities of shared emotional inference and reference correspond to Bau~~~'s (1·~n'lT notion of performance spaces as disruptive an(~isjunctive and as alter-

~~uc_~,iit~i~~~-;r~L~s~~~i~i3b!j~~~~o~fel r;)'pomts to the link between commumbes tounded on the dramaturgy of feel1llg] '-~"'-._----·--· --- .·-·· -----·<-~----·-· and the construction of re~istans;:.e spii:~:s. -----~~ -~--lctfo~--;;f either domination or resistance, the use of pain has been identified as a technique for the detachment of the self from everyday social contexts and identities (Morinis 1985). In Inner Mani, death rituals, in the past and present, have been a performative arena, demarcated by gender, where pain (p6nos) figures prominently as an orchestrating and prescriptive communicative paradigm. In these rites, the vocalization and physical display of pains construct ·• an affective enclave of women where alternative codifications of their relation to the ~ciaYO';de('achieve a formal statu~ ·as biographical testimony and oral his- _. tory.

Departures The analysis of gender power in Mediterranean ethnography and elsewhere has been locked into complementary male/female, public/private, overt/covert binary sets. The relative empowerment of women in the Mediterranean has been conceived as a narrow inversion of categories and domains defined by maledominated institutions and spheres of interaction. The practice of gossip carried out in domestic and other semiprivate spaces has become paradigmatic in this perspective. I am concerned with the extent to which this depiction of privatized resentment and covert social control has inappropriately defined the general image of Mediterranean societies. Correlative with the theoretical confinement of women's power to the domestic space and to covert discourse is the close identification of feminine C-{ltegories, symbolism, and ritual with the church in most studies. Recent analyses of the lament tradition of Greece in particular, and Greek women's culture in

6

CHAPTER ONE

general, have ignored the antiliturgical character and/or regional particularism of gender-inflected poetics -~r{d performance. Attempts to surpass binarism by a dialectical analysis of genders change nothing. Dialectical analysis, like binarism, presupposes that identities are formed in a shared social totality. This study reveals the interdiction of social totality by women's divinatory practices, thus questioning the binary or dialectical encompassment of gender identities in a shared social whole and the notion of social totality itself. ~·/"' Previous attempts at studying rituals in Greece are based on the premise of a rigid dichotomy between "rural" and "urban." They conflate residential settings with ideological-cultural orientations. This limits our understanding of both rural and urban realities. As normative categories, the "rural" and "urban" may have little or nothing to do with the actual residential settings of the person or group to which they are applied in this study. Maniats with predominantly rural residential patterns can be advocates of modernizing-urbanizing ideologies and values, while Maniats residing in urban centers can be intensely engaged in such "rural" practices as lamentation and divination. Any rigid rural/urban split is a presupposition that ignores the history of the Mediterranean. The above factors not only informed the character of my fieldwork in rural settings but also necessitated urban research, mainly in Athens and Piraeus. In fact, urban and rural fieldwork dynamics and contexts tended to blend for distinct historical and economic reasons. Most Maniat women pass back and forth between urban and rural socioeconomic and residential settings, code-switching between and within rural and urban cultures in the process. In doing so, they construct a third cultural continuum ___ _ neither completely rural nor urban. This cultural and economic tacking back and forth is not a new phenomenon in Mani although in recent years it has been facilitated by road systems, modern transportation, and emigration. The region has historically participated in multiple economies, i.e., subsistence agriculture, predatory piracy, mercantile shipping, seasonal migration, and permanent migration to urban centers in Greece and other parts of the world. In turn, this economic and cultural agility of Maniats must be linked to their equally flexible adaptation to a difficult ecology within which they have carved out unique and specialized eco-niches. Their contemporary mobility can be seen as an adaptive specialization within the modern Greek economy where they exploit the socioeconomic advantages of both the rural and the urban. This involves accumulation of surplus capital in the urban centers and the maintenance of rural subsistence bases as both an economic ~--·---,

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resource and as symbolic capital addressing current concerns over ethnicity and regional cultural identity in the modern nation state. (For further discussion see chapters 2 and 10.)

In contrast to traditional Greek folklore studies and most contemporary depictions of the lament genre, this book claims that a central referent of lament G narrative is the ritual process of performance itself. I~ is within this enclosure that bio_graphy, emotions, and local history should be ~-!1derstood. The laments ~#' akrefle'xive~ iilterveiillo~s in a ritual process where self and sentiment are inve-sted and constructed. The personal information presented in this text is that which the informants themselves chose to present in their laments and oral testimonies. The decision concerning what context a personal narrative should be inserted is a normative ...... and theoretical one. I opted for the ritual-performative context and not bio- / graphical case histories:~The latter would be an ethnocentric imposition in the context of Maniat culture. Inner Maniats do not present biography in the form of confession, or journalistic profile, or as an objective collation of facts; rather, their life history narratives are the components of a total, spatially and temporally bounded, multimedia performance. I do not confess in public myself. Whatever "confessions" appear in the book on my behalf, are also meant to convey public performative dynamics, not private personal detail. What may appear on the surface to be an editing omission on the level of writing and text is, in effect, a reflection of the dialogical editing between myself and informants that occurred in the field long before any writing took place. 3

Dutiful Ethnographer I originally considered undertaking an ethnographic study of the region in order to analyze the historical relationship between clan organization, brigandage, and resistance to state penetration. Yet, I was caught in a different "field site," which became my point of entry into the local culture. As an elderly woman confided once, "We Maniats, as you know, have the inside and the outside face." I soon found myself attending and actively participating in two or three mortuary events per week. Even while on short trips to Athens, I would be expected to attend

8 CHAPTER

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ONE

death rites in the city or back in Mani. My ongoing research, beginning in 1981 and continuing to this day, became increasingly informed by prior childhood acculturation and rapid reacquisition of the Maniat dialect. Research entailed several three- to four-month seasonal visits within a single year, an uninterrupted fifteen-month stay, ongoing contacts with Maniats in the Athens-Piraeus area and in New York, and written correspondence. Building informant networks largely depended on attending mortuary rites. Both the geography of my research and the complementary development of informant contacts rapidly exceeded any one particular village or sector of the region. This situation precluded a community study approach. The Maniats themselves maintained no territorial boundaries when participating in mortuary events to express solidarity with blood and symbolic kin. There was no conception of village or regional limits in affirming the significance-of a death. Yet, iiiformants were always meticulous about depicting mortuary rites, before and after their enactment, in terms of local history, village personalities, genealogies, and the importance of place. My mobility was further necessitated by the fact that no single village or sector could supply the variety of performances needed for contextual comparison. Death is largely an unscheduled and geographically irregular event in a region or'this size-a condition further aggravated by depopulation, which has left some villages with as few as three or four inhabitants. In addition, because lamentation is an improvised performance, there is a great degree of variation between mortuary rites. Therefore, it was necessary to attend a great many to get a sense of the range and depth of performative techniques and poetic composition. In any given fieldwork period, though I might have been resident in one or two villages, I would find myself attending rites all over the region. Because my initial entry was facilitated by kinship relations, many of the ritual events and oral history interviews were conducted in the area of the southwest. Oral history collection and ceremonial participation, however, extended throughout western Inner Mani, deep into eastern Inner Mani, and even Lower Mani (see maps). Each ceremony I attended was preceded and/or followed by life history and oral history interviews. Conversations might have focused on the recent performance but often led to unanticipated subject areas that encompassed the personal record of mortuary events attended throughout a lifetime, divination practices and beliefs, genealogical reckoning, revenge code tales, agricultural practices, and local taxonomies. The vast majority of dialogues were not formally scheduled encounters; rather, they took place in the context of everyday interactions and local protocols. They were part of an ongoing, personal partie-

ipation in the bereavement of kin groups away from the ritual, and in domestic chores and agricultural labor, such as olive picking and pickling, soap making, knitting, and the tending of domestic animals. I also worked in a kinsman's shop that doubled as a "male cafe." Driving with informants, particularly between Mani and Athens, also afforded an intimate space for directed conversation. Throughout this study, in reference to particular aspects and stages of the mortuary cycle, I have commented at length on the performative, emotional, and juridical constraints on participant observation ana~ethriographic dialogue. Iffllusfbe pointed out that Tattended all of these events in multiple roles: as ethnographer, kinswoman or official representative of my clan, fictive kin, clan archivist, and always as mourner. These roles were collectively negotiated in dialogue and performance by myself and the participants in the ceremonies. Whenever my role as sound recordist, photographer, and participant observer came into conflict with my position as mourner, the latter prevailed, and formal or structured documentation ceased. Proficiency in the local dialect greatly contributed to the sensibility of mourning overtaking the "duties" of the ethnographer. The emotional impact of mourning discourses, the prolonged intensity of performances, the polysemic and poetic force of the language, often precluded the distancing necessary for systematic documentation. My position as mourner is particularly evident in my photography, where the point of view is always that of the spatially constrained and decentered individual in a crowd, and there is no attempt to appropriate the observable scene as an objectified totality (for a detailed discussion of the visual ethnography of mortuary rites see Seremetakis 1984). Throughout my fieldwork, I made cassette recordings available to informants and their families. This practice was not simply a function of data validation; it was a component of Greek ritual exchange. In this context, the tapes and photographs that had the greatest impact were those sent to families after the death of the recorded subject. In return visits, informants would comment on how a recent mourning event had missed being recorded. My documentation was incorporated, in part, into the traditional record-keeping functions of lamenters who specialized in poetic improvisation on the life histories of the dead. The insistence that my presence and absence affected the preservation of local history, despite their awareness of archival collections of laments, indicated their sense of the mourning tradition as an ongoing and vital practice in their lives. Each death and each performance deserved historicization, and no history could completely exhaust the living tradition. These values were tied to the improvisational ethic of lament performance.

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CHAPTER ONE

It might be assumed at this point that my kinship connections with certain informants and villages and my status as a representative of my clan eased me into the centers of cultural production and knowledge. My presence at these events did have a jural inflection and thus explicitly activated political categories of perception and action on my part and on the part of informants. Recent accounts of ethnographic entry stress the implications of the objectification and textualization of the informant. But before I ever appeared in certain performances or villages, I was objectified, classified, and subjected to a political reading by the Maniats. My local classification was determined by numerous lineage factions and by the interrelationship between local and national politics. I did not enter an undifferentiated kinship center, but rather a dense web of boundaries, inclusions, and exclusions. My "appearance" (chapter 5) was splintered by lineage factions, relations of alliance, and fictive kinship. This fragmentation is indicative of the construction of the kinship persona in that society and can reach an acute stage when one enters a village of four inhabitants and realizes that his/her presence has just altered the political balance of that space. In all the above situations one becomes an object of desire that serves to justify existing divisions or that creates opportunities for boundary crossing (such desires refract the sometimes conflictual pulls of descent and alliance). The process of forming alliances should not be underestimated. As much as my presence held the potential for feeding into existing divisions, it also provided opportunities for mediations that were constantly sought after, particularly during ritual events. These issues were particularly true for blood kin. Within their categories of perception I was the "scientist" of the clan and enhanced the status of the corporate group. Negotiating entry into these multiple frames of reference is a test of agility and a form of political agon that calls for a polysemic and ironic appreciation of social interaction. The centrality of kin-based juridical and political positions was frequently relativized by the performative ethics that dominate the mortuary ceremony. Kinship allowed me access to certain thresholds, but unless the juridical categories of descent, fictive kin, or alliance were substantiated by the protocols of performance, kinship did not take one very far into the cognitive culture. Several episodes, recounted in the following text, point to the objective limits of kin relations and the further solidarities generated by relations of performance and exchange. Performative engagement on my part should not be conflated with voluntarism. As my periodic suspension of documenting during ceremonies suggests, the performative dynamics of the mourning ritual include involuntary

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reactions and uncontrollable affective pulls. The involuntary character of mourning ultimately informed my understanding of body symbolism, pain, and dreaming. The basic communicative components of the mortuary cycle determined the levels and methods of analyses. The performative dynamics of the death rite involve multiple media: spatial arrangements, singing techniques, nonverbal acoustic communication, improvised poetic discourse, body movement, and the arrangement of material artifacts. These media provide various entries into the rite. The emphasis on linguistic and discourse analysis in this study derives from the nature of the source materials: improvised poetry, oral history, life history, and a dialect with deep etymological and idiomatic roots in earlier periods of Greek history and culture. The polysemic force of both the poetic and everyday languages of the Inner Maniats necessitates careful linguistic exegesis and intimacy with the nuances of the local dialect. The dialect itself contains technical vocabulary that compels a linguistic archaeology of lament singing and death rituals. A good deal of comparative and historical analysis is accessible through linguistic stratigraphy. Rather than making clumsy comparisons between Inner Mani and other contemporary peasant or primitive societies (European or non-European), I have instead interfaced the symbolic categories of Inner Maniat culture with those of archaic and classical Greece-historical epochs that have been subjected to fruitful ethnological research in recent years. This interpretive strategy does not presume an uninterrupted or organic continuity between archaic Greece and contemporary Inner Mani. The analysis of the symbolic systems of contemporary Greece is severely inhibited by the absence of any comparative analysis utilizing data from archaic Greece and subsequent historical periods. Herzfeld (1987) correctly criticizes survivalist tendencies in Greek ethnography, but, in my view, recognition of historical discontinuity should not preclude comparative and genealogical analysis (Seremetakis 1989). The communication between the symbolic categories of several historical periods does show that death and gender possess their own historicity and archaeology, and the extent to which present-day symbolic systems and local vocabularies are mediated transformations of earlier belief systems and institutions. This is particularly true for the subjects of antiphony (chapter 6) and conflict between kin-centered and church-centered rituals (chapter 8). The investigation of linguistic archaeology in this study reflects my theoretical commitment to the type of particularistic analysis that can only emerge from

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long-term fieldwork. I further assert that the focus on local cognitive categories and symbolic systems in no way precludes analyses of a long-term, diachronic process; the latter can be made accessible by giving attention to the "particular," which functions as a repository of past experience. This point is crucial for Mediterranean ethnography. Community studies of this region, often crippled by an artificial dichotomy between culture and social organization, synchrony and diachrony, have far from exhausted the analysis of the particular despite their concentration on small-scale social units.

Diachronic Death The strategies by which contemporary anthropology conceptualizes death reflect the status of death studies both as an emergent field of theoretical colonization and as a subject that inherently transgresses the cultural mores of the ethnographer's society. The ethnography of death in other societies is unavoidably informed by the rationalization, medicalization, and commodification of death in modernity. The researcher may also feel negatively implicated by the division of labor in modern society-where death is encircled by technical specialists ranging from doctors to morticians-to which he/she belongs when observing, analyzing, and writing about death. There is a tacit interplay between the theorization of death in anthropology and the social context of the theorist. The representation of death is inflicted with the stigma of a culturally defined otherness that is often erased before it can be brought into ethnographic discourse. The theoretical negotiation of death takes several forms. Anthropologists concerned with self-reflexivity often assume a confessional posture in order to distance themselves and the other from any charge of morbidity. The confessional technique, which seeks to equate the ethnographer's death experiences with that of informants, advances the universal validity of such experience over and against "morbid" cultural particularity. Dissatisfied with the formalism and particularism of neo-Durkheimian studies of mortuary rites, Rosaldo ( 1984) asserts that ( 1) there are universal biological experiences, such as death; (2) all societies and social actors are forced to mediate these pre-given experiences as unavoidable, affective forces; and (3) the cultural practices that objectify or mediate these "rock bottom" experiences are analytically reducible to the a priori dimensions of individual biology and emotions (ibid., 191). This reduction should move ethnographic analysis away from the

"platitudes" of semantically shallow death rituals towards a focus on individual experience (ibid., 192). Rosaldo seeks to avoid the conflation of collective ritual process with individual mourning and rage. Yet, by separating individual mourning from the ceremonial, he simply preserves the Durkheimian opposition between the individual and the collective, the very foundation of those treatments of death rites he sets out to critique. Further, he situates cultural form in a metaphorical and chronologically secondary relation to affective forces. By theorizing a "rock bottom," precultural, biological-affective determination of subjectivity, he substitutes the classic culture/nature opposition with a culture/emotions polarity which in turn replicates the polarity between the collective and the individual. Danforth (1982) anticipated Rosaldo's objections to particularistic treatments of the mourning process. He is concerned with the "core of a universal cultural code" (ibid., 6) which exceeds particularity and provides the epistemological foundations of the anthropology of death. Both Danforth and Rosaldo use the anthropology of death to enter into the self-reflexivity debate and ground the latter on a universalist anthropology of the emotions. For Danforth the experience of death occurs in a state of sociocultural liiDinality in which affected ------ ""\ ~individuals become momentarilytdetached from collective structures. Thus, for Danforth, "the death of thecult~ral other can be a privileged moment of crosscultural connection through which superficial cultural divisions are overcome" (Seremetakis 1984). Here the "coeval" Ilthou relationship (Fabian 1983), the ethical construct favored by self-reflexivity theorists, is grounded on the universal experience of individual grief shared by ethnographer and mourner, both understood as liminal figures detached from respective collectivities. Not coincidentally, Danforth's reading of rural Greek death rites relies on Greek Orthodox liturgy. This expression of another universal institution, Christianity, stresses the individuated character of death based on concepts of personal sin, confession, and expiation. Both Rosaldo and Danforth smuggle a philosophical anthropology, a universal humanism, into death experience. The structuralist version of this is to classify death within a culture/nature polarity that is considered to be irreducible to particular cultures and generalizable to all. In contrast, Durkheimian theory localizes death in a specific culture as a determined component of an overarching social organization. In this perspective, death becomes figurative, part of a rhetoric. To talk about death is to really talk about kinship, inheritance, the fertility of women, the social power of men.

/...-

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ONE

These issues, however, can be overused by theorists to void death of any indigenous content in order to treat death as an empty stage for a variety of other social dramas. Bloch and Parry (1982) focus on the conjuncture between social structures and the bioeconomic metaphors of fertility, infertility, uncontrolled sexuality, and regeneration in reference to death (see also Huntington and Met-

@

calf 1979). 4 For Bloch and Parry, the dissemination of codes from the domain of fertility and biology determines the significance and symbolization of death rites. These rites are thus founded on external institutions and are simply avenues for the exercise of these external systems. Bloch and Parry, as well as Huntington and Metcalf, treat death rituals as passive repositories of economic and/or reproductive norms.. In their frameworks, the death ritual is placed if! a mimetic and subordinate position. 5 --In my opinion, all of the above approaches attempt to familiarize the death of the Other by depicting how domesticated death is in the society of the Other. BUt what perspectives emerge if, as opposed to observing death through the lens of social structure or culture/nature, we examine these categories through the optic of death? In other words, can theory shi[t from the familiarization of death [ to the defamiliarization of social order by death? Aries's historical study (1981) of death rites in premodern and early modern Europe is an implicit critique of synchronic assumptions in which death rites are treated as appendages of other sociocultural institutions. Aries, following Braude!, analyzes the cultural construction of death and mortuary rituals under the paradigm of longue dunie. Death ritual is one of the deep structures of premodern social life. In reference To Europe, he identifies a fundamental continuity in the belief system and rituals that surrounded death between the decline of the Roman Empire and the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, despite the signif• icant changes that occurred during that period in other social institutions such as religion and economy. Aries analyzes the institution of death in terms of the opposition of structure to event. Death rituals prove resistant to events taking place in other parts of the social order. The belief systems and performances organized around death are nonsynchronous with other cultural codes and values. Thus, the institution of death functions as a zone of local resistance to centralizing institutions such as church and state. --By treating death rites as deep structure, Aries inverts the customary Durkheimian treatment of death, in which death is always the eccentric event and social structure is the epitome of permanence and regulation.

Whether or not the scenario Aries extracts from premodern Europe is directly applicable to other cultures and historical periods, his thesis of the disynchronicity between death rites and other social institutions raises important methodological issues. The model of disynchronicity does not remove death rites from processes of social transformation. Rather, it permits one to treat death rites as an arena of social contestation, a space where heterogeneous and antagonistic cultural codes and social interests meet and tangle. Finally, this model contains the imperative to analyze death rituals as integrities with their own temporal rhythms, transformations, and levels of engagement with and disengagement from the social order. Aries's analysis moves from death to the social order rather than the reverse. The institutions of death function as a critical vantage point from which to view society. 6 I am not just posing an arbitrary methodological inversion here. The defamiliarization of social order through the optic offered by death is precisely the central task and cognitive orientation assumed by Maniat women in their performance of death rites. To examine death in Inner Mani is to look at Maniat society through female eyes.

2 SOCIAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Ecology and Topography Inner Mani forms the middle finger of the Morea, the trisected peninsula of the southern Peloponnese. Four mountain ranges that crosscut the Morea, running northwest to southeast, have historically impeded outside penetration while leaving the area vulnerable to contact via the sea and low-lying coasts. The Mani is centered around the Taygetos range, which branches off from the Vardounia Mountains in the north and terminates in the steep sea cliffs and deep inlets of Cape Tenaron (Matapas), at the southern ends of Europe. In contrast to the northern sectors of the Morea, the Maniat coastline is rugged and, like its inland topography, largely inhospitable. The Taygetos range bisects the Maniat peninsula creating narrow valley corridors which connect the eastern and western sectors. The west coast is seventy-five kilometers in length and the east is forty kilometers. The peninsula itself can be as narrow as ten kilometers across and no settlement is farther than twelve kilometers from the ocean. The Inner Maniat topography is formed by the tortuous rubble and outcroppings of limestone which account for its barrenness. Surface water is scarce, if not totally absent. The region is susceptible to periodic regular droughts and has a short rainy season during the winter. The soil cover is thin, vulnerable to the fierce winds that sweep the peninsula during winter and late summer. Reaching gale force, these winds can seriously damage local flora and horticulture as they carry sea salt, which "burns" crops, inland. During late summer, these winds become a hot sirocco blowing from the North African coast (Wagstaff 1975, 518; Wagstaff 1978, 295-96; Eliopoulou-Rogan 1973, 1-3; Allen 1974, 18).

