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 lamenting, is the absence of a chorus and of other soloists to "take" the moirol6i from a korifea. The highly visible presence of a solo mourner, with no "help" from others, was, for both elder Maniats and myself, a dramatic sign of deritualization. In a klama of an old woman who had no remaining close kin in Mani but was taken back to her natal village by her remaining urban kin, the collective mourning was minimal. The urban relatives appeared ignorant and/ or indifferent to any local ethics. The rural women who attended did not make any declarations of shared substance. The entire weight of the ceremony was taken by an urban niece of the deceased who had retained all the skills of lamentation, appropriate body gestures and behavior. She was mourning, wailing, and talking to the dead for at least seven hours in an incredible effort to create and maintain a center for the ceremony. She wanted to avoid a "silent" death, so her aunt would "not go discontented," alone and unscreamed (see lament no. 64, chapter 9). Every now and then, there was a nodding of heads, a supportive word or gesture from the village women who were attending, that granted the truth of what the mourner was saying. There was often an apologetic word from one or two older women for not being able to "help her out," "to take the song" from her, to allow her "to rest" by mourning themselves. A continuous, subdued humming in the background coming from the village women, stopped short of the usual intensity of the chorus as I had witnessed it in other ceremonies. There was a boundary defined by the absence of past reciprocity, the absence of close kin, biological or fictive, that this protochorus would not cross. Thus, there was no dynamic focus on the soloist's discourse by the chorus, and there was no competition between soloists. It was in this absence of dialogical tension and polyphony that the role of the chorus and the centrality of antiphony emerged for me. The acoustics of death embodied in "screaming" and lamenting and the presence or "appearance" (fanerosi) of kin construct the "good death." The silent death is the asocial "bad death" without kin support. Silence here connotes the absence of witness. "Screaming the dead" counters the isolation of death. It separates the mourner from residual social contexts, yet registers her entry into a social relation with the dead and the rest of the mourners. "Screaming" both demarcates and encloses a collectivity of subjects in exile. Of course, those in exile are united in pain. Rooted in shared substance, emotional ethics, and memories of reciprocity, "screaming" is witnessing pain.

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In Greek, the concept of antif6nisi (antiphony) possesses a social and juridical sense in addition to its aesthetic, musical, and dramaturgical uses. Antiphony can refer to the construction of contractual agreement, the creation of a symphony by opposing voices. It also implies echo, response, and guarantee. In

Greek, the prefix anti- does not only refer to opposition and antagonism but also equivalence, "in place of," reciprocity, face-to-face. These meanings are embedded in the vocabulary oflaments. Mourners in their laments claim to "come out as representative" (na vgh6 antipr6sopos) of the dead (pr6sopo means face or person, and antipr6sopos means representative). A related and emotionally laden phrase is "to witness, suffer for, and reveal the truth about" the dead (na tine martirisoume). The concept embodied here does not necessarily evoke Christian liturgical belief among Inner Maniats. The term itself has pre-Christian usages that possess antiphonic and dyadic inflections. The term marturion (witness) appears in Herodotus and is associated with the oracles of the dead (nekromanteion) (duBois 1988, 113). The marturion was also a coded message composed of two incomplete halves, one each in the possession of sender and recipient. Completion and decipherment of the message required joining the two parts (ibid.). To "witness," "to suffer for," and "to come out as representative for" are narrative devices in laments that fuse jural notions of reciprocity and truth claiming with the emotional nuances of pain. A related phrase that is asked of the dead at the beginning of burial procedures and at certain commemoration services is "Are you coming back? for this is the last trial (dhiki)." The concept of trial here evokes the "judgement of the dead," the notion of ordeal, and the last opportunity to be witnessed and represented by the living. Gernet describes customary law in ancient Greece as a "system of conventions in which the signifier tends to absorb the signified" (Gernet 1981, 226). By this he means that the construction of proof does not lie in the recovery of a referential situation in an inquiry; rather, truth lies in the dramatization and ritualization of gestures and discourse that establish the authority of the witness as a guarantor (ibid., 229). In this customary legal system, the act and role of witnessing is structured as ritual passage, as an ordeal. According to Gernet, the demarcated space of witnessing is characterized by oath taking which involves proximity to polluting yet sacrilized substance. 2 In the Inner Maniat ritual the mourners make declarations of shared substance that not only sacrilize the corpse-mourner relation, but also presuppose the separate, polluted character of the corpse, its oppositional relation to the

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social order. Through declarations of shared substance, the mourner establishes the juridical authenticity of her mourning discourse and of her general participation in the klama. She first establishes a material connection to a polluting entity (the corpse). Then the mourner attempts to incorporate the chorus as collective witness of her shared substance with the dead. This takes the form of interrogatory appeals from the mourner to members of the chorus to come closer, to form a contiguity with the soloist and the corpse, to enter into and construct antiphonic relations. In the following lament, recited and validated by a group of women, the initial mourner appealed to her audience to witness the truth of her discourse. She was widowed twice and her household underwent several disruptions. In the verses below, she contrasts her past history of household instability with the good marriages made by her children, which have restored her status and the status of her household. She calls on a male affine to "witness" this. [31] I married off my Andreas nearby me and conveniently here in Koumouidrianika, and afterwards, my Demos, he took Christofilo, the sister of Alogakos who was a prosperous man and filled our houses with dresses and slips. Eh, Alogako, come close

for me to speak this and you to hear it. Am I speaking truth or lies?

Pandrepsa ton Andrea mou plisio mou ke volika edh6 sta Koumouidrianika kat6pi ke to Dhimo mou ti Hristofilo epare tou Aloghako ti kafi pou itane nikokirakas ki eyi6mise to spiti mas velehia ke poukamisa. E, Aloghako ela konda na ze ta leou na t'aghrikas alithia leou ni psemata?

Given the fact that the mourner knows well that the male affine will not cross the gender boundaries of the lament session, the appeal for validation is also addressed to the chorus of women. The phrase "come close" in laments always implies the establishment of physical contact with the dead and/or the metaphorical space of mourning. This is also an invitation to affirm shared substance, and it is a preliminary ritual gesture in establishing the truth of the mourner's discourse through dialogical performance. The mourner rhetorically appeals to the affine to "come close" in order for

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her "to speak" this discourse and for the witness "to hear it." The expression "to hear" in this case does not have the passive or purely receptive implications that the term has in English. "To hear" is to play an active role in the production of a juridical discourse. The act of hearing carries the value of the soloist's discourse. Hearing in the antiphonic relation is not external to speech but metonymical to it. Hearing is the doubling of the other's discourse. Through the hearing of the chorus, the discourse is disseminated to the rest of society. The absence of hearing is equivalent to the "silent" death. The "silent" death is also the social death of the mourner without witness. In the following lament, recited by an elderly woman, the close linkage between biological death and the loss of juridical status in the kinship structure is explicit. Here the silenced death is the preeminent sign of absence and loss of status. The deceased woman who is the subject of this lament had three daughters and no sons. It seems that her husband, at some point after the burial and before the forty-day memorial ceremony, remarried. The lament, improvised by the sister of the dead, indicates that the husband sought to suppress all mourning and gathering of kin for the commemoration. In ironic tones, the mourner protests this desocialization of her sister's death and the implicit erasure of the sister as the female head of the household; both of which the mourner codifies as absence of witness and of public suffering through mourning.

[32] Where are you Yiannakena [the dead]? I climbed up your staircase and I found Yiannakis [husband of the dead] I climbed down the stairs and I found Voulitsa alone and Kalliopitsa the little one and Vasilo drawing water [daughters of the dead]. I climbed back up and said to Yiannakis,

"Are we not going to say anything to witness her, to suffer for her?"

Ambou ise Yianakena anevika sti skala zou k'ivreka to Yianaki

ki exanakatevika k'ita i Voulitsa monahi k' i Kaliopitsa i mikri ke i Vasilo yid ner6 ki apano pou anevika ipeka tou Yianaki zou Dhe the na poume tipota na tine martirisome?

The status of this lament in the klama is evident in the last verses. The phrases "to say anything" and "witness her and suffer for her" (na tine martiri-

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some) imply that the discourse of the mourner is simultaneously a revelation, a disclosure, a witnessing, and an objectification of pain and suffering. The interrogatory form further reinforces the juridical aspect. It points to the improper behavior of the husband. The husband who sought to erase the dead by silencing her mourners is, in turn, reduced to silence by a discourse enunciated from the female space. It is doubtful that the husband would vocally respond to this space. His silence is the antiphonic completion of the mourning discourse.

Memorization The antiphonic relation is not only concerned with collective validation of discourse within the particular space and time of the klama (mourning ritual), but also with memorization. Antiphonic participation is a mnemo technique by which the individual mourning song constructed in the klama is reconstructed as collective oral history. This creates a narrative tradition whose impact extends beyond the klama. I asked informants to listen to my recordings of mourning ceremonies. They listened to laments with striking concern, care, and intense engagement. It was as if the ceremony were actually taking place, as if they were there. They did not begin to mourn, but they became musically engaged. At first I noticed that they repeated the last word or phrase of each verse sung on tape. I realized this was a form of oral writing, a technique of memorization, of record keeping that I had also witnessed in the actual klama. I soon noticed that they did not only echo the last words or phrases of the verse sung, but often anticipated them, as if they already knew where the singer's poetics were directed, thus sounding as if they were singing simultaneously with the improviser. This was a technique for printing the lament in their minds, for touching it, for taking it in their mouths as shared substance. The informants listened to my tapes not only to internalize verses of the recorded moirol6i, but also to know who mourned, at whose klama, what was precisely said in the laments, what were the general performative dynamics of the event. In listening to the tapes, they engaged in procedures of historical reconstruction that reveal the extent to which the moirol6i as discourse, the klama as social event, and the chorus as a body of record keepers were all linked into a coherent medium for the dissemination and circulation of signs beyond the space and time of death.

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The day I met a well-known mourner, often referred to as a record keeper, I was walking in the street with a relative. She immediately noticed my tape recorder and camera case. When my relative explained I was collecting stories and laments, she declared she was very busy and pointed with her body to the direction of her tower. Ready to walk away, she asked who I was. When she heard the kinship connection, she turned her body again to face me, "Thodoros's granddaughter?! Our own child, that is!" We sat in the middle of her old, spacious tower, just the two of us, in the cool empty space, far away from the small door, the only source of daylight. She treated me to a candy and said, "Since you are one of our own, I'll tell you a couple of mourning songs I like, provided of course that you will accompany me." I felt my hands freeze as she left me no space to react. She started by alternating between prose and poetry to give me a moirol6i and its context. As she continued mourning quietly, she stared at me with piercing eyes till my lips moved. I was humming along, at first with each verse's last syllable, then the whole verse as her head and body movements encouraged me to follow. The more I entered her rhythm, her mourning intensified. With pain in her face and eyes, she turned at key moments of her moirol6i to seek my nodding, my voice, leading me to taste her pain till I burst into tears.

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individual mourners (usually of close kin), which function as counterpoints to the singing and screaming; and (6) the screaming, that is, both a specific technique of mourning and a general designation of mourning. For Maniats, all mourning is technically "a screaming of the dead" by the mourners. Within that general classification, a distinction is made between a moirol6i and the particular acoustics of literal screaming. Screaming is contrapuntal to the solo moirol6i (lament). The soloist will shift the musical dynamics of her singing towards the acoustics of screaming as she emotionally intensifies her narrative. Screaming occurs at the initial visual encounter with the corpse and subsequent separation from the corpse. A good deal of the narrative content of the moirol6i, in turn, can be organized around genres of greeting and/or separation. Screaming of the individual dead either as greeting or separation will occur in tandem with the lament. Screaming is not considered an interruption of moirol6i but rather a punctuation. If the initiation of a moirol6i entails physical and affective proximity with the dead, at the end of the moirol6i the singer relinquishes an intense relation to the dead and surrenders her signification to another. This is experienced as separation and is often marked by screaming. The singer who takes the song from another, places herself between that other and the dead. The first singer moves from a position of contiguity with the dead to a mediated relation as she reenters the chorus. Laments are not given up easily and the termination and "taking" of laments is often a matter of interpersonal conflict, as much as it can be a reciprocal exchange.

Polyphony and the Orders of Discourse Polyphony is the raw material for the antiphonic practice. By polyphony I mean the improvised, heterogeneous, and superimposed linguistic, extralinguistic, musical, nonmusical, poetic, and prosaic discourses that constitute the performative aesthetics of the klama. The antiphonic relation emerges as an articulation between these linguistic and extralinguistic media, between poetry and prose, music and screaming, and it is distributed and redistributed through this multidimensional polyphony. The polyphony of the klama (wake) can be broken down into several, signifying techniques, each of which is a constituent part of a whole and obtains its meaning and performative value from its position within the total ensemble: (1) the moirol6i, that is, the improvised singing of the soloist; (2) the refrains of the chorus; (3) the stylized sobbing of both soloist and chorus; (4) the multiple corporeal gestures of soloist and chorus; (5) the improvised prose monologues of

Incorporations or the Double Ceremony One morning, early in my fieldwork, I was driven by a relative-informant to a nearby village to find out the details of a klama that was to take place that same day. On the way to the village, she made an impromptu stop at her old aunt's house. Waiting in the car, I could hear their dialogue. She introduced me by establishing my kin position within our clan and mentioned that I would be at the ceremony "to record some laments." The old Maniat lady, a well-known mourner herself, replied in a cold voice, "You know, we don't like that. There are women who cannot mourn knowing that they are being recorded." My relative-informant had overstepped ethical boundaries. She presented my participation in the ritual as not primarily motivated by kin relation or shared substance. In previous ceremonies I had become aware that my recording and pho-

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tography were not considered intrusive as long as they were perceived as an extension of kinship activity; I was either participating in rituals of my own clan or representing the latter in the ceremonies of others. In this context, recording and photography had an especially positive image, because participants have recently become aware of the fragile survival of the ritual. The ceremony was held in a small room of a towerhouse. To enter it, one had to pass through the open veranda (liak6s), which was crowded with men. In the middle of the room, on top of the table, rested the dead woman in her coffin. The corpse was laid out in the traditional east-west axis, the head positioned towards the west and the feet towards the east. According to a female informant:

[33] For the kldma? The head [of the dead] must be there, there is Gharpis. 3 [she points west] Gharpis means the weather. Here is Proventzas [east], it is forbidden for the head to go here. Sir6kos and Vorias [south and north] are also for the living. Gharpis is for the dead .... The living person must not lie down with his head in that direction .. . A photograph of the deceased's only son, who had died young, was placed at the head of the coffin. Her two daughters were sitting side by side across from the body facing the entrance of the room in order to receive the mourners. They had been living in urban centers for many years and "did not know how to mourn." The youngest daughter repeatedly called herself and her sister "log" for being unable to improvise laments. In Greek, a log is a metaphor for ignorance. The elder daughter hummed along with the elder mourners, while the younger one talked out loud in an extended monologue addressed to the dead mother and, at the same time, to the company of women mourners. The two sisters intimately called on other women "to scream for the dead and mourn." Despite their inability to mourn, their lack of acculturation in the techniques of moirol6i improvisation, they were well aware that their mother could only be properly mourned with "a lot of songs and screaming." At the same time, their personal body postures and their monologues with the dead were customary and appropriate. As they called on other women to mourn, they exclaimed that each should mourn for her own pain. In other words, they should mourn for their own dead, because the dead mother was going to meet the dead of those attending the ceremony. The sisters were attempting to create the center of the ceremony, initially through their body postures and their monologues, and subsequently by a discourse that established an equivalence between their own personal loss and the losses of those attending the ceremony. This was repre-

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sented as a reunion of all the dead in their own, separate domain. This reunion of the dead plays on the idea of xenitid and repositions the ethic of reciprocity into the other world. The ingathering of the dead, the reunion of the clan in the other world ' was a repetition of the ingathering of the mourners at the current klama. The two reunions form an arc of reciprocity between the sisters with their current loss and the mourners with their past losses. They addressed this discourse to specific women in the ceremony. One was a young woman dressed in black, an orphan, who responded with tears. Between these solicitations to the mourners ' they repeatedly told the dead mother that all her kin, her husband, and her son especially, "will be there" (in the otherworld), waiting for her with a table ready for a big ghlendi (feast); that the dead will receive her and place her in feathers (std poupoulotd). To place someone in feathers implies tender care; it is a metaphor for luxury, extravagant hospitality, and the absence of any labor and pain. These discourses were metacommentaries on host/guest relations around which all mourning rituals are organized. The family members of the deceased function as hosts, meeting the social obligations of the deceased. This honors the guests, who in turn honor the dead by their presence. In the world of the dead this reciprocity is reversed. The dead of the guest mourners will play host to the recently deceased when the latter finished their passage to the other world. These ethics of hospitality are an extension of interiorization and incorporation. They are explicitly thematized in the first and/or last verses of every lament when the singer identifies individual mourners by their relation to the dead and asks them to draw closer to share in her discourse and pain. The relation of the mourners to each other and to the dead, and the giving and taking of the lament, connects two worlds with threads of exchange. At one point during the ceremony, the old relative who had objected to my recording began her lament. She mourned by hovering over the corpse, her palm almost touching the forehead of the dead. She was one of those mourners who did not scream but displayed loss and tenderness for the dead with controlled movements and subdued tones. She sang in a low voice as if talking to a child who was sleeping, or to a sick person recovering from a long illness. In word and gesture she displayed a depth that brought tears to my eyes. To address the rest of the women, she quickly lifted her eyes to face the audience. Her piercing gaze caught my tears. In a momentary, almost imperceptible, pause of recognition I received the most affectionate look ever-a look too powerful to miss. She did not stay long after her mourning song. She said it and left quietly. Women have different styles of mourning.

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While the mourning singing went on, the two sisters cried their monologues, "If there is God, if there is Devil, they both cursed us." They meant that they had one loss after another: first the brother, now the mother. That segment of the clan was erased, or as the Maniats put it, "the house was closed." Although one of the two sisters was married, and they both were young, within the ideology of clan reproduction this did not count. This segment of the clan was closed with the death of the childless brother. The ceremony had started very early in the morning and was due to terminate at four when the funeral would begin at the church. At some point in the late afternoon, a little box appeared, and I sensed an entire change in the atmosphere of the klama (wake). At first I did not know why. The moment that box crossed the threshold and entered the room, the air became highly charged. I knew something was about to happen, but I did not know what. The box was placed by the head of the coffin, where it remained closed for some time. When a mourner referred to the dead son in her lament, one sister began to shout adherfi (brother) and the klama reached its peak. Ascending screams and calls to the dead son by his name filled the room. At that moment the box was opened and bones appeared. The klama rapidly shifted from moirol6i and monologue to screaming. The screaming began to my left and moved, mourner by mourner, to the right side of the room, peaking, subsiding, and ascending in emotional intensity again and again. Some of the screaming was completely cathartic, "disorderly," while other mourners engaged in stylized screams that were semimusical. When the box was opened, a sudden and powerful jolt electrified the room. It was so forceful that I do not recall who opened the box. One or two human leg bones were taken out. One scream, coming from the elder sister, rose above all others. It retained its peak without subsiding till the woman passed out. A little old lady passed out quietly right behind her. A male voice emerged, "Take her out!" (The young woman's husband had attempted to bring her out of her deep mourning by calling her name a couple of times during the ceremony, mentioning something about her health.) Women were standing and screaming, pulling their hair out. It was the peak. It was impossible to be fully conscious, to be an observer. What camera? What tape recorder? I did not know where to put my hands. There was no coherent lamenting at that moment of the ritual. There was polyphony. The two sisters had been exclaiming, "My brother, is that you?! Is that how you became? It can't be." The men, aware of the power of the emotions in that room, were alarmed and frightened. A woman can actually impose death on herself This is the female challenge of Death. People are alert

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in ceremonies for this type of catharsis, and they are ready to catch the collapsing body of the overwhelmed mourner. The men took the women out of the room to bring them back to consciousness. They pulled them out "to give them coffee and fresh air." For men-especially young men-these acts were a "medical intervention" in a ritual process that eluded their understanding; they reduced it to physiological disorder and issues of personal health. As the two women who had fainted were pulled out, a short period of rearrangement and movement followed, while other women engaged in quiet mourning: a synthesis of "disorder" and deep melodic sounds. Sitting at the threshold, I was split between this female polyphony and the "rational" discussions of men echoing from the outside: "There are systems that are strong enough to take this and systems that aren't." "Spread out to get some air in there!" I moved further in, closer to the center of the ceremony. The mourning was picking up quickly.

When I saw the big leg bones coming out of the box, I was at first struck and perplexed. I had not yet attended an exhumation ceremony, and, although I had attended many mourning ceremonies, I had not seen this practice in a preburial klama before. In this case, the exhumation of the dead son had been completed, for the bones were clean and in a box. It was a closed matter that had to be reopened for the occasion. The display of the bones of the son signified the "closing of their house" with a dramatic finality. The ingathering of the women for the ceremony was an assemblage of clan strength in numbers. The entry of the exhumed bones inverted the numerical power of the living for they symbolized the disappearance of a lineage. At first the bones had been placed by the head of the dead beside the photograph of the son. The assemblage of the bones, the photograph, and the dead mother was a material narrative in which, as one moved from the corpse to the photograph to the bones, one moved from whole to part, from totality to dissolution. The photograph next to the corpse expressed the separation of soul from body. The bones next to the corpse expressed the dissolution of flesh. This compilation of icons was a negative genealogy: an inverse movement, one towards death rather than regeneration.

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The Counterpoint The monologue with the dead can occur either by itself as an overture to moirol6i (lament), in simultaneity with the mourning discourse, or in its aftermath. The monologue is usually performed by close relatives. More than one monologue can occur at the same time. The klcima (mourning ritual) is a weaving and reweaving of multiple acoustic, linguistic, and visual effects. Both screaming and monologue are not transgressive of the moirol6i but largely function as amplifications and verifications of it, moving the entire ritual towards emotional peaks with the soloist's performance. The polyphony of the ritual does have limits that indicate a hierarchy in the order of discourse that must emerge in order to generate the formal antiphonic relation. Two dynamics are considered transgressive of the order of discourse and the ritual: ( 1) the disruption of polyphony by monophony (which will be discussed in reference to the role of the priest and in the context of deritualization), and (2) the disruption of the integrity of antiphonic reciprocity through the competitive overlapping of mourning performances. Perhaps the most dramatic and content intensive antiphony in klcima is the poetry-prose counterpoint that emerges between the singing and prose monologue(s). The following contrapuntal monologue took place in the ceremony described above, where the bones of the deceased son were exposed in the preburial klcima of his mother. The monologues are sung by the two daughters of the deceased, young women residing in urban centers, in coordination with the lament, which is sung by an elderly mourner of the mother's generation.

[34] Lament

Monologues FIRST SISTER.

Athena [the dead] suffered from many matters

My sweet mother, running back and forth, me and my sister, we managed nothing. In a single moment like a bird you left. You struggled alone with four children, and you became holocaust.

but she gave no right [to others] she was a proud woman.

When I went to Piraeus and I was informed that she got seriously ill, my sister, Athena, I went to her house, I found her confined, I was very grieved. Because she had incurable wound [her son's death],

her daughters kept her in feathers .... She will come no more She is going to find her son ...

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My sweet mother, you. You suffered so, yes, you suffered so. Yes, you were shutting the door, my sweet mother, for us not to be "heard" [not to be discussed].

The burning pain my mother, consumed you. My proud mother! She gave no right! No, we did nothing [for you], my mother, nothing. My adherfi! My kavoutsaki! [brother] You became bones! The hour and the moment arrived for you to go to rest, mother. Why my sweet mother? Why? They will have dinner tables ready, my mother, to receive you. Tell them the news. My mother, change your mind. My mother, levendisa! Us? We are logs, my mother, we don't know how to mourn you.

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We don't know. [addressing a woman who is arriving] Welcome--, she loved you dearly. That great pain she didn't manage to overcome. She became holocaust to raise us. Father left, and she did everything alone. My sweet mother! You went through a lot. Now that we grew up and you could enjoy... [instead] For three and a half years flowers we were taking in Anastasi [cemetery in Piraeus] to that child we all loved, that child [dead brother] we did not enjoy. SECOND SISTER.

You shut your eyes and you denied everything grandchildren and children. Come closer, - - , the hour approached, and they will take this scent [dead mother] away from us. FIRST SISTER.

We, my mother, we wanted you to be here on your corner even if only to see you. My sweet mother, my crown.

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SECOND SISTER.

Mother, did you decide it?

The moirol6i and the monologues here respond to each other and recapitulate a semiology of bereavement based on pain, sacrificial consumption, and the symbol of the wound. Laments are about both the pain of the survivor in the throes of mourning and the pain that the deceased bear during the course of their lives. P6nos (pain) is plural. It refers to a multiplicity of pains that at the moment of death cohere into a metaphor for the deceased's life and the mourner's life. Maniats understand pain as "burning" and "fire" (imagery that can be found throughout Greece). Grief, pain, and memory burn, so does anger. "Burning pain" (kaim6s) "melts" the subject, "liquefies the self" (li6ni, revi). Crying and tears as material signs of liquefaction are expressive complements to the inner experience of burning pain. In the above lament, "burning pain" is also metaphorized as a "holocaust" (olokaftoma). This term refers to pain as consuming the self, as a sacrificial expenditure, and as the labor of enduring pain. Labor is understood as the deceased's (and by inference the mourner's) "fate," "share," or allotment. The endurance of fate is conceptualized as a labor task. To endure or complete an arduous task in the agricultural and domestic spheres is often described as martirisa (past tense); a concept that links labor, suffering, and pain. Just as the mourner witnesses or "comes out as representative" for others, so women labor, suffer, and endure pain for others. Pain is the concept that determines the social character of women's labor, whether this takes place in the mortuary ceremony or the agricultural and domestic economies. Through pain, Maniat women link kinship, the division of labor, agricultural and domestic economies-all male-dominated institutions-into an experiential continuum. The concept of "burning pain" reinforces the pain/labor relation by engaging the iconography of the female body. In the above dialogue, the death of a child is described as the mother's holocaust. The separation of son from mother, of child from household, is the subtraction of part from whole-understood here as predestined, sacrificial payment of a share that is consumed. This subtraction, sacrifice, removal of part from whole is experienced as burning pain and as an "incurable wound" that leaves a gap, a rupture. The use of orificial symbolism encodes a subtle inversion where the experience of birthing (as the painful separation of mother from child) is rendered analogous to the death experience (as the painful separation of mother from child). The open wound is

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like the open mouth in "screaming" and lament improvisation. This iconography connects pain, death, lamenting, and moira (as payment) with the passage from inside (self and clan) to the outside (death or exile). Here, the wound stands for both the internal violence of death and the externalization of pain and witnessing. The violence inscribed in the poetic "body" of the mother informs the char- · acterization of the mother as lew!ndisa by the other sister. Lew?ndis, in its general use, refers to the man who exhibits bravery, who confronts violence and death, and is a highly valued, moral characteristic. Here, it is transferred from the absent son to the mother. In a male, lew?ndis is often associated with paradigmatic acts of the self during moments of crisis. In a woman, lew?ndisa is encoded as labor. The carrying of the "incurable wound" and burning pain with dignity, discretion, and restraint characterizes the female lew?ndisa. This is why the interiorization of pain and death dominates both discourses. This interiorization is expressed not only as the bearing of an open wound, but also as the enclosure of pain and its low voicing, so that it is not "heard" (that is, not subjected to discussion, gossip, or pity by those outside the family). Pain, which opens one to the outside, which is experienced as the forced exposure and disruption of interiority by arbitrary external fate, is never deliberately "shown" to the outside except in klcima. This tension constitutes another labor task for women. In this prose/poetry counterpoint, the two sisters as chorus to the lament singer,\ construct a discourse that is halfway between the poetics of the lament and everyday speech.JTheir prose declarations reproduce the poetic canons and symbolism of the lament. To the same extent that the sisters' discourse occupies a mediate position between prose and poetry, their social function as witness to the lament singer occupies a mediate position between what is said in the ritual and what will be said in the social domains outside the ritual.

The Breath Antiphonic alternation not only circumscribes a social structure within the ceremony, but constitutes the internal structure of the mourning singer's solo discourse. The acoustic signification in the lament can be presented as a single, tripartite structure: sob/discourse/sob. The movement from the nonlinguistic (sob) to linguistic media is antiphonic. This antiphony seals the juridical value of speech through nonlinguistic expressions of pain in a manner analogous to the acoustic and bodily techniques by which the chorus confirms, resonates,

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and memorializes the juridical authenticity of the entire performance of the korifea (soloist). In this movement from nonlanguage to language to nonlanguage, the sob occupies a pivotal position; it functions as a hinge in the soloist's improvisation. This function can be easily overlooked if one is to treat moirol6i (lament) only in musical terms. In an ethnomusicological framework, the sob appears as stylized weeping, as an affective ornamentation of linguistic discourse. A Durkheimian approach would interpret the sob as a conventional sign or trigger for the representation of induced affectivity. A performance analysis can interject that the sob appearing at the end of the verse is a stylized technique for taking a breath in preparation for the next verse. The latter analysis would be very close to the truth, but it overlooks the fact that the technical dynamics of breathing in moirol6i communicate with the moral connotations of breathing. Heavy breathing and breathlessness are corporeal signs of disorder (anastcitosi) and connote death. The expression varianaseni (one breathes heavily) is linked to acts of physical exertion or difficult labor and is also used to characterize the death throes of the dying. To be out of breath symbolizes urgency, crisis, struggle, and personal dissolution. Heavy breathing and loss of breath function as emotional intensifiers in the context of spoken conversations. The word xepsihismeni means (she is) out of breath, dying, losing the soul ( psih{); soul is equivalent to breath here. The term refers to the effects of strenuous activity, struggle, or fight with death (see also chapter 5). Heavy breathing, breathlessness, and syllabic prolongation establish semantic shifts between units of discourse. Anger in conversations, for instance, is shown by stressing the first syllable or the first word of the sentence to establish an affective rupture with all statements preceding. Stylized sobbing in laments combines both the acoustic dynamics of heavy breathing, breathlessness, and syllabic prolongation as emotional intensifiers and as keying devices for entry into the next sequence of improvisation. There is a correlation between the passage into cathartic emotions, the passage from life to death, and loss of breath. The loss of breath is the movement of the self from the inside to the outside. This passage signifies the disorderly exposure of interiority. The passage of the lamenter's discourse in a teleological movement towards the sob is a simulation of death, an expression of the mourner's social death as a response to the personal loss she has sustained. Yet, the subsequent positioning of the verse line after the sob, should not be seen as a metaphor of rebirth or as a sign of renewal. Stylized sobbing establishes the aesthetic-acoustic structure of moirol6i as a signifying system autonomous and independent of any specific verbal content.

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The positioning of a unit of discourse after the sob is highly significant, whether this occurs within the narrative integrity of the soloist's presentation or in the transfer of the lament from one singer to another. The continuation of mourning discourse after the sob is the continuation of discourse after death. The enunciation of discourse after death is an anomaly, insofar as death is supposedly the termination of discourse. The truthful discourse that follows the exhaled breath, that emerges from the pain and rupture of the sob, becomes a metaphor for the entire ritual, the klcima: an acoustic condensation of all representation that takes place after death. The singer's discourse, her very being, and the entire performative inflection of the klcima can be directed towards the condensing terminus of the sob. Klcima is "the screaming of the dead"; the stylized sob is the poeticization of this ritual screaming. As the mourning song intensifies in emotional power, language is incrementally subverted by sobbing. This penetration of language by stylized sobbing takes the acoustic form of microtonal variations and accidental harmonics which infiltrate each note and each word of the lament. The mourner sings with more than one voice and in more than one pitch at the same time. Through the sob, the singer fractures the musical tone, propels it into the space of the klcima in a polyphony of pain.

Sound and Violence In Maniat society, men traditionally manage violence through physical action. Women, in contrast, manage violence with language and sound. Men do display violence linguistically, but their verbal power is dependent on the capacity to perform physical violence. Women's acoustic-linguistic violence has no external · authorizing referent,ftmless one wants to consider the presence of the corpse in the klcima as the authorizing agency. [35]

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Here, you see, when one was killed, women could use in the lament all kinds of obscenities, too. In the laments, they could kill a person with language (l6yia).

For women, language and sound intensify and deintensify the presence of violence and defilement in any social situation. The systems of acoustic violence and power prevalent in the klcima are largely foreign to normal social discourses. They are contrasocial. In the ritual, a complex system of linguistic, acoustic,

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and corporeal signs informed by violence and pain constructs both the space of death and the separation from the everyday social order. The acoustic power of the lament, like its language, faces opposite directions: towards the dead and towards the living. 4 Acoustic violence can exceed the personal control of the singer as her discourse passes rapidly from language to screaming. Her passage into acoustic violence may be cathartic but is not perceived by the chorus as particularly therapeutic or cleansing. The acoustic pain of singing is self-inflicted corporeal violence, like scratching the face and pulling out hair. When the violence of singing becomes too dangerous for the singer, when the self is seen to have passed over into the autonomy of "screaming," when screaming permeates and infiltrates every word and gesture, members of the chorus will attempt to retrieve the singer from abjection through another moirol6i (lament). Exploiting the protocols of "taking" and "helping" the intervening singer will attach her mourning to that of the violent performer. The two discourses occur simultaneously as the consoling singer attempts to establish an antiphonic relation to the acoustic violence of the first singer. As the korifea passes into acoustic violence, the tempo of her song increases and her vocal tones move to higher pitches. The faster pace and the higher pitch increase emotional intensity for the singer and her chorus. The intervening singer takes the melodic scale of the previous singer but at a lower pitch. She paces her song at a much slower tempo so that her moirol6i sounds almost like a lullaby. This performance starts as an extension of the choral assent directed at the previous singer and gradually grows louder in an attempt to overshadow the cathartic singing and to break through the wall of acoustic violence. Between these two antithetical vocal performances a complete dialogue occurs, encoding emotional messages between the engaged singers. The intervening mourner transfers the ethics of care and tending (normally directed to the dead) to the previous singer, who has gone into deep mourning with no apparent return. This intervention is polysemic. It does not draw care away from the dead towards the living, but situates the dead and the living mourner in the same ethical space. The intervening mourner addresses the consoling lament narrative to the dead and simultaneously addresses the acoustic/ musical codes of the same moirol6i to the pain of the previous singer. When a mourner returns from her p6nos (pain) with or without consolation, she will signal her return by asking the dead to give blessings to those left behind, or she will include her own greetings or blessings to the attending mourners. In

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a ritual recitation of names, she identifies and greets all those present who honor the dead. In this way, she signals her separation from the dead, her emergence from the abyss of acoustic violence. This indicates that she is ready to give the mourning song to another singer. The moiroloyistra (mourning singer) dives into pain until she becomes p6nos personified, until she slowly burns out like the candle, the symbol of the dead's completed life. The pain that is invested in the song transforms the song into a tangible entity, a thing, an object. Moiroloyistres refer to the transfer of the singing from one mourner to another with the expression "she gave it" or "she took it," as if the song were an object out there in the space of mourning, an artifact of exchange.

Truth and Pain The practice of "witnessing" has revealed antiphonic relations as contractual relations, and antiphonic discourse as correspondance, concordance and the representation of one social agent by another. The correspondance between truth and pain is pivotal. For the Maniats, discoursed pain and discourse in pain constitutes truth. This is an antiphonic relation precisely because its expression is invested in contrastive modes of signification: poetic improvisation on the one hand, ritual sobbing and screaming on the other. The relation between truthful discourse and pain, in turn, parallels the antiphonic dynamics between soloist and chorus-the former primarily narrates, the latter responds in extralinguistic expressions of pain (including body gestures) punctuated with brief verbal replies. The truth claims that arise from the ritual, then, depend on the emotional force of pain and the jural force of anti phonic confirmation. By stating that they cannot properly sing laments without the help of others, Maniat women reveal that pain, in order to be rendered valid, has to be socially constructed in antiphonic relations. Antiphony is a jural and historicizing structure. Its dyadic organization (soloist/chorus) guarantees a built-in record-keeping function. Anti phonic performance entails both the original declarations of the korifea (soloist) and the repetition, response, and historicization of the latter's discourse by the chorus. To hear a lament improvised is not to merely hear one person sing, but to hear an entire social ensemble vocalize.

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The antiphonic display of pain is the cultural construction of truth· and in turn, truth for the Maniats is the disclosure or revelation of moira (fate). M~ira appears in the social order and in individual life as the forced entry of the exterior into the interior. This is apparent in divinatory dreaming where moira as a future event first appears in the desocialized state of sleeping. Dreams come from the outside, and the donors of moira in the dream are preeminent representatives of outsiderhood, of xenitia, the dead. The presence of the dead in the warning dream signifies the advent of a life event tied to moira. The entry of death into the domain of the living, the effectivity of the dream in the waking world, and the disclosure of moira through divination link the emergence of truth with dangerous entry. The chorus and the soloist deploy antiphonic relations and techniques to dramatize this dangerous entry. In turn, the mourning narratives represent this dangerous entry with the imagery of a disordered body. In both the performative dynamics of the body in the ritual and in the motif of the body in oral poetry, the passage of truth into the social order, the experience of dangerous entry, is expressed as "pain," "burning," and "wounding." Open wounds, the open mouth that screams and improvises moirol6i, and metaphors of birthing (see lament below) form a symbolic continuum, the orificial cartography of the female body. These are thresholds, limens, points of entry and exit where the outside and the inside-fate, truth, and the social order-meet in disordering contact. The presence of moira intensifies when the orificial imagery and functions of the female body intensify. In everyday social life, men associate this process with the polluting ambiance of the feminine. In the mourning ritual, women convert and invert the orificial symbolism of the polluting (women's speech and embodiment) into media of cultural power that contest the verities of everyday social life. The female body as gesture and as speech, in death and in birth, becomes the preeminent threshold for the disturbing passage of moira and truth into the social order. The following version of an old lament was given by two women. [36] Sister Katsivardou, I am asking you to give it to me to drink, for I am a wine seller and drinker from the Easter dinner.

Mori kafi Katsivardhou egh6 ap6 sena to zitou na me to dh6kis na do piou t' ime krascis ke methistis ap6 to yi6ma tis Lambris.

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Yiannakas [mourner's son], made me drunk and the glass does not suffice, I drink it by the oka [large measure]. Come close, Katsivardou, for me to help you today with the mourning of your precious son, the student since fate had written it that we'd become soul sisters. Teachers and educated ones and knowledgeable doctors, I ask you one question: What? In the woman's insides bloom basil, cinnamon, and clove? Nothing blooms, only the child circulates and emits so much scent, more than basil, it [the body] has also a heap of burning embers that neither the ocean can put out, nor the river of Iris, with its inexhaustible water. The mother bears the child, and moira becomes the midwife, whatever she writes will be written [will be done].

OF

Me methise o Yianakas ke to yiali dhe me dhika ke to zitou me tin oka Ela konda Katsivardhou esimero na ze voithiou ston akriv6 zou mathiti pou t6ghrapse i mira mas na yinoume psihadherfes. Dhaskali ke ghramatiki ke epistimones yiatri tha zase kamou r6tisi: Ti? sti yinekas ta end6s athovoli vasilik6s, kanela ke gharifalo? Tipota dhen athovoli m6n'to pedhi kiklofori ke vghani t6si miroidhici plea ki ap6 vasilika, ki ehi ke thraka karvouna dhen dine zvini thalasa ki oudhe tou Iri o potam6s

p6hi t' astirefto ner6. I mana kani to pedhi k'i mira yinete mami 6pos tou ghrafi tha ghrafti.

The mourner draws an analogy between the transfer of laments from singer to singer and the act of drinking. "Drinking" transfers pain through the open mouth. The mourning song delineates an ironic imagery of the inner space of

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the female body. The "burning" is expressed in the metaphor of the coals and complemented by crying in the reference to inexhaustible water. Orificial symbolism appears again in the image of birth, which, as a movement from the outside to the inside, establishes the time and place for the appearance of moira (fate). The passage of wine from mouth to mouth, the act of birth as the laborious bearing and externalization of pain encode the multiple incarnations of the moirol6i as it moves from one singer to the next. Moira appears at the moment of birth as a midwife and witness that writes, just as the mourner transforms pain, the outside, fate, and truth into oral text. Shifting the metaphors of moirol6i from wine, coals, and water to the act of birth underscores the monosemy of the mourning song as pain. Yet, the shape shifting of the moirol6i, its multiple incarnations, and the variety of its metaphors encode the polyphonic social construction of pain.

Truth, Pain, and Ethnography Antiphony as a formal institution for the reception and production of narratives and their juridical authentication extends beyond the immediate performance of the lament. Women perpetuate antiphony as they leave the ritual space to form an improvised "women's cafe" (rougha). There the events of the ritual and aspects of its discourse and performance are disseminated, reconfirmed, and established as oral history. Entry into the spaces of mourning and dream interpretation entails participation in the formal relations prevailing between soloist and chorus. This also holds true for the ethnographic interview that focuses on the recording of laments and the discussion of death and its oral history. In Inner Mani, the only way by which an ethnographer can enter into the feminine space of divination aml/or death is to enter as a member of the chorus, as a witness with contractual obligations. The anthropologist in search of an ethnographic discourse has to engage in the customary reciprocities for the production and reception of juridical narrative. Thus, the possibility of producing ethnographic knowledge with Inner Maniat women is determined by the extent to which the ethnographic interview and the ethnographer as witness obey the local antiphonic rules for the production of truth. For the informant, the ethnographer who is accepted can function as another vocality of concordance and, in this role, facilitate the construction and dissemination of social memory.

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Historical Context Inner Maniat dialect has a technical vocabulary of death and performance that possesses its own historicity and diachronic depth. Without assuming an organic or linear continuity between modern and archaic Greece, the comparison of cultural categories from both periods linked by a common linguistic substrate can facilitate semantic analysis. This is particularly true for the relation between the Maniat korifea and the corypheus of archaic Greek tragedy. The role of the corypheus in Greek tragedy was a continuation of the exarchon, leader of the chorus, and the prototype of the actor who stands in opposition and in dialogue with the chorus. According to Adrados (1975), the corypheus emerges from the chorus in order to dialogue with it and to engage in an agon with the "opponent" of the chorus. The discourse of the corypheus is united with the discourse of the chorus in the agon with the opponent; yet the discourse of the corypheus as a solo can establish antiphonic and dialogical relations with the chorus (ibid.: 31-32, 69-72). Like the corypheus, the Maniat korifea emerges as leader from within the chorus, and in the moirol6i establishes an antiphonic relation to the chorus. The korifea is united with the chorus in an agon with the Other, be that death, moira (fate), or the male social order outside the klama. 5 In archaic Greece, the anti phonic singing of laments has been identified as early as the Homeric epics (Garland 1985, 30; Alexiou 1974, 132). In that period, threnos (thrinos) corresponded to the actual singing of lament. In particular, it was the ritual lament that was sung by professional mourners who initiated and conducted the entire musical component of the mourning ritual. Threnos was distinguished from goos (gh6os), those laments sung by the kinswomen of the dead. Professional mourners were known as threnos exarchoi (leaders of the dirge) (Garland 1985, 31). The singing of the threnos alternated between the professional mourners and the kinswomen as a relation of soloist(s) to chorus. The chorus of kinswomen performed stylized cries, sobs, weeping, and refrains. The professional mourners were known for their singing of more formal laments, while the kinswomen were associated with improvised laments. Both threnos and goos were structured antiphonically.

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In Inner Mani, thrinos has no association with professional mourners. As far as it can be ascertained by local testimonies and archival records, there is no evidence of professional, paid mourners (in contrast to other parts of rural Greece). Yet, thrinos does retain a hierarchical qualification as a deeper, emotionally intense performance. If thrinos then was ever connected to the notion of professional mourners, the social relation indicated by the term has been treated in Inner Mani as a performative relation. Maniats do distinguish between levels of proficiency, poetic skill, and emotional intensity among mourners. Highly skilled mourners, although they may be distant relations, are welcome into the ceremony and often given precedence in the order of performance. A close neighbor who is a skilled mourning singer will poetically deploy the ethics of shared substance to establish her performative rights and precedence in the

klama. In archaic Greece, the original antiphonic structure of laments took the form of alternating lines or antistrophes sung between two choroi or between soloist and chorus. Alexiou (1974) sees the modern form of Greek lament with its chorus and refrain as a descendant of the antiphonic forms of the archaic lament. She asserts that the relegation of the second voice to the subordinate form of refrain, cry, or sob is due to the elaboration and evolution of the narrative element of the moirol6i in the soloist's discourse at the expense of the chorus. Yet, Alexiou remains within the literary canon by viewing the position of the refrain or accompanying cries as a reduction of the antiphonic element in favor of the centralization of the soloist's narrative. The importance of the antiphonic structure should not be measured solely in terms of the quantitative length of the refrains or the presence of linguistic signs. The performative dynamics of the mourning ritual in Inner Mani indicate that the chorus has not been decentered from a narrative function. The chorus supplements with an elaborate metanarrative: crying, stylized sobbing, body gestures, monologues, screams. This repertoire should be seen as possessing its own integrity. It has a central affective and juridical position in the performance of the klama.

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maximal lineage, the social unit represented by the yerondiki, and the minimal lineage and/or household, whose interests were frequently advanced by women. The klama could reinforce the decisions of the yerondiki as much as it contested them. Further, it could impose decisions on the yerondiki through the appeal to collectively held moral obligations, such as the fulfillment of revenge code ethics; an action that did not always conform to the political interest of the

yerondiki. The klama has survived the yerondiki in modernity, but their structural op-

Mens Council I Women s Mourning Ritual The previous analysis of antiphony has demonstrated that in the mourning ritual there are formal procedures and techniques for the production and reception of discourse as both juridical and true. The Maniat women's concern with form, protocol, and legitimating strategies not only reflects their marginal political position but is perhaps indicative of the fact that for centuries Inner Mani was a stateless society devoid of any codified laws or specialized juridical and administrative institutions. There were two kin-based institutions that assumed those political-legal functions currently assumed by the state: the yerondiki, the all-male council, and the klama, the women's mourning ceremony. These institutions both complemented and opposed each other in terms of their respective position in the social structure. The yerondiki was a jural institution enjoying a formal legitimacy in contrast to the klama, which had an indirect political and jural power. This is not to imply that klama is an informal event. It has always been more ritualized and public than yerondiki, which was often held secretly. Klama was officially defined as a mortuary event. Yet, the participants knew beforehand they would be witnessing a performance where juridical issues would be exposed and contested by formal systems of representation. Earlier, I described the gender oppositions at mourning sessions in terms of the symbolics of space. I also presented episodes where women deliver antagonistic discourses directed at male domains, against which men cannot respond without incurring pollution and lowering their status. These dynamics express the political relationship that existed between the klama and the yerondiki. What united the yerondiki and klama was also the source of their structural tensions. The same issues and acts were discussed and subjected to different valuation; these issues were revenge code killings, inheritance and other property disputes, marital relations, and kin obligations. The conflictual relations between the yerondiki and klama often expressed the inherent political tensions between the

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position and political tensions are currently replicated by the adversarial relations of the male-dominated ideologies of modernization and urbanization and the ritual practices of women; the former often deployed to delegitimize the latter. The opposition of the klama to the yerondiki expressed a pervasive feminine critique of the formal and informal control of the social order by men (Seremetakis 1984, 1989, 1989a). These tensions continue today, not only in terms of the particular content of the klama, but in terms of the legitimacy of the klama as a social institution in the first place (see chapter 10). The following laments are antagonistic to males and their political interests. The first lament presents an explicit opposition to a reconciliation mission from a yerondiki after the killing of the mourner's husband. She exploits the symbolic space of the klama, which underlines her discourse with moral authority and immunizes her from a punitive male response. Her sarcasm is directed against the representative of the yerondiki who has arrived at the klama in order to promote peace between the killer's and the victim's clan. The mourner counters this male representative with her own status as representative and witness of the dead. She rejects reconciliation and further propels the two clans into feuding by scandalizing and stigmatizing the mother of the killer. While exchanging revenge code stories, one of the women presented to the rest of us the following commentary by way of introducing this fragment of a wellknown lament. [37] In the old days, when killings occurred, reconciliations were attempted. So, a woman whose husband was killed says the following [mourning song] when someone from Katopagi (area of Inner Mani), who was serving as an elder in a yerondiki, appeared: Welcome, my Michalako, elder of Katopagi

Kal6s ton Mihalako mou yeronda tau Katopagiou

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why did you bother to come to Ochia [village] where "evil" Sourdena [mourner] spoils the elder's councils? Sourdi [murdered husband], who died a bad death, left me this order to raise the child, to reach eighteen, to give him the gun, hanging in the kremandalds [gun rack], to hunt the killers, Mourmouras and Karkis, and the child of the whore.

ti fthes pourthes stin Ohid pou i Sourdhena fne kakid ke tis yerondikes hald? To kakothdnato Sourdhf emena m'd{zse endolf na t' anastiso to pedhf na pdi dekaoht6 hron6 ke na tou dh6ko to sarmd p6houme sto kremandald na kiniyfsi to fonid ton Mourmoura ke ton Karkf ke tis poutdnas to pedhf.

In the following, a male informant recounts the effect of a singer lamenting her dead sister and admonishing her brother-in-law against remarriage. The lament is followed by his commentary. [38) Beware, Skylakoyianni, do not do an unthoughtful job to gather a fox [another wife] here to spoil the nest, and scatter the birds [children).

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Pr6sehe Skilak6yiani mi kdmis dskefti dhoulid ke mou maze-psis alepou ke sou haldsi ti folia ke skorpistoune ta poulid.

Indeed he stayed unmarried. "I will not spoil the advice she gave me," he said. People were listening to good mourners. If she said it to him casually talking somewhere else, that is not in the moirol6i, he would not listen to her perhaps. But in front of all these people ... it would be very arrogant not to listen to her. If something happened afterwards, if one of his children was ill fated, people would tell him, "Although she gave you the advice, you did not listen to her; now you dissolved your family." Another male narrator in his late eighties recollects in one of the usual gatherings of men in the local tavern.

[39) This was said in the kldma by Daifina [female mourner] when I was a twelve-years-old man: Eh, Lazaros and Panayis, and you, Fokas and Thodoris, what are you waiting for? The killer of Panagos is staying in Yerakia. Tie up your belts, pick up your guns, and hunt the killer, sunwards, in Yerakia. Come close to me Periklis, you dog of-- clan, for me to ask you and you to tell me if you happened to be there at the St. Stephanos locale when the killing occurred of big Panagoulakas.

E, Lazare ke Panayf ki esf Fokd ke Thodhori e, ti ton perimenete vre tou Pandgho to fonid pou kathete sti Gerakid. Dheste ke ti loridhe zas pdrete ke taus grddhe zas vre ke vardte to fonid prosiliakd sti Gerakid. Ela kondd mou Periklf a, vre - - skiif na za rotfsou na me pis an ftan k'fsouna mazf st' Ayiou Stephdnou t' dghrioma po' yfnike anak6loma sto hondro-Panaghoulaka.

So, [by calling him to come close) she revealed him as the killer. The mourner incited the taking of revenge by naming the avengers and revealing the name of the killer in the ceremony.