The area where Inner Mani ends towards the sea portrays a real picture of chaos. One would say that a Cyclop's hand had broken and turned that corner of the earth upside down! From all sides scorching naked rocks rise up in incredible shapes and with the most unusual colors. Some are

SOCIAL HISTORY AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

17

painted in lively colors, others in the most misty hues, depending on the surface they expose to the burning sun or they are sunk in deep and dark ravines. There is no sign of plants, only a few skinny herds here and there on the lips of these dizzying ravines, picking a yellowish drought grass. (Yemeniz 1865, 5) The folk mapping of this region has traditionally demarcated this arid zone (Laconian Mani) from the more fertile northern sector (Messinean Mani). The two regions are respectively termed Inner (Mesa) and Outer (Exo) Mani. Inner Mani itself is divided into sunward ( prosiliaki) Mani, constituting the east coast of the peninsula, and shadowy (aposkier{) Mani, which is the west coast. Sunward Mani, in turn, is demarcated in the northeast as Lower (Kdto) Mani. Outer Mani is characterized by the watershed of the Taygetos range and exposed, flat, low-lying coastal wedges that are less rocky and arid than Inner Mani. In both regions, the sea and the mountains have influenced settlement pattern. In Inner Mani, the rocky terrain and arid climate have further influenced settlement sites. Due to the natural borders formed by the mountain ranges, the sea has been the main avenue of contact with other parts of Greece and the outside world. Because of piracy, it also constituted a major threat to settlement integrity. As a result, settlement in Inner Mani from A.D. 400 to 18oo shifted from the coast to the inland sectors bordering the mountains. Over 90 percent of settlements were sited inland along the mountain periphery where soil covers are deeper and fertile. Only 9 percent of settlements are within five kilometers of the sea, and more than 50 percent of all settlements (coastal and inland) are located in the corridor formed by the west coast and the Taygetos range. This region evidences the highest levels of settlement concentration. In the eastern sectors, the settlement pattern is more dispersed (Wagstaff 1975, 518).

Settlement Pattern The settlement pattern of the Maniat region displays a long-term continuity from the Bronze Age to the third century A.D. 1 The number of settlements from the Bronze Age to the second century A.D. increased from four to twenty-three. By the seventeenth century, the number rose to 129 and by the late nineteenth century reached 225. Between the Roman period and the seventeenth century, there was a marked decline of coastal sites complemented by increased concentration of sites inland on the marine terraces and mountain foothills of the Taygetos. This was accompanied by the shift of settlement concentration from the

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CHAPTER TWO

northeast to the west and southwest. Consequently, the average altitude zoning of settlements increased from 83 meters to 236 meters above sea level (Wagstaff 1977a, 165-69). The formative period of this shift can be placed somewhere between the fourth and the tenth centuries. Prior to this, the Mani had been under Spartan rule (510-156 B.c.), the site of the Lacedaemonian Union (146 B.C.-A.D. 305), and a province of the Roman Empire (21 B.C.-A.D. 296). From A.D. 297 onward, the region was subject to invasions from Goths, Visigoths, and Avars. From the third to the tenth century the larger coastal and mercantile Roman towns began to disappear. The alteration of the names of the early coastal settlements in seventeenth-century documents bears further witness to the break in occupying populations. It has been adduced that the Maniat region was a late convert to Christianity at some point in the tenth century. Though there are sixth-century churches in the region, the majority are located on the coast. This indicates that the inland population had little exposure or was resistant to Christianity at that time. Post-tenth-century church sites follow the settlement shift inland and to higher altitude zones. It has been conjectured that these posttenth-century church sites reflect the Medieval settlement pattern which could place the shift in zonation from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the thirteenth century (Wagstaff 1977a, 165-71; Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 22-27). The shift away from the coast has been attributed to the intensification of piracy after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, to deforestation, and soil degradation. The new settlement areas, offering a somewhat thicker soil cover, were only marginally more fertile. (Certain arable coastal regions reveal a paucity of settlement, supporting the piracy theory). Whatever the causes of this shift, settlement concentration documented from the seventeenth century onward (though probably originating much earlier) increased on the western marine terraces bordering the Taygetos range. This was an arid, rocky region in which population/land ratios would always be precarious, given the state of subsistence agriculture. Various Slavic confederacies invaded the region from the fifth through the seventh century and held it for 218 years. It was about this time that Inner Mani first acquired its reputation as a refuge area (due to its isolation) for indigenous Greek populations. Its status as a refuge area then and later was correlated with its extreme poverty. The following passage from Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote an administrative guide to the Byzantine empire in A.D. 950, specifies the region as a refuge area, as poverty stricken, and as known for pre-Christian beliefs.

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HISTORY

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ORGANIZATION

Be it known that the inhabitants of Castle Maina are not from the race of the aforesaid Slavs but from the older Romaioi, who up to the present time are termed Hellenes by the local inhabitants on account of their being in older times idolaters and worshippers of idols like the ancient Greeks, and who were baptized and became Christians in the reign of the glorious Basil. The place in which they live is waterless and inaccessible, but has olives from which they gain some consolation. (Quoted in Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 22) The modern settlement distribution of Inner Mani was largely in place by 16oo, possibly earlier. In the preceding centuries, Outer Mani was conquered by the Normans in 1204-lnner Mani was excluded from Frankish colonization-to pass back into the hands of Byzantium in 1261. The region became a legendary refuge area for exiled Byzantine nobility after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. During the Turkish-Venetian War (1464-79), the region fell under the political and economic influence of Venice. Yet, it largely remained autonomous from all state hegemonies, and the populace considered itself completely independent of the Ottoman empire. The Turks garrisoned fortresses at strategic coastal locations but did not significantly move inland. The Venetian conquest of the Peloponnese in 168 5 did little to alter the Maniats' political insularity, although the region did develop close economic ties to the Republic. Numerous Maniats had been serving as mercenaries in the Venetian army as well as in the armies of other Italian city-states prior to this. The Turks reconquered the Peloponnese in 1715, but beyond the reoccupation of coastal fortifications and the extraction of nominal taxes, their political-military penetration of the region was minimal and always hotly contested by Maniat force of arms. An earlier example of the region's autonomy from state systems occurred when the Venetians attempted to conduct a census of the entire Morea during their occupation ( 1685-1715). The "fierce" Maniats refused to participate in this project conducted by a state that they considered their political-military ally (Eliopoulou-Rogan 1973, 23-38; Topping 1976, 93-108; Andromedas 1966, 36-39; Daskalakis 1923, 19; Mexis 1977, 128-29). According to a seventeenth-century military reconaissance submitted to the Due du Nevers, the number of hearths in Mani totaled 4,913. This was broken down into 125 villages capable of fielding twelve thousand armed combatants and six thousand unarmed combatants (many of whom were probably women, who were known to fight alongside the men against Turkish incursions). Wagstaff's mapping of degrees of settlement desertion in the seventeenth century re-

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CHAPTER TWO

veals Inner Mani as having the lowest levels of village abandonment, well below the mean for the entire Morea. This would be another indication of the region's insularity from state military incursion (Ottoman and Venetian) in the previous century. At this point in time, only three settlements were located by the coast and the remainder were sited inland (Wagstaff 1977a, 199, 211-13, and 1977, 299). The concentration of village settlements on the moderately sloping terrain east of the coastal cliffs and along the western slopes of the Taygetos range combined security measures with the need to diversify land use. The flat coastal terraces were reserved for horticulture and the steeper inclines for a mixture of horticulture and herding. Deeper soils are to be found at the foot of the mountains and settlement concentration was dense in these locales. The seventeenthcentury document cited earlier identifies clusters of smaller villages with the Italian predication paglia di attached to the name of a larger, adjacent stem village. The Italian paglia refers to straw huts used for seasonal herding and intermittent cultivation. This naming pattern provides evidence of transhumance in the Maniat region and offers important clues to the character and logic of settlement expansion and clan fissioning. These seasonal transhumant sites eventually became the basis for more permanent village settlements. Permanency in the region was usually associated with the building of war towers. A particular type of watchtower, xem6ni, is associated with guarding isolated upfields. These xem6nia would become the basis for nucleated residences (Wagstaff 1977, 205). (Discussed more fully in the section "Social Organization" below.) Wagstaff attributes the avoidance of coastal settlement primarily to the low level of coastal trading prior to the seventeenth century, and only secondarily to piracy. The first explanation is dubious since when some level of coastal trading did come into being, there was no marked influx of settlements on the coast. This was for obvious ecological reasons, since very few sectors of the Inner Maniat coastline offer available harbors and easy access to the sea. In fact, a common form of local piracy was wrecking offshore boats, often deliberately tricked into drawing close to the dangerous, rocky shallows. The inland settlement pattern combined security measures, the need of the Maniats to physically distance themselves from their marine brigandage, and the requirements of diversified land exploitation based on a mix of infield and outfield seasonal cultivation and transhumance. Wagstaff is probably correct in asserting that coastal enterprises were conducted from temporary seasonal settlements. This would be in keeping with patterns of upland transhumance. Coastal trading, wrecking,

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21

ORGANIZATION

and offshore piracy can all be considered in this context as forms of what EstynEvans terms "seasonal maritime transhumance" (Wagstaff 1977, 211-12; EstynEvans 1981, 84). The Maniats, from the seventeenth century onward, became infamous as pirates, brigands, and rebels against the Turkish state. As a political culture, the Maniats blurred the distinction between social banditry as insurrection against the Ottoman empire and outright brigandage to which Christian and Moslem, European and Turk, all fell victim. Brigandage, of course, is a logical choice in an arid environment that offers only a minimal subsistence base. This is particularly true for a topographically insulated periphery situated at the margins of several imperial states (Ottoman, Venetian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian) and overlooking one of the more important commercial sea lanes in the Mediterranean (Braude! 1976, 115-16). Not that the Maniats originated piracy in this region. In 1292, the Catalans raided the Maniat coast and sold their captives as slaves. Piracy, brigandage (exercised against the better-off villages of Outer Mani and the larger coastal settlements to the north of that region), and the slave trade constituted the region's entry into market economies and early modern capitalism. But this entry, given its predatory nature, was highly selective. There was an external and internal economy. The internal economy and social organization of Inner Mani, even during this period of intensive and violent contact with the growing world system of Mediterranean mercantilism, remained resolutely precapitalist. Two passages from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gentlemen travelers highlight the marked economic contrast between brigandage and agriculture among the Inner Maniats. For piracy is the most important business of the Maniates and their chief commerce is of captives. ltilon was called "Great Algiers." They take prisoners everywhere selling the Christians to the Turks and the Turks to the Christians. (Quoted in Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 27) The rocks and sides of the Taygetos, which is by nature barren as ever mountain was, are cut into terraces to support the little earth there is and covered with corn springing even from the very stones . . . . We were struck with the sight of a range of mountain ... which was scattered all over with thin corn, springing from little terraces of earth scraped together, often not larger than a table. (Morritt 1914, 200-204)

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CHAPTER TWO

The Village From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, this scarcity of arable land was combined with a settlement density (particularly on the west coast) that approached incipient urbanization. The residential configuration was composed oflarge villages with smaller stem villages no farther than two or three kilometers from each other. The larger parent villages were at a greater distance from each other. The older and often larger villages exhibit a radial groundplan. These villages tend to be located on the flat marine terraces. The old road system was composed of cobblestone paths. With the building of asphalt roads for automobile traffic, newer villages have been built or resited down on the main road in a linear layout reflecting the nuclearization of household kin groups that has accompanied modernization. The traditional village street plan resembles urban labyrinths: complex, narrow alleyways that divide the villages into neighborhood enclaves, each called mahalas, that is, household clusters of agnatic and often intermarrying kin groups. The mahalas is not only a physical ensemble of buildings. It is also an affective term for both blood and fictive kin. It is tied to the concept of sidrofia, a "company" connected by kin, and/or voluntary association, and/or the joint performance of instrumental tasks. There is no such thing as an undifferentiated village cluster. To enter a village is to enter a mosaic of highly differentiated mahaladhes (plural). Which particular mahalas the visitor will enter or become associated with constitutes a political statement. The mahalas is formed around one or more war towers or two-story towerhouses. Towerhouses can be physically attached to a war tower or adjacent to it. It is the height of the house and not its structural connection to a tower that defines it as a towerhouse. In pre-twentieth-century Inner Mani, there would have been single-story houses, which represented lower social ranks. New buildings erected in a village are always attached to a residual towerhouse, even if the latter was not habitable. The towers are never torn down. The basic Maniat tower prototype has been dated back to 16oo, but it is obvious that the influences on tower styles are considerably older. In the thirteenth century, Outer Mani had been part of the Frankish principality of Achaia, and the towers there show the influence of Norman keeps, particularly the crenelated upper battlements. Inner Maniat towers bear a striking resemblance to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century towers of Florence, Tuscany, and other citystates and hill towns of northeastern Italy; which is not surprising, since Maniats

SOCIAL AND

SOCIAL

HISTORY

23

ORGANIZATION

had considerable contact with Italy as mercenaries under the Venetians during the fourteenth century (Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 25). The tower architecture divides into two broad historical periods: pre-18 33 detached military towers and post-1833 connected tower/house complexes that combined military and domestic functions. The majority of pre-nineteenth-century towers did not function as domiciles except during feuds and war. The foundations of the tower were dug until the builders hit bedrock to give the tower firm "roots." It was a symbol of status and military strength to have the tallest tower in the area. This is consistent with the Maniat correlation between optical control and social power. Towers averaged three to five meters square at the base; they were rectangular, reached heights of up to twenty-five meters, and tapered at their summit. The tower walls were one meter thick and built with a dry stone technique that was reinforced at the base with coats of lime which strengthened the adhesion of the stones and made it difficult for besiegers to scale the walls. The upper stories were pitted with narrow gun slits, and many of the windows had drainage holes for pouring hot oil and boiling water on the enemy. The internal structure of the towers was reinforced by megalithic type stone lintel and wedged stone arches that exhibit a high degree of engineering sophistication. The entrances of towers were either small, ground level crawl spaces or elevated openings that required rope ladders to enter and exit. The mahalas was the fundamental residential unit of the maximal lineage and its consanguines. The houses of the malahas were usually sited in a radial arc around the war tower. There would have been a minimum of three or four households. Each mahalas had its own church and, prior to the nineteenth century, its own cemetery. Within the village, the mahaladhes might form a continuous cluster of enclaves, or they might be separated from each other. The older Inner Maniat village did not have a central open square for everyday social interaction. Instead, each neighborhood enclave had its rougha, a small enclosed gathering place that was spatially segregated by gender and exclusive to the population of the mahalcis. The rougha is surrounded by the stone walls of the adjacent houses and towers and is usually located in an area protected from the wind and sun. People sit on slate stone benches jutting out from the outer walls of the surrounding houses and towers. Some roughes are natural rock formations in the middle of the neighborhood. Central squares (also called roughes by the Maniats) are mainly a later phenomenon (mid-nineteenth century onward), and most villages still do not have these centralizing public spaces. Similarly, coffeehouses-which throughout Greece are usually associated with cen-

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TWO

tral, public, open spaces-are also a rare phenomenon in contemporary Inner Maniat village life and were totally unknown prior to the mid-nineteenth century. The war tower was the functional and symbolic center of the life of the mahalddhes. Their military, economic, and symbolic implication will be analyzed later. For now it will suffice to note that the towers were central to revenge code feuding, to the protection of households, livestock, and agricultural land and its products. Towers were built and sited to protect isolated outfields and sheilings used in transhumance. They were also used to claim land and blockade adversary settlements. The upper floors of the tower were given over to offensive and defensive military functions. The armament of towers ranged from throwing-stones to cannons (usually pillaged during piracy expeditions), muzzleloading rifles, and, in the nineteenth century, breech-loading rifles. The Maniats tended to keep up with the latest in military technology in a given historical period. At the same time, the material culture remained relatively static in the areas of agricultural production, milling, and transportation. The basements of the towers were devoted to storage spaces and cells for prisoners. Four or five related houses were attached to the towers by adjacent siting or by arches and tunnels. When more kin households were established, a new tower was built for this complex. Because of the layout of mahalddhes, the towers of adversary clans were sometimes only a few meters distant from each other. During feuds, these towers received point blank rifle and cannon fire and were vulnerable to nighttime attempts to blow up the foundations with gunpowder. In the early nineteenth century, the village of Kitta, with a population of up to one hundred households, was the site for twenty-two towers (Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 77). The sectoring of the Maniat skyline by towers gives the desolate rural landscape a disorienting urban character. Xem6nia, outlying isolated towers, were strategically placed at crossroads or at the boundaries between villages. These outlying towers were often sited in such manner that they were camouflaged by the surrounding topography, and the passerby would come upon them suddenly without any visual forewarning. Xem6nia would be profiled against cliff faces and set into rock depressions. As crucial tools in territorial expansion and clan fissioning, they formed the nuclei of new settlements. Their siting was thus not totally dictated by subsistence-economic requirements. The Maniat towerhouse (pirgh6spito) constructed after 1850, was a two- and sometimes three-story structure built of the same materials and with the same techniques as the war tower. The architectural design can be traced to the ancient Greek house, the megharo, which is common in the Aegean Islands and

SOCIAL

HISTORY

25

ORGANIZATION

in Thrace. The house was divided into two basic sections-the upper, ano(u)i, and the lower, kato(u)i-by a vaulted arch that is found in tower construction. The stories are connected by trap doors inside and a stone stairway outside. The ground floor is divided into two to four rooms, for animal feed storage and domestic livestock. The arch formed by the external stairway also housed domestic animals. The pre-1850 houses were largely single storied, although those houses associated with towers exhibited the vaulted arch that raised their roofs higher than those house clusters without a war tower (the social ranking behind this division of house types will be discussed below). The dimensions of the house were three by six to four by eight meters. Rainwater cisterns were located at the bottom of the two-story house. There were two types of cisterns associated with the Inner Maniat settlement: those that collected rain-water in anticipation of the dry and lengthy summer, and those that collected water for everyday use at other times of the year when rainfall was more common. The latter could be located inside or outside the house. The houses in a kin cluster tended to face a common yard for security reasons. There were numerous rituals and magical practices associated with the building and its opening to insure that the house was well "solidified."

Social Organization It can be assumed that the Inner Maniat clan system was in place along with the towers by 16oo. Kinship organization and terminology indicate a deeper chronology extending from the fourteenth century. The primary kin category for the Maniat was the yenid, or patrician, consisting of all patrilineal descendants of an apical ancestor as well as other blood and fictive kin assimilated into the line of descent. In everyday relations, yenid referred to the blood relatives of an apical ancestor within the maximal lineage. Each yenid was a component of a larger conglomerate of clans, known as {atria or dhikoloyid, bearing the name of an apical figure (though without being able to trace the direct connections). Both the {atria and the yenid were ideologically organized around the myth of patrilineal descent. But this ideology was more often invoked to enforce alliancesupport relations between yenies (plural) and/or lineages that had fissioned from each other, usually through residential change. There are in fact cases of a yenid formed as alliance between unrelated lineages; the latter constructed a fictive ancestor in order to stamp the alliance with the legitimacy of patrilineal descent. Fissioned clans begin to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-

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ries. The depth of the majority of clan genealogies can run ten to fifteen generations. Prior to the twentieth century, clan organization was clearly bifurcated into maximal and minimal lineages. A total of 307 members or more established the clan as a maximal lineage, and the average sublineage could consist of thirty to sixty members (Alexakis 1980, 41-45). Currently, the maximal lineage connection has been blurred or lost and social organization is characterized by a conglomerate group of sublineages sharing a common ancestral surname whose connection to the sublineages is rather hazy. The depth of the minimal lineage runs five to eight generations. Residence was crucial in determining the identification of a clan as a maximal or minimal lineage. The war towers would have been associated with the founding ancestor of the maximal lineage, and house-siting patterns would indicate lineage status within the mahaladhes. Mahalcidhes were usually named after the resident maximal lineage. Although there was an official ideology to maintain the mahaladhes exclusive and endogamous, sublineages could be resident in neighborhoods that were classified as belonging to a completely different yenici. This residential pattern was indicative of both the fissioning of the minimallineage and the construction of an alliance relation. The extended family household is the central reproductive unit of the yenia and its lineages. The affiliations of the yenici and the lineage supplied the organizational and ideological support for the household. But it is the household which is the central political unit for putting clan ethics into practice. Its internal organization, hierarchies, filial relations, sibling relations, patrilineal, affinal, and cognatic ties allow the household to function as a map of social relations beyond its space. Inner Maniats maintain a bilateral kinship classification which has a strong patrilineal bias. The basic subunits of this mapping around which all other classifications revolved are: the yenici; the manoyenici, that is, the natal clan of ego's mother; the kiroyenia, the natal clan of the father's mother; and the manokiroyenici, the natal clan of ego's mother's mother. This taxonomy situates siblings in the same bilateral network, which can be different from bilateral networks occupied by ego's father. Thus, the sibling tie among the Inner Maniats, which carries both patrilineal and cognatic linkages, is often stronger and more intimate than the parental tie. Another important category is the petherik6, used by in-marrying women to specify the husband's patrilineage. The married woman maintains an active affiliation and a strong identification with her natal clan. The extended family household consisted of three or four generations. As-

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pects of this structure have survived into modernity (in contrast to maximal lineages). The extended family is formed by parents with their married children, and two or more brothers with or without spouses and children. The household is usually known by the surname of the father or grandfather. Fissioning of the household occurred with the accumulation of conjugal couples under the same roof. Inner Maniats recognized the cramped condition of their living arrangements (the entire household used to sleep in the same communal room) with the maxim "a house just to fit you but fields as large as possible." Today genealogical memory can be quite shallow. Men tend to specialize more in the genealogy of ascendants and young women are more knowledgeable about contemporary blood relatives. Weddings and funerals are often opportunities for exploring and formalizing ascendant connections. Clan solidarity was also reproduced through various religious rituals, incipient tomb cults, clan churches (often erected on clan property), nucleated settlements, attached houses, collective hunts, specialized and often secret artisan skills, family bibles (with genealogical and inheritance chronicles written on the inside covers), and, of course, the inalienable status of clan land. The patrilineage is metaphorized as blood (ema), a category of shared substance that is opposed to nonblood. The term meat (kreas) is also used as a metaphor for patrilineal kin. It is believed that the mother transmits patrilineal blood of the husband to the children, but that the child may take a portion of its blood from the mother's side. The centrality of the blood metaphor seems to overdetermine the power of patrilineal relations; but in effect, the ethic of shared substance is readily extended (particularly by women) to food, residence, and affective care. These performative components of the shared substance ethic can, to a certain extent, relativize the descent connotation of shared substance. The Maniat naming system is central to the processes of segmentation, fissioning, and clan formation. Each extended family household of a patrician takes its surname from the first name of an apical ancestor. The firstborn sons of male siblings take the first name of their grandfather, one that is also linked to the apical ancestor or other male ancestors of the maximal lineage. Second born sons take their first names from the mother's father. This first name combined with the maximal lineage surname indicates the bilateral and patrilineal connection. The firstborn daughter takes her name from her father's mother, the second born daughter is given the name of the mother's mother. Subsequent male and female siblings take their first names from the siblings of the patrilineal and affinal grandparents.

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As a sublineage grows in numbers, i.e., male children and households the ' maximal lineage surname is replaced by the first name of the grandfather of a male sibling cohort. Continuity with the maximal lineage is preserved by retaining the alternate generation first name pattern. The taking of a new surname, which involves the specification of a male ascendant in the minimal lineage, is a prelude to the elevation of that group into a maximal lineage. Later on, this differentiation within the yenid could lead to total fissioning and the establishment of this emerging maximal lineage as a separate clan. The new name may be derived from the first name of the eldest male of the minimal lineage or from a nickname that refers to a physical or a personality characteristic of the new apical figure. The new surname can also refer to a topographic feature of the lineage's residential site. The taking of the new surname was traditionally associated with a residential shift and/or the erection or claiming of a separate war tower. War towers often exhibit the head sculptures of founding apical figures of the lineage. In situations of lineage relocation or settlement expansion, segmentation by residence could have led to complete fissioning, even though the emerging clan may have retained the surname of the maximal lineage from which it originated. Maniats account for segmentation and fissioning in the following manner: (1) when too many consanguines accumulate with overlapping first names and surnames, they differentiate sublineages; (2) in cases of feuding, the founder of the new maximal lineage or clan changes the surname in an attempt to avoid adversaries and the police-this also would have involved residence change; (3) name change will occur if a member of the clan has committed a dishonorable act; and (4) name changes will also occur in cases of conflict between male siblings over the allocation of plots of land within the partible inheritance system-here land claiming is considered to be tied to aspirations for attaining apical ancestor status. In the case of name change which resulted from feuding, the lineage embroiled in the feud could establish an alliance with another maximal lineage from a different clan, probably one that was resident in the same village. This type of alliance could also occur with a maximal lineage to which the smaller clan had a distant phatry connection. It is evident that the maximal lineage followed a developmental cycle towards segmentation and fissioning, and from residential endogamy to residential dispersal. The instability of the Inner Maniat military situation weakened residentially dispersed patrilineal connections and fostered coresidential alliances based on military support, marriage, and fictive

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kinship. In turn, this lateral alliance developed patrilineal myths of common descent, thereby assimilating the alliance into a vertical blood tie. Long-term warfare between clans accelerated the absorption of a smaller clan into a federation with a larger and militarily stronger clan. Such strategic alliances also formed between maximal lineages of two different clans. The creation of genealogical myths in which the apical founders of the two maximal lineages are made to appear as brothers reinforced assimilation. This fictive relation exploits the genealogical fact that the sibling relation carries close reciprocities. At one stage of the developmental cycle of the maximal lineage, residence was rooted in kinship, which determines the former's political character (mahalddhes being the fundamental political unit). At a later stage, after segmentation, residential dispersal and/or periods of intensive feuding, it was residence, now the fundamental political-military unit, that determined kinship. Residence could shift from a genealogical to a political category, or from a political to a genealogical category.

Alliance The term sidrofia (voluntary association, company formed for a particular purpose, or comradery) refers to several forms of contractual alliance: marriage, military support, and fictive kinship. Inner Maniat marriage was exogamous, the incest prohibition extending to cousins of the seventh degree. This is in marked contrast to the endogamous marriage patterns of Outer Mani. The difference between the two regions can be accounted for by the development of imported feudalism in Outer Mani (due to its Frankish colonization in the twelfth century), the accumulation of large holdings by hereditary chiefs, and a rigid stratification system based on landholding, military elites, and their retainer-clients. The latter was a hereditary relationship structured by both military obligations and relations of production. Inner Maniat social organization, however, remained politically decentralized. The minimal level of subsistence discouraged the development of feudal economic systems. Consequently, stratification was based on a form of ranking that was not essentially hereditary but performative. Chieftainship within the Inner Maniat clan lineage was nonhereditary, and the yenid or the {atria was governed by a council of elders drawn

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from both maximal and minimal lineage agnates. This council was ultimately responsible for all military matters involving both alliance and feuding. Exogamous marriage was crucial to the formation of military alliances. Men married upward and paid brideprice to both the bride's patrilineal and matrilineal clans. Arranged marriages were the rule, and these were often prenatal agreements made between two clans. The absence of a dowry system 2 can be accounted for by the need to centralize landholdings already fragmented by partible inheritance and the vast sectors of infertile land.

An exception to exogamous marriage was the case of xaklirospord, the female, only child of a household (see "Tracking Vangelio," chapter 7). She had the right to inherit the household land but not the tower. The tower would be placed under the control of her closest male agnate. Rather than permit the property to leave the clan, a male agnate could break the incest prohibition and declare an engagement by a ritual called "binding" (dhesmefsi): he would shoot his rifle in her presence or cut a strand of her hair. In contrast, the only male child of the household was the "key" (klidhi). 3 If he died, the household was characterized as "closed" because of the absence of direct heirs. This is eloquently stated by two women in the following lament fragments.

[1]

Eh, my sweet manoyenid, why did you raise me? I consumed my youth and life and [he] closed his house my blackened father. When I think of it I lose my mind. Endless life may my uncle's sons have let them hold the "key" for me to have an open door.

Mori ghlikid manoyenid yiati me anastisate? efagha nidta ke zoi ki eklise to spiti tau o mdvros o pateras mou. P' dma to siloyizome e, to mial6 mou efiye. Ki as ehoun dsoti zoi more tau bdrba mou i yi ndne meyid taus to klidhi na ehou porta anihti. (from lament no. 62, chapter 9).

[2]

Don't mourn for your husband, the husband gives burning pain

Ton dndra zou mi kleis 0 dndra' z' evale kaim6

SOCIAL

and social death to the woman. Mourn for your brother, who was an only son, a house with the key.

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ke ti yinekas marazm6. Na kleis to kavoutsdki zou pou 'tane yi6s monoyenis k' itane spiti me klidhi.

The married woman would retain the surname of her natal clan which is referred to as her "other side" (i dli plevrd or meird). She would be addressed by the surname of her natal clan or of her affinal clan or both. If she was addressed by her husband's surname, the term nifi, which means bride or daughter-in-law, was attached as a suffix to her husband's surname. Whether or not her natal or affinal name was used to address the married woman depended on who was speaking to or about her and in what context. The naming pattern expressed the strong ties of the wife to her natal clan and her ambivalent position among her affines. The wife was considered representative of her natal clan and always had a problematic status in the affinal household. In terms of authority, she was subordinate not only to her husband and his male agnates, but to her motherin-law and other female affines. Besides the cementing of a strategic alliance, the primary function of marriage was the bearing of "guns," or male children, for the clan. In keeping with the contribution of marriage to military reproduction, the brideprice itself was known as the "dollar for the cannon." In other words, the daughters of the household were exchanged for the strategic and material improvement of the clan's military position (Andromedas 1962, 71). Payment of the brideprice constituted recognition of the clan's superior status in relation to the groom's clan. There were frequent disputes over brideprice. Alliances or sidrofia were instituted by written contracts of military support between clans and by several forms of ritual and fictive kinship. Two forms of ritual kinship practiced by Maniat men and to a lesser extent by Maniat women display a tripartite scenario analogous to rites of passage. These practices formalized the social movement of the participants beyond the boundaries of descent relations into a more public sphere of military alliance between nonblood that deeply implicated the respective descent groups. In adhelfopi(t)ia (predominantly male ritual), the two male participants would cut their veins, mix their blood, then spend a period of time up in the mountains hunting and sharing food. When they returned from their sojourn in the wild they would go to a

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priest, who would perform a benediction over the new relationship, or directly return to their respective clans. The integration of their alliance into the patrilineal system of descent was instituted by an incest prohibition applicable to the entire membership of the concerned clans. The tripartite schema of this ritual is obvious. The exchange of blood is in effect the dilution oflineal descent and incurs pollution. The two initiates would separate themselves from their respective clans for a liminal period in the wild. Their separation from descent groups was further amplified by their separation from food originating in agricultural relations of production and their adoption of a hunting/gathering, nonsedentary lifestyle. Agriculture and landholding are components of the domain of descent, while living in the wild and hunting expresses a comradely, military lifestyle that neutralizes the hierarchies and exclusions associated with descent. Distancing from and contact with certain foods is in Inner Mani a sign of repositioning within the descent group (see chapter 4 regarding food bans during mourning periods). The sharing of food is understood by Maniats as either the extension of shared substance rooted in the blood tie or a substitution of the blood tie when this is absent. Ethics of shared substance prevail in the social relations among women, although, in the case of fictive kinship, the sharing of substance between women did not have the wider, corporate impact that such acts had when performed by men. Women, whenever engaging in this ritual, kissed and exchanged gifts instead of blood and spent a shorter period in the wild. The reciprocal spilling of blood, the contact of alien metal with clan "meat" in the blood brotherhood rite, evokes revenge code violence. Revenge code violence is explicit in a rite of fictive kinship termed psihadherfosini, a relationship generated by the act of psihik6 (rite of forgiveness). This occurred when a killing had taken place between two groups. If the offending clan sought to avoid retaliation and the subsequent revenge code cycle, the killer would go unarmed and bearing gifts to the victim's clan to ask forgiveness. The killer would kneel and kiss the hands both of the victim's parents and of the rest of the agnates, who stood in a line that extended from the entrance to the backyard of the house. The mother of the victim would cover the killer with her top skirt or apron; the victim's father would kiss the killer on his forehead. These acts constituted the parents' recognition of the killer as a substitute for their lost "gun," or son. The forgiven killer would address the parents as "soul father" and "soul mother." This rite of adoption occurred in situations of manslaughter when the killing took place between blood relations, and when the victim's clan was militarily more powerful than the killer's clan. The central role of the mother in this rite, beyond

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her reenactment of birth, concerns the potential role of her natal clan, the victim's manoyenia, in exacting revenge for the crime. A strong military alliance resulted from this fictive kin relation. These rites were frequently negotiated by priests, neutrals from powerful clans, or by relatives with distant blood connection to both parties. Simulated birthing was also involved in direct rites of adoption, which were used to rectify childless marriages or marriages that had not produced male children. According to one story, when the pregnancy of a woman in her late fifties was announced, a female relative of the expectant mother declared that "her belly was no pillow!" This testimony refers back to the faking of pregnancy in cases of adoption. There is also a saying pertinent to adoption that "the father passes the kid through his sleeve." This indicates that adoption proceedings were initiated by males because of the strategic position of male children in the military situation. Adoption of this sort also resulted in a military alliance between clans. Inner Maniats maintain the institution of koumbaria, that is, godfatherhood and/or marriage sponsor. The latter takes place between the bridegroom and his best man, while the former occurs between two males seeking to establish a patron-client relation in which the patron fulfills the role of godfather at the baptism of one of the client's children. The relationship is sanctioned by the church and can be formed between blood relations, but it occurs more frequently between males with no blood tie. In the past, koumbaria was most often cemented between representatives of a lower status and higher status corporate group. An incest prohibition up to the third degree was placed by the church between the families implicated by this relationship (Andromedas 1962, 79). The wide gauge and flexibility of sidrofia-type relationships relativizes the political importance of patrilineal descent. Throughout the structures of Maniat kinship there is an alternation between the same and the different. Blood ties are the foundation of the domain of the same, but naming systems, which begin as mechanisms of transgenerational solidarity, identity, and repetition, move towards differentiation. Similarly, descent structures, once they reach a certain magnitude, move towards residential and lineage dispersal. Ties of descent came into pragmatic conflict with residence during the historical period of interclan warfare. The descent system is an idealized mythic unit that can be peripheral to everyday social practice. The yenia, in its widest semantic sense (corresponding to a maximal lineage or phatry), operates as an absent center to which various sublineages and households establish a metaphorical relation; a relation that sanctions and legitimizes political structures that are horizontal and lateral. The

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yenid as a polity must function like a sidro{fa (voluntary association), and the sidro{fa relation between non kin must be covered with the metaphors of blood and descent, if it is to be politically legitimate.

The llilr Tower The war tower (pfrghos) in Inner Mani links two social networks, alliance and descent, both pragmatically and symbolically. Therefore, it should not be understood solely as the preeminent symbol of blood kin. Rather, it is situated at the nexus of a heterogeneous web of relations in which descent and agnation are but one component. This is why Alexakis, when referring to the central political unit of Inner Maniat social organization, uses the term kastropolitfa, or tower society (Alexakis 1980, 30). This concept effectively encompasses the multiplicity ofkinship (agnatic and cognatic) and symbolic, ritual, and voluntary associations centered on the physical possession and locality (mahalddhes) of the war tower(s). This term also permits comparative historical analysis with analogous social organizations in other parts of the Mediterranean roughly contemporaneous with the Inner Maniat social order. In analyzing the formation of Italian communes in the thirteenth century, Lauro Martines (1979) was confronted with a heterogeneous social arrangement that bears a striking resemblance to the social structures centered around the Maniat war tower. Martines's equivalent of kastropolitfa was the consorteria, an urban phenomenon corresponding to the influx of rural populations and wealth into mercantile towns in the thirteenth century. This intensification of population and economic activity precipitated the expansion of aristocratic families into military, economic, predatory, and kinship-based associations. These familial associations, in turn, spun out social ties of a voluntary nature. The Italian consorteria and the Maniat kastropolitfa both emerged in historical periods that witnessed the withdrawal of state and imperial power from their respective locales. Drawing upon a strong sense of clan and consanguinity, noblemen clustered into tight-knit associations and built fortified towers so as to defend themselves or to expand their rights and privileges. Each such consorteria was a sworn corporate grouping consisting of males descended from a common male ancestor. ... In time, the consorteria entered into sworn association with other like neighborhood groups. Any particular consorteria

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might include anywhere from ten to thirty to forty sworn associates ... . Agreements included prohibitions of marriage into specified families .. . girls were debarred from the right to inherit towers or to receive them as dowries. The towers in any case were not necessarily habitable, they were intended for military operations . . . . All cohorts had keys or access to the group tower or towers. Occasionally their houses were connected to the group tower by means of underground passages. More often connecting spans were built leading from the upper parts of their houses to one of the tower's entrance windows. (Martines 1979, 35-36) The consorteria formed neighborhood enclaves identical to the Maniat mahalddhes, which were usually known by the name of the dominant clan group. Property was held communally and partible inheritance was observed. The consorteria exercised the right of capital punishment over its members, a right also assumed by the Maniat yerondikf, or council of elders. Lucca, near Florence, was described as "a forest of towers" (ibid., 36), while the village of Kitta has been referred to as "the multitowered Kitta" (Kitta polipirghou). Like the Maniat mahalddhes, the consorteria neighborhood was a labyrinth composed of towers, loggias, and vaulted structures. Fortified neighborhood enclaves intensified urban feuding, and the alliance structures built by aristocrats also aggravated an aristo-plebeian split in the cities. The issue of derivation, diffusion, influence, or parallel development between the Italian and Maniat tower society is complicated by the fact that from 1400 onwards, Inner Maniats were known to serve as mercenaries in the armies of Italian city-states and communes, and were certainly exposed to the architectural and organizational features of the tower societies there.

Social Stratification Inner Maniat social organization resembled a moiety system that exhibited certain characteristics of incipient stratification based on the possession of military force and towers. The group known as Niklidni, consisted of those clans that possessed tower, cannons, rifles, and manpower. The other group, known as Ahamn6meri, were pictured as either clients of Niklidni or as nucleated kinship groups of freehold peasants. Some Maniats insist there was a marriage prohibition between the two groups, but alternative evidence suggests that the two groups constructed military alliances sealed by intermarriage. This resulted in

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the gradual absorption of the low status clan by the high status clan as a minimal lineage of the latter. These facts are difficult to verify as contemporary Maniats tend to erase any hints of former Ahamn6meri when discussing genealogies. It is agreed by several scholars (even those who conflate the Inner Maniat system with feudalism) that the interactions of the Nikliani and Ahamn6meri were not based on relations of production. The Ahamn6meri paid no rent; in the large village of Kitta, there is some evidence of them paying nominal protection tributes to the Nikliani. The two groups possessed a shared material culture that exhibited slight material differences with the exception of fortifications. The Ahamn6meri were forbidden to build towers or even two-story houses, yet they bore arms and could take sides in the feuds between Nikliani. Ahamn6meri could raise their status to that of the Nikliani by strategic alliance, ritual kinship, intermarriage, and the reproductive accumulation of manpower sufficient to defend their right to erect a tower (which was often done secretly at night). Conversely, a high status clan defeated in a feud could lose its tower, be exiled from its village, and become Ahamn6meri (Mexis 1977, 425; Andromedas 1962, 82-88; Wagstaff 1975; Dimitrakos-Mesisklis 1949, 162-66; Kapernaros 1971, 68-69).

It is a fact that Ahamn6meri could rise in social status .... And this was because social classes in Mani were not closed. The power of guns and the conquering or buying of land was the decisive factor. The Maniat feudalism had its idiosyncracies. This has special importance in Inner Mani where there were neither big plots of land nor large accumulations of livestock, and interdependence in social relations basically had a military character. The Nikliani of course, had their status and power. .. . The control of men and things through their tower was immediate ... . In the Ahamn6meri, the Nikliani of Inner Mani had subjects that worked for them as partners or serfs. But at the same time ... in going to war or in piracy, they needed warriors on land and pirates for the sea. So the Ahamn6meri were first of all warriors. All the Maniats had guns and were warriors. With a lot of guns or the power of wealth-by buying land or animals from them [Nikliani]-Ahamn6meri sometimes secured their upward mobility. (Mexis 1977, 425-26) The heterogeneity of terms used above, such as serfs, partners, pirates, warriors, and idiosyncratic feudalism, reflects the dilemma of a Marxist analyst, influenced by Engels and Morgan, when confronted with a social order that deviates from standard Marxist theory of development. Although the Nikliani

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did monopolize certain economic resources, such as salt pans, the absence of a fixed and regulated economic relationship between the latter and the Ahamn6meri, the fluidity of status relations, and the fact that clan groups within both classifications held land autonomously, indicates that the Inner Maniat social order was not feudal. The two groups were often described in terms of bipolar moral characteristics (according to the classification of the Nikliani). These moral characteristics included the possession of honor, physical prowess, patterns of food consumption, and even clothing. But this was an idealized set of characteristics that were organically associated with the possession and nonpossession of a tower. The relationships to ancestors were constantly being fictionalized in terms of descent and status. Lineages that attained a certain level of military manpower could construct new founding figures that symbolized their accession to a higher status and erection of a tower. The Nikliani dominated the best land through sheer size and military force. They were associated with the larger settlements. The Ahamn6meri were associated with poor quality land and more isolated, nucleated settlements. Expansive residential alliances were the key to power and high social status for corporate groups in Inner Mani. The kin networks among the Ahamn6meri were not extensive and were limited to the household unit. Several such Ahamn6meri groups could unite in an alliance under the banner of a fictive ancestor and become recognized as a corporate group of the status of Nikliani. The absence of static social stratification can also be inferred from the derivation of the term Nikliani. Although there are several competing theories, the one that makes the most ethnographic sense in terms of the logic of Maniat social organization links the term to a large kin confederacy known as the Nikliani, that dominated the area of Kitta and Nomia in western Inner Mani. Their territories were termed the Niklianiko, a type of nomination usually applied to mahaladhes (neighborhoods), but which in this case extended to an entire region under the political control of the Nikliani clan. The term Nikliani, it is conjectured, was linked to the concept of regional clan hegemony and was subsequently metaphorized as the nomenclature for all clans attaining analogous territorial hegemony. This would account for the fact that there are other terms linked to particular regions of Inner Mani that are used to designate clans of the size and status of Nikliani. The status of a Niklicini clan was not solely based on the material possession of a war tower, but it was also tied to a performative dimension connected to the notion of honor ( phil6timo ), of which tower possession was one central component. The high status clan was one that had the

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military capacity to brook no insult from others regarding their territoriality and status. Any infringement of the latter engendered persistent revenge code violence and cycles of feuding that could erupt intermittently for decades. Slander was the commonest cause of revenge code violence, followed by offenses against women of the clan, which included kidnapping, bride theft, rape, adultery, seduction, and breaking an engagement. It was common practice for the major clans to abduct female heirs of households lacking sons. (Maniats consider the female child a powder keg of explosives attached to the foundations of the house.) Fallowing these gender transgressions were crimes such as weapon theft, property trespass, damage to crops and herds, property disputes among kinsmen, and breach of contractual agreements. Exacting revenge for these offenses was termed ghdhikiom6s, a word which carries a stronger juridical overtone than vendetta (the latter is often inappropriately imported from the Italian situation to characterize Maniat corporate violence). Revenge code ethics were informed by "economic" paradigms of reciprocity, loss, exchange, and equivalence, all of which were measured out in the local value of male and female life. Homicide was understood as the theft of household or clan blood. The blood of the dead was depicted as "screaming for revenge." The killer could not escape revenge because the blood of the dead "drags" the killer to his death. There were various prophylactic rites performed by killers to prevent the dragging of the blood, to neutralize the dead as agency. The metaphor of blood as agency directly evoked the kin tie and implicated consanguines as instruments of retaliation. Revenge strategy was managed by the yerondiki, the council of elders (composed of distinguished male agnates and not necessarily elderly men). This council deliberated on whether or not collective response was required, what type of response, who would deliver it, and at what target. The agent of retaliation was not necessarily the offended party, but rather a male "gun" whose death, or subsequent exile, would not have a debilitating effect on the clan or the gun's household. Unmarried men were favored for these tasks and subject to a lottery through which the avenger would be selected. The target of revenge was not necessarily the offending party, but rather the "best of the clan" (kcilios tis yenias), whose death would strategically weaken and demoralize the adversary group. Preferential targeting and the distancing of offending and offended parties from the conflict disclose the overt, corporate, and symbolic character of such violence. The council of elders ( yerondik() usually met in rougha. Rougha was associated with residential kin clusters; it was the public space of these households.