Kalliopi's Story Internal conflict does not only occur between men and women, yerondikf and kldma, but also between women, usually as representatives of corporate groups. The initial contention between them revolves around the protocols of mourning: who sits closer to the corpse, who mourns first or the longest, who has the "right" to "take" the lament from another. These performances are means of claiming status. But such conflict and dialogical contention can also engage wider social

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issues like marriage, inheritance, and killings. The following narratives deal with ritual and lament performances that resulted from the premature death, in 1932, of a young man who was engaged to be married to Kalliopi, a woman from a high-status clan. The deceased man was a schoolteacher, as was his fiance. Both had studied in urban centers, and he died of an urban disease, tuberculosis, before the marriage could occur. Sitting in a neighborhood rougha (gathering place) one hot afternoon, women took turns discussing the dead man's mourning ceremony and its context. (Later on, I recorded versions of the same story and laments from the central protagonist, Kalliopi herself). The following lament and commentaries were given in a mosaic of fragments with which each narrator emphasized different elements and sequences of the confrontation between the mother of the deceased and his fiance, Kalliopi. Some women depicted the mother-in-law speaking first and Kalliopi responding, while others recounted Kalliopi's initial lament to which the mother-in-law responded. What scenes from the ceremony were related and how different versions of the laments were worded reflects the informant's kin connection to Kalliopi. The following version is given by a female relative of Kalliopi from her present affinal clan. [4o] Aunt Kalliopi was an only daughter with the thick braids. She got engaged to - - , the teacher and an only child. His bad luck: after five, six months he died of kalpazousa (tuberculosis) within fifteen, twenty days. Aunt had the moirol6i innate in her [had inherited the ability to compose and sing laments]. When they informed her, she set out-I am narrating it here like a fairy tale-and went to the cemetery. When people saw her they said, "His fiance, the teacher! Stand aside, she will mourn." When her mother-in-law saw her, she revolted (epanastatise) [was overcome by emotions]. Kalliopi says: Please, allow me, and bless you. On this day departs Poulos, 1 the professor 2 from St. Kyriaki [village]. When the schools closed and the students returned home and the boat blew its whistle

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Afiste mou naste kala esimera anahora o Poulos o kathiyitis ap6 tin Ayia Kiryiaki. Totes pou klinoun i skoles ke erhonde i fitites ke to karavi tha sfira

in Mezapo and in Kourkou [harbor in western Mani], Kostarako's son came, the Bey of Yialia too, and - - , the doctor, who is my own brother. I started to ask them if they happened to see Poulos the professor, the excellent student. But Monday morning they brought me the message to go to St. Kyriaki, the professor is asking for me. I asked my father, "Father, do you give me permission, because Poulos asks for me, to go to St. Kyriaki?" He gave permission and me, Kalliopi, the slender one and the fine young lady, got up early in the morning, pensive and thoughtful, and went to St. Kyriaki. As I was approaching closer, Poulos spoke to me, "Kalliopi stay away for all have left me, you will separate from me, too." Then I replied to him, "Paulo, where did you find the htiki6 [consumption]? Tell me, in which store

sto Mezapo ke sti Gourkou irthe tau Kostarako o yi6s irthe ki o Beis tau Yialia ke - - o yiatr6s pone dhik6s mou adher{6s. Epkhiasa taus er6tisa mi mbai ke ton idhiasi to PaUlo to kathiyiti ton aristo mou fititi. Ma ti Dheftera to prof irthasi me milisasi na paou stin Ayia Kiriaki pou me zita o kathiyitis. R6tisa ton patera mou Baba me dh6nis adhia yiati o Poulos me zita na paou stin Ayia Kiryiaki? Ke m'edhose tin adhia. Ki egh6 i Kali6pi i liyeri poumou kopela eklehti sik6thika proi-proi me skepsi ke me siloyi ke paou stin Ayia Kiryiaki. Ki eki po 'zighona konda na ke o Poulos me mila: Kali6pi kame kata ki ti 6li me horistisa the na me horistis ki esi. Ke t'apokrithika ki egh6 Paulo pou t6vres to htiki6 pes mou se pia emborik6

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and was it economical? You found it so cheap that you bought it by the sack?" Paulo, ungrateful child, where are you to go, where to settle and deny me? You are leaving your parents and taking the "key" along in your pocket, in your belt, leaving them out in the yard to be slowly tormented in time and weather. Father [in-law], come close, for me to speak it and you to hear it. Why have you tortured and punished yourselves, both of you, his parents? In Kalamata, low on the pier you worked till morning for the double day's pay, and the sacks you were carrying to gather money, for you were educating a professor. And my sweet mother [worked] here with oxen and with sheep. You were both struggling hard. You thought, good parents, that to make him a professor,

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ke t6vrekes sifertik6? Ke t6vrekes ftin6 poli ke t6pares me to saki? PaUlo afil6timo pedhi ambou tha pais ambou tha vyis Ke pou the na 'katastathis ke mena tha me amithis? Ki afinis tou ghoniate zou ke pemis to klidhi konda sti tzepi ke sti zounaira ke tous afinis stin avli na douse renousi i kerf. Patera zighoso konda na ze to leou na d'aghrikcis Ti erenosta ti etizosta k' i dhio i ghoniate tou? Sti Kalamata hambila st6 m6lo ximer6nosou yia to dhipl6 mer6kama ke ta tsouvalia efemes ke ta !efta emazounes ti espoudhazes kathiyiti Ke i manoula mou epa

would give you in return a good old age. But the ill fate that found you cannot be corrected. Eh, mother, blackened mother and fake mother-in-law, couldn't you buy sheep and make him a shepherd? It would have been better for me, too. Mother, what reason did Poulos find to abandon me? Whenever you came to Dri [village], wasn't I waiting for you at the Skali [place name]? Wasn't I running from afar to bring you up the road in my embrace? When did I ever show arrogance that my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, and I am educated myself? Cry, houses and housefronts and all St. Kyriaki village, that the professor leaves, the child of--.

na kaloyerokomithis Ma z'ivreke dhin6 kak6 pou dhen ehi dhiorthom6. E, mana e mavr6mana ke pseftiki mou pethera pr6vata dhen agh6razes ke dhen ton ekanes vosk6 kalitera t6ha ki egh6. Mana ti m' ivre aformi o Poulos yia na m' amithi? Onda po 'rh6souna sto Dhri dhe se karterou sto Skaff? dhen etreha ap6 makra ke z' anif6riza agalia? Se ti eperifaneftika t' ehou patera dhaskalo ki o adherf6 mou ine yiatr6s ke epistimonas ki egh6? Klafte spitcikia ke liaki ki 6li i Ayia Kiryiaki pou fevyi o kathiyitis ke tau - - t6 pedhi.

The mother-in-law responds:

me v6idha ke me pr6vata ke aghonizosta sklira. En6mizes kale ghoni na vghcilis ton kathiyiti

Ah, icon of Christ, how will I part from you? My Poulos and Kalliopi, I thought, poor me, my Poulos is a professor,

Mori ik6na tau Hristou tiloghou na ze horistou? Paulo mou ke Kali6pi mou po 'n6miza i yiamartoli o Paulo mou kathiyitis

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my Kalliopi is a teacher, you will be getting double salaries for your mother to rest. I lost bride and child. Ah, my sweet, golden crown, didn't I come up to Dri on Easter Day with the big koulouria [bread rolls] and the red eggs, with a silk dress and the fat goat? How can I part from you icon of Christ?

dhaskala i Kaliopi mou tha pemete dhiplous misthous na kdthete i mana zas Ehasa ni{t ke pedhi. E, koronitsa mou hrisi dhen aniforisa sto Dhri tin idhia mera ti Lambri me ta koulouria ta pahici ke me ta kokina avghci me forema metaxouto ke me to kriciri to pahio? Tiloghou na ze horistou mori ikona tau Hristou?

Kalliopi replies: Listen, my sweet mother, don't cry for your sweet, little crown [mourner], cry for the professor for you have no other child. For I will get married, another professor I will find. For I, on my part, have no need of anything, my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself. I, on my part, don't mourn him as my husband nor as my fiance, I only mourn him as a brother for we studied together over there in Areopoli.

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Aka manoula mou ghlikici mi kleis ti koronitsa zou na kleis ton kathiyiti pou dhen ehis ala pedhi. To dhe egho tha pandreftou ki ala kathiyiti tha VTOU ti egho apo tau loghou mou dhen ehou ancigi tipota ehou patera dhciskalo ke adherfo ehou yiatro ke epistimonas ki egho. Egho apo tau loghou mou dhen tone kleou yi' cindra mou oute yi' aravoniastiko mon' tone kleou yi' adherfo pou espoudhcizame mazi pera stin Areopoli.

You, burned mother, how will you console yourself, and where will you find another child?

Esi, e mana kapseri ambos thci parighorithis ke pou tha vris ala pedhi?

A shorter version of the above is given by another woman, also Kalliopi's relative from her present affinal clan.

[41] When the mother-in-law-to-be saw her: Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate from you? To lose bride and groom and all the in-laws? Wasn't I coming Easter and Easter day to bring the fat lamb?

Mori ikona tau Hristou ambos the na se horistou na hcisou ni{t ke ghabro ke olo to simbetherio? Dhe 'rhomoun Pciskha ke Lambri ki efema to pahi ami?

There the bride-to-be "took it" and said: Stop, my sweet mother, you melt my heart. Me, what kind of good do I bring you that you are warmly receiving me? Such good [let it go] to the sea and to the deepest waters. I, on my part, have no need of anything, for I am well in my household, the household of my father, for my father is a teacher, my brother is a doctor, a teacher I am myself. I beg your pardon, please, I am not mourning a fiance,

Stamcitise manitsa mou me revis tin kardhoula mou Egho, sa ti kala sou efera 6pou me kalodhehese? tetia kala sti thcilasa ke sta vathitera nerd. Egho apo tau loghou mou dhen eho ancigi tipote t' ime kala sto spiti mou sto spiti tau patera mou ti eho patera dhciskalo ke o kafo mou ine yiatros dhaskcilisa ime ki egho Sighnomi sas parakalo dhen tone kleo yi' aravoniastiko

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but a neighbor and covillager, an only child. Eh, Poulo, professor, eh, Poulo, knowledgeable .

mon' yitona ke horian6 yia ena monah6pedho. E, Paule mou kathiyiti e, Paule mou polimathi .

my brother is a doctor, I am educated myself, but for your good parents who are melting, suffering. Your old father on the pier worked all night for the double day's pay for Poulos to have and enjoy. And your old mother, with goats and with sheep and mules in the backyard, was tortured a lot for you to be deprived of nothing. Poulo, go to the good. Allow me five more minutes all the people to receive, to come out as representative for his sweet mother. All, welcome, educated and lay, and all his colleagues, he deserved such honor and even greater, he was an enviable young man, well educated. His two parents thank you

The lament continues but that's all that was told to me. She went very proud to the ceremony. Later I interviewed Kalliopi herself, an elderly widow now, who has been living in Athens (earlier in Piraeus) for decades. This is her version:

[42] MOTHER-IN-LAW Ah, icon of Christ, how am I to separate myself from you? I was proud of you, to come to my household as a bride gave me great honor.

Mori ik6na tou Hristou ambos the na ze horistou pou se krifokamarona nifi sto spiti mou na 'rthis t6ha meghdli mou timi.

KALLIO PI.

I will mourn him today, your only cherished son, I am not mourning a fiance, for I hardly came to know him, one month only. He passed from Dri as if an itinerant. Generous Poulo - - , my poor one, won't you change your mind, and not for my sake, I am well in my household, queen I am and kira [woman of the house; house-proud] in the king's palaces, my father is a teacher,

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Tha t6ne klapso simera to yi6 sou ton monakrivo dhen t6ne kleo yi' aravoniastik6 yiati dhen ton eghn6risa yia ena mina monahd eperase ap6 to Dhri sa natane periyitis. Paulo - - kouvardha kaimene dhe metanoas ke 6hi yia tou l6ghou mou egh6 kala sto spiti mou vasilisa ime ke kira st'anahtora tou vasilia eho patera dhdskalo

'

together with his only sister. I thank you, too. Poulo, go to the good.

eho ke adherf6 yiatr6 ke epistimonas ki egh6 m6no yia taus kalous ghonious pou erenonda ki etfzonda o yeros o patera zou st6 m6lo eximer6nonda yia to dhipl6 mer6kama na ehi o Poulos na ghlenda ke i manoUla zou i ghria me yidhia ke me pr6vata ke me moularia stin avli evasanizota poli esi na min esterithis. Paulo na pais sto kal6. Afiste me pende lefta 6lo to k6smo na dheht6 ke antipr6sopos na vgh6 anti yia ti manoula tou Oli kalosorisate ke morfomeni ke apli ke 6li tou i sinadhelfi tou axize tetia timi ki ak6mi meghaliteri itane neos zileft6s ke epistimonas kal6s. Sas ezitoun efharist6 i dhio i ghoniate tou ke i monahi tou adherfi sas efharist6 ki egh6 Paulo na pais st6 kal6.

The different versions shown above portray exactly the dialogues that occur between women in the process of writing and rewriting a mourning ceremony. Thus antiphony, which begins in the performance of lament between soloist and chorus and between soloists, extends to the oral history of the event as contested

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by various members of the chorus, the community of witness. The initial presentation by Kalliopi, the response of the mother-in-law-to-be, and Kalliopi's further response, are metacommentaries on several interrelated issues, such as clan status, clan affiliation, alliances and nonalliances between clans, and the jural status of the bride-to-be. Kalliopi's lament, in the first version, opens up with the typical imagery of separation, xenitici, and travel: the steamboat blowing its whistle. Here the image of the boat is ironic. It evokes the return of the students, but this "reunion" is juxtaposed with the journey of separation that the dead make to the other world. The next important scene is the encounter on the road. This is not an encounter with a living person but with an apparition. The pensiveness of the lamenter refers to composing the lament on the road as she journeys to see the dead. The dead greets her with a warning, declaring he is abandoned by his kin and she, too, will be forced to separate from him. The mourner equates the separation of the dead from kin and significant others with the passage of the deceased from the country to the city when he was alive. The illness of consumption is linked to a specific place, the urban environment and the market economy, symbols of the outside. The dead's "aquisition" of the disease is an economic transaction, an exchange that is both devaluing and unequal. Here the "good bargain" is ironically contrasted to ill fate or bad luck. The economic metaphors continue in reference to the "key." The only son of a household was known as "the key," because it is through him that a genealogical line is continued. The death of the sole heir is the "closing of the house." With the closing of the house, the parents are left in "the outside," tormented by time and weathers (na douse renousi i kerf), or, more accurately, by the time of (bad) weather. The experience of time and duration after the death of a significant other is equated with exposure to the outside in the form of shifting, unstable weather. The references to the father's and mother's hard labor to create an educated son now signify the labor and pain of the mourning cycle. This analogue is contained in the image of the father carrying sacks from night to dawn. The wake is often described as "carrying" the dead through the night (na t6ne ximer6soume). "Carrying" implies care and keeping company. Kalliopi reproaches her "fake" mother-in-law for having struggled to create a high social status for her son, because if he had been a shepherd he would be alive today. But behind this literal reproach lie the contractual protocols of marriage: if he had been a shepherd, there would have never been an issue of marriage. Their roads would not have met. Kalliopi's lament closes with the image of the crying house. One would say "his house was mourning." The crying house is a meta-

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phor for the ritual itself (as it takes place in the house). This is at the same time a reference to "the closing" of a house-the social death of a household when a sole, or last, male heir dies. The situation of the widow within the affinal clan after the death of her husband is very problematic and often involves a lowering of her status. Despite the fact that in this case no marriage has taken place, these issues color the dialogue between the mother of the deceased and the fiance. The jural qualification of Kalliopi's lament is signaled by her calling the father-in-law to "come close for me to speak it and you to hear it." She appeals to the father of the dead to witness her mourning, that is, to confirm her as representative of the dead. But, it is the mother, in keeping with the gender divisions of the klcima, who responds to this appeal. She names Kalliopi "icon of Christ." Christ refers to the dead son, and by characterizing her as "icon," that is, "representative" of the dead son, she establishes Kalliopi's juridical status. But the issue is what type of representative she is to be. Several concerns about role and status are intertwined here: 1) The mother-in-law attempts to effect a substitute marriage between the fiance and her son through Kalliopi's mourning, grief, and pain; she insinuates that this is the mourning style of a wife. She also declares she cannot part from her, attempting to incorporate both her and her clan into an affinal relation. As one of my commentators remarked, intense mourning by widows is seen as unseemly and as frustrated desire for the dead. The category of pathos (the desire) of survivors for male dead undergoes profound semantic alteration from female consanguines to female affines. This involves the transformation of the ethics of shared substance from care and tending to sexual desire. Such characterization of her mourning was exactly what Kallio pi had to avoid. 2) To accept a surrogate conjugal relation to the dead by prolonged mourning, was to undergo the cycle of social death that widows endured. This involved confinement, dress codes, cooking prohibition, and, of course, it precluded another engagement in the near future. These would be some of the consequences for Kalliopi if she accepted the incorporation attempted by her mother-in-lawto-be; an incorporation made at the public arena of the klcima acquires an official, juridical character. 3) In mourning rituals, the witness who represents the dead usually does so in order to establish the status of the deceased through biographical recollection. In this case, however, the mother-in-law seeks to establish that the fiancee as witness takes her status from the dead. It is the status of the fiancee and not of the dead that is at issue here. Kalliopi's counterstrategy to the mother-in-law's

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discourse is to name her father and brother, the males from whom she takes status. This taking of status from men is not a passive process or a lack of autonomous identity. Kalliopi is threatened by social death and a lowering of her status. Here we have a woman's active construction of a relation of social equivalence to the men of her natal clan. This is signified by her sharing the same education and occupation with them. She also declares that she has mourned the deceased as a fellow student and covillager; this establishes a symbolic kin relation analogous to that of sister and brother. Thus she moves away from a conjugal-sexual implication by evoking a sibling relation which in Inner Mani has stronger affective connotations than that of husband and wife. Kalliopi closes her lament by asserting that her wounds can be healed, for she can always marry someone else, while the mother of the dead is "burned" and "blackened" because she lost that which is irreplaceable, the "key to the house." [43] KALLIOPI.

There were students, professors [in the ceremony]! One month we had been engaged. When I was saying the moirol6i I couldn't see in front of me, that is who was there. Your grandpa [the man she married later] was nodding at me not to cry and mourn. ETHNOGRAPHER.

Why? KALLIO PI.

Not to grieve, not to care much. I was not mourning him, I was keeping my pride. If I mourned, they would misunderstand. That's why I said "for the good parents." I kept my pride. There were students there as well. You know what they would say? What need does she have of him? This took place in 1932. In 1933 I got engaged to your grandpa. In 1934 we got married. I did not wear black, no. Just dark clothes. Because they would misunderstand: "For the fiancee to wear black?" They [his parents] had burning pain and desire to take me. Later they came to our new home and they were saying to your grandpa, "How lucky!" The above interview with Kalliopi was taken in 1983. In 1984, Kalliopi mourned the man she did marry. He died in Athens where they had been living for decades.

[44] Eh, my Panayiotis, eagle, how do you not condescend

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E, Panayi6ti mou aite Ma pas to katadhehese

to get up, to thank them, all the people, the populace, friends, and relatives who honored you with their presence, and all your colleagues. You were proud, you were dignified, but I will come out as representative to the whole populace, and I will thank them, I will say it on your behalf: My friends, we thank you, his children and I, together with our grandchildren and his two sisters and our good nephews, children of Spiros, and of the professor who gave you honor [addressing the dead], and our family, too. Millions of thanks from my brother, the doctor, who was a unique groom. Potis, winged eagle, you sailed in the skies, you stepped and the earth shook. I am not saying these to praise him you all knew him. He was an educator

ke pano dhe sik6nese yia na taus pis efharist6 s' 6lo to k6smo, to la6 se filous ke se sigenis 6pou se dh6sane timi ke 6li zou i sinadher{t Esi 'sauna perifanos esi isouna eghoistis rna egh6 tha vgh6 antipr6sopos se 6lo to la6 ke tha zitiso efharist6 ki anti yia sena tha to p6 Fili mou sas efharist6 ke ta pedhia tou ki egh6 ke ta eg6nia mas mazi ke i dhio i adherfadhes zou ke i kali mas anepsi tou Spirou ke kathiyiti 6pou sou dh6sane timi ke etimisan ki emas Hilia efharistiria ki o adherf6s mou o yiatr6s pou itane akriv6s ghambr6s. P6ti aite me ta ftera pou eplees sta ourania epatas ki etreme i yis. Dhen tou ta leo yia timi 6si ton eghnorizate itane ekpedheftik6s

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perfect in his job. He worked in the ministry [of education] twenty full years, honestly and genuinely. My tall cypress tree that the times and weather turned upside down [leaving you] without air and water. He was the perfect man with rich feelings rare qualities that you don't find easily, with phil6timo, generous, he made the bitter sweet, that's why I chose him among so many Maniats. What a husband I had and lost, a piece of gold that fell in the sea and won't come back. You will find yourself repenting, for whoever descends to Hades does not easily come out. The guards are strict and the door closes and shuts with a silver lock which neither rusts nor breaks. Potis, my great athlete with the manly body, hero and fighter, you went to the Middle East in a sailing boat, and you became a volunteer

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ke sti dhoulid tau telios sto ipouryio erghdstike ikosi hr6nia klidhotd timia ke alithind. Kiparisdki mou psil6 pou s' anak6lose o ker6s

horis aera ke ner6. ftane dndhras telios me plousia esthimata spdnia proterimata pou dhen ta vriskis efkola {ll6timos ke kouvardhds ki ekane ta pikrd ghlikd yiaft6 ki egh6 ton dhidlexa se t6sa maniat6poula Ti dndra iha ke ehasa ena komdti mdlama pou epese sti thdlasa ke dhe tharthi ali ford. Metaniomenos tha vrethis ti 6pios stan A.dhi katevi dhen ine efkolo na vyi, i filakes ine afstiri ke i porta klini ke sfald me asimenia klidharid pou dhe skouridzi oute spa P6ti meghdle mou athliti me to levendiko kormi iroa ke aghonisti piyes sti Mesi Anatoli me mia vdrka me pani ke eyines ethelondis

for the honor of the country. I said to him when he was departing, "Where are you leaving me with four children?" And he replied to me, "You are the woman of the house, you have all the goods, you will be taking a good salary, your brother is a doctor, too." And I responded to him, "Go then to the good, well to go, well to come back, and a winner to return." Potis, go to the good, find a good heaven to fall, to rest, and here leave the blessing to your grandchildren and children and your good nephews, who treated you well and loved you dearly. You were levendis and eagle. My friends, I thank you.

yid tis patridhas tin timi. Ke toupa 6tan efevye Emena pou me paratds me tesera mora pedhid? Ki ekinos m'apokrithike fse arhondonikokird, ehis ap'6la ta kala tha pernis ke kal6 misth6 ehis ke adherf6 yiatr6. Ke tau apdndisa ki egh6 A.nde na pais st6 kal6 kala na pas kala narthfs ke na yirisis nikitis. P6ti na pais st6 kal6 na vris kali Parddhiso na pesis na xekourastis ki edh6 n' afisis tin efhi se gonia zou ke se pedhid ke stous kalous zou anepsious 6pou se peripithikan ke se aghdpisan poli. isoun levendis ke aet6s Fili mou zas efharist6.

Between the two laments composed fifty years apart, the concern with social status, including from which males a woman takes her status, remains crucial; the valorization of her dead husband is counterbalanced by references to her brother and his professional status. Any display of intensity in the conjugal relation is relativized by reaffirming links to the natal clan. In reference to the 1932 incident, Kalliopi's current version of her lament and narrative, as compared to other versions of covillagers, plays down the conflictual dimensions of the exchange with the mother-in-law. After her marriage,

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her previous engagement to a high-status man heightens her status in the new affinal clan. Taking status from men shifts and changes according to women's changing relationships throughout their lives. Thus the women of her present affinal clan, in recounting the 1932 event, play down the high status of the dead fiance's clan and the depth of Kalliopi's mourning and emphasize "how proud she went and left."

families directly related to the lineage of Vangelio, different versions are recounted according to gender divisions. There is a male and a female view of these events. They express the political relations and conflicts of two juridical institutions, the male yerondikf and the female klama. Vangelio's mother recounts in her lament what happened in Areopolis (recited by a female agnate of Vangelio ).

[45] One day, one evening hour,

Tracking Vangelio In the 1920s, Yiorgos and his family lived in a small village on the coast of Inner Mani. The village had developed into a local center for coastal trading because of its accessible harbor. Yiorgos was known to be a well-off merchant who had an only daughter, Vangelio. She is described as tall, slender, beautiful, and the only heir to his fortune. Many men desired her. The only female heir in a household, known as xaklirospora, is an extremely problematic figure. She cannot derive sufficient protection from her father alone, especially when he is old. She is a woman exposed, which increases her desirability and, in turn, exposes the clan to the outside. Vangelio had many marriage proposals, but she fell in love with and became pregnant by a cousin of hers who suffered from tuberculosis. When her belly became visible, her parents, to silence the gossip, put out the word that she suffered from idhropikfa (or dhropik(), a disease that swells the body (the common excuse for all pregnancies out of wedlock). Under the guise of seeking medical attention for Vangelio's affliction, her parents secreted her in the nearby town, Areopolis, with the intention of getting her to Athens to deliver the baby. But the truth was known and became a matter of honor for her nearest male agnates, who immediately formed a secret yerondikf (male council). They held a lottery to decide who would avenge the honor of the clan with her death. The subsequent events became a matter of lament composition and local history in various versions according to the alignments of the lineages and clans involved: Vangelio's immediate lineage, that of the killer, and that of the cousin she had an affair with-all sublineages of the same clan. Further, within the

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I was inside frying, making koutalfdhes [fried dough], when my door made a rumbling noise. "Who is knocking?" "It is me, aunt Yiorgena. " I got up and opened and I saw the ill-Vasilio, the worthless, the rotten one, the son of--. He sat down to ask me, "Aunt, where is my uncle? Aunt, where is Vangelio?" "The doctor sent us a letter for Vangelio to go up [to Athens] where the good doctors are for Vangelio to be cured, for dhropikf to go away. " So, me, the cow of the pasture, I revealed everything. "Your uncle is in Tzimova [Areopolis], in Tzimova is Vangelio going for the medicine." He didn't believe me he was looking around

Mia mera mfa vradhinf mesa imou ki etighaniza ke koutalidhes eftiana k' i porta mou etsahalepse Ambios fne pou htipa? Egho {me thia Yioryena. Sikothika ke anixa k' idhia to palio-Vasilio to tipotenio to lovo ti - - ton iyio. Ki ekatse ke me rotise Thia ambon' o bapa mou? Thia ambon' i Vangelio? Mas ihe ghrama o yiatros na pai panou i Vangelio pou fne i kali yiatri i Vangelio na yiatrefti na dis efiyi i dhropiki. Ki egho i gheladha ti nomis ola tou ta martiriza. 0 barba zou sti Tzimova sti Tzimova k'i Vangelio ke pai yid to yiatriko. Ekinos dhe me pistepse eyirize ki etiraze

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in the lower tower and in the yard, he climbed even to the peak [of the tower]. Then he got up and left and went to Tzimova, to cursed Areopolis, together with Alexandros. There he found his uncle sitting in the cafe. "What brought you here, Vasilio?" "Order me a coffee while I greet Vangelio." And he found my Vangelia, she was in her bed. He sent Alexandros for cigarettes, for tobacco. In the time it took Alexandros to go and to come, he took out the gun that he had in his shoe, he gave her a bullet, and ate her vastayia [that which holds the body together; from the verb vastdzo, meaning to hold up as a foundation]. "I was screaming it that they are going to kill me, this ill-Vasilio, to eat my share, me, who was proposed to by four grooms from Limenas

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ke se katouia ke s' avli anevi mehri ti kor{f. Ki apei sik6thi ki efiye ki edhiaike sti Tzfmova sti magouf Are6poli mazf me ton Alexandra. Ekf fvre to bdrpa tou sto kafenfo ekdthota Ambou evrethis Vasili6?

Dhiataxo ena kafe ki egh6 tha idhou ti Vangeli6. Ke fvre ti Vangelia mou ftane sto krevati tis. Estile ton Alexandra yid tsighareta yid kapn6. Ki 6so na pai o Alexandras 6so na pai ki 6so na 'rthf evghale to peristrafo pou t6he sto papoutsi tou tis edhose mid bistolia tis efae ti vastayia.

Zas t6legha, zas t6skouza 6ti tha me skot6sousi touto to palio-Vasili6 yid na me fai to mertik6, mena pou me zitfsasi tesera Limeni6tika

who were the best. First and foremost the child of-who had a huge store, and Lazaros of--, who is a young merchant, and Yiannis of--, a prestigious young man to whom I was inclined myself, for he is from high status clan; and the child of--, who has the flour mill and a store in Limenas. Why then to kill me and not to marry me off?"

pou fta ta kalitera. Proto ke dhe ki olou mbrastd tou - - to pedhf pouhe kotza mou maghazf ki o Lazaras tou - pou fne embor6poulo ki o Yidnis t ' - opou 'ne neos ekleht6s s' ekfnon eklina ki egh6 ti ene kapetan6poulo ke tou - - to pedhf p6hi ton alevr6milo ke sto Limena maghazf. Yiatf na me skot6sousi ki 6hi na me pandrepsousi?

Vangelio, the precious one, the white fattened hen who had the big inheritance.

I Vangeli6 i eklehtf i dspri i k6ta i pahouli pouhe ti mbrfka ti mboli.

The procession of Vangelio's body through the villages was a major event, vividly recalled, although the details of the killing are low voiced by the concerned clans to this day. The following is narrated by a female relative of Vangelio, an affine of her clan. [46] I remember they had placed straw on both sides of the mule and Vangelio on top. She was tall and beautiful, and oh, when I saw her! I was in shock. Her mother and father were crying, crying! They said to me, "They ate Vangelio." I said, "But she was at fault herself." "No!" her father screamed. "She was not at fault!" You should have seen how her parents were mourning her, the ill-fated ones. Another Maniat had engaged her, and he wanted her [even pregnant]. Afterwards, of course, other women did the same thing, but they did not get killed. My father was telling her father, "Come on, don't be so upset. Your child was at fault after all." "No! And if she were, it was not their business. I wanted her alive, even as a whore," he was saying. You see, she also had property. Everything was in the middle.

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Another woman recounts:

MALE RELATIVE.

[47] They used to place one sack filled with straw on the one side and one

The father was an old man! The first cousins decided and intervened because they were responsible for protection [surprised with my ignorant question]. It happened in a hotel. Somebody was accompanying her to prevent "the bad" [ill-fated event] from happening. He went off to buy cigarettes. Vasilio climbed up the stairs to kill her in her room. They say she looked at him with his gun and said to him, "Hey, you Vasilio, you will kill me?" So, Vasilio did it, "Pritsilio," as they call him [pejoratively].

sack on the other side of the mule and the dead on top in the middle. They would pass the dead through the villages. This is more dramatic. They did bring their daughter [Vangelio] back to bury her [in the village] despite the fact that your grandfathers did not want to mourn her and such, for she had offended them. And she did offend them of course .... But they brought her back, her father and mother did. People say that her mother took all her dotal to the cemetery and hung it there on the monument. People would ask her, "Don't you need it?" I was a child, I remember them saying it. If the dead was unmarried and the only daughter and child, people would do that [take her clothes to the cemetery].

ETHNOGRAPHER.

What happened to her property? MALE RELATIVE.

Nothing! Her father remarried later and through his second wife had another girl [pause]

The following is a discussion with a male agnate of Vangelio.

ETHNOGRAPHER.

[48] MALE RELATIVE.

But your in-law [narrative 46] claims that Vangelio was already proposed to and engaged to another Maniat, even after her pregnancy was known.

They say she was very beautiful. They also say she was an only child and had a big property. [Pause] She became pregnant by a relative. Her cousins living in Mani at the time, had a lottery among themselves to decide who would kill her. They excluded from the lottery two male relatives, a professor and a doctor, both residing in cities. These two were the highest status males of the clan and they [the council] did not want to involve them with the law. So, they had a lottery. It fell to the youngest, Vasilis [or Vasilio], who also happened to be her closest relative. It all took place very quickly among them. Once grandpa [the professor who had been exempted from the lottery] heard about it, he was furious.

MALE RELATIVE.

This is all her nonsense! [with contempt] And if this was true, it happened before the pregnancy was known! ETHNOGRAPHER.

But how do you explain, then, why her father opposed the killing, if this was customary? Other fathers did not oppose for instance. MALE RELATIVE.

ETHNOGRAPHER.

But the mother and father did not want her killed. How could the cousins make the decision on their own and execute it? They were not even her brothers. MALE RELATIVE.

This is irrelevant! [abruptly, authoritatively] ETHNOGRAPHER.

The decision of the father is irrelevant?

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She was an only child and her father of course loved her dearly. [pause] Your grandpa [the professor exempted from the lottery] by no means wanted them to kill her. He did not know about it. They decided and did it in his ignorance. He was furious when he learned it. The cousins knew his thoughts about it, because he had intervened in other cases. Grandpa always intervened to reconcile. In one case, it was rumored that a remote relative of ours (who nevertheless was clan, and as you know the clan in Inner Mani was the important thing) had a boyfriend. Her father and mother were chasing her to kill her. Vangelio's killing had already happened. So, grandpa did not want the clan to be involved in blood be'

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cause now the clan had produced scientists, educated people. He did not want it to get dirty again or molested in criminal courts. There was also a humanistic issue here, to kill a human being just like that. ETHNOGRAPHER.

How did grandpa come to know about this other possible killing? MALE RELATIVE.

He was immediately notified. ETHNOGRAPHER.

In order to intervene? MALE RELATIVE.

Most likely. Because it is true that among all those maddened ones who say kill her, there is always a wise one who says why kill a human being? He was notified because people suspected that he would intervene. But it seems that she was very sertikia [seductive, looking for it]. Anyway, when he learned about it, he said to the clan, "Don't harm her. She is under my protection." ETHNOGRAPHER.

Did he go there, to the village, in person? MALE RELATIVE.

It seems so. And he said, "I will find her a job in Kalamata [where he lived and taught then], and I will keep her at home." Indeed, he found her a job. She worked in a warehouse. He was teaching in the-[school] and he had lots of contacts with merchants. She was a young woman of twenty-five or twenty-six. When she was asked about her relation to grandpa, she would say, "He is my first cousin." He was actually fourth or fifth cousin to her. Later he also found jobs for her two brothers, because he had a very wide network due to his position and status. He took her home and told her, "Stay here until I marry you off to somebody." She had her own room. But as soon as she came to Kalamata, she started the same behavior. One night, grandpa's youngest brother heard weird noises from downstairs. He ran to grandpa and said, "She is downstairs with a boyfriend." Grandpa jumps down. They heard him and the

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young boyfriend escaped. "That's what you are?" grandpa says to her. He took off the first step of the wooden staircase, and there he begins [beating her]. Your grandma used to tell me that he had beaten her so hard that for a month she couldn't move from the bed. He said to her, "I brought you all the way from Inner Mani to ruin me?" She did not stop. He saw that unless he married her off, he was in trouble. So, he found her--, a shoemaker. She was indeed a beautiful woman. Everything turned out well. In fact she gave birth to four sons! For twenty years, while grandpa was alive, she would pass by the house to see him very often. He was the one who saved her life. The very recollection of Vangelio's lament and of the oral histories that have congealed around her death encode a litigious arena of claims and counterclaims concerning the legitimacy of her killing. These claims can, on one level, be identified with the various segmentary groups of the clan which side with the killer or with the victim. On another level, the very fact that the illegitimacy of the killing is passed down in time via the medium of moirol6i (lament) and the oral history of the mourning ritual, indicates that this social criticism emanates from a specific gender space. This type of dissent is always informed by the political tensions between the female-dominated klama, where death is mourned, and the all-male yerondiki, which in this case was the institution that ordered the killing. As stated earlier, conflicts between klama and yerondiki often express conflicts between household and lineage and/or lineage and clan. Vangelio's case illustrates this. The historicization of this event emanates from the household and is antagonistic to the decisions of the yerondiki. The very fact that the chorus of women both inside and outside the klama have preserved the lament, is indicative of the sanctioning functions of witnessing which, in this case, legitimize the position of the household. The claims and counterclaims concerning the legitimacy of the killing are further complexified by the historical transitions occurring at the time of the event and afterwards. The interventions of "grandpa" reflect changing cultural codes. When interviewing men of the clan about these events today, the response is a tense silence and brief commentaries, precisely because first, they may feel that the original decision of the male yerondiki (council of elders) was legitimate; second, they are aware of the political position of the opposing lineage; and third, with the modernization and urbanization of Inner Mani these honor kill-

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ings are perceived as illegitimate by the society at large. From the perspective of Maniats, this killing is recent history and some of the protagonists and/or their immediate kin are still alive. The feud still prevails as an undercurrent of tension, and its status as a historical event is relativized by the knowledge of how easily it can be transformed into a contemporary issue. The feud is not only reproduced in time by the laments and oral history but also by the appropriate maintenance of silence on specific subjects between lineages and clans. It is perpetuated by residual boundaries, social and interpersonal, between different segmentary groups of the clan and by the dissemination of surrogate conflicts that appear on the surface to have no connection to the original killing. Feuding has many temporal components: the immediate and physical acts of violence; the construction of a new mosaic of boundaries, separations, reciprocities and nonreciprocities, new networks of shared substance and the breaking of old cycles of shared substance. These new trajectories of fission and fusion reflect the process by which corporate groups reorganize collective identity around an emergent, polarizing event, which itself gives rise to subsequent series of polarization and exchange. Furthermore, this type of conflict produces explicit metacommentaries on cultural codes that are usually taken for granted. What can be claimed to be a straightforward honor killing is subverted by the female discourse which intimates, in the case of Vangelio for instance, that behind official obligations to clan honor lie economic interests. This indicates that cultural codes can become a dialogical arena subjected to multiple valuations by different antagonists. The place for this contestation has been the mourning ceremony, where conflicts emerge in a sharper profile than they often do in everyday life.

The discourses that opposed the yerondiki in the previous episode revolved around the concept of "share" (merdhik6 or mertik6). "Share" is linked to the notion of moira (fate), luck, property, inheritance, chance, and time. The share is central to the procedures of partible inheritance-property was distributed by the parents to all male heirs through lottery or other games of chance. The connection between chance and the division and distribution of an inheritance links one's share to moira: in partible inheritance one receives by lottery the share he is fated to obtain. That share is his moira, as good or bad luck. A lottery was

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also held among male agnates to decide who would kill Vangelio. It is the killer's fate, decided by chance, to carry out that task. All these sedimentations of the concept of "share" are condensed in the term xaklirospord. It must be kept in mind that although this term denotes a single person or category, it connotes a whole network of social relations. As stated above, xaklirospord designates the sole female heir of a household and explicitly refers to the absence of male heirs. A xaklirospord is inherently transgressive, for she violates the ethics of partible inheritance. An etymological analysis of the term (x-a-kliro-spord) confirms this. Kliros means lottery, token, and it originally referred to a little stone or pebble used as a sign (semfon) of lottery. It can also refer to anything that is shared or divided or obtained by lottery. 3 Akliros refers to someone who has no inheritance, share, or land and implies a person who has no luck and is poor. It also refers to anything that is left undivided. A synonymous term is amoirastos, meaning undivided, without share, and implies dmoiros, meaning without fate. In the Maniat dialect, the term akliros refers specifically to a childless person. Xakliros, however, refers to a person who has only female children. The verb xaklirise (past tense) refers to a household or clan that has lost all its males and any share, property, or inheritance it possessed. Finally, spord means seed (and the act of seeding). It also metaphorizes yenid, or origin (as in the English "he came from good seed"). All these terms recapitulate the motifs found in both the lament ofVangelio and the oral history of her death. When Maniat women insinuate the economic interest behind the honor killing ofVangelio, they are simply giving an extended commentary on all the social ramifications of the term xaklirospord. When Vangelio is depicted in the lament as accusing the killer of "eating" her "share," the term xaklirospord is, in this case, shifted from its explicit economic meanings and is metaphorically applied to the biographical condition of being without fate, luck, or share of time. Death is frequently equated with theft, illicit consumption, and flesh eating. Thus, the phrase to "eat my share" accuses her killer of stealing and eating her property but also of consuming her share of life, and time. The initial situation predicates Vangelio as a source of pollution (dishonor), but moirol6i and oral histories transfer impurity from Vangelio to her killer. The ill fate of Vangelio, her violent and premature death, is transmuted into the fate of the killer. The notion of "eating" and theft does not only stigmatize the killer, but it is extended to the male yerondiki and its decision. The killer is characterized as "worthless," "ill fated," and given a nickname which is a pejorative modification of his name.

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The following stories exchanged between two middle-aged women illustrate the above. [49] FIRST WOMAN.

Our uncle [the killer of Vangelio] from Tambouria [Piraeus] had not set foot here in Mani for many years, after an incident [Vangelio's killing] with our family [in the village]. When he came back, he was holding his new gun from America, beautiful and shiny, here in our sten6 [narrow street in front of our house]. He was observing it with Nikos --,who had asked to see it. Nikolou [or Nikena, Nico's wife] had a young daughter. When her father was examining the gun, she ran towards them. The gun shoots and kills the girl. SECOND WOMAN.

You understand what it means for Vasilio to come back one day and the next day to become a killer again! Madness! We set out for the ceremony. Here comes aunt-- [from Vasilio's clan], and she "takes" the lament because, you see, politics characterize some families and is kind of hereditary. Let me speak and don't oppose me . Nikena, come close [addressing the mother of the dead girl], make your heart like stone. Nikena, I beg you not to put a curse on the ill-fated Vasilio, for he did not mean to commit such evil in my Spyrena's path.

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Emena na m'afisete ke min m'antistomizete . Nikena zighoso konda ke kane petrini kardhia Nikena se parakal6 esi na min katarastis to atiho to Vasili6 yiati dhe to ithele na kami tetio kak6 sti Spirena mou to sten6.

you, the child of an honored father and of good origin, for politics was taught to me by my aunt, Yiorgulena, the pillar and the precious one. Listen,--, it was not my mule [that was killed] nor was it my oxen, it was my little girl. And you knew it well that was a good child, prudent and beloved, and I knew it well from the past that he was an old hunter [referring to Vangelio's killing]. Where are you, aunt Yiorgulena, who brought me here to these households and the white chamber? Bring me now the divorce I don't want --[husband], for this day I am left with no child, let my others be well.

6pou ise patr6s pedhi ki ap6 kali kataghoyi ti mena tin politiki emena me tin emathe i thia mou i Yiorghoulena i P6li ke i Preveza. Akouso-dhen ita to moulari mou dhen ita to zevghari mou ita to koritsaki mou Ki esi to ghn6rizes kala 6t' itane pedhi kal6 fr6nimo ke aghapit6 ki egh6 to ghn6riza kala ap6 ta hr6nia ta palia 6ti ita kinigh6s pali6s. Pou ise thia YiorghoUlena edh6 6pou me ferate edh6 std - edh6 st6n asprone onda Ferte mou to dhiaziyio dhen tone theou to - ti mera ti simerini egh6 meno dhihos pedhi ke nane tala mou kala.

A third woman here interjects amending the last verses: FIRST WOMAN.

Ah! She [mother of the killed girl] did not let the mourner finish. She lit up and burned (anapse ke kdike)! Close your mouth, - - , and leave politics aside,

Kamb6sou-asta me tin politiki

Get lost from my sight you, Niko --[husband]. I want the divorce I will scream it out loud! Where are you, aunt Yiorgulena?

Fiye ap'ta matia mou brosta esi vre Niko - - , egh6 theou dhiaziyio tha to fonaxo fonahtd Pou 'se thia Yiorghoulena?

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SECOND WOMAN.

And the whole world was shaking. And what of Vasilio [alleged killer]? He was present [at the ritual] and sitting silent. His situation was dramatic. But it was not his fault, the poor thing! The girl's father shot her, but the poor one [Vasilio] took it on himself because the wife would kill the husband. She half realized the truth. She thought to herself, "Well, both men were playing with the gun, so ..." This lament finalizes the transfer of pollution onto Vasilio, which began in the lament sung by Vangelio's mother. The two laments taken together constitute an ongoing juridical record in which the second lament is a response to the first. Here Vangelio's killer is identified as miasmic-a disseminator of pollution, bad luck, and ill fate. Several similarities between the first and second killings establish further links. In both cases, we are dealing with the death of a kinswoman by a kinsman. Both killings were committed with a gun, and, in both cases, the father of the victim was in proximity to the event and played an ambiguous and/ or unsuspecting role. The opening lament in the above account (no. 49) is sung by a close and elderly kinswoman of Vasilio, attempting a reconciliation by appealing to wider corporate kin connections over and against the immediate ties of the household. For in this case there are two close male agnates in opposition to a female affine, the mother of the dead girl, that is a representative of an outside clan. It is in this context that the mother's appeal to her natal clan and her call for a divorce should be understood. Such actions can implicate natal clans in revenge. She responds to the initial lament of reconciliation by countering its assumptions. She accuses the mourner of playing politics, i.e., the agnatic politics of the male domain. In her own lament she revalues a female child by contrasting it to farm animals. She implies here that the first mourner has covertly placed greater value on the life and status of the two male agnates thereby devaluing the girl. She then valorizes her daughter as she devalues her husband by demanding a divorce. By demanding a divorce, she also implicates her husband in the killing of the child. A characterization is given to Vasilio: "an old hunter." He has incurred pollution from his first killing, which has not been eradicated with time but has become his share and fate, which can implicate others with whom he comes into contact. The gun is identified as coming from a foreign land. That which destroys household order comes from the outside. The foreignness of the gun is linked to Vasilio's exile after the killing of Vangelio. This is a direct inversion of

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one of the traditional mechanisms of setting male status in Inner Mani: according to warrior ethics, weapons acquired from foreign lands, usually as a result of piracy, generated status. In the commentary following the lament, a kinswoman of the killer hints that he took the blame on himself for an act committed by the father of the girl. She positions Vasilio into a self-sacrificial role. She uses this event to imply that even in the first killing (ofVangelio), having been chosen by lottery, his function involved an act of self-sacrifice on behalf of the corporate group. In that first case he defended the clan honor; in the second case, his "acceptance" of guilt, his silence, is an attempt to preserve the unity of the household of the dead girl. From one perspective, the dialogical relation of the two laments separated by many years serves to seal the defiling status of Vasilio and to confirm the illegitimacy of the first killing. From another perspective, the linkage of the two events serves to vindicate and purify the killer through the imagery of the sacrificial substitute.

I was there in that village a long time before I met him. They were telling me stories about him, Uncle Vasilis, who is very old. I even met his son, a young kid, and I had seen his wife separately but never together with him. One day, they said to me, "Uncle Vasilis is sitting up there in the tower. Why don't you go see him?" I went up. His wife showed me around the tower. I sat with him on the veranda for almost half an hour talking casually. He was a mediumsize man in his eighties, sitting quietly on his veranda. He answered politely all sorts of questions in a gentle voice and asked his wife to treat me. I left in a light mood. As I was walking towards my uncle's store, images of the interview were replaying in my mind. I was contrasting his meek and retiring appearance to the stories they had told me about his late marriage, and I fell into a humorous mood. He fathered a child in his seventies, the wife was in her late fifties, and this was her first child. The clan had sent an elderly woman to "check the wife to see that the belly was no pillow." In the midst of these reflections, I suddenly froze in the middle of the pathway. His lame eye stuck in front of my eyes: "Oh, my God! That's him! The killer of Vangelio." In the past, I heard the story about the killing, but I never made the connection, nor did the villagers, or my kin, make it for me. The lament, excerpts of which I had heard many times because it is a classic, occurred to me at the same moment I recalled his lame eye. It was a subconscious connection. In the

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lament, the mourner calls him lov6, a term which implies that something is beginning to rot, or has a defect, and therefore is worthless or useless. For me, his eye was lov6. That metaphor from the lament hit me. I thought, "That's him!" The sign of the lov6 was his fate written on his body. Whether or not it was his eye that the lamenter was referring to, my delayed recognition of who he was had been mediated by her lament, whose verses had stuck in my mind. She renamed him in the lament, fixing his moral status, and in turn, his body carried a physical signature of this moral status that was linked to the lament. For me, his lame eye, the sign of lov6, was the last manifestation of his share and fate originating in the killing of Vangelio. Yet, I could not believe the encounter! The whole incident was always a distant history to me. I froze when all the associations clicked in my mind, because all of a sudden, the ghost of the killer was in front of my eyes, the past was in the present.

WOMEN AND PRIESTS VOICE AND TEXT

Mourning Ritual versus Funeral • The klama (mourning ritual) can take place in one's home, in the village church, or even in a village square, depending on available space. If the deceased was based in Inner Mani and has a large enough house to accommodate the mourners, the mourning ritual will take place in the house. An urban Maniat whose body is being returned to her/his native village for burial and who has no kin to properly accommodate the mourners will be mourned in the village church and/or outside of it. During the wake, whether it takes ptace in a church, village square or in a house, the priest is absent. As a male and an official of the church, the priest takes no active part in any aspect of the klama except its termination. When mourning takes place in the house of the deceased or of a close relative the priest will visit to bless the house and its inhabitants. His appearance sign~ls to both male and female mourners that the time to move the corpse to the church approaches: If the klama takes place in the church, his appearance signals the end of the mourning and the beginning of the Orthodox Christian ceremony. Inner Maniats do not consider the church a more desirable place to hold the ritual than a private house (on the contrary, lack of one's own home and clan support is a cause of anxiety and pity), nor do they consider a klama held in a church more sacred. During ceremonies that take place in church, there is very little or no interaction with the icons and other religious symbols. As an architectural, religious text, the church is peripheral and even irrelevant to the performance of the mourning ritual. A ceremony that does not take place in the house is an occasion for apologetic explanation by kinswomen, insofar as it may be interpreted as the absence of proper kin support for the dead and his/her survivors. Holding the klama in church is seen as a rather unfortunate but necessary accommodation. From the tenth century to the early nineteenth, the vast majority of churches in Inner Mani were familial churches dedicated to a patron saint/ 159

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ancestor cult and located on clan property. The identity of a clan, its genealogical continuity with a patrilineal ancestor, its autonomous and differential identity in relation to other clans, and its claim to specific land, were invested in architectural symbols: the tower, the family church, and the family cemetery. Church and cemetery could be symbolic centers for lineages of the same clan that did not hold property at these sites because of an identification with an apical ancestor. When lineages fissioned and attempted to establish themselves as autonomous from the residual clan, building a familial church would be one sign of independence. The familial church was a rather small affair in comparison to the larger contemporary communal churches, although familial churches that represented large, powerful clans could attain the size and wealth of later communal churches. Many communal churches were originally familial cult churches of these clans. The familial church could be as small as three by five meters; and its architecture, particularly its stone archways and megalithic lintels, replicated the dry stone technology and design of towers. Similarly, almost all tombs built prior to the nineteenth century were miniature versions of the familial church, characterized by the same arch construction. The familial cult church is recognized by the absence of the characteristic dome of the larger Byzantine church. The care and maintenance of these familial churches was the responsibility of clan women and these smaller churches lacked a bema, a space which in larger churches is forbidden to women. The cemetery and ossuary of the clan were adjacent to the church. Each familial church was dedicated to a patron-protector saint. The particular saint was linked by name to the apical ancestor. The majority of churches were dedicated to male saints, although churches dedicated to female saints or the Virgin Mary were not unknown. The naming pattern of familial churches reflects a conflation of ancestor cult worship and Christian hagiography. This reveals the local articulation of Christianity with pre-Christian religious systems. It must be noted again here that Inner Mani was the last region of Greece to convert to Christianity. Its conversion date is figured to be as late as the ninth or tenth century, and even this is difficult to determine, because many of the oldest churches are built on coastal sites and do not necessarily reflect affiliation with specific villages and clans. The vast majority of villages were located inland, and coastal settlement of Mani during this period was sparse due to piracy (Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos 1985, 22-27; and Wagstaff 1977a, 165-71). From 1821 onward, after the establishment of the Greek state, two significant patterns appear in reference to church and cemetery location. Government

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legislation abolished familial cemetery plots on household property and mandated the establishment of centralized cemeteries at a distance from the village. Concurrently, communal churches were built by several clans, which precipitated the decline of the familial cult church, although Alexakis states that familial churches are still built (Alexakis 1980, 156). The gradual centralization of church sites also coincided with the weakening of kin affiliation between priests and clans. In earlier periods, each clan had its own priest, sometimes more than one. These priests were infamous, secular figures who carried guns, even inside the churches during ceremonies, and fully participated in family feuds. With the centralization of church sites, we find the introduction of priests into Mani from other parts of Greece. This brought about the establishment of a clergy with little or no affiliation with Maniat clans and certainly no strong association with the local, familial cult churches. The assignment of priests was mandated by civil law and rendered the priest a figure equivalent to the doctor and teacher. They were all legally bound to serve in a region assigned by the government (not necessarily their native area).