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The site of the yerondiki meeting meant that the interests or concerns of one household in a feud was not to override the interests of the entire clan. When revenge code violence in this century took the form of more individualized and unilateral retaliation, many Maniats saw this as a departure from the juridical form and legitimacy stamped on violence by the yerondiki. The decision to retaliate was not always taken, particularly if it could lead to the destruction of the clan because of the power of the adversary. Forced exile imposed on one clan by another was a common occurrence in Inner Mani, not to mention the destruction of the clan tower and the accompanying loss of Nikliani rank. In cases where retaliation was deferred by the men, the mourning ceremony often functioned as the ritual space where women, while singing over the dead, lashed out at men for failing to meet their kin obligations. Another aspect of forestalling the negative effects of revenge code violence involved the withdrawal of "the best of the clan," the primary target, to be constantly guarded by his relatives. The initiation of a feud was formally announced by the display of a cut thread or the exchange of priming rods of rifles. Since ambush, hosia, was the customary strategy of revenge taking, all the "guns" implicated in a feud would immediately lock themselves up in clan towers. The women, who were usually, though not always, looked upon as noncombatants, would continue their daily tasks of agricultural work, food processing, and water hauling. Prolonged, pointblank gun battles waged from behind tower fortifications between mahaladhes were commonplace. Standard forms of combat were periodic ambushes set for particular individuals of the adversary clan and casual sniping at all members of adversary clans, irrespective of gender and age. The casebook of a local doctor, Papadakis, covering the years 1715-1763, contains seven hundred cases that illustrate the pattern of alternating surprise attacks. He describes stiletto wounds, abrasions and split skulls from thrown rocks, bullet wounds from rifles and pistols, and sword wounds, indicating that combat frequently occurred at close range. He describes the bullet wound of his aunt, another woman's shotgun wound in the back, another's sword wound on her head. One victim was a fifteen-year-old girl. In one village one half of the treated wounded were women. The wounding of women attests to the fact that, unlike men, women frequently exposed themselves to public spaces during feuds in pursuit of their daily round of agricultural and domestic work. The casebook also notates the wounding of numerous priests. The clergy was known to maintain intense familial loyalties; each clan

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AND

mahalas had its own church. The notion of the local clergy as representative of a centralized external institution may not be relevant throughout Inner Mani's history and should probably be considered as a late nineteenth- or twentiethcentury phenomenon. The author of the eighteenth-century casebook was paid in kind with agricultural products, such as pails of wheat and loads of firewood. Certain contractual agreements he concluded with entire clans stipulated that his medical services did not include natural illnesses, aches, or diseases, but were only applicable to weapon wounds. This degree of medical specialization reflects the importance of warfare in that society. Since the doctor grouped his cases by village and region, Andromedas conjectures that the contemporary absence of certain family names, listed in the register as once associated with specific villages, provides evidence of their forced expulsion during feuds. Dimitrakos documents the resulting increase in settlements in one such region from the late eighteenth century onward (Dimitrakos-Mesisklis 1949, 199-216; Andromedas 1962, 89-90). In 1805, Leake, a gentleman traveler who toured Inner Mani, encountered belligerents from the village Vathia, who informed him that a forty-year feud had divided the village into two camps. During that period, one hundred men had been killed (Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 134). This indicates the symbolic character of this type of feuding. Despite the expulsion of entire clans, these feuds were not wars of extermination. As the ritual of psihik6 implies, feuds often culminated in alliances between adversaries. It is worth pondering to what extent certain feuds were initiated as a testing-courtship process with a prospective military alliance in mind. Besides fictive kinship rites, there were other symbolic systems in place that carried sufficient juridical weight to constrain the intensity and gauge of feuds. During the summer, a truce (tniva) was called that allowed the clans to engage in agricultural tasks. This could take the form of a written agreement sanctioned by the yerondiki of a third and neutral clan. Treva has two components: atsahalefti, in which the opponents were not allowed to raise new fortifications, build a new tower, or elevate the height of an existing tower; and adoufekisti, which forbade sniping. Reciting the following fragment of a lament originally improvised by a woman, a male informant refers to the institution of the xevghartis. [3]

Koumbare, if you need

Koumbare an theis xevgharti

a xevghartis

don't be ashamed to ask.

mi drepese na mas to pis.

SOCIAL

He took it as shame and as great offense: "As if I have enemies and I am ashamed to say it! I don't need a xevghartis. I am xevghartis for others, I kill, I don't get killed." And he left angry without greeting.

HIS T 0 R Y

41

ORGANIZATION

Kinou tau fanike dropi ke yia meghali prosvoli. Tighare ki ehou taus ehtrous ke drepoume na zas to pou! egh6 dhe theou xevgharti xevghanou, dhen xevghanoume skot6nou dhen skot6noume. Ki edhose mia ki efiye ki oute apoheretise.

Xevghartis was the respected elder of a neutral clan who accompanied a targeted clansman to insure his immunity from attack whenever the latter appeared in public. If an attack did occur, this would precipitate the entry of the clan of the xevghartis into the feud as adversary of the clan that had transgressed his neutrality. Members of warring clans could also appear in public carrying the walking stick of a respected elder for protection. Peace was known as aghapi, which was a juridical term although it translates as love. (See chapter 6 for the juridical construction of emotions). The existence of symbolic forms that mediated the duration and intensity of warfare, the lack of any evidence indicating that these feuds were wars of extermination, and the low mortality rate of much of this warfare, all challenge the thesis that feuding is a pressure release in reaction to overpopulation. There is no evidence that population levels were markedly affected by feuding, and, although the expulsion of a clan increased the resource base of the victor, there were numerous other types of possible conclusions to a conflict that relativized property appropriation as a motivating factor. Even Wagstaff, who seeks to propose a population pressure explanation of Inner Maniat feuding, documents that the growth of population moved from an estimated o.o8 percent annually between 1618 and 1700, to an estimated o. 16 percent annually from 1700 to 1830. This means that from 1618 to 1830 the population rose from an estimated 13,940 to 18,311. Wagstaff admits these figures imply a small increase in population and they certainly do not indicate a growth rate accelerated enough to destabilize indigenous social structure. He cautions that the resource base could have become that much more tenuous even with this rate of population growth, but here one would also have to account for income earned by piracy, slave trading, mercenaries, and brigandage, for which there seems to be no economic figures. There is no question that the Maniat agricultural economy operated on a subsistence level. At the same time, we have no record of famine in Inner

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Mani, nor of substantial settlement desertion beyond that of induced exile after feuds. Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gentlemen travelers to the region noted its poverty, its violence, and its overpopulation. But tirades against peasant overpopulation and appeals for agricultural rationalization and peasant emigration were stereotypic class discourses of gentlemen travelers influenced by the physiocratic ideologies of the period. Their class-biased ideas about political economy were bound to influence their responses to nucleated rural settlements, subsistence economies, and a social order devoid of civil law and state structures. Overpopulation and an unstable resource base can be considered influential but highly mediated determinants of the shape of Inner Maniat society from the seventeenth century onward. Political decentralization based on the clan order, originating in the collapse of the Byzantine imperium and subsequently reinforced by foreign invasions, must also be understood as informing the agonistic political character of Inner Mani. It is also quite possible that the intensification of resource scarcity was in part a result of the militarization of Maniat culture and not the cause. The sites of settlements could possibly have been determined more by strategic considerations than agricultural requirements, thereby aggravating the scarcity of resources. Rather than accounting for Inner Maniat militarism with a cathartic or utilitarian population pressure model, it would be more fruitful to examine the structures of social reproduction of Inner Mani, structures that are tied to its political decentralization. I have in mind here the practical and symbolic status of the war tower. Everybody wanted one-in fact, more than one. The tower, along with the production of male "guns" who were required for building and defending this edifice, became the fetishized mechanism of clan reproduction. By its presence or absence, it designated clan status. It was the central, material symbol around which both ideologies of descent and alliance revolved. The tower was there to maintain and protect a particular social organization and its economic base. In turn, the building, fortifying, and arming of towers were dependent on manpower, ideologies of kin solidarity and labor cooperation, and an access to foreign military technologies that brigandage financed. There was an interdependence and reciprocity between the tower, political ideology, the primitive accumulation of economic surplus by brigandage, and ideologies of biological reproduction. The tower absorbed both the economic and ideological surplus of a social order in which the notion of surplus was alien. The practical and symbolic investment in the tower was central to the structural reproduction of the clan within Inner Mani and certainly informed the clan's political relations with successive state systems.

AND

SOCIAL

HISTORY

43

ORGANIZATION

The Economy and Division of Labor To fully appreciate the economic practice of Inner Maniat society, we must understand it first within the framework of the region's arid ecology, and second in the context of its militarization. For even though the militarization of the society was predicated on the local necessities of protecting a subsistence base, many economic practices, particularly the division of labor, were determined by military logistics and strategy. There were two tiers of corporate property holding in Inner Mani. The war tower, the church, and the tower cannon were considered the communal property of the lineages forming the clan. But within each lineage the household was the basic property holding unit of household sites and adjacent agricultural land. Agricultural land was divided into infields adjacent to the mahaladhes, outfields, and grazing commons in the mountains. Due to both the rocky terrain and the fragmented, dispersed locations of arable land and partible inheritance, the household fields were organized into discontinuous, walled-in strips. Inheritance occurred during the father's lifetime or after his death. In the first case, inheritance took place as the result of conjugal couples splitting away. But separate households did not necessarily entail separate property holdings between the father and male siblings. This could occur in the next generation between cousins. The oldest male agnates of the lineage would adjudicate the distribution of household property. If decisions could not be reached on this level, the yerondiki made up of distinguished men from other lineages would arbitrate (this shamed the household, because it reflected a lack of solidarity). The best fields, known as the "mother(s)" (mana) were distributed first; then, other, less fertile fields were distributed by lottery. As many mother fields would be distributed as there were male siblings. Sisters, of course, were excluded from inheritance because of the exogamous marriage rule. One of the mother fields would also be reserved for the parents, if they were still living. A widow would keep her husband's share, unless she remarried. The parental share of the land was about one-third of the total property. The parents expected to receive a certain quantity of produce from the land distributed to the sons. In recent times this was often codified in a written agreement, and, if not observed, the land would revert back to the parent. The father also had the right to keep certain strips of land out of the lottery, if, for instance, they produced exceptionally good harvests. If the house was too small for partitioning, it could also be included in the lottery as equivalent to a certain quality and quantity of land. If the only child of the house were a female, she would inherit the land but not the house.

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The house would go to the closest male relative, i.e., her first cousin from her father's side. Mobile property, such as furniture, was not subject to partible inheritance and out-marrying women had inheritance rights in regard to such objects. All heirs were expected to participate in the commemoration ceremonies of dead elders from whom they received property. The subsistence economy of Inner Mani consisted of horticulture, herding, various hunting and gathering activities, fishing, and crafts. Beginning in the seventeenth century, piracy, brigandage, and slave trading contributed to the economy; but piracy was suppressed by the mid 18oos, and brigandage by the end of the nineteenth century. The primary crop before 1900 was barley and wheat, cultivated on small, dry stone terraces. As part of its colonization of the region and in order to attach Inner Mani to metropolitan markets, the Greek state introduced intensive olive tree cultivation in the late nineteenth century. Olive trees rapidly supplanted barley and wheat cultivation and most olive groves are located on the site of former grain terraces. Women numerically dominated horticultural labor, food processing, and household tasks and shared hunting with the men. They were central to the entire planting cycle, reserving only some of the heavier labor tasks for the men, such as plowing and hauling stones. They also performed numerous tasks that involved heavy, manual labor: hand plowing and cultivation, land clearing, and hauling water and wood on their backs, or on a donkey, over long distances. In rainless years, ... women ran with barrels on their backs to a little well in Yerolimena to find, if they do, a little brackish water ... and in severe cases of drought they go to Viskina beyond Alika and even to Kournos behind the mountains of Mina to the east. (Dimitrakos-Mesisklis 1949, 3). Women also harvested and ground grain for household bread. They hunted and trapped migratory birds in the mountains and took the herds to their upland grazing. Women did all the spinning and in addition to water and wood hauling, collected salt from salt pans, and assisted men in fishing. Inner Maniat women were not limited to the household and its immediate environment; they were extremely visible in the outside, in the spaces of agriculture and the mountains. From the point of view of Maniat men, these outside activities were components of the domestic sphere of production. The men are associated with olive grinding, building walls, towers, and houses, stone carving, fishing, and migratory labor (which involved working at lime kilns).

SOCIAL AND

SOCIAL

HISTORY

45

ORGANIZATION

During the summer (there were two basic seasons in folk reckoning: summer and winter), men would help women mow and transport grain crops for threshing. The men had an exclusive involvement in artisan production, including weapon maintenance and the production of shoes, pigskin sacks, nets for quail trapping, harnesses, and tools. Craft production took place inside, in contrast to agricultural work. The association of men with this domestic production, in contrast to women's centrality in agricultural work, can be traced back to the organization of interclan feuding. As described earlier, women were ideally treated as noncombatants during feuds, though this was not strictly observed, as the records of the local doctor, Papadakis, confirm. However, irrespective of the validity of their immunity, women's labor guaranteed the economic reproduction of their clan during feuds. Such activities were forbidden to men because visibility could be fatal during a feud. Some men were confined to their towers for years. Yet, the central role of women in agricultural production has not inhibited the preservation of male mythology concerning men's centrality in the economic well-being of the household and clan. Denied the usual outlets of piracy and brigandage in the nineteenth century, Maniat men were forced to alter their relationship to market economies by migratory labor and permanent emigration. Subsequent to the intensification of Inner Mani's contact with urban labor and commodity markets, women's agricultural labor has been more firmly pushed back into the symbolic topography of the domestic and private space where it retains its historic low status in male eyes. The low status of women's labor in contemporary Inner Mani is further reinforced by its association with precapitalist subsistence modes of production. The high rate of depopulation since World War II has further lessened the importance of the agricultural sphere and women's labor. The shrinkage of households that had resulted from depopulation and the loss of the extended family's political and cultural authority has also contributed to the identification of women with the private sphere. Inner Mani now has less than half its pre-World War II population, and the pattern of seasonal migration has shifted to permanent emigration. Patterns of permanent emigration began to appear in the late nineteenth century, after several decades of police-military repression of the local clans' political authority and the intensification of the region's economic contacts with external markets. Urban Maniat women are even more exclusively associated with the domestic sphere (child rearing and household maintenance) than their rural counterparts. In fact, due to depopulation and the general dearth of male labor, rural Maniat

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3

CHAPTER

TWO

women continue their close involvement in agricultural work, which today they can supplement by running small shops, seasonal restaurants, and cafes in the villages (men still rhetorically present themselves as the managers of these enterprises). The centrality of those women who have remained in the village is reinforced by the fact that corporate property, land, houses, and towers have not been sold off. Despite the emigration, ethics of the inalienability of clan property persist. This collective inheritance confers an enhanced responsibility for its care and maintenance: activities that have strong symbolic overtones. Women's labor continues to remain as ubiquitous as in the past. What has shifted the status of women's labor, besides depopulation, is the mapping of the public and the private in rural areas. The public space of the village takes on diminished political importance relative to the public spaces formed by larger adjacent towns, urban centers, and Greek national life. The tendency of urban Maniats to use natal villages as summer residences also contributes to the privatization of rural life and the identification of crucial public, economic, and political space as being outside the confines of the village and of the whole region. Yet, two activities counter this marginalization of the rural space: olive harvesting and mortuary ceremonies. Urbanized Maniats return to their natal villages for these events, which are public performances of clan solidarity. The participation of urbanized women particularly in olive harvesting and mortuary ceremonies involves radical code switching in their dress, discourse, and demeanor. Olive harvesting and mortuary rites are not occasions for the romanticization of the past. They continue to engage and articulate contemporary issues bearing on kinship, inheritance, and familial and village politics. (For further discussion see chapter 1 "Departures" and chapter 10 "Cynics and Others.")

THE

WARNINGS

Multiple Entries The analysis of ritual in anthropology is informed by the assumption that ritual is an event separated in time and space from other domains of social practice, and thus marked by explicit beginnings and ends. This facilitates the translation of the ritual event to narrative. The ethnographic narration of ritual then becomes a mimesis of a discrete sequence of observed events. Ethnographic analysis, however, should remain skeptical of facile correspondences between observed events and the requirements of narration (Rosaldo 1984; Taussig 1987). In the present analysis, although I am concerned with the formal ceremonial structure of mortuary events, I intend to locate death in a more heterogeneous and encompassing context: ritualization. Ritualization here is defined as the processual representation of death in a variety of social contexts and practices that do not have the formal status of a public rite. The concept of ritualization moves the analysis of death rites away from performances fixed in time and space and resituates it within the flux and contingency of everyday events. It is from ongoing and discontinuous everyday experience that certain events and signs are specified and then organized into an ideological system that inscribes death as a cultural form. The death ritual in Inner Mani cannot be treated as discrete narrative, insofar as it has no clear-cut beginnings and ends or spatial-temporal locus. The ceremonialization of death emerges gradually from the background of everyday social life and never fully fades back into it.

The description of death ritual as discrete event susceptible to linear narration has its origins in the seminal works of Van Gennep (196o) and Hertz (1960). Parts of this chapter were presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, November 1987.

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Both theorists, concerned with death rites as structured forms of passage, focused on the internal periodization of the death event. Van Gennep proposed a tripartite model of rites of passage with successive moments of separation and reincorporation, and Hertz documented a ritual process consisting of the disappearance of the flesh and the emergence of the bones. Both influenced subsequent treatments of death ritual as displaying clear-cut boundaries. Van Gennep's and Hertz's analysis of the emergence and termination of the rite of passage in space, time, and discourse was based on their assumption that disorder injected into society was deliberately structured by ritual actors in such a manner as to restore society to a predetermined homeostatic condition. In contrast, a treatment of mourning rituals which acknowledges the problematic nature of discrete beginnings and endings also assumes that there is never a full restoration of social stability; that death, its representation, its discourses, and its performative elaboration can haunt society and become an essential collective metaphor of social experience beyond the margins of ceremonial performance. 1 Aries ( 1981 ), with his focus on the warning, the precognition of death by the dying, pushed back the threshold of death rites to a domain of social practice and discourse not dealt with by Hertz or Van Gennep. The warning is a knowledge of future events and processes that are manifested in the present through a conventional system of signs. In premodern Europe, according to Aries (who echoes Foucault [1972] here), death, like nature, was culturally constructed by paradigmatic acts of reading. For Aries, the pervasiveness of the warning indicated a culture in which the natural and social world, life and death, were not rigid and oppositional but intertwined. Yet, he assigns the death ritual with a specific origin. In almost all cases of precognition discussed by Aries, the warning, when delivered to the dying person, facilitated the performance of the good death. Death ritual for Aries originates in the cognitive experience of the dying person. The delivery of the warning to the dying provides Aries with a clear-cut origin. This is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that his sources were stylized literary texts ranging from epic poetry to religious tracts. In Inner Mani, the origins of the death ritual are more dispersed, anomalous, and plural than the diverse thresholds described by Hertz, Van Gennep, Aries, and others. Neither the warning nor death have a singular origin. The warning does not mainly involve the self-cognition of impending death but is scattered in the cognition of significant others, i.e., blood and symbolic kin, affines, friends, and neighbors. It is a sign that impacts on those who are near enough to be implicated by the death, yet distanced enough to be able to objec-

THE WARNINGS

49

tify it. This implies multiple private entries into death that do not have the status of a public rite, but which are no less determined by systems of conventional representation. The warning, because of its multiple origins, conforms to the model of miasma advanced by Vernant in his discussion of the symbolization of impurity in archaic Greece. Vernant describes the advent of miasma as a decentering and boundary-violating force. [Miasma] does not so much emanate from the agent as if he were its origin; rather, it overwhelms and envelops him, engulfing him in a power which affects not only him but a whole sequence of actions of greater or lesser duration that are influenced by him. The effects of the defilement thus cover a field of action in which the constituent parts and moments are all connected. . . . [T]he 'miasma' is embodied in all the beings or objects that are involved .... [It] may even embrace an entire territory causing the land to be infertile, the herds to be barren and the children to be born deformed. The objects on which the power of the 8a(flWV works comprise a whole more or less extensive system of human social and cosmic relations the order of which has been upset. ... Basically, it is this disorder that the defilement makes manifest through all the various concrete forms it adopts. (Vernant 1980, 122) In Inner Mani, the prospective dead is decentered from death, insofar as this impending event is first announced to others. Those who function as witnesses through their experience of the warning are also decentered. For the warning comes to them in surrogate symbols, indirect signs, substitutions, and tokens: a generalized language of otherness and deferment that has to be deciphered. The temporal chasm that separates the imminent event from the signs that predict it, and the uncertain meaning of polysemic symbols deployed in the warning, distance those concerned from the origin of death. The subject of the warning occupies the blind center of a divinatory circle which others must confront as an interpretive margin. During fieldwork, there was always a nagging feeling that the beginning of the death ritual eluded me. My sense of the beginning was more a function of methodological expectations than a cultural reality. The ethnographic narration of ritual is assumed to be contingent on the insertion of the observer into the performance as a participant, coexistensive with the sequencing and duration of the event. This coextensiveness is a metaphor for the fieldworker's appropriation

50

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CHAPTER

of the culture as a totality. To be separated from the initiation of the ceremony was to be separated from my own process of initiation into the local culture. To attend the beginning of a ceremony was, in some sense, to witness its structural origins. The elusiveness of the beginning perpetuated the tensions of relative outsiderhood and cultural distance. I soon realized there was no official beginning to the death ritual in Inner Mani. I had not yet realized that I was up against a culture of the warning in which someone somewhere knows beforehand and is therefore in a position to construct a personal entry into the ceremony of death. The dissemination of the death event, the collective knowledge of someone's death, is imperceptible, like a whisper-a whisper that soon turns into a scream. There seemed to be no linear transmission of information from kin to kin, neighbor to neighbor, village to village. The reason is clear: Death is always accompanied by divination which is never linear. Many private entries are based on the personal experience and/or dissemination of the messages of the warning. All these entries into death by the living and the dying construct a multiplicity of perceptions and experiences that cannot be forced into the narrative straightjacket of the formal ceremonial beginning. 2

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feelings center on the imagery of the open mouth and the eating of flesh as a metaphor for theft. Death is seen as the theft of flesh; this is reinforced by the elaborate attention paid to the dissolution of the corpse's flesh in exhumation rites. The revenant-the animated dead, known as vrik6lakas or vrek6lakas-is associated with a voracious appetite, vampirism, and the consumption of human and animal flesh. The negative imagery of the open mouth reappears in dreaming and in laying out the corpse where the mouth of the dead is shut by tying the jaw. In the appearance of nekropouli, the imagery of the open mouth is critical. The nekropouli is more frequently heard than seen or is heard before seen. In fact, although the location of the nekropouli can indicate the topos of imminent death, a more crucial warning sign is the direction toward which it throws its call. The call of the nekropotili is an acoustic analogue of the consuming mouth of flesh-eating birds, and the linkage of this call with the taking of life encapsulates the illicit consumption and theft of flesh. Thus, the call of the nekropouli introduces the paradigmatic sensory medium that organizes the experience of death in Inner Mani: sound. Defiling sound begins with the call of the nekropouli, and it is followed by the women's ritual screaming at the sight of the dead and the singing of laments. The following narrator recounts the death of her mother.

The Bird of the Dead The warning takes three forms in Inner Mani, although these forms may combine and recombine to generate variations. The three forms are (1) the hearing and/or sighting of the nekropouli (bird of the dead); (2) the experience of what is locally termed pr6fasi-the capacity of the dying person to send, at the hour of death, images, apparitions, or doubles of the dying self to significant others absent from the locale of death; and (3) 6nira or onirata (dreams)-seeing in dreams signs that foretell death. The nekropouli, as described by Maniats, appears to be the cinereous vulture, also known as the African vulture (although other carnivorous, predatory, and black-colored birds can be identified as nekropouli). This migratory bird is seen as foreign. In Maniat culture, the semantic linkage between death and that which comes from the outside is particularly strong. The nekropouli has other associations that render it a symbol of outsiderhood, transgression, and defilement. Local ornithography is quite elaborate and detailed in reference to carnivorous birds, e. g., vitsila, mboulakas, kinigh6s. All these birds signify transgression and pollution, and Maniats harbor negative feelings about them. These

[4]

I knew my mother would die. A bird came to the church next door and was screaming. I took a piece of wood, and I hit it to chase it away. But it came back again. A bird, that if it screams, ... a bird called nekropouli. But, for instance, if it screams straight in that direction, it is Pouliatiko [the news is for the village Ano Poula]. If in this direction, it is for Lagoudies. If it is here [in this village] and screams towards Varvatianika [Varvatakos clan households] . . . But it came for me right here at the church. I hit it and it came back. Then I said to myself, "She will die."

Another narrator, recounting the death of her neighbor, characterizes the sound of defilement with the same verb that Maniat women use for "screaming" the dead, skouzo. The image of "screaming" and "hovering over" evokes the

nekropouli. [5]

When Yiannou's husband died, I heard a voice screaming, [it sounded] as if one moaned, groaned three times. I said, "My virgin! It is over my home." My home above [top floor of the house] had not been blessed yet, the lower home [ground floor] had. When a house is not blessed by

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THE

THREE

the priest, they say, it hunts, attracts all these things. Before I even stepped out to go shopping, I heard the news. The man had died. When the house has been blessed and is clean, that is you haven't slept with your husband, you haven't done anything with your husband for instance, when you are clean, this pulls, attracts all the purity of the house. In the lower house that we are living in, we don't hear anything. When we go upstairs and something happens, we hear. The narrator is talking about a newly built house in which the top floor is still unfinished, therefore not yet blessed by the priest, and temporarily uninhabited. Houses belong to the domain of the inside. An incomplete but inhabited house is the physical admixture of opposing domains that should ideally be kept separate: the inside and the outside, the present and the future. If not, pollution results, or, as the narrator infers, the unfinished house "attracts these things [impurities]." In this story, the defiling sounds of screaming, moaning, and groaning are not "heard," do not occur, on the bottom floor of the completed house; they are only heard on the incomplete floor, the top floor. The incomplete house is a trope for two contrasting spatial categories that in this case have been mixed. The defiling sounds can also be heard if you are not "clean," if you have "slept" with your husband. The sexual act here mimes the entry of the outside into the inside. The warning, in turn, is a mixture of two contrasting temporal domains: the present and the future. The warning is both predicated by and parallel to the anomalous spatial order of the incomplete but inhabited house. When the narrator hears the confirmation of the death indicated by the warning, she states, "I heard the news" or "we learned his news" (narrative 6). The Greek word for news used here is mandata (singular), which is a cognate of mandfa, (foretelling or divination), mandia (oracle), and mandataf6ros (messenger). The word mandata has a polysemic status, indicating both factual news and divination.

knocked its stick three times in the kitchen. I said to myself, "Well, it is my father-in-law and he is pounding his walking stick." I heard it three times. We were even hearing footsteps in our home before he died. A week later we learned his news [that he died]. That thing was circling around our houses like a whirlwind. You don't see these things. Only the draggings, the voices, etc. [you hear]. Crows also on top of our houses. We understood it. "It is someone of our own," I said. He was well, in four days he suddenly died. In this narrative, too, the defiling sound comes from above and outside as in bird imagery. In her statement "a thing was dragging over our houses," the word "drags" pertains to the belief that the dead can drag the living against their will to death. The "thing" (prama) sounded "like a wolf." The wolf is associated with devouring and theft. The sound of the walking stick introduces the other central sign of the warning complex: the presentation of doubles as in pr6fasi and in dreaming. The walking stick is a symbol of the authority of the father-inlaw (and of elderly men in general). Belligerents in clan feuds could walk in public unmolested if accompanied by esteemed males of neutral clans. The walking stick of these intermediaries was a symbol of authority that could function as their substitute and double, providing the same protection to a belligerent who carried it. The appearance of the double is a central component of "making pr6fasi." Pr6fasi has no semantic linkage to the standard modern Greek word pr6fasi which means pretext, excuse. Its semantic linkage is with the ancient Greek word pr6fa(n)si (preappearance). To "make pr6fasi," the dying re-experience significant places in their life and in doing so, intentionally or inadvertently send their image to those places at the moment of death. In an evening rougha, continuing our exchange of laments and stories concerning apparitions, two women recollect: [7]

Apparition By discussing the death of her father-in-law, the following narrator introduces the subject of apparition, pr6fasi. [6]

When my father-in-law died: A thing was dragging over our houses like a snake, going around and around our houses [sounding] like a wolf and

53

WARNINGS

Go, my Gitas, go to Kalamata, to Fytia where Potias is training and make pr6fasi to him, his bandoliers to break and his gun to fall. For Potias to understand that our Gitas is departing.

A.inde na pdis Gita mau sti Kalamata sti Fitia 6pau yimnazete a Patias na daune kanis pr6fasi na dau kopaune ta Iauria na dau xabalithi a gras. Na katalavi a Patias tf a Gita mas anahara.

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[8]

My husband was away for the animals .... I heard a voice from the window that is towards the general's house. "Koula! Koula!" ... The voice seemed to me foreign and educated. "Koula! Koula!" I got scared and I closed doors and windows. Next day the news came that the general had died. The general had been gone from Mani since 1920 or so. He had died the same moment he made pr6fasi to me. Only he would call me Koula, the voice came from his house and it was his voice.

Dreams The appearance of the dead, in conjunction with those who are about to die, is a common feature of warning dreams (6nira). In the story below, several genres of the· warning complex are combined. The narrator discusses how dreaming and pr6fasi episodes in Athens, where she spent several years of her life, clarified a life crisis situation. Her father, who is known to be dead, and the fiance, whose death is undecided, appear in the dream and waking states of their significant others. Her story combines elements of dreaming and pr6fasi in order to verify a previously unknown death (and not to signify impending death). The narrator treated her engagement as a marriage and chose the social death of prolonged mourning after her fiance disappeared.

[9]

In a dream I saw him [fiance]. I had boiled wheat to take to the church, it was Soul Saturday. Aunt B. had also arrived to accompany me to Haidari to find out whether he was dead or alive. I told her of my dream. Then she said, "Let's not go. Don't you understand? You saw him among the dead. He was angry and said to you, 'Since you wrote my name last on the list I do not want to eat."' [A list of names of dead relatives is submitted to the priest for blessing and commemoration on Soul Saturday.] This was an indication that he was dead. I had written his name last because I hesitated to put him with the dead. When my sister-in-law gave birth-we lived in Athens then-1 went to help her with her first baby girl. It was four o'clock. I took the bus and then the train .... When I got off the bus, I had been a little upset with something and I was walking in thoughts ... a gentleman coming in my direction steps on me. He was unkown to me (I recognized him [her dead father] later). "Well, my Christian, you came to bother me now! Aren't my troubles enough?" I said.-He looked back, smiled at me with

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vivid eyes-as if I see him now-with his hat and coat, the same my father wore when he was buried. Yes, he stepped on me! I walk a few steps away-there was a pharmacy across-and, I see Yiorgos [the fiance] standing there. 'This is Yiorgos," I said to myself and hesitated. I see my [dead] father, he looks at me and literally disappears. I go home and I find out my mother had been unconscious. . . . During dinner she dropped like dead. ''Ah, my child, ... I saw your father," she said to me, "and I told him: Dikeo, you heard I fainted and you came to see me? Won't you sit down?" He said, "No, I cannot stay, there are others waiting for me." Yiorgos [the fiance] then was waiting for him at the pharmacy. There were others, too. He mentioned-- and-- [all dead]. The following story presents a different form of liminality, that of illness. However, as in the preceding story, the appearance of the dead kinsmen in the dream informs our narrator of the impending resolution of her liminality.

[10] I saw the dream when I was in Zanio hospital: I went home and there were four female sheep blocking the door. I was fighting to get in and my father-in-law wouldn't let me. I was holding a basket full of white figs. I was stepping here, stepping there, thinking, "Not to let me into my own home!" Then one of my dead uncles grabbed my father[-in-law] and cursing him said to him, "You dare chase out of here our in-law, - - ? She will stay here!" My home was upside down. I thought to myself, "Well, and I brought them figs to eat!" And in one movement I threw the figs out. From that day on I started becoming better. The fever went down on Monday. On Tuesday I asked to be released, to go. The same narrator continues her story with a mixed dreaming-profasi experience. One time we were sleeping. As we were sleeping, I hear someone screaming and calling [my name] in the middle of the night. We were in bed. I said, "If you were not here, I would think it was you, husband. Oh my burning, [it's] my father then!" He replied, "It's not your father, it's me. Because you hear it and I don't." Before my husband was killed, people were saying they were hearing his dead sister calling, "Come, my brother! You can't because you are blind? Come slowly, slowly, I am waiting." In one-and-a-half years she took my husband along.

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Low Voicing In Inner Mani, both men and women dream, but it is women who possess the language of interpretation. In the past, dreams were part of the discourse of both men and women, although divination was subjected to the gender segregation that characterized much of the Inner Maniat speech economy. Today, this stratification of discourse by gender has been intensified and has resulted in the silencing of feminine discourse by men, as the latter abandon certain aspects of the culture, such as dreaming. Dream divination is now solely a woman's predilection, and is steadily becoming an underground practice (like coffee cup reading). The formal organization of dream divination was similar for both genders. Informal interpretation sessions took place in the male and female roughes (streets or alleys that functioned as gathering places). (Symbolic analysis of my own dreams from these gatherings can be found in chapter 10.) Although today men do not talk with other men about their dreams, they might confess a dream to a woman of the household. Even within the privacy of the household, such an act of confession by a male to a female is a weakening of masculine power, a momentary surrender of authority to the woman. Women do not converse regularly about their dreams among themselves, but when they do, it becomes an informal divination event in which interpretations are shared and compared, and signs and symbols are verified. Though it is a peripheral and perhaps an excluded language in public domains, dream language among women is a shared and objective system of signification. The peripheral or excluded status of dream language in the public domain is partly rooted in the connection of warning dreams to the objectification and spreading of pollution. Warning dreams, like many other polluting signs, events, acts, and agents, are publicly subjected to what I term "low voicing." The warning dream, its dreamer, and its interpreter may be seen as having the power of prediction, but they are also perceived as capable of provoking evil. The voice of the dreamer and/or the interpreter, by transferring dream signs and sensibility from the world of sleep to the waking world and from private to public domains, is perceived as granting evil and fulfilling the dream. This extends to other signs of the warning. Women do not easily speak out about hearing the nekropouli; such discourse is seen to have a particular affinity with the amplification and dissemination of pollution and negativity. Among women, dream interpretation takes the form of quick recitations which omit or underemphasize the narrative action of the dream while specify-

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ing telltale conventional signs. Women narrate dreams in the form of snapshots, with cuts and ellipses, which shift abruptly from one loaded image to another. Dreams that do not present the conventional signs of foretelling are never recited. Skilled diviners intervene with either a verbal exegesis (exiyisi) based on comparison with the extensive dream repertoire of the participants, or just a quick sympathetic hand or facial gesture or body movement that confirms the meanings of the sign relation. Women conclude by speculating on the reference of the dream and, at the same time, may attempt to downplay its seriousness. This can extend to overt "low voicing" of a dream that seems particularly negative. When the women are particularly close and know each other's "secrets," they will engage in more detailed localization of the dream's message, trying to correlate the dream signs to existing persons and specific events. Maniats distinguish analytically between pollution as event and pollution as ambient in human affairs. The objectification of pollution through language, signs, and gestures turns it from a latent to an overt force. Pollution has its own autonomous dynamics of reproduction, dissemination, and amplification. Its autonomous potency exploits certain practices, capacities, and attributes of social life. For example, pollution reproduces itself through language, which is self-elaborating, and can elude social control. Involuntary gestures of the body are another vehicle for the autonomous reproduction of impurity. Human flesh in general, because of its continuity with nature, partially eludes the social domain and is thus a conduit for the elaboration of pollution. Pollution may come from the outside, but its mechanisms of reproduction are intrinsic to social life. For example, two years after severely damaging brushfires in Mani, I was in conversation with one of my informants and her brother. Looking at the arid landscape still recovering from the previous burnings, she stated, very concerned, "I just hope we don't have those fires again." The brother sharply responded, "Close your mouth. These things, especially coming from the mouth of a woman, come true." The vocality of women, the signs of dreaming and warning, the signs of death itself, are wild. They come from the outside, and they are intrusive and transgressive. They must be subjected to domestication through silencing or low voicing. To subject the warning to low voicing is to place a boundary around the signs, agents, and media of pollution. The low voicing of the warning returns us to our initial point about the absence of clear-cut, formal, performative beginnings in the ritualization of death. For low voicing of the signs of imminent death is directly tied to the process of multiple and invisible entries into the death event.

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Dream Codes The symbology of dreaming centers on transformation, particularly the repositioning of the dreamer and/or significant others into negative conditions. Each individual sign takes on differential value in relation to all other signs and symbols present in the dreams-though certain signs tend to have fixed meaning no matter what their context. Moral and physical transformations in the dream system are signified by (1) defamiliarization, (2) inversion, (3) shared substance, and (4) static signs of negativity. These narrative devices are operators of the specific dream code, and they establish the connection between the different sign elements. In Inner Mani, not all divinatory dreaming is negative. People do have positive dreams that indicate beneficial shifts in their life situations. Some of the generic signs found in the dreams of warning appear in inverted forms, i.e., laughing is negative in the warning dream, and crying is positive in the beneficial dream. But the warning dream itself, the penetration of a negating future into a positive or stable present, intensifies temporal displacement to a greater extent than the dream indicating beneficial change. A central static sign of the warning dream is the appearance of the dead. They function as a basic operator of all other sign relations. The return of the dead codifies a future displacement of the life situation of the dreamer and/or significant others. The dead can also signify by biological shared substance, that is, the kinship affiliation of the dead indicates the general direction of the dream's message. There are four operators of the dream: One is defamiliarization. By this I mean the physical imposition of unfamiliar elements upon familiar persons, places, objects, and situations in the dream. Defamiliarization depicts temporal transformation of persons and social situations through mutations of appearance. Characteristic sites of defamiliarization are domestic spaces (past and present) and the body. Childhood homes and family houses can appear as both the same and other; conversely, unfamiliar places can be experienced as homelike and encompassing. Defamiliarization of the body includes changes in hair or eye color, distortion of body parts, nakedness, marks on the body, foreign objects attached to the body, acts inflicted on the body that inhibit natural body functions, such as movement or communication. Recurrent physical transformations are: regression of an adult body to the physical state of childhood or, conversely, premature aging. In the latter case, the current age of the person is juxtaposed with debilitating physical conditions

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that evoke tiredness, exhaustion, and weakness-for instance, a young body moving like an old person. In general, babies seen in dreams, whether related to the dreamer or not, are a static sign of negativity. The value of children and infants in dreams is possibly informed by the various meanings associated with the word pedhi (child). The verb pedhevo can mean to educate and enculturate, but it can also mean to torment, worry, and harass. The dream imagery of childhood and infancy actually participates in two transformative modes of the dream: inversion and defamiliarization. Since children and infants (particularly males) are so highly valued in Greek culture, the negative dream imagery of the child is in effect an inversion of the actual social status of the child. The second operator is inversion. A most common inversion is constituted by those actions, signs, and substances that are linked to the open mouth. The image of the mouth forms a metonymy with theft, flesh eating, revenants, carnivorous birds, the bound jaw of the corpse, and defiling sound. In the dream, laughing, smiling, and eating, despite their positive connotations in real life, tend to signify negative transformation and substantial pollution of the person engaged in or exposed to such actions. In conjunction with this, almost all celebratory gatherings displayed in the dream, particularly the wedding, carry a negative charge. Throughout all rural Greece, iconic analogies link birth and/ or the wedding with the funeral (see also Danforth 1982). Motifs of inversion extend not only to acts related to the mouth, but also to substances that come in contact with the mouth. Food in general, its ingestion and handling, is a sign of imminent pollution, and specific types of food in the dream are seen as defiling, i.e., sweet food, desserts, meat, fish, eggs, darkcolored foods, and "heavy foods" (in Greek culture these are foods difficult to digest, spicy sauces, and burnt food). Food or any object that blocks the mouth and prevents speaking and breathing is a negative symbol. A variation of these motifs is tasting sour fruit and rotting food. Fish, raw or cooked, and eggs provoke negative feelings. The fish is connected to sudden fright. There is an analogy between the death throes of the fish out of water and the rapid beating of the heart caused by fright, as expressed by the verb lahtdrisa (past tense of lahtarao). Eggs in some cases signify negative talk and verbal conflict. The third operator is shared substance. The negative charge of food in the warning dream also engages the symbolism of shared substance. This involves the handling and/or transfer of defiling substances from one actor in the dream to another. These acts include the ingestion of food or other defiling substances.

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Of course, certain types of handling can signify beneficial occurrences. To the same extent that giving, taking, touching, or tasting food connotes a negative situation, the rejection of food indicates the avoidance of negative events. In the dream cited above, no. 10, throwing away the white figs signifies the narrator's subsequent cure from illness. Shared substance also extends to the alphabet. People who appear in the dream with specific sets of initials or letters in their names usually refer to others with the same sets of initials, letters, or phonetic resemblance in their names. As Maniats say when referring to a dream, "It goes from name to name." This could also extend to shared physical characteristics, such as hair color, eye color, and marks on the body. The fourth operator is static signs of negativity. The handling and transfer of defiling shared substance also extends to objects qualified for instance by "negative" color or heaviness, and to those objects which are static symbols of negativity, such as paper money, which, in most cases, like eggs, signifies verbal conflict. The sign for actually gaining money is excrement. Besides the ones already mentioned, such as babies, eggs, paper money, and the open mouth, we can include the following signs of free-floating negativity: animals, particularly dogs and cats, irritating noise and music, and, of course, blood. Related to but distinct from the transformative modes of defamiliarization, inversion, and shared substance, are images of mobility and immobility, of movement and constraint. Easy upward movement such as climbing stairs, hills, etc., has positive resonances. Conversely, difficult upward movement, difficult and/or obstructed pathways and roads, and broken stairways are negatively charged. Downward movement is generally seen as negative. It is analogous to burial and/or movement to the otherworld. Winds occupy a central role as facilitators or inhibitors of physical movement. The imagery of immobility and constraint expresses confinement and is informed by the opposition between the heavy and the light. Closed spaces, tiny rooms, tight-fitting clothing or shoes, traveling in small and/or crowded cars, and particularly lying in bed are images of constraint and immobility. This imagery, particularly that of the bed, connects with the imagery of the coffin and the grave as closed spaces of constraint. The opposition between the heavy and the light is usually codified in wearing heavy clothes and winter clothes in contradistinction to light clothing, summer clothing, and light-colored clothing. This opposition can also apply to carrying objects.

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The Economy of Dreams The word for dreams in Greek is 6nira or onirata and the practice of dream interpretation is called oniroskopia. The nouns skopia, skopi, skop6s mean target, mark (as in target), aim, objective, goal, watcher. They derive from the verb skopin or skopevin meaning to watch, examine, plan, aim, aim at a target. Skopia is also part of the word kerdhoskopia, which means profit making. When Maniat women interpret warning dreams, they speculate on whom the dream "targets." Dreams do not necessarily "aim at" the dreamer. In one instance, where a warning dream of particular intensity occurred and later the pet dog of the family died, a woman who had previously been involved in the interpretation of the dream, exclaimed with relief, "It went to the dog!" This implied that the dog, as a member of the household, had been targeted in the dream and not the human members of the family. Dreams move in specific directions. Like the cry of the nekropouli, the source of the dream and the objects or target of the dream involve two separate times, places, and situations. The realization of the dream is seen by Maniat women as a predetermined fulfillment of fate, moira. Only the interpretation of specific signs and the ascertainment of the direction of the message is open to speculation. Women refer to the realization of a dream as "the dream has been paid off" (xoflithi). For example, in the period prior to Lent known as Apokries (carnival) whatever dreams are received "will not be paid off," that is, they will not come true. The preLenten period is a time for the inversion of social life and of all sign systems. There is an economy of dreaming formed by a relation of debt and payment that links the message of the dream (the sign) to its actualization in social life (the referent). The nature of the debt is structured by several factors: (1) the time that separates the reception of the dream in the present from its realization in the future, (2) the social and physical space that separates the dreamer from the persons the dream might refer to, and (3) the local belief that the fulfillment of moira is a payment of a predetermined debt. The completion of a person's life is compared to the closing of an account ledger. This metaphor of the account ledger is used by the following mourner in her lament to express the sense of termination.

[11] Seal your account book that you are holding in your hand

Sfaliso to dhefteri zou 6pou kratcis sto heri zou

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and leave it on the ground for the unskilled to read it, the teacher and the student. May a lawyer be found to give you the proper help for I'm only a rural woman.

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ke cifise to katayfs nci t' anaghn6si o atzamfs o dhciskalos ki o mathitfs. Pou dhikigh6ros na vrethf ke na se dh6ki apandf ti egh6 yineka horikf.

The verb x6flise (was paid off) is used to describe the dying person, the individual dead, and the extinction of an entire household. In its present tense, xoflcio means to pay off a debt, to fulfill an obligation or task. Moira (fate) implies the individual's share or allotment of positive and negative events and the expenditure of these qualities in the course of a life. An individual's life, as structured by moira (fate), is an economic system informed by relations of debt, obligation, expenditure, and compensation. Individuals can carry the signs of moira on their bodies, in their speech and acts. These signs function as advanced tokens of the moira to be fulfilled or paid. Like the warning, they are semiotic loans from the future that are given to the present as tokens, as informational credit. This implies that dreams and the general signs of warning are analogous to the semiology of money. Money and dreams circulate between people, places, and temporalities. The signs of the dream, the signs of the warning, like currency, are tokens, a language of general value equivalence. (Consider the fact that it is paper bills that have negative semantic status in the dream system, and not coins, which once had intrinsic value.) Money encodes economic value in an abstract, detachable, free-floating form. Currency and capitalization have been described by Deleuze and Guattari (1977) as deterritorialized value codes. The signs and symbols of the dream and the warning are provisionally free-floating, deterritorialized tokens. The process of ascertaining to whom the dream is directed is an attempt to territorialize, to locate, and to anchor the signs of the dream in their proper place. The dreamer(s) is decentered from the full meanings of the warning and particularly from the realization of the fate the warning rehearses. The dreamer witnesses fate in a mediated form. The message is delivered to the dreamer by overcoded, emotionally charged signs. Divination of the warning dream converts these signs into material events and persons. It is in this conversion that the full value of the dream sign is materialized. Dream signs, like currency, are polysemic. Two or more values are encapsulated in the same vehicle. It is this encapsulation of polysemy in a single form that allows both money and dreams to function as languages of value equivalence that bring events, people, and meanings, previously separated in time and

space, into a fixed relation. The Maniat belief that dreams are "paid off," that the abstract symbols, signs, and tokens of the warning can be decoded and converted into real events, replicates an economic logic that is based on precapitalist cultural codes. In a fully commodified society, the inscription of value into abstract forms, such as currency, does not create a relation of lack between the token and its referential value. The circulating currency is accepted as a permanent substitute of material objects and their value. In contrast, in economies that are not fully commodified, money has a limited autonomy in reference to other economic media. In precapitalist systems of exchange, the token is directly connected to its material reference, author, or site of origin. Aries ( 1981) identifies the disappearance of warning beliefs in Europe with the commodification, rationalization, and linearization of time. Linear, compartmentalized time precludes any interpenetration of the present and the future, which remain exclusive commodified units. In contrast, the warning in Inner Mani is rooted in the nonlinear temporalities of dreaming and divination. The inscription of heterogeneous time into the dream sign facilitates the penetration of the present by alterity. Contemporary dreaming and warning beliefs point to the incomplete historical articulation of Inner Mani with capitalist economies. This distancing from modes of temporal cognition based on commodification and rationalization is due to the relatively late and uneven penetration of Inner Mani by capitalist systems. Women have been the sector of Maniat society most removed from external economies. Through dreaming and divination, Inner Maniat women smuggle clandestine temporalities and "economies" into the everyday organization of modernity. 3

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connect with the soul ( psiM). Dressing, washing, and laying out the body is also an extension of the kinship ethics of care and tending. It functions (as in the following narratives) as a reciprocation for the concern and care that the dying show the living when the former plan for the gaps and social obligations that arise from their death. One narrator recollects her husband's death in Athens.