In contemporary Inner Mani, mourning ceremonies are linked to the household, while funerals are associated with the church. This distinction between klama (mourning ritual), and kidhia (funeral) can be understood as a contemporary version of the past tension between ancestral cult and centralized churches. The current use of the church for the klama is a practice determined by the phenomena of depopulation, migration to urban centers, and abandonment and decay of local towerhouses. It does not indicate an increase in the religiosity of Maniats, nor does it infer the religious institutionalization of the ceremony. This is apparent in the temporal bifurcation of the mortuary ceremony as a totality-a bifurcation which occurs invariably, whether the klama begins in church and gives way to the Orthodox Christian service or begins in the house and is temporarily terminated when the body is removed to the church. The time of the church ceremony is based on the Orthodox doctrine, which is also an accepted folk belief, that burial of the dead cannot take place after sunset. The Orthodox service and entry of the priest into the mourning ceremony is determined by this necessity to schedule burial before sunset. When a death is announced, women will specifically inquire about the location of the klama, making the distinction between klama and kidhfa or Orthodox Christian

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service. Women at a distance from the deceased's village, when informed about the time and location of the funeral and/or burial, will automatically backtrack and calculate when the klama will be taking place. Such calculations are not necessary among mourners who inhabit the same village with the dead. They know when klama (mourning ritual) begins and when kidhia (funeral) begins. ....._ Holding klama and the church service at different times discloses important performative, spatial, and gender segmentations. In common Greek usage, the word klama literally means the act of crying and does not have any of the ceremonial or juridical resonances that this term possesses in Inner Mani. In urban Greece, the standard denotation of the death ritual is kidhia, which literally designates the modern funeral. Until recent years, kidhia was a term little used by Inner Maniats in reference to the death rite. Currently, it is employed by urbanized Maniats and priests. Rural women of the older generation and elderly women living in urban centers who engage in mourning performances will either not use the term kidhia at all or make a distinction-linguistically or in the timing of their attendance-between kidhia and klama. In this case, kidhia begins with the moment of the priest's entry into the church and includes the Orthodox service, the procession from the church to the cemetery, and the burial service by the priest. Klama indicates the period of "screaming the dead" and lamentation that takes place at least several hours prior to the funeral and reoccurs at the completion of the Orthodox burial. The spatial distinctions between klama and kidhia can be organized around those mourning observances that take place within the household or village square in contrast to the Orthodox service that takes place solely at the church and later in the cemetery. It is important to note that even when klama takes place in church, those imbued with the Maniat mortuary ethics would not call this ceremony kidhia. They will identify kidhia always with the entry of the priest. Today, urbanized Maniats will conflate kidhia and klama, either making no distinction between the two, or absorbing the latter term into the former. In numerous cases this indicates an active rejection and even abhorrence of what occurs in klama and its dismissal as an irrational and even barbaric event, indicative of rural backwardness. Both the intentional and unintentional "erasure" of klama as a separate and distinct performative and ethical moment are indicative of incremental deritualization. The unintentional conflation of kidhia and klama shows that deritualization does not only occur by taking overt positions in cultural politics, but also proceeds through the unconscious penetration of one sign system by another. The term kidhia is not value free. It always carries the strong association with the institutional rites, iconography, and general ide-

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ology of the church. In relation to it, klama now often carries the sense of local, "informal," noninstitutionalized social practice. This conflation of the terms can be seen as a hegemonic victory of church rites and urban values. Yet, the opposition between the two institutions represented by these terms can not only be identified with current deritualization and culture change. This split between kidhia and klama reflects a long, historical antagonism in Greek culture. The term kidhia may well be a modern usage among Maniats, but the institution and conflict it metaphorizes are several centuries old. The split between kidhia and klama poses a complex problem for the ethnography of death ritual in Inner Mani and perhaps in the rest of rural Greece. For now, it can be asserted that to speak of a unitary mortuary ritual in Inner Mani, especially in its current struggle with the forces of deritualization, is a blatant ethnographic error. Rather, the ritualization of death has been profoundly bifurcated by oppositional performative practices, belief systems, social structures, and institutions. When examined in this context of deritualization, it is also apparent that the bifurcation of the death ritual is a vehicle for the reproduction of conflictual positions organized around both religious and gender codes. Kidlzra-should not be linked solely with the institutionalized role of the 'chu.rch, but also with an entire range of urbanized values that extend far beyond its ritual functions. Kidhia (funeral) is but one component of the historical ra-

tionalization of death, which involves medical and social welfare institutions, economic systems, and civil law. When klama (mourning ritual) takes place in the church, the latter is packed with women sitting and standing around the coffin, blocking the aisles and entrances. The entry of the priest into this feminized space is initially registered in a variety of noises, gestures, talk, and rearrangement of body postures and sitting positions from the outer edges of the mourning group. The mourning continues as he enters, and it is not until he positions himself directly over the corpse that the mourning singers stop. There is no gradual performative or iconographic transition from klama to kidhia that would give the impression that this is an integrated movement from one episode to another of a unitary ritual process. The transition is abrupt. The entry of the priest, the entry of the institution of the church into the klama, creates a disciplinary space. The previous polyphony, in turn, becomes imbued with an aura of chaos. The first overt sign of the advent of a disciplined space is silence. In Orthodox Church ritual, silence customarily organizes the relation between clergy and their congregation and expresses the piety, obedience, and submission of the congregation. The priest (usually accompanied by

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(

his sacristan and on occasions a choir) creates the space of discipline by first imposing a boundary between his body and the bodies of the women through processional movements. The waving back and forth of his silver censer literally creates an empty physical space around his body, a sacred distance. The swinging movement of the censer makes a loud metallic noise that also contributes to the construction of a visual and acoustic border around the priest. As he enters, he immediately begins to chant the service in a loud voice, attempting to overpower the polyphony of the klama. The priest's entry does not only mark the appearance of the religious institution, but also a gender defined performance. The loud voice of the priest is a continuation of the abrasive, high-volumed vocal tones with which Maniat men address women in almost all social contexts. The priest imposes his presence onto the klama with typical male postures, and although he stands by the corpse, his sensory relation to it is visual. This is also true for the male kinsmen during their rare moments of entry into the klama. The priest's relation to the women mourners is also visual. There is no verbal address to them or acknowledgment of pain and loss, as there is no touching of the corpse. His positioning by the corpse is thus a literal attempt to separate women from it, to disrupt their centering around it, and, by implication, the exchange of shared substance among the mourners and between the mourners and the dead. The iconography of male entry here is amplified by the occasional presence of a male choir ( psaltis) who can assist the priest with his ritual tasks. This choir usually consists of one or two local men. The response of women to all this is explicit. Not only does mourning singing stop, but the entire acoustic and corporeal repertoire that constitutes the "screaming of the dead" ceases. Women rearrange their body postures, fix their scarves, and silence their weeping. The dramatics of self-inflicted emotional and acoustic violence, the ethical signs of pain, go underground. This moment is anticipated well in advance by women mourners, and whether the klama is taking place in the house or in church, the singing, the monologues, and the dramatization of pain intensify before the priest's arrival. The initiation of kidhfa is a moment of physical and social separation from the dead, and it is experienced as rupture. In their monologues, women during the mourning ritual will literally warn the dead that she/he is about to be taken away and plead with the dead to remain: "The time is approaching," "Change your mind!" These appeals to the decisionmaking capacities of the dead reveal the social relations of the klama, the shared substance between the living and the dead, which overrides any notion of biological death and challenges accepted beliefs in the absolute separation of the

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soul from the body. Urban witnesses to this drama experience it as irrational and as a display of ignorance, while the religious orthodox Christians see it as idolatrous. For both groups, biological death overrules all other realities; the dead have already been taken. These interplays of dramatic separation, male entry, and institutional colo- · nization of a female space have further acoustic dimensions. The Byzantine chant sung by the priest and his choir is aesthetically, stylistically, and ideologically antithetical to the moiroloi (lament). Byzantine chant is a refined, textual product of centuries-old literacy. It is defined by stylized conventions and a fixed musical and linguistic text. Its ornamentation does not at all resemble the acoustic ornamentation of pain that characterizes improvised moiroloi. Here ornamentation does not override texti' The displacement of the mourning singing by the Byzantine chant encodes a confrontation of two musical cultures, which in turn expresses the historical divergences between two institutions-one local, oral, and improvised, the other metropolitan and textual. This contrast of musical forms registers the bifurcation of the mortuary rite into the spaces of klama and kidhfa. The strategy of separating the dead from kin is carried on by the church during and after the service by characterizing the dead as sihoremenos (forgiven one) or makaritis (blessed one). Both terms refer to the purification of the SQlll of the dead, and they are designations that institutionalize the dead. Inner Maniat women perceive these words as depersonalizing their dead, and as rupturing their kin relation and shared substance. They instead refer to their dead, during and after the ritual, by their names and/or other metaphors of personal intimacy. The terms sihoremenos and makaritis have the same hegemonic function as the term kidhia. All three terms are in common usage in the everyday discourse on death in urban Greece and have a problematic, if not negative, association among Inner Maniat women who engage in mourning ceremonies. -'ifhe mourning ceremonies defer separation. The ethics of care, tending, , shared substance, and interiorization continue to keep the survivors in contact with the dead. The Orthodox liturgy instead places the church in an authorita1 tive position between the living and the dead. The church posits an absolute . separation between survivors and the deceased, between soul and body. The sharp contrast between this unmediated separation and the mediation of death in the Maniat drama became starkly clear for me when I attended a funeral for a non-Maniat relative in Athens immediately after spending a protracted period in Mani participating in mourning ceremonies. My relative's ceremony was indeed a funeral in conventional terms. What I had experienced in Inner Mani

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then was something else. A number of friends and relatives were standing half inside and half outside the church, engaging in sober conversations mostly irrelevant to the event. The deceased was placed in a coffin covered with flowers to the neck, hands crossed over the chest and holding an icon. On one side of the coffin stood the deceased's children and in-laws; on the other side, members of the natal clan, mainly elder sisters. People standing outside the cemetery church entered only when the priest started his ceremony. Prior to and during the ceremony, emotions of the close kin were contained, even hidden, by lowering the head. The priest passed through the ceremony quickly since there was another funeral waiting to be performed. The ceremony ended in the church with relatives individually greeting the dead by kissing the icon in the dead's hands or by kissing the forehead of the dead and the icon next. The coffin was rushed to the cemetery next door and placed in the grave and covered with dirt. Most of us attending did not witness this process of burial because of its rapidity. Once I reflected, after fieldwork in Inner Mani, "how can I ever fear death?" The physical distance between myself and death had grown so small after the experience of the Maniat klcima. Yet in the Athenian ceremony that day, I was terrified by the process I was witnessing. The Athenian kidhia disclosed the extent to which emotional effect could be determined by ritual; that fear of death and the dead could be constructed performatively. If the focus of the klcima is the interiorization of death and the dead, the goal of the Christian kidhia was to establish the rigid dichotomy between the living and the dead through the secular/sacred opposition. In this performative context, the classic Durkheimean definition of the sacred as that which is to be kept separate was evident; the separateness of the sacred makes it terrifying. This division also relegates the klcima to the secular and defines the deritualization of Maniat mortuary beliefs. In Inner Mani, the monosemic dominance of the church service is impermanent. The moment that the priest finishes his liturgy and the coffin is about to be lifted to be taken to the cemetery, the polyphony of pain, the feminine discourse, reasserts itself, and from that moment on till the completion of burial neither the church nor the women's discourse holds absolute dominance. There is a continuous, almost agonistic interplay between the two ritual domains, each connected to the other by a magnetic repulsion. It is a contest between the ethic of the separation of the living from the dead and the ethic of shared substance with the dead. In contrast to the church, the cemetery is a liminal space. Although most

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cemeteries have been centralized and are located at a significant distance from the village, at one time they were located on clan land and were for the use of clan members exclusively. Therefore, even today the cemetery is much more of a kinship space than part of the institutional space of the church. In the cemetery, the priest is only a temporary occupant, while in the numerous graves, the women have a material symbol of clan genealogies. For the moiroloyistres (mourners), the priest has his part to play, but that part does not have greater authority or legitimacy than their own ritual observances. Both Maniat men and women, especially during funerals, will voice criticisms of priests in general and of the officiating priest in particular. There is constant depreciation of the priest and his role in ceremonies that in some ways appears as an attempt to balance the ritual authority, space, and time that is relinquished to the priest. There is also a critical distance established by both men and women to the dramaturgy of the church ceremony. The priest's function as a ritual technician or specialist is analogous to the other technicians of the mourning ritual, such as the grave digger or coffin carrier-although the priest's role does occupy a higher status than these customary male functions. For women, the disciplinary authority of the priest is rooted more in his pedagogical functions as keeper and reader of text than in his religious power. In this sense, the priest is equivalent to a set of institutional figures that originate outside of Inner Mani: the teacher, the policeman, and the doctor. The authority of all these figures derives not only from their specific technical functions, but more so from their position in a single, hegemonic continuum: they represent the institutional complex of domination and authority formed by the church, state, and male gender. They constitute an ideological representation of whatever knowledge, social practices, decision-making functions, and social mobility - has been traditionally denied to women.{ The women in turn, especially the moiroloyistres, establish an ideological relation to these figures as evidenced by the {act that they often depict them negatively in their discourses. The performative role of the priest and the formal opposition between klcima and kidhia can be seen as a wide ranging dramaturgical tension. The conflict of ritual forms in the mourning ceremony reproduces the tensions and antagonisms that are present in the lives of the mourners: the opposition between men and women, between religious or scientific rationality and local forms of divination, between clan and external institutions. \

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Sitting in the neighborhood rougha (women's gathering place) one afternoon, two middle-aged women discussed the news of the day.

[5o]

FIRST WOMAN.

What happened at the church today, did you go? SECOND WOMAN.

They had consecration of bread, and later food, drinks, party. FIRST WOMAN.

I went in the morning. Later, I learned, there was dancing! [ironically] I instead lit a little candle for God to forgive all my dead. I decided last year that the priest is not going to take from me again. I'll feed and water my construction workers that I hired for four to five days, and this is the best forgiveness! SECOND WOMAN.

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memorial [of her dead], which after all is something necessary-that's how it was left to us by our ancestors-and all she took to the church was a dish of wheat. She too said enough with the God bless you .... On another occasion, in a klama taking place in a village square, several women mourners engaged at some point in critical conversations about the role of the priests. This was triggered by the delay of the priest way beyond his scheduled time for the present ceremony. As the "time was getting closer to sunset," the criticisms intensified. Women began to look at the sky every now and then as they were mourning; others exchanged anxious looks among themselves; more and more joined the critical discussions, alternating between mourning and complaining. They were commenting on the misbehavior of the priests, "their hunger for money lately," attributing their lateness to neglect and indifference. When some women voiced the issue of a possible "bad arrangement" for the present funeral, others responded that priests certainly would not delay a rich, well-paying funeral. When the priest showed up much later, the women gave way to him as usual. The ceremony was rushed through. The tension remained in the air too strong for any observer to miss. As soon as the priest finished, the women returned to their mourning.

Of course! Give to your worker and don't do charity, they say. FIRST WOMAN.

Last year when I brought the tray for the trisayion (blessing), he [the priest] took my five hundred drachmas and passed the piece of paper with the deads' names to the younger priest. . . . '~ren't you going to perform trisayion?" I asked. He had already taken off his vestments. He put them on again. I brought the bread for the forgiveness as they say, and everybody was grabbing, one piece for the priest, one for the deacon ... I said, "If you see me again, if you are ever given to eat even a bite from me again, write me!" SECOND WOMAN.

There was also a ceremony for Health, I heard. FIRST WOMAN.

Sure! [sarcastically] The priest will read to bless their names and make them well! I am pleased I didn't go. I lit my little candles at the cemetery in the morning and that is all. Theatricalities all the time? Enough with the "God bless you!" S. N., for instance, came to Mani for the one-year

Historical Context In her discussion of the ancient Greek lament, Alexiou (1974) identifies a dichotomy between discursive forms in archaic funeral rituals: threnos (thrinos) and epitaphios logos. Threnos was characterized by its emotional intensity, its improvised and antiphonic performative styles, its focus on the negative aspects of the separation of the dead from the kin group, and its sociological base in the discourse of women. In contrast, epitaphios logos was a later development that coincided with the emergence of the city-state. It was a product of literacy and took the form of written text. It praised the dead and avoided, "morbid," narrative themes connected to death. According to Alexiou, it emerged from the "social and literary activity of men" (Alexiou 1974, 108). The emergence of epitaphios logos and its related forms was also linked to a performative shift in the ritual stages of the mourning service. Threnos was explicitly linked to the preburial wake, an event tied to the household and feminine space. The epitaphios logos was associated with ceremonies that took place at the tomb site, and that part of the mourning ceremony that took place in civil space. In the polis, the epitaphios logos and its related discursive genres eventually supplanted the

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practice of threnos, and the performative focus of mourning ceremonies shifted from household to tombsite. Eventually the epitaphios logos became conflated with lamentation or threnos. With the development of Byzantine liturgy, the epitaphios logos became exclusively linked with those commemorative processions and laments associated with Easter Holy Week celebrations. The processional component of the archaic epitaphios logos seems also to have filtered down to the modem Greek funerary procession from church to graveyard, in which the priest and the iconography of the church occupy a central place (ibid.; Garland 1985, 90). The opposition between kldma (mourning ritual) and kidhia (funeral) replicates the dichotomies that once organized the relation between threnos and epitaphios logos: (1) the opposition of gender discourses, (2) the opposition be'tween oral and textual genres, (3) the opposition between personalized connection with the dead and depersonalization of the dead, and (4) the opposition between household and public institution. Kldma, like threnos, is linked to the performative space and temporality of the preburial wake, although in Inner Mani it is not limited to these. Kidhia and its liturgy are associated with the postwake ceremonial, the transfer of the body from church to cemetery, and the act of the burial. Like epitaphios logos, it is identified in part with the tomb site. Loraux is even more explicit than Alexiou concerning the cultural antagonisms between epitaphios logos and threnos (Loraux 1986, 40). The former was a component of civil discourses on the prohibition of lamentation of the dead and types of female emotional catharsis associated with these practices. Loraux characterizes this prohibition as "civic" and expressive of a political tension between state institutions and kin groups. The funeral oration as a literary genre, civic discourse, and male practice was an attempt "to suppress displays of excessive mourning because mourning was traditionally the prerogative of the family, but also allowed individuals who were 'full of complaints' to lament their own lot under cover of paying the dead the homage that was their due. In short, the lament gave vent to uncontrollable, because essentially feminine, emotion" (ibid.' 45). The civic discourse on proper mourning separated the kin group from the individual dead; but this polarity was a displaced codification of the appropriation of the dead by the state. The epitaphios logos originally commemorated the war dead and was concerned with the civic institutionalization of the dead, a process which was in direct conflict with familial claims particularly when these claims were associated with an aristocracy hostile to the institutions of the Athenian polis. The charge that excessive mourning was a selfish act on the part of

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the surviving kin, that it privileged the latter more than the dead and thus was a vulgar display, is one that has been echoed down through the centuries by a variety of institutional discourses, from Solonic law to the Byzantine church, and can still be heard today as a condemnation of the Maniat kldma. Loraux states that the exclusion of lament and its replacement by more restrained civic ritual was tied to condemnation of the "pathos of the dead" (ibid., 47); that is, the desire of the living for the dead, which was seen as the foundation of cathartic mourning. Pathos is semantically equivalent to the Maniat panos (pain), which also carries the sense of desire and lack. 1 The suppression of pathos is a variant and a historical anticipation of later institutional/religious attempts to create insurmountable barriers between the living and the dead. These various strategies, shifting from state to church and then again from church to state in subsequent historical periods, can all be seen as a disciplinary confinement of the dead, whether this confinement is effected for religious, political, and/or medical-sanitary reasons. These strategies of confinement can be viewed as central to the hegemonization of death rites. In other words, the social construction of the dead by legislative, religious, and medical proscriptions is dialectically tied to and may even alter the social/institutional ordering of the living. This focus on separation and confinement of the dead inadvertently discloses the role of the dead as a crucial component in a contrainstitutional social imaginary. -Although the Byzantine church made many accommodations to preChristian ritual practices, it took a negative position towards the oral lament tradition and its cathartic drama (see also Corrington 1989). The church regularly condemned lamentation as unseemly and in one instance it was denounced as blasphemous (Alexiou 1974, 28). The self-inflicted violence of women was particularly condemned as the desire to protract improper relations of the living with the dead. As Alexiou informs us, this was characterized as a "wild desire" (ibid). Pathos for the dead in Byzantine discourse was countered by proscriptive strategies which, as in the classical polis, were based on the institutional program of separating the living from the dead. Aries identifies a rupture between folk discourses of the dead and Catholic church liturgy in medieval Europe, as well as vocal condemnations of cathartic mourning practices by the church hierarchy. These practices were seen as rites planctus, the desire of the survivors to placate the dead (Aries 1981, 144-46). At issue here again is the trope of desire, of a social imaginary of death that is constructed outside of institutional discourses and practices. Aries sees the ideological separation of the dead from the living enacted in

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the physical confinement of the dead and in the concealment of the body. He excepts the Mediterranean region from this practice of corpse concealment, because to this day the face of the dead, in contrast to Northern Europe, remains visible and uncovered. Resistance to this practice of concealment was expressed, according to Aries, by refusing to use a coffin or cover the face (ibid., 168). In Inner Mani, the use of the coffin was a recent innovation. The coffin was initially a functional, undecorated artifact. The practice of burying corpses without a coffin, without a device for concealment, survived well into this century. An official church coffin with a false bottom was occasionally used to convey bodies from church to cemetery, but it was never buried with the body. The coffin was an artifact of the church, a material expression of the church's symbolic investment in the concealment and confinement of the dead.

Procession and Burial An elderly woman recollects:

[51] When the priest enters, the mourning stops. It begins again when they [relatives] take the dead out, walking towards the cemetery. Especially when the dead is young, it is a frenzy. Those days they were carried by hand, on foot. Now they are put in a car and off it goes quickly, quickly! The funeral must take place while the sun is not yet set. It is not proper to bury one after sunset. Once upon a time, there were children, ten to twelve years old, with three banners, a lamp, a cross, and they were leading the procession with the priests and coffin and all the people following. Many priests. Now, one priest is plenty. My mother died and there were twelve priests from the whole area. Things are changing now, things have changed a lot. ... They would place a sack filled with straw on the one side [of a mule or donkey] and one sack on the other side and the dead on top, in the middle. And they would pass the dead through the villages. You know, this is more dramatic. I remember in 1934, my husband's first cousin-he was a lawyer-died in Serres [Central Greece]. There were no cars those days, and they took him to Kalamata [Southern Greece] and from Kalamata on a boat to Trahila [village in Inner Mani] and from there tied him on the mule and brought him here to his parents. There was some crowd of people! Populations! [accompanying the procession] ....