Death, Birth, and the Outside All moral and social transformations can be read through the visible signs of the body. This type of corporeal reading by Maniats is a form of divination that invests the flesh with an autonomy distinct from the volition of the self. This autonomy is mainly expressed in the juxtaposition of temporal states: transformations of the body in the present can disclose signs of the future. In the Inner Maniat construction of self and body, the self, with the exception of the dream state, is tied to the present while the body and the flesh are tied to the invisible domains of the past and the future-a dynamic that creates dissonance between the self and the body. 1 Temporal discontinuities between body and self are evident in the process of dying and in laying out the corpse. The acts of dying and laying out the body are a unified and continuous ritual sequence. The body passes from the social and orderly domain of the living to the dangerous domain of the dying and the dead and is managed by being washed, dressed, and laid out. This does not imply the resocialization of the soul or persona of the dead. The soul is perceived as an invisible presence (metaphorized as breath) external to the body. After death, the visibility of the body in the world of the living is perceived as disjunctive. When ritual procedures are not observed, the corpse can be reanimated and enter the domain of the living as an autonomous entity, a revenant, introducing pollution into the social order. The corpse that has not been properly cleansed and subjected to various prophylactic procedures and techniques, including closing the orifices, can "drag" (souri) the living into the domain of the dead. The process of laying out the corpse has a twofold purpose: (1) it domesticates the corpse in an attempt to constrain and control it as a conduit of pollution, and (z) it symbolically constructs the corpse as a hinge between the domain of the dead and the living; the living, through the corpse, can communicate and

[12] Three, four days before, he knew it [his death]. He put money in an envelope and said to me, "This is for my funeral. Please make sure that my ark (kivot6s) is 1. 8 meters, because I'm tall, and make sure that I don't smell, I go beautiful. If I die early and you have enough time, take me to my birthplace to put me together, in an embrace, with my mother, otherwise I should be buried in Attica, here." I fulfilled his will, he went down scented. The hour he closed his eyes, I myself washed him with vinegar, wine, and changed his clothes. With a round stick thirty centimeters long and cotton I closed every open semion (point) of the body. The particular semio that I had to close was the rear, because it would bring the stench. With a fluffy towel dipped in vinegar-water solution we wipe clean the whole body. The wine is customary. Perhaps it plays a role in keeping the stench out. We dress the body with the best suit. We fulfilled his order to be mourned by his female covillagers and especially three or four persons he knew that mourn well and he liked. Another woman describes her mother's death in Inner Mani. [13]

They stripped her naked, I couldn't. They were only telling me what to bring. But she had everything ready, even ironed. She used to say to other women as they were chatting, "Only one thing I'm short of, my shroud." I had bought one for her, all cotton, and I had it in my suitcase. Also, a pair of good stockings, linen, expensive,· and a woolen pair, too, and the silk ribbon for the hands-everything, everything!-without telling anybody ... They washed her with a sponge bought new from the store, they threw away the wet sheets and wiped her dry. They were washing her with wine well. Then they cut the shroud with a knife, and they pull it over the head (May it stay away from us!) to go all the way down to the feet, back and front. Then the underwear, undershirt, I had everything in cotton. I wouldn't buy the cheap ones from the stores. She

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made them all herself. She had even put lace in her underwear. Then the dress, the matching suit, her beautiful apron (I didn't tie it), her glasses, her purse. Some woman took off her gold ring and gave it to me. "It shouldn't stay in the grave," she said. She [the dead] was never taking it off her hand. I put it in a little box. This year I wore it for the first time. Or should I take it off? You think it may harm me?

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is said: "Be careful for the eyes and the mouth not to remain open!" If you hold them for awhile as you tie him, the person freezes afterwards. It feels dissatisfying, like an unfinished job, when eyes and mouth of the dead stay open. They get untied when the dead is put in the grave. If you forget it, others yell, "Untie!" not to leave him tied up.

The following narrator recounts the death of her in-law in Piraeus.

[14] When she died, her children wanted to rush in. I said, ''All right to see your mother, but don't start the screams and mourning, because we must prepare her first." . . . I started from the eyes, closed tightly, and then the jaw, to secure them well. We undress the person, then [put on J the shroud, which is a piece of cotton. We make a hole in the middle to wear it like an undershirt. Then the rest of the underwear [is put on]. We've already washed the body with ghlikcidhi (vinegar) from top to bottom very well. We fill the anus with cotton not to smell .... We combed her and all the rest and waited for the coffin and then the bus. Silence, of course, because in apartments in the city, these things [mourning screams] are forbidden. Her wish was to have first a procession in Limena [village in Inner Mani] and then to take her to her home. So, we drove with the bus all around Yerolimena and then home, where we mourned her all night. Next day we took her to the church for the blessing and then to the cemetery. Laments, of course, and people, people, people. Describing proper preparations of the dead body in the past and present, an elderly woman instructs:

[15] The dead is placed on a table, and in the old days, down on the floor because people didn't have anything [to place the dead on]. They would spread a blanket, a sheet, until the coffin arrived. The coffins were once made here .... The dead is prepared by close relatives but in some cases by xeni [strangers; in this case, non-kin]. Ornaments? Each one brings a little flower.... Those who live up in Piraeus bring flowers from there. All women bring candles. The dead must have the head down [west] and the feet up [east]. The same way the dead is buried in the cemetery, too. With ribbon you tie the hands, feet, and jaw [of the dead], for if you leave him [untied] he stays open, his mouth, [pause] and it's not right. It

The body of the mourner, the dying person, or the dead are margins between self and society, life and death, and function as places of mediation. Mediation is particularly visible in the Maniat coding of body orifices. Orifices are "points" (narrative 12) of the bodily threshold. They are the boundaries between the inside and the outside, and the place where one passes into the other. Therefore, they are the sites for the exchange, transfer, and conversion of moral and material substance and qualities. As thresholds, the orifices of the body are Janus-like structures: they are bivalent and face two directions. They are inherently liminal, and therefore subjected to social control. Washing and cleansing the body constitutes the purification and sterilization of the boundary. It is an act of sealing, but not exclusion. 2 The corporeal boundary is purified because it will be deployed by the women mourners as a vehicle for communication and connection. The corpse will also be the boundary-artifact that the mourners will interpose between themselves and men in order to effect a separation from everyday social institutions and discourses. The sealing of the body is the first step in its deployment as a ritual instrument. The household of the deceased, as a physical and metaphorical extension of the corpse, is also subjected to purification. The mirror, as an orifice or passage into the inverted world of the specular, is turned to the wall. Frying pans are turned over to mark the prohibition against eating food cooked in the house. Food is brought by friends and relatives to the bereaved. After the initial ceremony, while waiting for the commemorative services (three, nine, or forty days), the immediate kin remain in seclusion (particularly the women), limiting their exchanges with the outside world. The entire household is then constructed as an orifice of death that has to be monitored and sealed. Death is the passage of the inside to the outside. But it is a nonguaranteed passage, subject to reversibility, suspension, and anomaly, and is thus problematic. Since the dead are believed to have the capacity to drag others with them, orificial closure can be seen as an attempt to inhibit this possibility.

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If death is the passage of the inside to the outside, birth is the passage of the outside to the inside, and is an equally dangerous event in the Maniat worldview. The sharp decline of the birth rate in Inner Mani has in part contributed to the disappearance of birthing rituals and beliefs. Yet we can reconstruct the latter in order to explore their relation to death imagery still prevalent. The mother and child during pregnancy participated in a liminal condition which intensified at birthing and for the following forty days. This mandated their seclusion. Yet, the forty-day seclusion both of mourners and of mothers with newborn babies seems to have been loosely observed in Inner Mani. Women of close relation to the dead could seclude themselves for periods much longer than forty days and would display their condition of mourning for years to come. Maniat women who have delivered children have been known to return to the fields after birth. Despite this, these proscriptions establish a rite of passage analogy between death and birth and reflect belief, if not practice. Forty days after birth, the delivered mother goes to church to be blessed, together with the child, and they are then considered free of the liminal condition. As an urban woman points out: "Young mothers have changed certain things. They do not stay in the house for forty days. They go to the priest in twenty days, take half the blessing and circulate. . . . In another twenty days they go again to complete it." In death rituals, the ending of the forty-day term is commemorated by a church service and signals the emergence of the mourning kin from their state of confinement. (This period applied more to men, and in some cases sisters and daughters, than to widows.) The termination of the forty-day period also marks the "final judgment" of the dead. The body of the dying person, the corpse, and, years later, the exhumed bones are subjected to divinatory readings. The reading of the pregnant woman's body is also organized around the practice of foretelling. In the case of pregnancy, it pertains to the gender of the child, while in exhumation it focuses on the moral condition of the dead. Once women entered the state of visible pregnancy they were subjected to intensified textualization. The first signs of conception were characterized in Inner Mani with the phrase "a child has been

imprinted," (tipothike pedhi). The mother bears the child, and moira becomes the midwife, whatever she writes will be written [including one's death]. (Fragment of lament no. 36, chapter 6)

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In the pregnant mother, as in the dream, the character of prospective events was discerned by the defamiliarization of the features of the body, particularly the face. A pregnant woman whose face aghrievi-that is, changes to look rough, wild, untamed-indicated that she would give birth to a male. This implied an impending positive moral condition for her, the baby, her affinal and natal clans. A woman whose face did not change indicated the imminent negativity of giving birth to a girl. Birthing itself is implicated in the politics of gender control. The pregnant woman whose face changes and eventually gives birth to a male child registers the determining influence and force of male substance over her body. The woman whose face does not change and eventually gives birth to a female child resists male force, and mother and child become stigmatized. If the face of the corpse does not exhibit the signs of death but looks vivid and alive, it means that the dead will soon "drag" a living relative to death. The common sign in both cases is the absence of corporeal transformation (see also chapter 9). The unchanging face of the pregnant woman and that of the dead are read as negative, because this absence of physical change is anomalous. In such cases there is no physical mark of the temporal and moral passage of either the corpse or the pregnant woman. The good death in Inner Mani involves the ethic of an easy separation of the soul from the body. 3 The same ethic is echoed in the easy separation of the newborn from the mother in birthing. The common blessing to the pregnant woman is "be well-freed" (kalolefteroti) for the easy separation of the child from the mother. Pregnant women engaging in agricultural work are described as working "with their belly in the mouth" (me tin kilia sto stoma), which expresses the constraining presence of the child in the body of the mother. The blockage of the mouth and breathing in both dreaming and mourning signifies disorder and negative conditions. The person who is thrown into disorder by death is described as arriving at the mourning ceremony or as mourning "with her soul in her mouth" (me tin psihi sto stoma), a metaphor for a type of breathlessness that characterizes personal anguish. The soul departs from the body through the open mouth and the eyes. When the pregnant woman's contractions began, she was often tied to a rope hanging from the ceiling, which she gripped to facilitate her birthing. The hands, feet, and jaw of the corpse are tied with ribbon. There are beliefs that if the mouth of the dead person is left to gape open, he/she will drag a living relative to death. A stone pebble which was believed to have magical powers that facilitate the baby's passage was placed in the woman's hands to hold tightly in

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cases of difficult birth. A stone pebble is placed in the hands of the corpse to facilitate the dead's passage to the other world. In the exhumation process, the dissolution of the flesh is both the physical and moral detachment of antithetical parts of the dead body (flesh and bones) and figures as a central theme in discussions on the moral condition of the dead. The detached parts of the pregnant woman's and newborn's bodies after the birth were similarly subjected to divination. The placenta after birth was read by older women in order to predict the gender of the next child. The umbilical cord, the first tooth of the child, and the placenta were stored behind religious icons or ancestors' pictures to insure the child's good fortune. Any hair or nails of the baby cut from his/her body prior to baptism were placed in safekeeping. Generally, the baby's hair and nails were not supposed to be cut before baptism. Mourners stated their liminality by leaving their hair and nails uncut and their faces unshaven until forty days after the death of a relative. The entire process of washing and laying out the dead, sealing its orifices, and dressing it in a cotton shroud is analogous to cleansing the afterbirth, washing the newborn baby, and wrapping it in cloth. The newborn baby that is wrapped from the neck down and thus immobilized is called kopanciki. 4 Until the time of its baptism the infant is a dangerous and liminal entity. The movements of the dead to the outside and of the newborn to the inside create a rupture, a rent, a dangerous point of contact and communication between the opposing domains. To this imagery, we can add the "open grave." All such dangerous holes, passageways, or conduits are described with the verb hcisko (gape open). This sensitivity to the threshold or orifice is evident in the idea of"dragging." If certain ritual precautions are not taken, such as closing the mouth of the dead or observing all the procedures of the mourning cycle, the dead can drag the living with them to the outside. The vrik6lakas, a reanimated corpse, "drags" the living, particularly young children and babies, to the outside. The newborn baby, particularly the male, embodied the future well-being and luck of the clan. But the newborn was as dangerous as it was beneficial. A baby that was born with a tooth in its mouth or that developed one before three months would "devour its parents" (tha fcii tou ghonicite tou), which meant one of its parents would die. A child grinding its teeth in its sleep was mimicking the act of chewing and devouring the living. All these relate to the "dragging" powers of the child that are similar to those of the dead. The child and the dead are themselves the threshold through which the inside comes into dangerous contact with the outside, where the two domains leak into each other.

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A synonymous expression to thci souri (it will drag another) is thcihi sincigloutho which means it will be followed or accompanied by another, or there will be repetition of the same. Newborn female babies who looked like males would "drag" a male child into life in the next pregnancy. Conversely, a male child who appeared female would "drag" a girl in the next pregnancy. What is significant in these beliefs and what ties them to the powers of the dead is the trope of physical anomaly. The boy baby that appears as a girl, the girl baby that appears as a boy, and the corpse that appears as living, will "drag" another. The dragging agent mimics its other, and thus gains power over it. In both instances, physical ambiguity expresses, as in dreams, temporal overlap. The necessity to maintain passageways between the inside and the outside for those who are to be born and for those who are to die, and at the same time to maintain a boundary between the inside and the outside, leads to a contradiction. The social structure, in order to manage birth and death, has to establish relations with that which lies outside of it. Yet, the contact between inside and outside destabilizes the social order. This contradiction is materialized through gender divisions. Beneficial exchange between the inside and the outside in birth is symbolized by maleness. Conversely, the destructive contact between the inside and the outside, is symbolized by the feminine. The above polarities were transferred in birth rites to material objects, k6skino and skcifi (flour sieve and washtub), that simulated passage and separation between the opposing domains of the interior and the exterior. The k6skino is a round perforated sieve for straining flour; its multiple holes functioned in birth rites as orificial symbols of passage between the outside and inside. Newborn males were often laid in the k6skino in order to insure that male children as numerous as the holes in the sieve will subsequently be born. To have many male children in the clan is the ultimate sign of good luck and collective fortune. In contrast, the female child was placed in a skcifi, a rectangular, wooden or stone tub used mainly for washing, which symbolized the grave and, in later periods, the coffin. Placing the female child in the skcifi was symbolic infanticide. The holes of the k6skino and the rectangular, wooden or stone closure of the skcifi polarize these objects. The k6skino was a symbol of beneficial passage and of contact of the social order with its Other. The skcifi with its death symbolism indicated a strict separation between opposing domains, between the male and the female, the inside and the outside. The ritual of the skcifi is crucial. As a sign of the feminine, it establishes the originary taxonomic linkage between women and death. The entry of the female into the social order is the transgressive entry of the outside into the inside.

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Correspondingly, in the past, when Maniats spoke of their children, they used the word children to refer only to males, e.g., "I have three children and two girls," differentiating the categories of the child and of the female. The rite of the skafi. with its symbolism of infanticide demonstrates that female identity is constructed through the sign of death and alterity. The closure of the skcifi. participates in the same logic that informs the closing of the corpse. Sealing the corpse prevents it from "dragging" the living along; the rite of the skcifi. not only played out the death of the newborn female but also functioned as a prophylactic against the birth of subsequent female children. Both the sealing of the corpse and the rite of the skcifi. are symbolic resolutions of polarizing events that are unavoidable: the entry of the female and Death into

the social order.

High Voicing The advent of death is the transition from "low voicing" pollution, disorder, and transgression, to "high voicing." In the context of the warning dreams and other omens of pending death and disorder, low voicing controls the circulation of pollution and confines disorder. 5 Death is a shift from low voicing to what the Maniats term "screaming the dead," t6n skouzo. Outside the situation of death, violence, and other forms of disorder, screaming is considered to be noise out of place. The cry of the nekropouli, the imagery of the open mouth in warning dreams, and the "screaming" form a diverse iconography of acoustic pollution which marks important transitions. We can say that in Inner Mani there are acoustics of the inside and the outside. The acoustics of the inside gather language, sound, and meaning into closed circles of speaking subjects. The acoustics of the outside eject sound and meaning from bounded social situations outward. It is a collectivizing discourse that has an impact on all members of society, although the authors are almost exclusively women. When the boundary between life and death is crossed, women initially disseminate the signs of transgression through screaming. Screaming is tied to the condition of anastcitosi, disorder and inversion. Anastdtosi is a synonym of dna kdto, meaning upside down, and it resonates the word andstasi, meaning resurrection-that is, inverse movement from low to high or from death to life. In standard Greek, stdsi(s) (as in and-stasi) means cessation of normal order and uprising, while ep-and-stasi means revolution. In

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Mani, strong emotions linked to the death of significant others that overwhelm the mourner are often described as epandstasi-a revolution of emotions. Those who hear the screaming stop what they are doing. They run in different directions either on urgent tasks related to death or to disseminate the news of the death. They use streets and paths they may not ordinarily cross because of property boundaries and/or gender divisions. This imagery of disordered movement, the undifferentiation of spatial boundaries which accompanies the "screaming," is also known as anabouboula, a synonym of anastdtosi, that has a stronger inflection of confusion and disorder. An everyday sign of deep mourning among women is the black scarf worn across the face, revealing only the eyes. The woman who wears the black scarf in this manner is called bouboulomeni, which implies that she is in a state of extreme disorder and as such carries with her a polluting aura. What a woman does with her scarf, and ultimately with the rest of her body, at the moment of death states the intensity of her relation to the dead-the intensity of her anastdtosi. The woman who pulls her scarf off her head and down to her shoulders displays one level of intensity, while the woman who pulls it completely off her head signifies a deeper level of mourning. A woman who rids herself of the scarf, pulling her hair out, scratching her face and beating her chest, exhibits the deepest signs of p6nos (pain). 6 These are the gestures that accompany "screaming." They are sudden, physical movements and self-inflicted violence on the bodies of the living. This is eloquently described below by a middle-aged Maniat woman who has been residing in Athens since the age of seventeen.

[16] In "the first years" [in the past], especially when a young man died, thrini [mourning] would occur. Now it is not the same. People don't mourn the way they used to. You should see hair! When a man was lost, you would see down here [pointing], the streets full of women's hair! These things I lived myself. I remember when I was a little girl, in one ceremony, my mother's sister had come, also the teacher, both very good mourners. My mother's sister-we had lived together a long time-1 remember, then had grey hair like mine now. She had the braids down here [pointing], and she had unraveled them. Together with the deceased's eight sisters and his many female relatives and lots of cousins, they covered the church square with hair. And the throats of all the

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women, his sisters', aunts', and cousins', had "closed" from the screaming. And their voices had "closed" from the mourning. He was, you see, an only son with eight sisters. He also left his wife with three children. And it was all happening there! To show you, his sisters were pricking themselves, trying to push thorns into their hands for their life to be cut off since they ended up losing their only brother. They were losing their minds! A lot was happening those days. Now? Nothing. Things changed. Up in Athens, human beings are lost, and it is as if nothing is happening. [Disapprovingly, bitterly] To separate from your dnthropos [mate, or other close relative] and not to see him/her again! [and to be able toremain cool!] Women represent the violence of death through their own bodies. Their postures, gestures, and general facial expressions function as corporeal texts which reaudit the experience of death as passage and disorder on behalf of the now silent and immobile dead. It is through this imagery of bodily disorder and movement that women not only establish their shared substance with the dead but also establish themselves as the iconic representatives of the dead in the world of the living. For women, the corporeal mimesis of death, the transformation of their bodies into a text of disorder, is part of an incremental process of desocialization-a process of leaving society, as symbolized in the stripping off and disarray of clothing and the scarring of flesh. This exposure of femininity in conjunction with ritual entry into the space of death signifies the breaking of those gender constraints that characterize the world of the living. The condition of anabouboula is signaled not only by the acoustics of pollution but also the visibility and subsequent dramatization of feminity. 7 The exposure of feminine flesh combined with screaming heightens the social presence of women. This synthesis of somatic and acoustic presence or visibility is the central performative dynamic of mourning singing in the death ritual. These body postures, which are linked to the advent of death and the death ritual proper, are in sharp contrast with the body imagery of women in everyday social life.

Maniat women move discreetly and swiftly in their towers and through the narrow streets between towers. They move close to walls and avoid public spaces defined as male. They emerge from the low entrances and exits of their tower-

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houses, from underneath a heavy load of wood or water carried on their backs, only to bend again over a rocky terrain during agricultural work, over an open or covered grave in the cemetery, over the protected cistern at the bottom of their towers. When the "whisper" of death comes, these bent women, creatures of the back alleys, stand up. They stretch their upper body and throw the head back, pulling out their loosened hair. They raise fists against the sky, beating their chests in anger, scratching their faces, screaming. It is then that one sees Maniat women in their full height.

[17] Hey, you God, from high above where the gun can't reach you! Why don't you descend below to talk about rights? We have the most [rights] for we are left without child.

[18] My voice burst forth like thunder to reach my Niko's ear to come back from America.

[19] I began mourning and like a madwoman I screamed, "God is a merciless criminal to have killed the orphan [her son]!" Relatives advised me, with friends and covillagers together, not to curse God, for it's sinful and bad. And I replied to them, "This thing that God did on the Savior's Day,

A, re Thee ap6 psild

pou dhe se ftdni oUte grds! Dhe katevenis hambild na poume dhike6mata? T d plea tdhome em is po' miname horis pedhi.

Skouxe foni mou sd vrodi na pdi stou Niko mou t'afti na 'rthi ap' tin Ameriki.

T6 moirol6i epkiasa ke sa zourli ehouyiaxa: Kakourghos ene o The6s po sk6tose to arfan6! Me sivoulepsasi i dhiki i fili ke i horiani yid na mi vrizou to The6 t' ene amartia ke kak6. Toun apokrithika ki egh6, Etouto p6kam' o The6s animera ti Sotir6s

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killing the orphan, is this not sinful and bad?"

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po' sk6tose to arfan6 dhen en' amartia ke kak6?

The Silent and Naked Death Silent death is the bad death. It implies the deceased was alone, without clan, without "numbers," without appearance (fanerosi), or screaming. The silent death is a public shame. Death must always have its accompaniment. The silent death is considered a naked death. Nakedness ( yimnio) implies the isolate. Trees in winter without leaves or fruit are seen as naked and as burnt. The person who is left alone by death is described as burnt. Nakedness also evokes the cold, the damp, and winter. The bare tree belongs to winter; it is outside the agricultural domain. The covered, fertile tree is a trope of the inside, a component of the agricultural domain, and thus an expression of socialized nature. The notion of socialized and desocialized existence is extended from the category of nature, domesticated and wild, to the category of the person predicated by the presence or absence of kin and/or caretakers. The naked death is also a symbol of "poverty." Poverty is not simply lack of material goods but the absence of a large turnout of mourners, of "numbers." Nakedness as contrasocial and as linked to solitary conditions implies the uncovered, the unsheltered, the outside, the abandoned, the unprotected. Uncovered flesh is embarrassing, as is the unattended ceremony. Both are the exposure of the inside to the outside.

The Good Death The following narrator documents at length the good death of her mother.

[2o] I said, "Do we have any hopes, doctor?" "Listen, my child, I congratulate you for all the things you are doing [for your mother], I have not seen before a yiayia [grandma, old lady] like this, so clean and well taken care of, and so polite in her manners, but by seven o'clock she will die ... unless a krousma, a kousouri [stroke] comes and leaves her in bed but alive. "Doctor, when the kr6tos arrives, my mother goes." [Kr6tos means loud noise, gunshot. Here it is a synonym for death and stroke.]

A lot of people had already gathered in the house ... to greet her. I had this house [newly built section] ready, because she had left me order to bring her here with the coffin. It was full of people. I had brought someone to help me lift up everything [furniture] and place it in the shed and cover it up with a sheet. . . . She finished there [died] in the old tower where she was married and gave birth to her children .... The veranda (liak6s) had filled up with people. As I turned away from her bed for a moment, the woman who was sitting by her pillow-you know how brave she is!-says to me, "My koumbdra is finished." She finished? I grab my head, I pull out my hair, I scratch myself, I pound my head into the steel frame of the bed, on the wall-dead! ... You should have seen my brother! We had closed the door to prepare her, to put things in order, and he started pounding his head on the column [outside]. I was screaming Mother! as if it would have any effect. Two other women took care of her. I couldn't. I was dead. My brother was kicking the door. The women didn't want to let him in before they finished. He broke the door, the lock, and entered. The doctor entered, too, gave me an injection, and put me on the double bed .... I was not feeling anything. What did I care whether the doctor was there and what he was saying to me. He sat by my side and my brother from the other side held me. "I want some information from you," said the doctor. I had no energy to say a thing. "Later, don't bother me now, don't upset me," I said. He wanted me to submit IDs, etc. He examined me well and said, "Women, grandma's mission is completed, but this young woman [must go on] ...."Later on he asked me, "I want you to tell me from your heart, do you have any grudges against me?" I said, "Doctor, thank you very much. Complaints only to Him. Only He cannot be won over." Didn't I talk right? ... One bag full of medicines he had given to my brother. He would buy whatever [medicines] he was told as if he could do something. I gave them all away. She gave me orders [before she died] whom to respect, what obligations to pay off, to do this and to do that. Those she loved and shared things with, she mentioned them all. Do you know what she said when your uncles came? It was pouring rain-it was a catastrophe-and the lights went off. I lit the kerosene lamp .... They entered to kiss herwhen she finished they camel-and she said, "Thank you, but now that you came it is too late." They started to cry. "Step aside!" I said. Shouldn't they have come earlier?

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She had prepared and hung everything from the top of her bed, everything she needed to wear when she died. Her shoes, too. She had a suitcase full of clothes. Clothes you should see! But she had left orders: "Dress me in that grey woolen matching suit, even if it is summer." She had it hanging ready, although she had a beautiful dress with a matching jacket on top that my brother had bought her. I dressed her with the dress inside, the jacket by her side, and on top of that the suit she had asked to wear. I was afraid to leave them outside [the grave]; she could be asking me for them. She was a good woman. She left easy. That's why I was upset, because I didn't suffer. Tak! and she left. One kr6tos, to say, in the front of the legs, one at the back and she stayed [still], she finished. Without snoring or other sounds people make when they die. I saw her in my dream now that I got ill recently. As I was sleeping-! was always up at six to go for the olives-she patted me tak! on my hands, as she used to do sometimes when she needed something, '1\re you sleeping?" "Yes, mother," I say. "Haven't you left yet for Piraeus to see to your brother?" "No, I still have some of our sweet little olives to pick, and as soon as I finish them, I'll go." I rush up, I light up the little icon lamp. I had been fighting to find the door to get out, and I couldn't. My heart was beating hard. What is the human mind! I finally found it. I sit on that seat [outside in the yard] and soon I say to myself "What am I talking about? My mother is dead." I go in, I make coffee. It was three o'clock. I stayed there till six [in the morning].

In the narrative above, the signs of anastdtosi (inversion) cohere into an entire native sociology of contemporary death in Inner Mani. All the ritual elements of the public death, of the good death, and the entry of disorder and its objectification by the bodies of the mourners, are present and formally compose the traditional iconography of anastdtosi. This is punctuated by disorderly nature: rain, storm, light failures, etc. The medicalization of death by the doctor is dissonant with the traditional signs and behavior of mourning. The attempt to deritualize death, to subordinate it to medical rationality, is perceived by the narrator as an extension of the condition of disorder that accompanies all death. The doctor's interventions in this narrative are understood as typical out-of-place events that are linked with the beginnings of anastdtosi.

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Beyond this imagery of disorder, the narrator is basically concerned with documenting her mother's performance of the good death. Her mother's death is foremost a public event. The house is full of mourners to witness her death. Prior to this, the mother had instructed the daughter to whom she should be respectful, to pay debts of honor, and to fulfill kinship obligations for all "those she [the mother]loved and shared things with" (including property issues, which have often been arranged orally). The good death is also the completion of a life cycle. Life cycle imagery appears in reference to the space of dying. The mother "finishes" in the space where she had been married and had given birth to her children. Dying in that room is a completion of that sequence. The history of the room itself becomes a metaphor for the completed life and the good death. The other sign of good death concerns the performance of an easy death. Maniats believe that rapid and unobstructed or difficult and prolonged separations of the soul from the body indicate the presence or absence of a state of sin. A kr6tos (loud noise like a gunshot) successfully strikes each part of the dying woman's body, partially detaching the soul from the flesh. (Maniats do not believe in a rigid separation of soul and body at this stage of death.) The good death is confirmed by the dead mother's subsequent appearance in the daughter's dreams. The reappearance of the dead in the dream completes the cycle of togetherness, separation, and beneficial return. In the context of her dreaming, another aspect of anastcitosi is revealed. When the mother appears in the dream-when the dead enter the world of the living-temporal disorder occurs. The daughter enters into a liminal state which codifies her illness. The disorder associated with the death event now informs the representation of subsequent disorder among the living. In the following narrative, the trope of kr6tos appears again. Here, the good death is analogous to the flight of a bird. The metaphor of the bird evokes the value of lightness and is linked to the imagery of the soul and breath leaving the body. Despite what is generally felt about medical rationality and other urban "intrusions," this narrative indicates that the good death can be performed in the urban setting.

[21] I prepared aunt M., too. It has been eleven years since she died. She had been ill. Her last day was the day before Clean Monday; she died on that day. Everybody was around her, but she sent for me. So I closed the store-there was no transportation then-and from truck to truck I arrived in Piraeus. When I entered the room-she was half dead-I called

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her name twice, no answer. Somebody next to her told her, "Our in-law is here." I said, "It's me, I came from Mani, open your eyes so that I give you the news. We trimmed and clipped the fields." "For me it is late," she whispered. Of course her soul didn't leave that very moment. She had the death rattle and tremors on the lower jaw. When the fatal [death] came, her soul came out with a jolt. While she was almost dead, she opened her eyes suddenly and made a jolt abruptly. Grandma D., likewise, had a difficult death, very difficult for her soul to come out! Despite the fact that she was a good woman, she was tormented a lot to die. That shaking of the jaw alone was very upsetting, and it took too long. Otherwise, it is believed, one dies like a little bird. Look, for instance, at grandma S. She ate, got dressed, washed herself, sat on a chair, tak! she died. They say that in bad, evil people, the bad soul tortures the dying. I don't believe these things, judging from what I've seen among our kin. The good death did not just come. Women often had to create it, even if this meant challenging male orders, bureaucracy and the naked death itself.

[22] In Limena, a one hundred percent Maniat woman lived alone with her old mother. She had "fallen once into a mistake" and brought a child into the world. She falls ill. The kid of course was growing up, the same age with my son. I was bringing him home every night to eat together. Whatever I was cooking I'd bring her some. The end arrived. Dirt you should see! The poor, ill-fated thing! She had nobody, only an old mother. She [the mother] was coming out the door calling, "Eh, Dina! Eh, Anna! My Maria is dying." We run up the hill, to see what! Since that moment I thought that the human being is but an animal, a dog, a nothing. That woman was laying on a plank bed like an old female sheep. She didn't die that particular moment, so we went back down the hill. ... Her mother, again, "Eh, Anna! Eh, Dina! My Maria is dying." There we are back up the hill, running. I called her name, she half opened her sweet little eyes. The moment her soul was leaving her body, the woman said (I'm getting goose bumps saying it), "Mother, I'm dying!" And she died. She just died. Well, then, me and my sister started to do the customary [prepare the body], and afterwards we go down to Yerolimenas to the coffin maker. But he wouldn't make her a kcisa [coffin] because once her oxen had stepped into his fields. I go to the police station and I say, "Mr. Policeman, leave the whitewashed sidewalks and

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the tourism aside. Here is the tourism! What is going to happen to this woman that he doesn't agree to make a coffin for?" I go, I make the coffin myself. ... I dress her with ornaments and everything, I place her in, and with all my kids following-her home, a small hut, was not appropriate for the gathering-we take her to the church. People gathered ... and we mourned her all night. Next morning was the funeral. My son held the banner, I the breads and oil, on the way to the cemetery.

5 THE APPEARANCE

On the Road A little old lady advised me, "Listen, my brave Marouso, put the road ahead, and go to the narrow paths of Kounos there your mother to find." I put the road ahead. I go to the narrow paths of Kounos . (From lament no. 25) The road occupies a heterogeneous position in the ritualization of death. In the preliminary stages of the death ritual the road signifies disorder and separation, and, at a subsequent stage, order and togetherness with the dead. After burial, the path taken from the cemetery is "erased" in order to make a distinction between the domains of the living and the dead. To enter the road is to cross a threshold-a threshold which is not to be traversed by a woman alone. Whether death is present or not, entry onto the road, especially by a woman, is never a neutral or indifferent act. Roads are tied to the outside and are central components of public and political space. How and when a road is used, therefore, is a matter of consideration for Inner Maniats. There is no such thing as hanging out on a road or taking an aimless stroll alone on the road. A woman traveling without a visible purpose on the road, especially a deserted road, provokes suspicion, worry, curiosity, concern, and anxiety (not necessarily regarding sexual misconduct [as in Hirschon 1978]). Women moving in groups, or a woman accompanied by another, do not provoke such reactions; nor does the woman in the household or working in the field. The presence of the woman in these locales and situations has a fixed and unproblematic significance. A

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woman alone on the road, however, becomes a problematic, unfixed sign, an object of the social imaginary of the feminine. During periods of feuding, the road was one of the principal locales where men ambushed their enemies. As the symbol of the outside, the road was an emblematic place of death. Revenants, the walking dead, are often encountered on the road, i.e., crossroads. In pr6fasi, the image of the dying person was seen on or near the road. Being on the road means being a messenger. It implies being both a recipient and a donor. Those who are about to leave a household receive blessings and "gifts," messages and wishes for both the traveler and those the traveler will meet at the other end of the journey. Transition or separation here do not imply significant geographical or temporal distance, but rather the shift in classificatory domains from the "covered" to the "uncovered," from the household to the road. The traveler as messenger is thus symbolically covered with detached signs of the household order: clothes (e.g., coat), food, oral messages, small blessings, wishes, and beneficial physical gestures. Whether one goes across the street or embarks on a long journey, the traveler is always sent "to the good." Correspondingly, there is a common expression "coming from the road" (erhete ap6 dhr6mo). The person who comes from the road to the household personifies the entry of the outside into the inside and carries the ambience of the messenger-donor, the bringer of news. A similar qualification is attached to specific figures in the dream who are messengers that come from the outside. The relation between road, inside/outside, exile, and messengers intertwines the journey and news or signs from the outside with moira (fate). There is a direct parallel between the endowment of the traveler as messenger and the role of the dead in the mourning ceremony. The traditional blessing for the dead is "go to the good." The dead are frequently given messages by kinsmen and neighbors to take to their own dead. The semiology of death in Mani is the semiology of the nonsedentary, of things, people, and tokens in movement: an imagery that establishes a relation between the here and there, between the then and now. The nekropouli (bird of the dead, mainly a migratory species), the dead who return in dreams to deliver warnings, the dying who "make pr6fasi" by sending their images to significant others, the women that travel to the place of death-all personify this transience. With the first announcement of death by screams or church bell, people find themselves on the road, whether it is a village path or a road that connects village to village or city to village. In the spoken and sung discourses of the mourning ritual (klama) the im-

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agery of the road is central. Pira to dhr6mo sta brostci ("I took the road ahead of me" or "put the road ahead of me") 1 infers the journey to the klama as an encounter with fate. To "take the road" is to place one's fate ahead of oneself. The phrase "she took the road ahead," used in narrations and laments, is associated with special, urgent movements (e.g., from a brisk pace to running). One of my female informants described a woman entering a mourning ritual as dhromohismeni. The word connotes "being taken" by the road (dhr6mos). This improvisation was based on the word xepsihismeni, being out of breath, dying, having lost her soul (psihi) (soul is equivalent to breath here). The term connotes the effects of strenuous activity, struggle, or fight, which evokes the struggle with death. Dhromohismeni is formed by virtue of a metonymic relation between the passage of breath from the body in crisis or death and the struggle of the mourner on the road to the space of death (the klama). Commenting on the improvisation of a lament, a narrator stated, "The mourner had the moirol6i implanted in her" and then proceeded to describe the mourner's journey to the ritual, implying that the lament takes form on the road to the klama (mourning ritual), that the physical movement from everyday social order to the disorder of death is analogous to the cognitive entry into the discourse of death. Composing and singing the moirol6i is making a journey and confronting fate. In the ritual, the solo singer (korifea) and the other mourners can be "taken" (caught up) by the moirol6i, just as one can be taken by the road which is one's fate. Today, with the substantial depopulation of Mani and the urban migration, the road retains its ambience of separation, liminality, and disorder. Maniats who die in Athens and other cities are conveyed to their natal village for mourning and burial. A bus is rented and driven to Mani carrying the urban relatives and the dead in a coffin. Buses full of people are a contemporary sign of death, insofar as tourism has made few inroads into this region. I traveled separately to one such ceremony that took place in the village of Alika. The bus had passed earlier, around seven in the morning. The villages beside the road had received the message, and the klama was well under way when I arrived a few hours later. I traveled to this ceremony with a distant aunt in a car driven by her son. He grumbled, as he drove, that whenever he came to Mani on a vacation, he was dragged every day to a funeral. As we drove by the villages, my aunt spotted women she wanted to notify about the event. He refused to stop. She muttered about this and complained angrily throughout the trip about not having brought incense or flowers to the dead. She exclaimed that to appear without anything in this klama of her manoyenia (mother's clan) was

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as if she had shit in her pants in public. Her son responded, "These things are gone now. After all you've been living in Athens for decades!" She shouted, "I don't leave tradition! I shit on Athenians!" (Dhen tin afino egh6 ti paradhosi.

Taus ehezo taus Athineous. ). Her continuous scatological talk implied that she felt polluted by the manner in which she was journeying and attending that mortuary ceremony. I asked her at one point if we weren't going early, since the funeral would begin at four in the afternoon, and we were arriving before eleven in the morning. She answered impatiently that this was her "sweet mother's clan" (ghlikia manoyenia), and "so it's never early!" As we approached her natal village, she turned with pain in her eyes and voice and said, as if talking to herself, "Here once upon a time, if you only knew what was here!" As we passed by a deserted tower and its towerhouses, her voice broke, "Here is my sweet mother's clan. Now I don't want to turn to look, for all I see is ruins." (Once there would have been people to greet her upon her arrival from the road).

The road is one of the central signs of xenitia. Travel, journey, passage to a foreign land, and exile are central metaphors of death in rural Greece. They are perceived as xenitia, which encompasses the condition of estrangement, the outside, the movement from the inside to the outside, as well as contact and exchange between foreign domains, objects, and agents. Xenitia is a basic cognitive structure within which life and death are thought. Xenitia is reversible and situationally contingent. Inserting the logic or imagery of estrangement into any social situation, life event, or discourse immediately organizes the contingent into relations of the inside and outside, the same and the other. Xenitia then is a foundational taxonomy, and its imagery informs dreaming, death rituals, kinship systems, marriage, geography, history, ethnicity, and politics. 2

Xenitia is encapsulated in the deserted villages and empty roads that my aunt passed by on our way to the ceremony. The journey and the road functioned as images of separation from a past social order and evoked the absence of clan. In contrast, her entry into the klama was a recovery of the clan. The ceremony was taking place in a towerhouse. We went up the stairs, passed through the veranda (liak6s), which was full of men, and entered a small room

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of the towerhouse crowded with women seated around the coffin. They had been sitting there since the arrival of the deceased from Athens. She stepped right into the room and immediately took the prescribed position and chair, close to the dead, across from the daughters of the dead, and at the center of the ceremony. She sat among women who were approximately of the same kinship distance to the dead. By her body posture and movements she explicitly stated, "I am clan. I am here, we are all here in numbers." It was a formalized entrance and there was nothing humble about it. Rather, it was an assertion of status, an individual assertion of collective power: "This is my clan. I have power here." This movement towards the clan and the dead (the dead as center of the clan) was in direct contrast to the dispersal and disarray of the clan embodied in the depopulated villages and deserted houses seen from the road.

From Segmentary Kinship to Shared Substance The mourning is "distributed" in terms of intensity as follows: (1) If [the dead] was a young man and educated or lewindis [physically strong and/or brave] or military official or all three, the mourning was very intense. [The intensity of mourning decreased with the following categories]: (2) an elderly man but also esteemed or powerful; (3) a young woman; (4) an elderly man or a young child; (5) an old woman; (6) a deformed, mutilated or retarded person ... ; (7) a newborn or infant. The status of the family contributed to all this .... In the first case the mourning implicated the whole of Inner Mani .... In the second case only the demos [regional division]. In the third case the adjacent villages. In the fourth and fifth cases, the village (if the dead had children the mourning was more intense). In the sixth and seventh cases they would hold three-day, nine-day, forty-day, one-year, commemorative ceremonies. In the last two, there was only funeral and rarely a forty-day memorial. My mother remembers that for ... her great grandfather's brother who was killed young ... in 1828 and he was very levendis [synonym of palikdri: young, physically strong, and/or morally brave male], they held memorials ... on his name day until1922 (when her thirty-three-year-old uncle ... was killed. Then the old mourning was overshadowed by the new). (Kassis 1980, 271) The hierarchy of mourning participation and performances based on the social status of the corpse, as described above by the folklorist Kassis, remains an

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important piece of data to the extent that it depicts the idealized relation of the mourning ceremony to kinship structure as Maniats themselves conceptualize it. However, it should be considered that this idealized relation between kinship and ceremonial structure is not necessarily continuous with the actual discourses and performances that Maniat women deploy in the ceremony. The above list sets the status of the dead, the intensity of mourning, and the numerical attendance of the klama in terms of age and gender categories. Yet, these categories infer the dead's particular position or nonposition in a range of alliances that extend beyond the clan, but which are crucial in the establishment and enhancement of clan status. Life cycle and gender place the dead in a larger or smaller network of formal and informal alliances. Thus, at the top of the list we find the young single or recently married man whose death precipitates the most intense mourning and wide participation in the ceremony. The young or recently married levendis is valorized because of his pivotal position in the creation of alliances through his marriage. Second on the list is the elderly man who represents the life cycle at its widest elaboration of affinal and symbolic kinship networks. Through his own relations and the relations of his children, the elderly man is the nexus of multiple linkages. He is followed in importance by the young, married or single woman. In contrast, the extreme elderly occupy a lower position, because the role of maintaining and enlarging social relations in the form of strategic marriages, symbolic kinship, and military alliances has at this stage of their life cycle been taken over by a younger generation. At the very lowest end of the mourning hierarchy, we have persons whose social roles are extremely limited and are contained within the boundaries of the clan if not the household. The status of the dead, based on life cycle stage and capacity for alliances, affected the geographical range of the klama (wake). The most public klama would be that of the death of the young man, the most private, that of the deformed or an infant. Kassis's description then presents an image of the ceremony as impregnated with kinship, gender, and age distinctions. Yet the centrality of segmentary kinship is not the total picture. At the moment of entry into the ceremony, men and women collapse segmentary rankings through ritual forms of greeting. Nuclear kin terms are used exclusively in the ceremony and function as honorific forms of address that bypass segmentary kin hierarchy. As the mourners enter, they raise their right arm and shout several times with emotional intensity one of the following greetings: (1) adhelfi or adherfi-neuter term indicating sibling relation applied to both men and women, by people of the same generation; (2) kafi mou or adhelfoula mou (my sister)-used by female mourners to address a

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female dead of the same generation and in rare occasions by a male mourner to a female dead of the same generation; (3) mana mou ke manitsa mou (my mother and my sweet, little mother)-used by young males or females for an elderly female dead; (4) afendi ke afendciki mou (lord or father)-used by a young female or male for an elderly male dead, also by a young woman for a young male who is not a close relative; (5) yi6ka mou, levendi mou (my son, my levendis)-used by the elderly for a young male dead; (6) k6ri mou ke souscina mou (my daughter)-used by the elderly for a young female dead. With these greetings the segmentary system, organized along lines of distance or closeness to an apical ancestor, is suspended and reduced to the elementary categories proper to the nuclear family: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter. This is a ritual movement towards undifferentiated clan solidarity. The collapse of segmentary ranking incorporates an appeal to shared substance-in this case, the elemental blood tie. This ideology of shared substance will take other forms besides that of blood as the ceremony progresses. But its deployment in the ritual greeting reveals a tension between segmentary kinship and the affective relations of social practice. Monosemic categories of segmentary kinship are rendered polysemic by ideologies of shared substance. Ideologies of shared substance play with kin terms and metaphorize blood ties. Thus, on one level the mortuary ceremony appears as an extension of segmentary kinship; on another level, it is transformed through ritual greeting and subsequent performances into an affective collectivity. Shared substance functions as an imaginary representation of clan fusion; the discourses of the klcima (mourning ritual) emerge out of this social imaginary. Herzfeld portrays Greek rural performance as competitive "segmentary action" and sees the latter as foundational to all social relations and signification. In his view, performance is in effect social structural segmentation (see also Bauman 1975) and semantic segmentation (or deformation of collective "texts") by the individual (a segmentary unit). The accomplished performer in this agonistic cosmos poetically links other segmentary units, agnatic descent, regional separatism, and national honor (Herzfeld 1985, 11-16). In contrast, the discussion of shared substance in this study builds a model of gendered performance as a transgression of both segmentary kinship and androcentric social structure. Rather than founding the ethos of performance solely on agonistic relations as Herzfeld does, the centrality of shared substance ethics in Inner Mani points to the pivotal role of nonagonistic female exchange as a social structure that counters androcentric descent hierarchy. In women's performances agonistic and nonagonistic modes of exchange co-exist.'