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The old Maniat women, especially those who had only one child [buried in the cemetery], were passing the night in the cemetery! They would grab their bedclothes and go to the grave of their child. If God was raining, they were covering the grave for the water not to get in. This was done for as long as one could last [physically and emotionally]. I judge from myself.... I was four times a day in Anastasi [cemetery in Piraeus]. Now I have no more strength. I don't go at all. The long lapse of time and the fatigue [pause] bring silence. You have no longer the strength to beat yourself. Back then? I used to lock my door and let no one inside. I stopped [everyday activity] whenever I pleased. Now? Do I have the strength to do these things? Another woman describes the procession of one of her in-laws, who died in Piraeus and came to be buried in Mani. Her wish was to have a procession around Limenas and then to go to her home. That is, we circled Limenas once by bus and then home where we mourned her all night. And next morning we took her to St. Nicholas church and then to Monodendri [cemetery in Inner Mani]. Of course, kldma and lots of people. The processions of the dead from xenitid to the natal household, from household to church, or from church to burial are known as pombf or pardta. The pombf to household and to church carries the image of kin support, numbers, and strength-what the mourners refer to as "appearance." The procession of the corpse from xenitid to the natal household constitutes a reunification. On the contrary, the removal of the corpse from the household to the church and/ or from the church to the cemetery is understood by the women as extreme separation. Mourning reaches its peak with the "last separation," the burial of the corpse. The procession of the corpse to the cemetery is the dead's embarkation. It is a movement from inside to outside, from church to road. It is here that the polyphony of kldma, of feminine discourse, reappears. Traversing that road which ends in the graveyard is stepping out of institutional order (church and social hierarchy). The spatial movement from church to road is paralleled by the acoustic movement from monophony (the priest's discourse) to polyphony (women's discourse) and from male domination to male/female contestation. Although the pombf exhibits all the trappings of church ritual with its banners, icons, flowers, and priestly procession, the discipline of the church asserted with the entry of the priest into kldma cannot be maintained on the road during

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the procession to the cemetery. Currently, the desire of the priest and men to "finish" this procession and the burial with minimal female intrusion is aided and abetted by the automobile, which now often carries corpse and mourners from church to cemetery. The corpse is usually taken by truck while the mourners follow separately in private cars. The automobile plays a central role in the desymbolization of social space in rural society. The car empties the road of its traditional semantic content and symbolic associations. It reinforces an exclusively instrumental value of the road. Yet, despite the intervention of the car, symbolic space returns in the graveyard. A black mass of moiroloyistres form a distinct, chromatic-spatial unit around the grave, leaving the men and children on the peripheries of the site. Their congealed blackness contrasts with the diversity of colors worn by men, children, and urbanized relatives, both male and female. The residual opposition and tension between kidhia and klcima, which began to reappear at the departure from the church, becomes explicit and formal at the grave site. The two forms of ritualization collide and their inherent dissonance is foregrounded. There can be no illusion at this point that the performative shift from kidhia to kldma, or the superimposition of one upon the other, is an inbuilt, ordered sequence in which the two ceremonies are meant to complement and morally reinforce each other. Rather, aJ the grave site two distinct rites occur: the rite of \the priest and that of the women. The grave is dug on an east-west axis with the head facing west. The priest briefly performs his "last blessing" of the dead. During this liturgy, the coffin is lowered into the grave. At this moment, the kldma reaches another peak. What takes place is almost an acoustic struggle that often borders on discursive warfare between priest and women mourners. The entry of the coffin into the grave signifies the "last sight" of the dead person, the "last separation." Strands of the women's hair are thrown into the grave, together with dirt and pebbles, as the expression of pain reaches its most dramatic moment. As the dead disappears from sight, the polyphony of the kldma is amplified by a spatial polyphony or dispersal. The edges of the black cluster of moiroloyistres (mourners) slowly break up and spread outward in dark streams towards other graves in the cemetery. At the same time, the priest and the rest of the men and visitors move towards the exit. Usually, at the gate of the cemetery, the immediate relatives offer food to the participants, as the latter greet them and pay their respects. The food offered is fish soup and/or bread, which was in the past dipped into a dish of oil, cheese, or-as Maniat women would say-"the best one can afford." In the meantime, the black ribbon of women has dispersed into tiny clusters

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and scattered figures throughout the cemetery. In some spots, there are two or three women standing by a single grave, while in other spots solitary figures tend individual graves. The cemetery echoes with mourning. When the mourners eventually begin to depart in groups, there is always a single figure lingering behind; she has the most recent death. Many of these women have not seen each other for quite some time, for they either live in separate villages or have traveled to the ceremony from urban centers. The presence of the collectivity of the dead in the surrounding graves informs these reunions with the sensibility of shared substance and communal ponos (pain). This is a reunion of the women over their dead. Their meeting is affectionate: they stand or walk embracing each other, chatting with their faces almost touching, often whispering in intimacy. The cemetery begins to function as a cognitive map. The women will read the graves for the news of who has died, when and how, who tends the grave, and how well it is tended. The state of the grave "talks" about the moral condition of the living kin and/or the dead. This reading of the grave is organized by the ethics of kin support, care, and tending. The abandoned grave, the grave that is not properly washed clean, with its wick lit, its flowers fresh, is equivalent to the abandoned house. It constitutes an exposure of the inside to the outside, and because of the lack of kin "appearance," it is a sign of the naked and silent death. In or outside of the mourning ceremony, women talk to their dead. Conceptions of the domain of the dead are rather vague; the underworld is unknown. It is a negative space, one of lack and absence. That is why the women's talk to the dead takes the form of ironic and challenging riddles. The riddle encodes the unanswerable aspects of the other world. The riddle as a question without an answer becomes an antiphonic genre. It encodes the dialectic of language and silence, which itself stands for the separation of the living from the dead. The riddle is an appropriately polysemic language for the liminal space of the graveyard.

I came to the graveyard with one of my informants. The moment we passed through the gate, her expression and her pace changed. She held my arm. We were coming as a group, a sidro{ia, united by the topos of death. We moved slowly and stood by the grave. She held my arm as she talked to the dead: "Hello mother, I brought you Constantina. She is here to see you. Say hello to her!" After a moment's silence: '1\re you going to be rude to her? You won't say hello?!

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And she came from far away to see you. You know how far!" Her discourse, ironically organized around the polysemic imagery of xenitia, made the ground fall out from under me. Like a mourning song, her statements were directed not only at the dead, but also at the living witness. Her reference to my own xenitia, my long journey back to greet the dead as an expression of kin solida~~ty, ~as also pointing to the fact that she knew well how far I had gone. In the forei_gn land" normal social conventions are no longer practiced, people are rude; hke the dead, they do not respond.

THE SECOND BODY AND THE POETICS OF LABOR

Hertz and the New Body The theoretical investment of anthropology in the cultural construction of the body has detached the body from any exclusive biological determination. Ethnological theory transforms the body (soma) into a sign (sema). This translation has its roots in Hegelian semiology in which the sign is conceived as a body, a sensible vehicle for the conveyance of intelligible meaning (Derrida 1982). Exhumation, or secondary burial, occupies a special theoretical status in this framework. In his analysis of the secondary burial, Hertz detached both death and the body from biological determinism and disclosed an isomorphic eschatology between the corpse and the soul. For Hertz, reciprocal metaphorization endowed both the soul and the body with autonomous personalities. The essential thrust of Hertz's theory was the concept of death as transition and not as termination. Death was literally the topological movement from one classificatory status to another, and reburial was a rite that significantly affected the direction of this passage. This direction was reversible; the passage of the dead was not merely a linear rite of passage. The presence of the corpse in the world of the living symbolized the possibility of return. Hertz asserted that mortuary practices are not aimed at facilitating physical disintegration, exclusion, or erasure of the body, but rather at transforming the character of the corpse, reinscribing it with a new semiology that "turns it into a new body" (ibid., 43). Again, what appears as separation is in effect a series of gradual transformations that maintain the efficacy of the body as social nexus, as signifying center, while endowing it with a new value. The body here functions as a hinge, as a threshold in and of itself, and it remains so, even in the form of bones. The question is whether it functions as a manageable or unmanageable threshold. Any episode of separation, isolation, or exclusion of the corpse functions in Hertz's analysis as prelude to a renewed contact (ibid., 45). For Hertz, those beliefs and rites that focus on the separation of flesh and bones follow a sacrificial sequence: in order for a material object or being to pass

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from one domain to another, it must be destroyed in part or whole. Passage and journey here are tied to a necessary transformation of material character. This does not solely mean that the dead become components of a new social unit, a society of the dead distinct from that of the living, but that between the living and the dead, a new social relation must be constructed (ibid., 46). Hertz proposed that the separation of the dead from the living and the concomitant transformation of the corpse were analogous to the ritual separation of the male initiate from feminine domains and his entry into a male domain (ibid., So). Later theorists see this shift from feminine to masculine domains as the transition from flesh to bones, in which flesh is feminine and bones are masculine. For Huntington and Metcalf (1979), as well as Bloch and Parry (1982), this opposition represents decaying, disorderly fertility and sterile order. Bones and the dry symbolize male order, closure, and immobility. (A similar view of the imagery of death is discussed by Vernant 1983). For Danforth (1982), the reappearance of the dead in the form of bones in Greek exhumation is "disjunctive" (ibid., 65) because it is a false return. The message of the bones is ultimately that of separation. Depositing the individual's bones in the collective ossuary is the advent of the deindividuation and depersonalization of the dead. 1 Both Danforth and Huntington and Metcalf deploy the binary sets flesh/bones, wet/dry, where the dry symbolizes death, and the wet, life. The bones, as components of the dry separate the living and the dead. But if we return to Hertz's concept of a second body and the new social relations it entails, then bones can be seen as a communication device between two topological orders and two classes of beings. Their separation from the flesh is the necessary transformation of material character that accompanies all radical shifts in space and time. The dialectic of separation and contact is crucial in Inner Mani. But a moment of final separation coinciding with exhumation and a progressive deindividuation of the dead is highly elusive. The dead can return again and again to enter into the lives of the living through the trigger of other deaths that intensify the residual p6nos (pain) and pathos (desire) of those who engage in mourning. The deindividuation of the dead at any stage of the mourning process and afterwards is particularly offensive to the Maniats. Certainly the mourning songs, some of which have been preserved over a two-hundred-year period and which are always remembered by the name of both mourner and mourned, constitute the strongest evidence for the desire to preserve the individual character of the dead. The centrality of dreaming, and of long-term, intimate rela-

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tions with exhumed bones, indicates that the issue is not final separation from the dead, but maintaining contact between beings who have residual, social relations based on shared substance and exchange and now happen to inhabit separate domains. The problem of death, contact, and separation is organized by the imagery of xenitia (estrangement, separate habitation). Xenitia, as the most profound condition of lack and separation, gives rise to p6nos and pathos (pain and desire). These form the affective sensibility for those social relations organized by estrangement.

The Maniat Double Burial In Inner Mani, the dead is referred to as xer6s (plural xeri). In standard Greek, xer6s means dried out, stale. Xerenome means I am drying out, I am dying, and I am suffering due to physical and/or emotional exertion; that is to say, "I am drying out" due to aging, extreme cold or heat, hard work, crying. Besides mnemion, the ossuary is often referred to as kokaliara from the noun k6kalo, which means bone. The verb kokal6no(u) or kokaliazo(u), when referring to the dead, means to become stiff, hard. Metaphorically, one "becomes k6kalo" (bone) out of extreme cold, or heat, and the passing of time. Exhumation in Mani is called anakomidhi. Anakomidhi means the taking back, return, transfer of an object. Ana-komizo (or anakomidhizo in Mani) means I bring back or up, I transfer something (bones). The stem verb komizo in general means (1) to look after, cure, take care of, place in order; and (2) to lift up and bring something (in order to take care of it, look after it, preserve it). If death and burial invoke a movement from inside to outside, then exhumation is a reversal of that passage. It brings what was outside inside, what was down up, the dark into the light, and the wet into the dry. This natal imagery can be understood as a concerted attempt to socialize death at its most obscure, unapproachable stage, when the body lies buried in the grave. The passages of mourners, the dead, the flesh, and bones from burial to exhumation constitute the temporalities of death. When mourners refer to the time when a specific person died, they do not simply mean the hour or day of biological termination, but rather the period initiated by klama and terminated by exhumation and the depositing of bones (k6kala or osta) in the ossuary (mne-

mion or kokaliara).

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The following narrator describes elaborately the burial and exhumation of her mother-in-law. [53] NARRATOR.

The Maniats-according to their custom-when dying up [in Athens], come down to their birthplace. However, today that the villages have been deserted and there are no young women or youth for instance to open graves, we turn to the German unfortunately! [The "German" is a "hippie" who now lives permanently in one of the villages.] As you know, people pay today [someone to dig up graves]. But such things! [disapprovingly]. He would defile "the grandma" for us! [husband's mother]. So I did it alone, I didn't say a word to anybody. I don't like the fuss either, to have to print invitations and such. In the old days, of course, women did it all alone. The eldest women would gather and have a klama. Now these things have eclipsed, we are more [insensitive] .... It used to be done exactly three years after burial. Now that they place the dead in kamaria [cement crypts], the body does not dissolve. In the old days, "from earth to earth"; this is the right thing. "Grandma" had a wish. [We did not know it and] we had opened the grave, me and Sofia [close friend], after we received the news [death]. But when the funeral arrived we were told "our mother left an order to be placed on a stripodha [metal base] in the kamari!" Yes! To spoil a deceased's command? You don't dare it! For if something happens to you, you say, "You see what I get for not fulfilling it?" So we came back and dropped stones, dirt, etc. in the opened [unused] grave for it not to show open because it's "ugly" [bad]. The kamari is a two-and-a-half by two-and-a-half, or two by three meter thing. Deep into the earth about forty-five p6ntous. A square thing, a boxlike thing, made of cement blocks, with a little door. Inside there is a coffin case where the coffin is inserted and then sealed all around not to smell. These things have started many years ago. The old kama ria are made of stones and archlike. And there is the katav6thra [a hole] to push in the coffin from underneath. [Katav6thra means cesspool, pool of dirty water, sewer; voracious person.] Nowadays, things are made impressive, of marble, etc. In the old

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days, they'd bury the corpse in the lakos [grave] and on top marmares [megaliths] for the body not to be lifted by animals. This is still done. It is old, but it is still done today. So, the door of "grandma's" grave was too small because the coffin was too big and couldn't fit. What did we do? Since of course she had left an order! We brought the stripodha from home, we put them in the kamari. (Stripodha are the two iron-made pylons placed one across from the other, and you place the kasa [coffin] on top). What an order! For her not to be on the dirt . . . and get dirty. So, we took her out of the coffin on the sheet [by holding it], we placed her down, we then placed the kcisa [coffin], pushing it left and right to fit; one person from inside, the other from outside. We lifted her on the sheet and placed her in the coffin and finally covered her. In three years customarily, the grave is opened. [On many occasions], the flesh was on the bones. Yes! And people closed them [the dead] again. But "grandma" was completely dissolved. There was nothing, nothing! First of all, I had armed myself with self control and strength because I didn't know what I would face. I hadn't done an exhumation before. This happened two years ago. I only took aunt Sofia with me [next door neighbor]-alone I wouldn't know how ... but I was also scared. If others got to know about it, I'd need programs, commemorations, "breads," etc. We set out early in the morning. It was a winter day. There wasn't a single soul around! Sofia had done it before for her father and mother together with other women. But as I said, these days if you know how, fine. If not, [pause] ... You can't "open" your own people! You've got to hire someone [to do it]. We took a clean pail, a sponge, a bucket of water and straight to the cemetery. The door of each kamari is sealed all around with plaster for the odor not to leave from the inside out. In one-and-a-half years [after burial], we go back for memorials, for scents, etc. As we rub on it, and with the passage of time too, the plaster scratches off little by little. So when we arrived, the plaster was all gone; we opened the door, which was tied with wires and locks . . . We faced her. "Sofia," I said, "You'll go down first, I can't". The coffin had disintegrated, it was only the skeleton [whispering]. Something like a mummy. So immediately you recover from the first chill and go to work.

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How did you feel afterwards?

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We threw out the wood, straw (the coffin makers place a fake kind of mattress in the coffin), and clothes, socks, etc. that had dissolved. It was only the body. The only thing that had not dissolved was a little handkerchief of polyester. We threw it out too. Careful not to lose a single bone. First of all we took the head, the skull. We placed the bones in a pail as we took them out one by one. One was giving them [the bones from the grave] and the other was carefully taking them, for any scorpions and such. "Grandma" had two teeth and her eyes [pause] ... other than that ... [pause] Man is not recognizable; we are all one thing. Then we started, the tsambounes, the big bones including the arms. We cleaned the big ones, the spine, ribs, everything. Then we put in socks the two feet up to the knee, to catch all the tiny bones, and we lost none, because even the little toes have bones that tiny [pointing] .... We poured them out of the sock into the pail. We did the same for the hands. We found a little cologne bottle that she had asked to take with her and her syringe. These I didn't throw out because I am scared of the curses. So we put them in. We cleaned the grave well, we left no trace inside. Then Sofia came out too and we washed all the bones many times, very well! But grandma's bones were perfectly clean, neither black nor dirty. We rinsed them and placed them on top of the kamciri for the sun and air to see them. After they dried, we rinsed them with vinegar. We had a nice kaselciki [little chest], and we placed them in order. In fact, I had covered the bottom with aluminum foil and had sprinkled the bones with cologne. Then we closed them. Of course, this job takes time, patient time. I forgot to tell you that before all the above, before the exhumation that is, you call the priest for trisciyion [blessing] before you open the door of the mnemion [grave]. Then you do the exhumation whenever you want. Well that's how we learned it! [It's customary.] Then to place the bones in the kaselciki, you bring the priest. He says the words there, I don't know what he says exactly; he has a bottle of oil, he oils them [the bones]. They become a mess in there, the poor things! But then we leave them out in the sun again to rid them of the excess oil, and then with a clean white, cloth napkin we cover them, and their curtain falls . ETHNOGRAPHER.

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Afterwards? Why don't you ask me, my crown, [about] before? Before [the exhumation] I couldn't close my eyes [sleep] for a week. It is the first facing. Afterwards, whether a dog or a man, it is one and the same appearance; grabbing the tsambouna [big bone] and throwing it ... [pause] But the first facing ... [pause] For that, you must be armed with great strength, which I had. Afterwards? Disappointed [with life]. More disappointment, to the point to say, "That woman [her mother-in-law], for years the woman of a whole household, who had been working "hard with pain" [me k6po ke m6htho] all her life! to close her eyes and become "a handful of bones" [mia demela k6kala]! Not even a kilo! Not even a kilo of bones she was! She had at least her own people to exhume her. What about others who [don't] ... Aunt Sofia [throughout the exhumation] was very cool, very calm. She is a hard bone! I happened to participate in another exhumation many years ago. An exhumation of the old times. It was done with klcimata of course. Only that it wasn't tidy, good; that is, they may have left a couple of bones. I could see them but since it was a foreign exhumation [nankin] .... Untidy, they only cared to mourn. When the construction men came for the new family monument [mnemion] we are building now, I opened the old monument where I had not only "grandma" but also grandpa, uncle M., grandma K., and other ancestors. I found them all poured together and I got a new kaselciki and put them in. The old one had disintegrated, it was wooden. I cleaned them all over again. I found also grandpa's shaving razor. I put it back in. Soon we are going to exhume grandpa P. In substance, it is nothing [to be afraid ofj. Imagine, I want now to go exhume my father myself. I know now what I am going to face. Well, I may be moved more than during my mother-in-law's exhumation. Because, after all, a mother-in-law is a mother-in-law. And I didn't see my father when he died.

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Talking about her husband, another narrator gives her account of how she fulfilled the promise of a proper burial and exhumation.

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[54] Customarily, all are buried in the dirt in individual graves. Afterwards, the bones are transferred together. After three years they are washed and placed in a grave where one's wife, children and the rest of the household follow. My husband had arranged it himself because he forsaw he'd die and he knew he had his mother unexhumed for thirty-seven years (for financial reasons). Not being certain perhaps that I would do it, he had started to build a mnemfon. He left with the plea to me not to leave it unfinished. And on that order I gave my word that "If you die, if death is unavoidable, I'll make something much superior; that is, your head too will stay in the cemetery to show through the centuries." I kept my word and I'm happy for it. Three to five years passed, praying to be well [to fulfill her duty, to exhume him properly] ... because if he has not dissolved they say he has sinned and such things. So, I first did a test to see if the man has dissolved. Then one day with another woman, without any protection, i.e., gloves or anything, I went down three meters deep, I opened the kivot6 [ark] and found the corpse unrecognizable. I sat and with the smallest detail gathered even the last little bone; even a little tooth on the jaw. The clothes and everything were burnt from the humidity and the time. I burnt them [incineration] and then took the bones to wash them with water and vinegar and placed them in the sun to sun them. I took the local artist to finish the interior of the mnemfon [and the head sculpture of her husband on top of the mnemfon] and in a year's time I placed the bones in, and with that, all ended [her obligation]. I thanked the people who participated with "five [a few] words" from my life written [by moira] [that is, she recited an autobiographical mourning song]. I didn't officially invite people but there were none from the adjacent villages who didn't come. It was 1979. I thanked them from my heart. I simply announced the placement of his bones in the mnemfon and people poured in. Afterwards I invited them home. I said please, I don't have children to "reopen" my house, so come to "forgive." And they did. I fulfilled his wish. I also exhumed his mother, my mother-in-law. I placed her together in the kivot6 [ark] in an embrace with her kid, as he left me order. I did all these alone. The exhumation? You open the coffin and for a moment you only see a shadow, the whole dead. The shadow leaves in a fraction of a sec-

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ond. You first take the head. Then you take out the bones, and you keep on taking out. Others? They use "foreign" hands. There are specialists who bury people and specialists who unbury. All these things have hardened me. I can now face life with no .. sensitivity. Originally we had one mm:!ma [grave] for grandpa and grandma, etc. [i.e., apical ancestors]. But as time passes, kin relations become more distant, i.e., first, second, third cousins, etc. Most families have their own grave.

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Both of the above narratives reveal again the Maniat concern with the proper treatment of the body as an aspect of good death. In the first narrative, the deceased expressed a wish for her body to be placed on stripodha. She did not want her body coming into direct contact with the ground. This echoes an earlier narrative (no. 21, chapter 4) where the dying woman expressed a wish to be buried in a heavy protective woolen suit even if it were summer. The most negative condition for the body before and after death is its confinement in darkness and dampness. The sunless damp grave is a space where one is consumed by the earth. Entering a damp house, Maniats (as most rural Greeks) exclaim, "It's cold as a grave." Dampness is associated with disturbing cold even in summertime. In turn, darkness implies the inability to see and to be seen. To see is to exchange. Eyes interiorize. As the saying goes: "Eyes that don't meet, soon forget each other." Death and xenitia take one's eyes away. Vision, memory, recognition, and identity are intertwined. The loss of vision is the loss of memory and is equated with death; for death is the loss of time. Vision is continuous with hearing. It, too, is a form of witnessing. "Listen to see," as they would say when demanding your attention in everyday conversation. The manner in which darkness and dampness affect the destination and condition of the body overwhelms any concern about the final destination of the soul. The concern is always about the body in the cemetery. Moral valuations accompany the changing physical conditions of the body in the cemetery. In their narratives and laments, women subjectify and magnify the moral topography of the cemetery. Sitting in the dark, cool veranda of her modern country house surrounded by the flickering lights of the nearby towns, an urbanized woman ironically observed: "I guess that's what it is like to be in your grave in

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the cemetery ..." [in the darkness of the grave, the dead is surrounded by the flickering lamps of the nearby graves]. The gravestone is the substitute, double, and house of the corpse. Maniats, like the narrator above (no. 54), personify the dead with the architecture of the grave. Head sculptures of the dead are often placed on the grave. The shape of the eyes is always carved in detail. The gravestone is an object of pathos (desire) and p6nos (pain). Women have been known to sleep out next to the grave and to cover it with blankets in bad weather. The grave, like the house of the recently dead, is sealed and sanitized through symbolic acts redolent of orificial closure. Roofed enclosure indicates the erection of socialized spaces, the creation of interiors, and belongs to the positive direction of the upward. Edifices separate the inside from the outside. Yet, as a temporary abode for the dead, the grave is not as stable an edifice as the household. It is a mediating place, a site for transformations, an embarkation point, and as such it is also a kind of halfway house. Below the roofed enclosure of the gravestone is the lakos, the burial hole and a source of impurity. The lakos is the "eater of the dead." The lakos implies downward movement as passage to the outside. To the same extent that roofed enclosure, in the form of the grave edifice, generates a stable form for the dead, the lakos dissolves and destroys. It renders the identity and physical being of the dead transitory and impermanent; "itinerant and passerby," as the mourner would say. The word lakos designates not only the grave hole, but any hole in the ground, particularly those filled with dirty, stilled, or muddy water. To the polarities of the inside and outside, the up and the down, we add that of the dry and the wet. In Maniat culture, to be dry is to be inside and within the protective circle of the household; to be wet is to be exposed, to be outside of social order as represented by the kin centered household. The particular connotation of wet and dry in Mani differs from that of other cultures, and even other parts of the Mediterranean (Huntington and Metcalf 1979, 99-101; Dundes 1978; Bourdieu 1977, 129-160). In ethnological theory, the conventional gloss of wet/dry establishes an equivalence to fertility/sterility. The wet is associated with life-affirming powers and substances and the dry with rigidity and death. Given the aridity of the Maniat ecology, one would expect the wet to receive a positive valuation. Yet, in Mani the dry/wet opposition points to the significance of water out of place. Household water is controlled water, confined to the bottom of the house by stone cisterns. Stones are the preeminent dry and interiorizing material; they keep the wet in place. Water can be out of place if it leaks from the outside to the inside, or from the inside to the outside. The damp

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house exhibits signs of the outside, absence of kin, care, and interiority, and reveals abandonment. On the other hand, dried out (xer6s) is a metaphor for the dead person; in death, moisture moves from the inside to the outside. The lakos (grave hole) facilitates the passage of flesh (moisture) from inside to outside in the process of desiccation. The flesh/bones polarity is not only based on the opposition of wet and dry but also up and down. The bones in exhumation are raised upwards while the dissolution of the flesh in the lakos implies a downward movement. The meaning of wet and dry shifts when these are modified by locality and direction. Maniats consider the erection of stone grave edifices as protecting the dead from predatory carnivores. Consumption of flesh by scavengers is an upward movement and as such is an improper direction for such an act. In death, and in the grave, the proper direction of flesh consumption is downward. Only the whitened, dry, defleshed bones are supposed to emerge upwards from the grave. Here the enclosure of the grave facilitates the proper direction and fate of the flesh. The kamari as halfway house insures the fulfillment of the dead's fate, proper passage into the otherworld below. Maniats fear the consumption of the corpse by wild scavengers, because the improper and premature exposure of flesh to the outside is an expression of kin abandonment. It is in this context that the grave takes on its affective linkage with the household. The scattered residue of the grave opened for exhumation is described in the above narrative as "burnt by humidity and time." In another narrative (no. 55), the rotten, damp shards of the wooden coffin are likened to "ashes." The linkage between burning, liquefaction, and death is encountered in those mourning discourses where the deceased's life is compared to a melting candle or the burning lamp wick, and in the analogy made between this burning and the burning pain (p6nos) of the mourning singer. The burning pain of the mourner and the burning/liquefaction of the dead both signify the profound and violent separation from residual social identities and statuses. Burning p6nos disorders the mourner's body, and the burning of the grave destructures the physical integrity of the flesh. The bodies of the living mourner and the dead stand for desocialization.