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Mourners who may be distanced for one reason or another from a kinship proximity to the dead in strict segmentary terms can close that gap of blood with the ideology of shared substance. The following two narratives show the competition over mourning and how shared substance such as food and residence is used to establish precedence and rights (dhike6mata). The first narrator recollects fragments of the mourning ceremony held for her husband.

[23] When we brought him [to Mani from Athens], because he was the only son and la6filos (popular), immaculate (am6lindos) in society, the people received him very moved. They started the mourning songs but a little disorderly because of the emotions. In his village ... we gathered at the church. There I interfered and said, Please, do listen to me, to me that he has left an order for all of you [women] to mourn him, to pour tears down, but with some order, nicely to be mourned.

Sas parakal6 polf emena mou t6hi endolf 6les na t6ne klcipsete na dhakrokatevcisete m6no me lfyi prosohi 6morfa yici na klafti.

Well, I was heard, and they started the customary with their mourning songs. One was saying one moirol6i, the other [was saying] another and concretely Mitsena was saying, "Me, allow me, for we grew up, we were raised together with one water, one food."

Emena na m'afisete yiati emis emeghal6same, anastithikame mazi m'ena ner6 m'ena fai.

Another woman was saying, "Please, allow me. I come with rights this day to [mourn] Demos the professor, for we were raised together in Kitta, in the capital."

Emena na m' afisete ki egh6 me dhike6mata ti mera ti simerini sto Dhimo to kathiyiti ti anastithikame mazi sti Kit a ti protevousa.

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Yes, due to their relation [to the dead] they have priority-the mother, sisters, wife, cousins, etc.-and then koumbari [symbolic kin], etc. The second narrator is also concerned with the rights and order of mourning in the ceremony held for her mother.

[24] ... People[ and mourning songs[ [a lot of people and intense mourning]. I said, "You will mourn my mother all equally; and you can mourn till morning. No fights[" Because they fight when one takes it [the mourning song] from the other. . . . The reason is who has rights to take it ... The following lament was recited by a group of women in a typical afternoon gathering at the local rougha. One woman begins, the others, taking turns, interject, amend, clarify, validate their versions, and finally mine. The original composer and mourner of the lament establishes shared substance with her dead mother. She is a child from the mother's first marriage. Her mother remarried into another clan after the death of her husband. She was forced to leave her children with the original affinal clan. Second marriage of widows with children was discouraged and, if it occurred at all, the bride was not allowed to take the children of the first marriage with her into her new household. Thus, the mother with her second marriage assumed a new kinship persona, one that excluded filial relations with children of the first marriage. The integrity of the new jural persona of the mother can only be subverted through the metaphors of shared substance. [2

5] Once as I was sitting a little old lady advised me, "Listen, my brave Marouso, put the road ahead and go to the narrow paths of Kounos [village] there your mother to find." I put the road ahead. I go to the narrow paths ofKounos

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Mia mera po' kathomou mfa ghritsa me sivoulepse Akouso Marousaka mou vale to dhr6mo sta brostd ki ai stou Kounou ta stena ekf ti mana zou na vrfs. vanou to dhr6mo sta brostd paou stou Kounou ta stena

in the households of Yiorgatzas clan. Their door I knocked. She [the mother] came out to open she embraced me and kissed me, and her big eyes ran. She took me in her home, washed my dress for me sat me down and deloused me. She cooks a fat kayiana and put me to eat it. Her door was knocked. It was my aunt [from mourner's natal clan]. By the hair she grabbed me and out she dragged me. . .

mesa sta Yiorghagianika. Ehtipisa ti mb6rta tous Evyike 6xou m'anixe, m'agaliase, me filise, k'etrexasi i matoure tis. Me pire mes' to spiti tis m'epline to foustdni mou epiase ke me psfrise ftiani mbahine kayiana m'evale ke ton efaa. I porta tis ehtfpise ke itane i thfa mou Ap'td malfa m'arpaxe ki 6xou me sourtavaliase.

The imagery of the road in the first verses of the above moirol6i repeats the bivalence of the road described earlier. Here it is a metaphor of the daughter's encounter with fate; fate is both her reunion with and separation from her mother. This narrative is organized under the sign of xenitia. The movement of the mother from inside to outside (from the daughter's natal to the mother's new, affinal clan), is also the passage of the mother from life to death. As I voiced the above thoughts, one of the women responded with the following fragment that concluded the above lament recollections. . . . Out to the rougha I was going asking for my mother. My brother was beating me, beating me and scolding me, "We don't have a mother she died and left us, we are orphans."

6xou sti rougha evyena ti mana mou ezitouna M'ekroe to kavoutsi mou m' ekroe ke me malone Emis mana dhen ehome pethane ke mas afise emis imaste orfana.

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The social death of both the mother and the children caused by remarriage is repeated with the actual death of the mother, which throws the daughter into a renewed liminality; her journey of reunion with the mother is made twice, both in life and in the space of death. The first reunion in life functions as a metaphor for the current relation between the living daughter and the dead mother. This is punctuated by the coerced separation described in her account of their first reunion. Separation will be repeated with the termination of the mourning cycle. Why is this event recounted in the mourning ritual? Because by "rights" the singer is excluded from taking a central role in this ceremony. It is the children of the second marriage that have the right to stand close to the corpse and mourn publicly. Just as the divisions of segmentary kinship separated mother and daughter in life, they continue to separate them in the space of death. The daughter deploys the ideology of shared substance to close the distance between herself and the dead. Since the tie of blood was that which was deferred, sublated, and excluded by the new status of the mother, it is not this tie that the daughter makes public and central in her discourse. Rather, the blood tie is signified obliquely by the ethic of care, intimacy, and exchange: the mother serving the daughter with one of the most valued dishes in Maniat cuisine, kayianci, washing the daughter's dress, the physical contact of delousing, and the ultimate sign of connection, tears. The poetics of the above scene is encased in the movement of the daughter from xenitici (or ta xena) to origin, from outside to inside. But the scene is ironic: the last moment of violent separation represents both the social death of the daughter and the burial of the mother. The pulling of the daughter's hair by an aunt of her natal clan evokes the pulling out of hair in the mourning ceremony.

[26] I don't want beggar's bread, I take it with my own hand, I have the rights to be in the middle of the table [to be the chief mourner].

Dhe theou apodhot6 psomi to pemou me to heri mou ehou ta dhike6mata ncime sti mesi tou soufrci.

In the above lyric, given by an elderly lady, the ideology of shared substance transforms the corpse in the coffin on the table into the "communal meal" of

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the household. The distribution of bread or other food becomes analogous to the distribution of kinship ties and mourning rights by linking food and the body of the dead. The displacement of blood by other forms of shared substance, particularly food, is itself a metaphor for the substitution of relations of descent by relations of exchange.

[27] To me one time she was very useful [referring to the dead] when a heavy rain caught me she stripped her children and dressed mine.

Emena mia epohi me ehrisimepse poli pou m' epiase mia vrohi Ta pedhia tis eghdhise ke ta dhikci mou endise.

This mourner uses in her lament the imagery of the inside/outside, the uncovered and the covered. Heavy rain signifies the uncovered, and bad weather in general intensifies the sense of the outside. Dressing is a metaphor of interiorization, of sheltering and care that establishes a sibling/filial relation. The following mourner, in her lament creates a sibling relation by residence.

[28] ... my aunt's sons call me adherfi [sister]. [Here] in Kitta the capital, when my mother married me off, she consulted Demos. [Demos replied] "Eh, aunt, we will be living close we will be genuine adherfia [siblings]."

Yiati tis thias mou i iyi adherfi me foncizousi . .. Sti Kita tin protevousa pou i mcina m' me pcindrepse ton Dhimone ekcilese. -E, thia thcimaste kondci

thcimast' adherfia ghnisia.

The following moirol6i is of particular interest in the sense that the mourner has to make one of the most difficult and long journeys through the webs of kinship in order to establish a proximity with the dead. The mourner laments her husband's mother's brother's son. In other words, she is an affine of the dead and is using her conjugal relation to her husband to function as a "representative" of her mother-in-law in the ceremony.

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of the mother and the brother respectively). The sibling relation in Inner Mani carries the highest levels of affectivity. Its direct other is the exogamous relation between husband and wife, which is traditionally seen as a transgression of the sibling relation. motherin-law

Center and Peripheries

T6 mazema [the ingathering] is done in the house. One parea [company] B present dead mourner A

+ B = transposed into sibling relation

_____.,. = direction of symbolic displacement of mourning

X

=deceased

[29] Allow me, please, I will be the representative for my poor mother-in-law, who, for the professor [the mourner's dead husband], if she were alive, she would scream the hard voice to shake the topos, for they were growing up [the present dead and the mourner's husband] in the xemonaki [isolated tower] of Archia all together and inseparable with one water, one food.

Sign6mi sas parakal6 egh6 antipr6sopi tha vgh6 yia ti ftohia mou pethera pou yia ton kathiyiti an ita nane sti zoi thavghaze skliri foni o t6pos na anakounisti

yiati emeghal6nane

sto xemonaki tis Arhias anakata ki 6lo mazi m'ena ner6 m'ena fai.

The valorized sibling relation of the dead mother and her brother is duplicated in the symbolic sibling relation of the two cousins, both dead (the male children

is coming from Kitta [to the house of the dead], another company from Nomia, another from Kalonious, etc. Each one taking turns. We came first, we would mourn first, etc .... We will come at eight, nine, or ten and the funeral will take place at three or four. Until then the dead is mourned. The priest will come to the house to bless the dead and then [we go] to the church. Those who come from Piraeus usually, or those that don't have a spacious house, take their dead directly to the church. Someone who had, however, his home will be taken to his home . . . The two crucial terms that the narrator uses in her description above, are mazema and parea. Parea and sidrofia are voluntary associations often connected to the road, to travel. Parea also evokes the sense of numbers. The gathering of kin for the klama implies a movement towards the center, which is captured by the word mazema (also mazama or mazouma). The same word is used for the gathering of olives or figs. It implies the collection and organization of small units, bits and pieces, at a central place to form a quantity. The agricultural reference of mazema implies a movement of interiorization. Gathering implies the creation of an orderly appearance. A field that has been gathered properly has a certain appearance of orderliness, domestication, and interiority. Tending the fields is also analogous to tending the house, another orderly interior. The tended house is called mazemeno or sim-mazemeno. The same adjective can be used to qualify a woman as "centered" in terms of both her physical appearance and her persona as orderly components of a household. Such a woman is characterized as being "from a household" as opposed to being "from the road," "from the mountains," or "from the h6rta [wild vegetables]." These valuations of the feminine are not accidental. Like the dead (and the fields), women stand halfway between the outside and the inside. The movement of ingathering implies (1) the return of the scattered elements of the clan to a topographic center inscribed by the death event, (2) the

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collapse of the differential spacing of segmentary kinship through the force of shared substance, and (3) the interiorization of the dead as an element of the outside. The corpse on display is the center where mourners formally establish their relation of shared substance and therefore their status in the ceremony. Mothers, sisters, wives, and the close relatives of the dead surround the coffin. The moiroloyistra (mourner) creates the center with her physical presence by molding her body through gestures, caresses, and improvised discourses around the space of the corpse. All these are dramatic expressions of an ethic of care and of tending the dead. Mourning necessitates touching and caressing the dead, leaning over the dead with tender gestures as if talking to a sleeping person. The mourner holds the forehead of the dead while talking with an outpouring of emotions. In this society with its everyday emphasis on optical distancing, care and tending are symbolized by spatial intimacy. Because of the predominant inside/ outside polarities, and the multiple boundaries between men and women, clan and clan, and society and nature, spatial intimacy has a particular impact and meaning: interiority. The creation of interiors involves the overcoming of residual boundaries to create new, emergent interiors with their own separate margins. Interiorization of the outside (nature) in agriculture takes a particular form in Inner Mani because of its rocky topography: the clearing of land for cultivation, which entails moving beyond old cultivation lines, removing stones and rocks and building stone walls to contain the land. Agricultural, household, and mortuary spaces can be seen as a mosaic of discontinuous interiors. They are linked by the ethics of care. Care and tending of the agricultural domain and household are analogous to the care and tending of the dead. The logic of agricultural interiorization is found in the interiorization of death. Creating a center around the corpse is not an attempt to bring death into the social order, but rather (as in agriculture) to break with a residual margin to move beyond borders, such as segmentary kinship. From this movement, an emergent enclosed space is created in which the living (women) and the dead can be together. This unique space is of course transgressive, because it constitutes a contradiction, a topological anomaly. It is neither the exclusive space of the living nor of the dead. The dead completely separated and sundered from the spaces of the living are not polluting. Death is polluting when the dead

intermingle with the living. The dynamics of the corpse as center became apparent to me when I was attending memorial services that usually take place in three, nine, forty days,

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and one year from the day of death. In these events the corpse is absent. When the corpse is absent, an imaginary center is created. In the memorial service, there is no pretense that the body is present. The mourners are conscious of its absence. They ask the dead, 'Are you coming back? For this is the last trial." The mourners play with presence and absence by standing in as doubles and surrogates of the dead. In the memorial, as in other later stages of the mourning cycle such as exhumation, there is a symbolic reassemblage of the body and persona of the dead. In both the original klcima when the corpse is present and later memorial services, the voice of the mourner supplements the silence of the corpse. Positioning the voice and body next to the corpse and in place of the corpse expresses shared substance. Spatial order decreases as one moves from the center towards the periphery of the ceremony. At the edges, one can see by the body language of the women the extent to which they are distanced from the center. There the ambience of the ceremony is diffused and dispersed. This increases as one moves past the space of women into the space of men. Men cluster in small, fragmented, groups outside the house or church where the mourning ritual is taking place, creating a social space analogous to the kafenio (cafe). Back inside, the women by the corpse literally hold the center of the ceremony in their hands and voices. The center is maintained despite physical and emotional exhaustion and interpersonal conflict. Disorder does not emerge from this center. It always comes from the outside, from the peripheries of distant kin and men. Even when men enter the ceremony to pay their respects to the corpse, they display no relation to the center of mourning. Men enter briefly and leave, displaying a "dignified" restraint. There is no interaction with the female mourners. There are sensory and corporeal dichotomies that organize the gender relations to the dead. Men have essentially an optical relation to the corpse and to the ceremony as a totality in contrast to the women's spatial proximity and acoustic and tactile intimacy with the dead. The male gaze here encapsulates a hierarchical relation. The mourners themselves are very conscious of the value connotations and power of space in the ceremony. They play with the dynamics of center/periphery. One technique is to call to women in the audience, to name them, and ask them to draw closer to the dead-a rhetorical strategy that intensifies the emotions of the ceremony. Those called usually respond by tears and enter into mourning. The center of the ceremony is amplified by the loss and pains of others present. As a counterpoint to this, women mourners will call to men who

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are at the periphery of the ceremony. This is ironic, for the men will not respond and engage in dialogue with the mourners, nor will they enter into the space of mourning at the behest of the women. In one of the mourning ceremonies that took place in the village square, I witnessed the following interaction: The square was as always divided into two gender domains-one side was occupied by women, the other side by men. One man moving towards the male side inadvertently passed too close to the female space of the klcima. He was immediately addressed by a female mourner, literally called to "come close and join." The expression on his face was one of embarrassment, disorientation, and confusion. He quickly moved away. Playing with center and periphery through gesture and discourse effectively marks out the margins of the klcima-an act of exclusion that inverts the customary gender organization of public space. The immediate relatives of the dead are confined to the center for the duration of the klcima and never leave it. Other mourners, however, will periodically withdraw from their mourning and leave their space because the ceremony is several hours long and very intense. There is a repetitive movement of women in and out of the ceremony, and this becomes an occasion of warm encounters between those leaving and those entering. There are moments of touching, warm embraces and clinging against each other that generate dispersed microcenters among women. These encounters elaborate the ethics of care and tending that were given to the dead a moment ago. In one meeting, two elderly women embraced and one picked with care a hair from the chin of the other. These meetings generate a "women's cafe," which is a direct spatial, gender, and emotional counterpoint to the "men's cafe" that hovers at the periphery. The women's cafe is informed by the sensibility and ambience of xenitici. It is a place where women from "far away" (other villages and cities) come together after a long separation. In this "cafe," they will stop to cry, two by two. There is an orchestrated movement of black and white-the alternation of pale face and black scarf which is foregrounded as the heads bend in the greeting embrace. In the background, inside the house of mourning, one discerns the sounds and movements of a mourner "taking" the song from another. Two others have withdrawn temporarily and are standing outside. Their heads lean against each other like pigeons, whispering "Ch Ch Ch," as they carry on intimate conversation. These informal moments are integral components of the ceremony. There is no deliberate structure governing the visual and acoustic relations between the "women's cafe" and the centers of mourning. There is simply a polyphony of movements and voices.

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY

Categories of Performance and Pain Maniats use the following terms to classify and characterize the sequences of the mourning ceremony up to the point of burial: (1) klcima, or parcipono, which refers to the women's mourning ritual; (2) kidhia, a term not often used by Maniat women and associated with that part of the ceremony which begins with the officiation of the priest and ends with the inhumation of the body; (3) moirol6i, which refers to the improvised mourning song itself; and (4) thrinos, which designates an emotionally intense mourning session. In klcima, the practices and techniques of mourning are organized by a conceptual vocabulary that fuses categories of performance with categories of feeling. 1 This fusion is accomplished by the division of roles in the wake and the different genres and methods utilized to signify pain (p6nos). To analyze the performance structure of Maniat lament sessions is to describe their emotional structure. The collectivity of female mourners is known as moiroloyistres. Each woman who emerges from this group to improvise the extended lament is known as the korifea. The moiroloyistres and the korifea institute the fundamental dynamics of lament performance and of mourning in general. These roles also bridge the different relations among agnation, affinity, and residence that crisscross the wake. Several women will assume the role of the korifea during the wake. The term korifea comes from the noun korifi, which means peak, top, summit and implies leader, most accomplished. Though each mourner who engages in solo improvisation functions temporarily as korifea, there is at least one woman who is felt to be the korifea of all the mourners because she attains the deepest intensities of pain and her performance is the symbolic center around which other performances are organized. The korifea is the soloist in pain and the moiroloyistres are the chorus; their responses to the korifea validate her pain with their own pain. As the korifea improvises her eight-syllable verses, the chorus generates antiphonic responses.

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This includes singing refrains, such as doubling the last word of the verse or the last verse of the lament, and stylized sobbing that occurs simultaneously with, and in counterpoint to, the singing of the korifea. This acoustic interplay between soloist and chorus is accompanied by a physical interplay of gestures that also serve as validating responses to the solo improvisation. Antiphonic interplay also occurs in the successive alternation between soloists as they "take" the lament from each other. The gender dichotomies of the lament session, in which women are vocal, emotionally demonstrative in public, and the men are silent, inhibited, and spatially separate, can also be understood as a further antiphonic dynamic. The men are not ignored by the women mourners during the ceremony, nor are they oblivious to what is happening within the circle of mourners; they function as a silent chorus. The linguistic, acoustic, and corporeal interaction between the korifea and the moiroloyistres is considered crucial to the performance of the korifea. Lament singers cannot attain the proper emotional intensity and reality outside of the antiphonic structure and thus outside of the ceremony itself. Women may recite the narrative of a lament but are unable to sing it "with proper pain." Moreover, they' often feel that lamenting outside the ceremony can be polluting. Any klama in which there are not enough skilled participants to form a chorus/soloist structure is considered "incomplete" and "improper." The absence of others to "help" a singer is considered absence of kin support and a sign of "bad death." Antiphony is an extension of the ethic of helping. This ethic has connotations that range from the domain of agricultural labor to that of the mourning ritual itself. In agricultural practice, it means assistance from others that facilitates the completion of a work cycle. In the context of the mourning ceremony, the ethic of helping permeates all practices, from laying out the body to exhumation. It implies the active role that kinswomen and/or neighbors play in facilitating the survivors' completion of the mourning cycle. Helping is a loaded term referring to a complex system of social exchange in which individual grief is but one component. Antiphony has been described as a prevalent pattern of Greek lamentation from antiquity to the present. Since antiphony characterizes the form of Greek lament, it has been understood by commentators as an aesthetic device and a literary genre. In contrast, among Maniats antiphony is ( 1) the social structure of mortuary ritual; (2) the internal acoustic organization of lament singing; (3) a prescribed technique for wimessing, for the production/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of truth; and (4) a political strategy that organizes the relation of women to male-dominated institutions.

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Customary Law: The Women fury The most prominent and striking signs of a "naked" death, discounting the absence of