The First Facing or The Meeting of the Eyes Burial interrupts visual contact with the dead. Exhumation restores that contact which is described as the "first facing" of the dead. This can be a moment of

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shock, loss, and extreme grief for the exhumer who finds the dead "unrecognizable." Exhumation then constitutes a re-encounter with the dead in a new and alien form. The desiccation of the flesh does not efface the dead; rather, it defamiliarizes the dead by disclosing what Hertz (196o) termed the new body of the dead. For Maniats this second body of the dead is a material expression of the deceased in the state of estrangement. The "first facing" is informed with a sense of loss, transformation, and diminishment. These sensibilities are not based on the final nullity of the dead, but rather on consciousness of topographic separation. The dead are still an active force for the living. The concern and fear of "those left behind" about those who "left for xenitia" focuses on the degree of the latters' defamiliarization. When they return, the search of the senses for recognizable traces begins. In dreaming, defamiliarization expresses qualitative alteration in time, such as the juxtaposition of two temporal states in the physical appearance of a significant other (childhood and adulthood). In exhumation, temporal transformation, the tense relation between the past and present, divides the body into the polarities of the decaying and the desiccated, flesh and bones, "whitened" or "yellow" bones, and "black" bones. The exhumer's contemplation of the transitory and the residual extends from the corporeal remains to the rotting shards of the coffin, and to those artifacts of the dead which have resisted desiccation-the bits and pieces of clothing, jewelry, and perfume bottles (narratives 53, 54). The arrangement of the artifacts of the grave into the past and present, the residual and emergent, and the decaying and the desiccated, forms an iconography of the time bound separation of the dead from the social order. The shadow of the dead that is quickly glimpsed when the grave is opened carries an iconic association with the previous social identity of the deceased. The shadow is familiar, it harbors a resemblance to what was known in the past, "the whole dead" (no. 59). The bones, which appear immediately after, do not have these iconic associations. The abrupt movement from familiar shadow to the unfamiliar bones encapsulates the long-drawn-out process of rotting and purifying desiccation. The shadow is bivalent-it points to the separation of the flesh from the bones and, at the same time, it establishes an iconic-narrative connection between the past and the present. Exhumation involves the jolt of recognizing the familiar as unfamiliar. The shadow is the brief presence of the now absent flesh. Its darkness is in contrast to the "white," purified bones. The shock of the unfamiliar soon gives way to the need for reordering. The division of the remains into categories of the rotting (the past) and the desiccated

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(the present, the purified) is the first step in the iconic reconstruction of the dead which culminates in the reassemblage of the skeleton. The exhumer, by collecting and ordering the bones, creates the "second body" of the dead. The juxtaposition between the rotting and the desiccated, the past and the present, does not cause the mourner to abandon the remains as depersonalized inert artifacts, but compels her to enter into a new, symbolic-material relation with the dead. The residual character of the shadow, its evocation of the former appearance of the absent flesh, points to my earlier assertion that the eye and the flesh found, even prior to language, the elementary dynamics of encounter among Maniats. The flesh is a dense text in which many things can be read, even the future. The flesh seen as shadow at the opening of the grave announces the termination of the eye/flesh connection. The momentary presence of the shadow and its subsequent disappearance redirects the eye of the mourner to the bones and away from the past towards the present and future. For the mourner, these temporalities are present in the sight of the purified bones. Yet, as shall be discussed, the bones convey to the present the signs of a sometimes hidden past. Bones that display the signs of impurity compel the mourner to confront and to mediate the past in the present.

The Second Body and Its Reading The deployment of human and animal bones for the purposes of divination has been a widespread practice throughout rural Greece. Lawson (1964) describes the divinatory reading of the shoulder blades of butchered sheep. The bones were used to inquire about "questions of life and death" (ibid., 324) as well as to forecast the weather. The bone readings described by Lawson at the turn of this century were organized around chromatic oppositions between the "clean" white parts and darker sections of the shoulder blade. A similar light/dark polarity informs the reading of exhumed bones in Inner Mani. Herzfeld (1985) offers a contemporary description of what he terms "scapulomancy" (ibid., 249) by Cretan shepherds. Before the shoulder blade of the sheep can function as divinatory object, all of its flesh must be consumed by the diviner. This variation of the flesh/bone polarity links bone reading to the dynamics of shared substance. An ethic of shared substance (though not of consumption) also organizes the relations of the diviner and the bones of the deceased at Maniat exhumation rites. Most Maniat exhumation narratives revolve around the painstaking labor of gathering all the bones and cleaning them. After these tasks are completed, the

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bones are placed in a special box. The arrangement of the bones in the box is not haphazard. The head is always placed on the top of the bone heap. In her survey of Slavic exhumation practices, Gasparini (1962) notes the special attention, reverence, and symbolization directed at the skull of the dead. Alexakis (1980) identifies "obeisance" to the deceased's skull as a central component of the ancestor cult in Mani (ibid., 151 ). Gasparini also describes the practice wherein the skull is separated from the rest of the remains, brought into the house and placed in what was known as the "sacred corner," the corner of the kitchen-living-room opposite the hearth (Gasparini 1962, 116). During one period of fieldwork I lived with an informant who kept the exhumed skull of her husband in the drawer of a bedside table for a period of time. The skull's contiguity to the bed in this instance echoes Gasparini's identification of a metaphorical relation between bed pillows and the head of the dead in the Balkans. Gasparini sees this analogy as an expression of the desire for the dead (ibid., 12 3). In Maniat culture, the head and face are considered the centers of the body and originating sites of selfhood. During mourning performances, the moiroloyistra focuses her gestures of care on the head, face, and forehead of the dead. These parts are also touched and kissed by other mourners during the klcima. In mourning songs, the face, the head and component parts, such as the eyes, forehead, mouth, and hair, are frequently specified and valorized. Maniat grave sculpture, erected from the eighteenth century to the present, often features the head and upper torso of the deceased to the exclusion of the rest of the body. Protruding from the upper walls of certain towers are carved stone heads. These heads, many of which are male/female pairs, depict apical ancestors of the clan. The head sculptures not only document the pervasiveness of an ancestor cult in relation to the dead, but also strengthen the linkages between household iconography and mortuary edifices. This architectural complex of gravestones and head sculptures on graves and towerhouses, in conjunction with exhumed bones, forms the "second body" of the dead. The presence of the "second body" in funeral and household architecture bears witness to the continuation of symbolic relations with the dead after exhumation. This iconography of the dead indicates that the dead are not depersonalized. The divinatory reading of exhumed bones is the most explicit demonstration of the connection of exhumed remains to a persona of the dead. The following is an account of a paid exhumation by a young woman. [55] At 6:30 in the morning ... we hit it with the pick, me and my husband ... and we found a kamciri made of lots of cement. ... They had

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placed the dead and then, to avoid the smell, they left a space, a meter or two, and covered her with cement and iron for the stench not to be heard. With the first hit of the pick a huge snake appears. "My poor --," I said [to my husband]. "It's going to eat us." He managed to kill it after chasing it. Underneath were the bones of the dead. Po! Po! How am I to touch them? In other words, we had broken the cement and reached the coffin which had become ashes, and her bones showed and then some patches of sock, etc., left over ten to fifteen years. We also found her nails in the socks. . . . So we took out the bones to wash them. The cousin of the dead woman was there. I washed her with water, then vinegar, the head first. The bones were turning yellow, full yellow; whether she was a virgin I don't know, but so much yellow ... she must have been unmarried. While in my second exhumation, the head was black like tar! ... So, we washed her three times with water and wine, I left her to dry on a little sheet to be placed later into the small box and into the mnemion they were building. This lasted about two hours. In the afternoon, I came back to finish .... They [relatives] did not mourn her because, you see, they were not her children or siblings [they were distant relatives from urban centers]. They decided to exhume her (after so many years) because they wanted to gather them [the family dead] together. They have here one grave [family grave]; the dead must come out, their bones must exist [be maintained]. When the dead come out it is as if they are resurrected let's say. So the relatives did it as an obligation. And since the relatives couldn't do it themselves, they paid someone else to do it for them. The other exhumation I did occurred last winter, six months ago or so. It was my grandfather's and grandmother's. They had been buried for more than ten years. We took them out and what a smell, as if alive! I found a shaving razor in his pocket. Half of his coat and socks were undissolved. The bones, of both, all black! We washed them, put them in order, and put them next to my father [next to his exhumed bones]. Well, when someones flesh is on the bones, they say, these are not good people, they have done many bad things, etc. That's why many do a test before. But you can only do this in the new mnemion; when the dead is directly in dirt you can't do it [test before exhumation: rattling the

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bones with a stick inserted through an aperture in the coffin to determine if the flesh has desiccated]. I have done in total four exhumations. The same day I did one in the morning, in the afternoon I exhumed another woman. This was a woman whose bones were all black .... Two exhumations were in Nomia. My grandparents' was in Kotronas. The exhumation must be done in three years after burial. But if you miss, then it must be done in five years. It cannot be an even number. It's bad luck. You can drag someone else, too [to death]. When my grandpa died my mother and brother almost died, too. Because we had left his grave open [after his exhumation. The dating of the individual's death is inclusive of the period from burial to exhumation]. People used to understand this as ... [polluting]. You had to close the hole. This has no meaning nowadays. In the above narration the young woman concludes with a reference to her grandparents' exhumation. The following story is told by her mother and concerns dreams, portents, and events that surround the same exhumation. In the daughter's narrative, the accumulated impurities of this deceased couple (her grandparents) are metaphorized by the blackness and stench of their bones. Both color and odor reveal the moral past of the dead. The tale of this couple is too intricate to fully relate here. It was rumored that the couple was responsible for the violent killing of their children (the husband and sister-in-law of the following narrator). That is why the father, in the following narrative, will be portrayed as anxious and trembling while he exhumes the bones of his children. For it is in the material evidence of the exhumed dead that the hidden acts of the living are disclosed. The following narrator, mother of the previous woman, recounts:

[56]

NARRATOR.

Once, before my husband died, I saw in a dream the mother of my mother-in-law. An old woman was coming wearing the red strip of cloth on her skirt [indicating a woman whose close kin is alive]. She greeted me. I said, "Who are you?" "Your kird [father's mother]," she said. So, at first I thought of my father's mother. How would I know she [the woman in the dream] died the day my husband was born? She then said, "I am your mother-in-law's mother. If your mother-in-law bothers you, don't mind her. If you don't look after me . . . , I'll make her home upside

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down! I want nothing more than the priest [ceremony]." I say, ''I'll look after you. If she lets me, I will." In the morning, Sunday morning, there they come [her father-inlaw and mother-in-law]. My husband told my mother-in-law [the dream]. "Fire that burned me!" she shouted. "That plotter to look after my own mother!" My father-in-law dared, "Maybe you should let her." "My own mother? You, hungry one [poor]! I am going to have a feast for her!" She was a single heir. But in thirty years she hasn't made a feast for her mother, she would make it now [offer food at her exhumation]? Before a year passed, her daughter, that is my sister-in-law, died. When the time came to open [exhume] my husband in three years, again she wouldn't let us. [An uncle interfered and the exhumation of the husband and his sister took place.] When people exhumed someone [anakomidhizane], many people participated. He [the father-in-law] was grabbing to open the one kamdri [of his children] then the other. He was shaking. He didn't take me into account. He finally opened them and took them out. When we took him out [her husband], we washed him, took care of him. There were four lines of letters, big letters, capitals [on the forehead of the skull]. A woman takes it to the priest. "Read them! These letters have meaning!" The letters were on the head. The priest takes it and says, "What do you women want now, to start the gossip? Alright, he may be writing about his wife, his father, or to his wife to leave his children and remarry. No matter what that is, it will come. All will happen here [We don't need to read it]. "That's not the case, priest!" she said. "I had a priest for a grandfather and he read them for the people to hear them!" He [her husband] had four lines of letters. And his head [skull] will still have them. ETHNOGRAPHER.

The women couldn't read the letters for themselves? NARRATOR.

They couldn't. They probably didn't know the letters [didn't know how to read]. You think everyone knew?

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I put them [the bones] in white cloth and off they go. [She had no money to buy an ossuary box]. The day we went for my in-laws [to exhume them] it was pouring out! I just took them [the bones] out and I said leave the shit-soul [the father-in-law], throw them down! I put them in a pillow case and in a carton. They'll still be there like this, in the pillows. I did it [exhumation] alone with my daughters and son. Four to five relatives came. My daughters-in-law were about to give birth. So, it was the best time. Otherwise we'd have to wait for the one child to be one year old, then the next one. My in-laws were already many years dead. In the old days women would often go with a male digger to do it. People hearing that you were going to unbury, would run to help. They'd gather from Saturday, and those days people also cooked fava, pasta, or whatever they had ... for forgiveness. The mother's narrative (no. 56) moves from divination by dreaming to divination by exhumation and inscription. The appearance of letters on exhuri_Ied skulls is a phenomenon mentioned in several mourning songs and exhumatiOn narratives. There is also some evidence that the seams of the exhumed skull were read as a divinatory text. This narrative suggests that the dead man printed these letters on his own skull. This remark makes explicit that the exhumed bones are not identical with the dead as agency, but neither are they inert and deindividualized objects. The dead performs an action on his own bones. The artifactual status of the bones for the dead and the living establishes their mediating function. The bones are a communication device, a point of i~terface between the living and the dead. This is particularly true for the skull, smce the head is considered the center of the person. The portrayal of the priest in this narrative is crucial to understanding_ th~ clergy's status and function in the ritual performances of women. The pnests refusal to read the message on the skull is a classic example of the male low voicing of the products of women's divination. Moral evil identifie~ by women is dismissed by the priest as gossip, a characterization often apphed to other discourses of women. Despite his attempt to assert moral authority, the priest is dismissed as a technical specialist and as nothing more. He is asked to read the skull, not to interpret the contents of the message. The task of interpretation is reserved for the women. The priest's function is "to read them [the letters on the skull] for the people to hear them." This circuit of discourse indicat~s t_h_e _formation of a juridical space out of the divinatory circle of women. In this hhgwus

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arena, the dead and their remains function as evidence, the priest as scribe or translator of records, and the "people" or more precisely the mourners hear, witness, and adjudicate. In this court the priest is the possessor of one type of literacy and the women the possessors of another.

The Otherworld The instrumental goal of exhumation is to both facilitate and to bear witness to the dead's passage into the otherworld. The nature of the dead's existence and character in the otherworld is vague, hazy, lacking in precision, and open to speculation. The passage of the dead from the domain of the living is a movement into xenitia, not only because the otherworld is foreign territory, but because the exact character of this foreignness is unknown. In Maniat folklore the iconography of a Christian heaven is either absent or fulfills an ironic and didactic function in the discourses of death. The heaven and afterlife of Greek Orthodox belief is certainly not the territory that dead Maniats enter. In certain instances the social imaginary of death attempts to colonize the otherworld with the familiar characteristics of this world. This is an approach to the afterlife that is decidedly pre-Christian. The living may attempt to familiarize the otherworld in order to maintain communication and contact with the dead. Yet the dead and their life in the otherworld are subject to an unanswerable interrogation. Like the rhetorical and ironic questions directed at the dead, the otherworld constitutes a riddle. This is also expressed in the following laments. The first lament was improvised by an elderly woman in the forty-day memorial ceremony of another. [57] May my worthy manoyenia [mother's clan] be well and [together like a] bunch of grapes, and now allow me [to represent the dead] at the setting of the sun before our friends depart,

I axia mou manoyenia naste stafili ke kala t6ra ke mena aste mou stou iliou to hioutdroma tha fighousi i fili mas

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show up here in the middle of the populace all our friends to receive, to thank them warmly for honoring her with their presence .. Come soon, my Demou, for we are waiting for you, all of us to ask you if Hades has roads and the underneath has passages, if the mother reunites with her child, the sister with the brother, the slave [the wife] with the blessed [the husband] . To Maria-- [also dead] whose sweet mother I am, if you meet her anywhere, if my Marikaki you see, I told you to say, that I miss her a lot. And kiss her for me sweetly on the mouth and the cheeks.

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since Demou [the dead] did not

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ke dhen e{fmi i Dhimou edho sti mesi tau laou olous taus filous na dhehti thenno efharisto na pi 6pou tin etimisasi . ... Ela Dhimou mou sindoma emis se perimenome oles na se rotisome an ehi a Adhis dhiavata k' i kcitou yis perasmata ki an smiyi i mana to pedhi k' i adherfi ton adherfo i sklava to vloyitiko . Sti - - ti Mario poum' i manoula tis egho an kapetciri pouthena to Marikciki mou ama idhis sou ipa ti the na tau pis oti to pethimou poli Ke filise to mou ghlika sto stoma ke sta maghoula.

and they will escort you for walks. Tell me, my poor Annio, Shall I put your coat in [the grave] that your father brought you for six 500-drachma bills? Wear it to show, my Annitsa when you come out for your walks in Hades and the Underworld.

ke tha ze soulatsemousi. Yia pese mou mori Anio na ze to valou to pardo pou z'ifere o patera zou m'exi pendakosarika? Anitsa mou na to {oris na soulatsemis ke na vyis stan Adhi ke sti kcitou yis.

~ In the otherworld then the recent dead and the dead of the past hold reunions. The otherworld is an antitopos, and each inhabitant is atopos, without place. This is symbolized in the prevalence of road imagery in many laments that speculate on the afterlife. The road is the signifier of the nonsedentary, the unsettled, and the nomadic. In the first lament, the narrator asks if there are any roads and if the "underneath has passages." The road constitutes the exemplary social space of the dead, the site where those without place can meet and interact. As the second lament fragment (no. 58) points, the otherworld is a place for walks, for continuous movement. These walks are the journeys that occur in the outside, in xenitia, journeys that require protective coats, expressions of kin concern and household care. But the road symbolism in these laments points out that, like the modern roads traversed by the living, the otherworld is an uninscribed and empty topography. If there are roads, or passageways, the dead can walk, and if the dead can walk, they can meet with each other. Yet, the dead are confined to the road.

Another woman remembers and recites: [58] There where you're going to find them [the dead], lucky and golden fated you'll become. In the topos [otherworld] where you'll be placed, you'll find father and brother,

Opou tha pais na taus evris ke kalomira tha yenis Sto topo pou tha pothestis tha vris patera ki adherfo

Another woman recollects in the city: [59] I'm going to give my wish to my Nikos, the brave, to go to Hades and return to ask him to tell me how are the souls treated? Do the nuns tell the truth?

Ki egho tha dosou tin e{kf tau Nfko mou tau dertili na pai stan Adhi ke na 'rthf na do rotisou na me pf pas ta pemousi i psihes? Alfthia lesi i kaloghries?

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Are they [the souls] hanging by the hair in a dirty cave? And those who committed good deeds, do they sit in soft armchairs?

Ti kremonde ap'tci malia se mfa vromeri spilia? Ki 6si ekcimane kales dhoulies se polithr6nes malakes?

nature are banished. As an inversion, the otherworld can also be the place where the dead lose the hierarchical status they possessed when alive. The loss of social status in the otherworld is a component of the "burning" away of previous social characteristics and the simple division of the dead into the pure and the impure, the desiccated and undesiccated, white bones and black bones. As a response to this commentary, my informant recited her favorite lament fragment.

I am a Doubting Thomas and I believe in nothing. But just in case, for Damianos [the person being mourned] let's make crosses for God to send him to a cool Paradise.

Egh6 fme apistos Thomas ke dhe pisteou tfpota rna le6u yia to Dhamian6 na kanoume kana stavr6 na t6ne stili o The6s se dhroseri paradhiso.

A common question asked of the dead by the living is how have they been treated and how have they "passed their time" in the otherworld. Has the dead been received there, who were the hosts, and how did they greet the dead? In these questions of hospitality and reciprocity, the projected hosts are frequently the dead of the mourners attending the klama and participating as members of the chorus in the moirol6i. The image of reception in the otherworld completes a cycle of reciprocity that originates with the living. The above lament fragment indicates that the speculative character of the afterlife is in part determined by the conflictual views of church and folk belief. Folk and liturgical belief literally cancel each other out. This heightens the unknowability of the otherworld. In effect, the clash of iconographies here in~ers that no imagery of the otherworld is authoritative or exhaustive. The "Doubb~g Thomas " who crosses herself as a form of insurance, discloses that the two behef systems ~oncerning the dead and their fate impinge on each ot~er without .any accommodation or synthesis. Her moirol6i offers three contrastmg speculations on the otherworld: (1) a dirty cave in which the dead are hung by their hair, (2) a cool heaven, which has a certain appeal to a people subsisting in an arid ecology, and (3) the pragmatic soft, comfortable armchair. The otherworld can be depicted as the negation or inversion of the world of the living. As a negation of the positive characteristics of this world, the otherworld can be an empty enclosure, a place from which the forces and effects of

[6o] Vasilis, my sweet cousin and brother close to my heart, in Hades, where you will now descend, in Tartarus, where you will go, there the sun gives no light and the wind does not blow. There you will find many others from Shadowy and Sunward Mani lawyers and doctors, senators and ministers.

Vasili ghlikoxadherfe ke gardhiake mou adherfe, stan Adhi pou tha katevfs sta Dartara pou tha dhiavfs ekf o flios dhe fotci ki 01.ite ayeras dhe fisa Ekf tha vrfs ki alous polous prosiliakous ki aposkierous ke dikigh6rous ke yiatrous ke vouleftes ke ipourghous.

As a space of confinement, the otherworld has also been described as a prison cell. In this imagery, there is a strong allusion to the grave as an asocial space of confinement. As the mourner expressed in a ceremony:

[61] Eh, our precious brother-in-law, won't you think it over? You will repent, for it is winter time, and you will be placed in the cell in Vrysaka [cemetery]. Eh, my honored Konstantis . . .

E, yialeghmene mas ghambre an theis na to xanadhfs metaniomenos tha vrethfs t' fne him6nas o ker6s ke pou tha pas n'apothestfs mes' tis V risakas to kelf e, eklehte mou Kostadf ...

An old belief of the Maniats is that the souls of the dead are kept in cages. They are released or remain there depending on the whim of the judge of the

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underworld. They are supposed to be released on All Souls' Day and can return to the world as revenants. As I played the recording of the following lament to two other women after the ceremony, they gave this commentary:

Eh, my sweet manoyenia [mother's clan], 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 in Neasa, in the country ... May they be well, my sweet mother [-in-law], for me to have air and wings. Come, my sweet mother [the dead], come back today for it is the last trial .

Commentary [sighing approvingly]

[nodding their heads, confirming]

FIRST WOMAN.

Yes, one can lose her mind. The mourner is brotherless. She is referring here to her first cousins.

The dead, after forty days, gets locked up. He does not return. It is kind of a trial. He goes to trial to get closed up. SECOND WOMAN.

The dead are like birds closed in cages in the underworld. In the above lament, as the commentators explain, the closing of a household is referred to as losing the key to a house (losing all male heirs). A closed house symbolizes death and here signifies the mourner's social death. She counters this with her reference and appeal to her first cousins, who now hold the key, so that she can have an open door; unlike the dead who are "closed in," she will have "air and wings."

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[62] Lament

SECOND

The place of judgement is crucial to the topography of death in Maniat belief. The entire semantics of exhumation indicates, as Hertz asserted, that the fates of the soul and the body parallel each other in those cultures that practice double burial. The "burning" and liquefaction of the flesh in the lakos is a downward movement, in contrast to the raising of purified bones. The journey of the soul to the otherworld is considered to be a literal downward movement to Cape Tenaron, the southernmost point of Mani. Cape Tenaron is known in Mani as Akrotiri Tenaro. There is a phonetic resemblance between this name and the verb krino (to judge); thus, kritiri, defined as the judging of the souls of the dead, has been used by Maniats as a substitute for Akrotiri Tenaro. The judge of the dead in Maniat mythology is not the Christian god, the devil, or Charos (death), but bears some resemblance to the god of the underworld. In the preChristian period, Tenaron was the site of a famous temple of Poseidon. A temple had been erected there because it was the site where Heracles brought up Cerebus, the watchdog of Hades. There was supposed to be a direct underground passage to the otherworld at Cape Tenaron. This entry bypassed the River Styx and Charon, the ferryman. Ancient commentators remarked that this passageway suited the poverty and thriftiness of the people of that area. When a death occurred, there was no need to place a coin in the hand of the corpse since the soul would enter Hades through the Tenaron passage, avoiding the River Styx and the ferryman, who had to be paid.

s

Death, Exhumation, and Women Labor Mourning discourses bring the pain of life-long labor and the pain of mourning , into a semantic equivalence. Death and labor are experiences of embodiment determined by moira (fate). This equivalence is expressed as shared substance between the mourner and the deceased. When a mourner directs a moirol6i (lament) to the female survivors of the dead, she depicts their life as a labor task-the maintenance of the physical and spiritual household following rupture. She characterizes this labor as the survivors' personal pain (p6nos), a fate that has to be confronted with endurance. The' role of the mourning singer, whether she addresses the dead or the survivors, is . one of support ("helping"). This support takes the form of "witnessing"; it is an extension of the labor cooperation between women that occurs in everyday life. In the past, Maniat social and economic life was rhetorically organized by a sharp division of labor. This rhetoric still prevails in the allocation of tradi-

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tiona] and modern economic practices. Today women are mainly associated with traditional labor tasks. Certain labor tasks, then and now, have been classified as male or female (there were also age divisions of labor). Yet, this classification does not conform to actual labor practice. In eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and up to mid-twentieth-century Mani, women were central to the practical performance of all major and minor agricultural tasks, whether these took place at infields, outfields, uncultivated grazing lands, or by the seashore. Maniat women performed numerous labor tasks in supposedly male spaces; something they still do today. Labor has been informed by the semantics, ethics, and aesthetics of interiorization-the bringing of the outside into the inside, the creation and maintenance of interiors, domestic and agricultural. The inside/outside polarity that separates household space from outfields, grazing land, and seashore in other parts of Greece does not hold true for Mani during most of its history. Labor in outlying fields and labor in household space (including infields) is not rigidly differentiated by women. Rather, inside/outside categories order the relations between cultivated, tended land and the wild; between lived-in and tended houses, and households that display signs of abandonment. In the past, Maniat women were largely responsible for the tending of sheep, pigs, cattle (assisted by young children), plowing and hand-cultivating the land, and carrying wood, produce, and water, within their physical capacity, which was considerable. A traditional task of women was clearing the land of its numerous stones in preparation for enclosure and cultivation. Women also mined and hauled salt from salt pans, fished, trapped migratory birds in nets, and hunted with firearms. They were central to the care of the olive crop, and performed tasks of olive harvesting that in the rest of rural Greece were customarily associated with men (e.g. climbing up the tree). Women also had individual cultivation rights over small plots of land called lagouna. All of these tasks were in addition to the usual run of domestic chores, such as meal preparation, general food processing, olive curing, grinding grains, laundry, child care. Women's relation to both the public space of the cultivated fields and the private space of the household was then and now defined by instrumental activity. Maniat men can have a noninstrumental relation to social space but women cannot. In public, domestic, and gender exclusive spaces (male or female), • women justify their presence in terms of task performance. Even in the female rougha, a place for gossip, oral history, and occasional dream divination, the "hands must always keep busy." This ethic holds true for all social situations that are not ostensively subsistence-related in character. During one season of field-

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work in which I was mainly engaged in collecting oral histories within the domestic sphere, I ended up knitting two sweaters and half a dozen scarves! It was impossible to conduct ethnographic interviews or to have lengthy informal encounters without engaging in a personal work task and/or participating in the work performed around me. When women had to leave the domestic space, work tasks, and the agricultural domain to meet with me, they would justify their departure by describing our meetings as "scientific" work with which they were assisting and thus created a new, empowered space. The ethnographic encounter outside of the klama was understood by local women within the framework of female labor cooperation. The rigid gender divisions of social space that ethnographers have encountered throughout the Mediterranean were certainly operational in Inner Mani. But women manipulated the performative boundaries and ethics of the domestic economy to create entryways into ostensively male public space. The women would establish stable enclaves in the territory of men by the performance of labor tasks. The systematic pursuit of labor tasks, no matter how small, in almost any prolonged social encounter, generated a performative boundary and created interiors from which men were either excluded or had to think twice before entering. The labor ethics of the household economy could also be remapped in order to create new, gender-exclusive spaces, such as those formed by the ethnographic interview. This is not to deny that the core structure of female work was rooted in the male exploitation of female labor. On the contrary, it is because many of these practices had historically developed within patriarchal social structures that their subversive role in the creation and dissemination of female social space is significant. Among the older generation of Maniat women, the poetics of labor, pain, death, and fate intertwine in daily discourse in the form of verse fragments and metaphors, derived mainly from moirol6i composition. The metaphors of death colonize the everyday life of women, but death itself can be conceptualized with ' the imagery of female labor taken from everyday practice. It is through this crossimagery and other related discourses that Maniat women bring together all of their excluded, marginalized, and silenced practices into a single semantic continuum.

[63] Yesterday at night, the earth was shaking, the winds blew and things were overturned

Ti nihta tin ehtesini anatarahtiken i yis ki eyine anakilisi

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in my father's house. The foundations had been shaken, but now the roof is gone too, and the bad fate is fulfilled. My own blackmother was from a good clan and the earth of the Red Apple Tree, she produced Russian wheat and rich crops of Kambos. She mowed them, she threshed them in one pile, she gathered them in the middle of the threshing floor. Bad years came for her and strong Northern wind blew and bad wind trouble that took both wheat and straw. It took them to Armenopetra to the deepest waters, and left nothing but a tiny bean of wild lentil, the blackened Kyriaki [the mourner], who would be better not to live.

SECOND

sto spiti tou patera mou. Ta themela fhane sistf rna t6ra pd.i k' i skepf ki esimblir6thi to kak6. Emena i mavromdna mou itan ap6 kalf yenia ki ap6 ti K6kini Milia ki ekane stdri rousiko ke yenima kambfstiko. Ta therise t' al6nise ke tcikame ena sor6 sti mesaria t'aloniou. Tis frthasi kakes hronies ki e{fsixe Delf Voiras ki anemotdraxi kakia ki epfre stdri ki ahioura. Ta idhiai stin Armen6petra ke sta apcitita nerd ke tfpota dhen afike m6n 'na koukaki aghriofakf ti mavrismeni Kiriakf

pou kalio fta na mf zi.

The above lament, recited by a woman who, like Kyriaki, has been left alone in life herself, points to the fact that the death of the significant other is a cosmological event that intersects with the uncontrollable forces of nature and earth. " Death comes as wind and as earthquakes that overturn household order and individuals. A word commonly used by mourners when referring to someone's death is anak6loma. The same word means the uprooting, the turning upside down, of a tree by bad weather. Strong winds are associated with the open road, the outside, states of exposure, and the absence of sheltering interiors.

Each member of the household is equivalent to a particular architectural component of the house. In the above lament, the shaken foundations signify the previous deaths of the mourner's brother and mother. The death of the father is experienced as a stripping away of protective enclosure symbolized by the roof. The mother and son, as symbols of reproductive and generational continuity, are left in a condition of exposure with the loss of the father. This exposed house is surrounded and penetrated by winds. The anchorage of the house no longer holds, and the stability formed by house and domesticated land is now given over to the disorder of the wild. Here, the house as a metaphor of the kin is literally turned inside out by a contrasocial nature. The mourner is concerned with the social value of women's labor. This is often expressed by the terms mazema and simazema, which refer to the act of ingathering, bringing scattered elements into a central place. This act is embodied in the task of collecting grain within the circular space of the threshing floor. Maniat threshing floors are circular plots of cleared land often surrounded by a circle of stones which demarcate this space from surrounding land. In the lament, the same disorderly wind that disrupts the household interior repeats this action within the symbolic terrain of the threshing floor. The linkage between the threshing floor and household is based on their status as products of women's labor and their ties to kin and economic reproduction. The contents of the threshing floor, that which has been gathered together by women's labor, is violently relocated by the negating wind into deep water. (The site mentioned by the mourner, Armenopetra, is known to be where the offshore ocean attains its greatest depth). The lament finishes by considering the condition of the survivor, the mourner herself. She perceives an analogy between herself and a solitary, wild, nondomestic lentil bean. This plant is considered to be extremely poisonous by Maniats. The mourner, in turn, is laden with the poison of bitter p6nos. The diminution and isolation of the wild lentil is a counterpoint to the quantification and cultivation associated with the gathered grain on the threshing floor. The iconography of unified quantity in the agricultural sphere is a metaphor of numerical kinship strength. This contrast between size and numbers, and between the domestic and the wild, points to the exile of the mourner and her eschatological rupture with house and kin. The internal contradictions of the feminine in Inner Mani are sharply profiled in this song. The song counterpoints the image of the woman who is the productive foundation of social order with that of the woman who is forcibly separated from social order through death. These

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unreconcilable components of the feminine constitute the fundamental content of women's moira. The iconography of interiority creates a relation of value equivalence for household, agricultural, and mortuary labor. In agriculture, interiorization entails the movement beyond a residual cultivation line (indicated by stone walls) and the erection of enclosed space which brings uncultivated land inside. The enculturation of death, through klama and exhumation practices, replicates the agricultural process. It demands both a break with residual social order and the colonization of the outside with the metaphors of interior space. In agriculture stones are to the earth what bones are to the flesh in exhumation. The sep:ration of stones from the earth and bones from the flesh are acts of purification. Clearing the land, the initial procedure of enclosure, is known as "cleaning." The removal of stones involves upward movement-the erection of a wall that transforms the rock from a natural object to a cultural artifact. The separation of stones from earth is a dichotomization between the dry and the wet. Stones in the ground are often depicted as sucking the earth, consuming the earth, the dry negating the wet. In exhumation too, the separation of the bones from the flesh is the differentiation of the dry from the wet. The stones spread on the earth and the bones spread out on the ground in exhumation carry an iconic resemblance, as does the careful selection of stones to build a new wall with the careful assemblage of bones to build "the new body." These scenes momentarily bring together all the semic elements of agricultural and thanatological interiorization: the polarities of wet and dry, down and up, earth and stones, flesh and bones. A well-tended piece of land has the look of the household: it is clean, ordered, and enclosed. Land cultivation is informed by aesthetic, visual values as much as it is informed by instrumental, economic values. The well-tended parcel of land attests to the status and standards of the household to which it belongs. In contrast, abandoned pieces of once-cultivated land are equated with death, emigration, and the destruction of the household. Retreating cultivation lines are eloquent reminders of the incremental takeover of the inside by the outside. Abandoned land is a poignant visual referent of cultural and personal loss (especially since the fallow land remains enclosed by crumbling stone walls). An entire archaelogy of feminine labor, household integrity, and reproduction is encoded in the didactic juxtaposition of stone enclosure and fallow land. This takeover of the inside by the outside extends to household imagery. When Maniats emigrate, their abandoned houses become records of separation and ab-

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sence, as they are gradually overgrown with weeds and their roof decays from lack of maintenance. This imagery of the house returning to nature signifies the destructive passage of the household to the outside. Houses and land have their own form of death, internal exile, and emigration. As in mortuary practice, absence is registered in disrupted, anomalous, and liminal forms of presence. If the symbology of death remains pertinent and contemporary for a certain generation of Maniat women, it is because, through moirol6i and exhumation, women possess a powerful reservoir of poetics, myths, analogies, metaphors, and inversions that are readily convertible to a sociology of contemporary rural life and its transformation. For the mourners, to poeticize death is to historicize social experience. There is no need to construct transparent, self-evident, and crude allegories between death and social change. Rather, the awareness of moira (fate) and the inherent suppleness of death symbology render all obvious allegorical relations between death and history superfluous. In Mani the symbolization, objectification, and performative dramatization of death is the foundation of historical consciousness. The symbolization of death is not an allegorical counterpart or reflection of history. Maniat women have smuggled illicit codes into the gender division of labor through the ethics of interiorization, care, and tending. Thus they rendered labor multivalent through the poetic construction of passageways between labor practice and death rituals. The convergence of labor practice and mortuary practice constitutes a profound deflection of the domination effects of androcentric economic structure. The poetic interplay between the agricultural and mortuary domains is a fundamental component of the Maniat feminine imaginary. This interplay ruptures the male dominated order. In reference to both residual and emergent male structures of domination, female labor in death rites and in agriculture hold a peripheral and bivalent status bordering on exclusion. In reaction, women's symbolic practice mobilizes a critical imagery. Female household, agricultural, and mortuary labor are unified into a domain of cultural power that exceeds and resists the barriers of low voicing, low status, and the impure. The interacting metaphors and cross-indexing of death, labor, care, and economic practice form a genealogy of what deceptively appears as fragmented and discontinuous female experience-a fragmentation effected by ideologies of modernization. Women overcome fragmentation by integrating poetics into everyday experience. These poetics disinter the imaginary side of labor and agriculture through the affective force of pain. They generate an articulation that renders the female imaginary

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of death, labor, and pain into media of cultural empowerment. The mourning rituals have traditionally functioned as performance events where the silenced semantic and social value of female labor is recuperated and then transformed into a poeticized archaeology of the feminine witness.

[64] My orphan aunt was telling me her pain for she was inclined to love me. She said once to my father give me my Marigoula to be my daughter. I am mourning you, my aunt, just the same as my sweet old mother, and even more, for you suffered hard, eh, aunt, compassionate aunt. My Koula [niece], come close, this hour calls for us to mourn her, our aunt the orphan. From her one side [clan] there was no "appearance," and this was a pain in her heart that at the time of mourning, she had to suffer death alone [death of her son]. And before she realized it she crossed her hands [died herseln. Now she will go to find them [the dead],

SECOND

I thia mou i arfani me eleye ton p6no tis ti ekline na maghapa ke eleye mia fora eleye tou patera mou dhosmou ti Marighoula mou Yici nane thighatera mou. Ma 'gho se kleo thia mou to idhio ke enou darou sa tin manoula mou ti ghria ki akomi perisotero ti vasanistikes sklira eh thia, thia splahnikia. E Kotila mou ela konda touti i ora to kali emis na tin eklapsome ti thia mas tin arfani. Ap6 ti mid tis meira dhen ine vre fanerosi ke tohe pono stin kardhia tote stis lipis ton kero pou ihe monah6 kako.

Ki ape ananoithike ke stavrose ta heira tis Tora tha pai na tous evri

her burning pain to come out. Ah, where are you, my Kostas, Kostas and my Charalambis, together with her grandsons, her whole "appearance." Come close to offer your shoulder for the dead to come out with a "procession," wasn't she nikokira 2 rare and unique and with philotimo [pride]? the slender of Karkako who in her last years, after she lost Po tis [her son], the world darkened wilted she was and her granchildren so young she struggled in life because my uncle -out in the world I will say itdid not care on his part he was earning lots of money, and was throwing it on the tavernas, with wine making friends and brothers. Won't you get up, my sweet aunt, .. like my mother you too had aching desire here to come transients and passersby [referring to the dead] body with no soul.

to marazaki tis na vyi. A pou 'se Kosta mou Kosta ke Haralambi mou ke me ta gonia tis mazi oli tis i fanerosi ela zighosete konda na valete ton omo zas me tin parata tis na vyi dhen itane nikokira spania ke monadhiki ke me filotimo poli? ke tou Karkako i liyeri ape sta teleftea tis opou ton Poti ehase ki o topos eskotiniase marazomemi itane ke me ta gonia tis mikra eviopalepse sklira yiati 0 barba mou more oxou ston kosmo tha to pou dhen tiraze yia loghou tou p6 'vghane bolika lefta epeta ta hiliarika stis tavemes sta krasia ki epiane filous ki adherfous. Yici siko eh thioUla mou ..

sa tin manoUla mou ki esi opou marazi ihate epa yia na erhosaste dhiavates ke perastiki ke to kormi dhihos psihi.

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Have a good fate, this night of the evening star you will find your bed made, your sweet child will be there [in the otherworld], my Potis, the well bred one, that tall body. I'm mourning you, my sweet aunt, not to go discontented. She had left me order when I was going to the hospital [in the city] me and my Panayiota [mourner's sister], and she was tenderly caressing us, "Come, my Maroula, come close. [I want you] to mourn me my child [when I die]." You too now, my golden Koula [come close now to join], for your mother will be asking [in the otherworld] come close [to reciprocate], for when you lost a key [only male of the house], Karkako's slender [present dead] pulled out her hair and was beating her chest, our modest aunt. She is going to meet them all now [all the dead]. . Eh, aunt, I got tired

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Ehe ti mira zou kali tin aposperini vradhia tha vri krevati etimo the nane to pedhaki tis o P6tis mou o evyenis ekino to psil6 kormi. Se kleo vre thioUla mou mi pas paraponoumeni

mou t6he afisi endoli sto Kratik6 pou piyena egh6 k' i Panayi6ta mou ke mas emorfohaidheve: Yia ela e Maroula mou ela ke zighoso konda na kleis e pedhaki mou. Ki esi mor' Koula mou hrisi the na rotai i mana zou ela ke zighoso konda tote pou hdsate klidhi e tou Karkdko i liyeri evghale ta malia tis ke ghrothokopanizota i thia mas i {r6nimi Olous tha pai na tous evri. . E thia ekourastika

since last night [mourning] for the other women don't know to witness you. I've been talking alone and my head aches. . Pitiful job it lit a fire inside me for I remembered a lot, I got burnt, aunt, I got burnt, I went to Hartou [cemetery], I looked here, I looked there, pictures and bones, and in Nikolianika [lineage], even worse, the whole key [the whole household dead]. Eh, aunt, go tell them [tell the dead] all we were saying, give your blessing may your hour be good [go to the good], to your right find Heaven to lie down to rest your tired body from many troubles, compassionate aunt. All of you women, welcome, to those who came, thousands of goods, may we pay it back, blessings to your households. Aunt, my sweet aunt, don't go, don't depart you will be better here

ap6 to vrddhi ki ap6 htes i ales dhen ta xeroune yia na ze martirisome 6lo ke leo monahi ke to kefali mou poni . dhoulia axiolipiti anapse mesa mou fotia ti anathimithika pola kaika thia kaika ke sti Hartou edhiaika tiraza pa tiraza ki fotografies ke ostd, eki sta Nikolianika ak6mi pi6 hir6tera ol6kliro klidhi.

E, thia mou na tous ta pis ta kouvendiazame mazi a, thia dh6so tin efki sire ke 6ra zou kali dhexia parahiso na vris na pesis na xekourastis to kourasmeno zou kormi ap6 zitimata pola mori thioula splahnikia. Ki 6les kalosorisate 6ses ki an ekopiasate hilia kala na kanete na zas to xeplir6some 6lo sta spitia zas kala Thia thioula mou ghlikia mi fevyis min anahoras epa thase kalitera

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together with our Thodora, my sister's daughter. I told her, I sent her the message, she will grab you in her arms: "Welcome, sweet aunt." You will have all the goods, you will have help, because you once did the same for them, you stayed up late. 3 When they became orphans, they lost their father, you drew them together. Your precious sister, who gave you a plot [land] and helped you discreetly, well, now, my sweet aunt, she must have heard [the news], the ill-fated Yerakaira, who, if she happened to be here today, would scream a loud voice "Adher{t, adher{t" to mourn. Eh, aunt, compassionate aunt, aunt, I got so tired.

thane ke i Thodh6ra mou tis adherfis mou to pedhi tis t6pa tis to mfnisa tha se voutixi agalid kal6s ti thia ti ghlikid thdhis ap'6la ta kala thdhis exipiretisi yiat'etsi thia mou ki esi yid dhafta exenihtises 6nde pou orfanepsane hdsane ton patera taus ape ta mdzepse kondd Tin akrivi tis adherfi p' ik6pedho tis edhose ke tin ev6ithaye krifd e t6ra thia mou ghlikid tha to pliroforithike i dtihi Yerakaird pou an itan ndne simera thaskouze dhinati foni adher{t, adherft na skouhti e thia, thia splahniki thia kourdstika poli.

THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE DIVINATION, HISTORY AND THE SELF

The Archaeology of Feeling "Appearance," fanerosi, connotes numbers (of kin). In turn, numerical presence, the physical, emotional, moral support of the kin, in any public situation is an adornment and ornamentation of the self. Adornment as kin or clothes is a sign of pride, honor, and status. The "appearance" of kin in klama (mourning ceremony) bestows status on the dead. The iconic construction of status is bidirectional. By "appearing" for the dead, the kin makes visual claims concerning its own status. The dead ornament the living as much as the living ornament the dead. This reversibility of adornment and endowment is linked to shared substance, which always involves reciprocity, the exchange of artifacts, emotions, and presences. In laments and in everyday speech, a common honorific that refers to kin is "my crown" (kor6na mou). The connotation is that the other is a crown, an ornament on one's head; the head is the center of the self. The other ornaments the self and in turn the self valorizes the other (as crown). Once, my mother, examining with her eyes my "bare" hands and arms, bemoaned the absence of bracelets or other jewelry, "What are people going to think?" An Inner Maniat relative witnessing this scene, responded quickly, "She needs no bracelets. She has her diplomas for bracelets." Educational attainment is metaphorized as ornament for it establishes visible status in the public domain. In the past, a red strip of cloth, boughazf, ornamented the hem of the dark skirt of the herdmeni woman, the woman who "enjoyed all her kin alive." The red ornamentation on the dark skirt was a metaphor of kin presence and of the emotional qualities and states linked to this presence. The opposite of herdmeni is lipimeni, meaning a woman in a state of mourning. Festive events like the wedding ritual are termed hard while the state of mourning is known as lipi. 1 213

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These are social and not psychological categories. The woman in mourning strips the red trim off her skirt and covers her face with a black scarf. Death entails a social divestiture of the self, self-inflicted violence directed at the body, clothes, and ornaments (see also Caraveli 1982). The following narrator, living in the city for decades, recollects the divestiture of her widowed grandmother. [65]

My father's father was twenty-three when he got married and went to Lavrio to work for extra money. He had hardly been there for a full week when one afternoon during his siesta, he caught a chill-those days there were no medicines such as penicillin-and he died in five days. He was buried there, but they brought his bones horne. He was survived by my grandma [his wife] and their son, my father, who was then three years old. My grandma was also pregnant with another child, which was born without a father. She was widowed at twenty-three ... and you know what she did? She had very long braids, and after his death she cut them. She also had shoes-those days leather shoes were called double shoes (dhiplopdpoutsa) because people only wore little slippers ( padoflitses, tsarouhdkia). These double shoes were given to her by her husband and father-in-law for the wedding. She threw them in the theridha-the old houses have theridhes, that is closets-together with her braids and they were eaten by mold (tdfae i mouhla). She walked barefoot, for the people not to say that the widow wears double shoes or braided her hair [that the widow ornamented herself and is not in mourning].

The ornaments were thrown away to rot, to be desiccated by humidity, to be "burned" in much the same way that the flesh is desiccated from the bones of the corpse in the grave. The presence and absence of ornaments on the body is a public statement concerning self and collectivities. Self-ornamentation is tied to the "appearance" of the self in public domains. Self-divestiture is an expression of loss of collectivity in whole or part, and thus of social death. Ornaments are the inscriptions of collectivity upon the self, the mark of the many on

the one. The chorus ornaments the soloist, just as the latter ornaments the dead with poetry, gesture, and feeling. The soloist reserves her greatest expression of pain for the dead in her ritual sobbing at the end and beginning of each verse of her lament. The sob is both a musical and emotional ornament. The person who is

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not mourned, whose kin did not "appear," dies a "naked" death. Ornamentation

reverses the divestiture of the self that comes with death. The dead are reinvested and adorned with emotions and artifacts of feeling such as language and narrative. To refer to the dead person as "crown" or to refer to a kin member present in the ceremony as koronitsa mou ghlikid (my sweet, little crown), as many larnenters do, is to establish status for both the mourner or kin and the deceased. The valorization of the dead kin as "crown" should not be mistaken as a royalistpolitical iconography or religious identification with icons on the part of the mourner. It is a subversive transfer of the iconography of these powerful institutions to the dead and by inference to the social units of household and clan. The divestment of church and monarchy and the dressing of the dead transforms the dead into an effigy. The iconoclastic emptying of the emblematic signs of dominant political institutions and their redeployment as honorifics for the dead reinforces the cult of the ancestors and political particularism. The effigy is the preeminent artifact of emotions, collective endowment, ornamentation, and shared substance. When children or adults appear dressed up, Maniats say: their mother or wife "has them like dolls" or "like a prince (princess)." The reference here is not to physical beauty alone but to the aesthetics of being "from a household" and "house-proud." These aesthetics involve the part/whole relation that the "appearance" of a singular representative brings into play in any public situation. This part/whole relation of individual to collectivity is materialized in the ornamentation of the body. Similar expressions, such as "she has them like dolls," "they are proud like dolls," or "she has them with her hands like dolls" or "like children," are also used in reference to olive trees. The care and tending of olive trees is their adornment, what connects them to a household, to collectivity. The care and tending of olive trees endows them with affective value in relation to other subsistence crops. For instance, there is a discourse on the olive tree but no discourse on the prickly pear (frag6siko), a common everyday food that requires no care. The prickly pear cactus, unlike the olive tree, does not differentiate between the self and other. Each grove of olive trees carries the signature of a person. It is the mark of the one on

the

man~.

The preparation of the corpse before the burial and, later, the cleaning and ordering of the bones construct the dead as an effigy, as a "doll" (skoutsa). Adornment and ornamentation, cleaning, ordering, divination, and narration of the bones generate tangible emotions. The clean bones are tangible memory, a fossil held in the palm. In life and death, the self is "dressed" with the eye of others. The self is dressed with eyes, memory, and language. Emotions are tangible

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because the senses of the body are the templates of feeling. To remember al"ld to adorn is to embody emotions. The embodiment of feeling is shared substance. Shared substance is not merely theiliaringof objects but rather the exchange of artifacts of emotions. The tending of exhumed bones revolves around the issue of who does it. This performance must be based on shared substance with the dead. That is why there were never paid mourners in Inner Mani: paid mourning does not require shared substance as an exchange of emotions. Tears shed without a common history of reciprocity are matter out of place. The shared artifact historicizes exchanges of feeling. It is a treasure kept and revered (filaht6) and acquires a sacred quality. This is especially so when the artifact stands for a person absent by death or journey. The view of such artifacts by the recipient provokes an immediate response: tears. Tangible emotions. There is an exchange of artifacts at moments of separation. That is why at exhumation the sight of bones inspires lamentation, often as intense as the first klcima. Bones at exhumation become tangible emotive substitutes of the absent "flesh." Separation entails the mutual divestiture of self and other. The self disappears with the absent other. The other, moving into xenitici (estrangement; exile), is like water slipping off your hands, irretrievable substance. The ultimate sign of loss in Inner Mani is the loss of water. Personal liquefaction is the self following the other into the outside. At this moment the imaginary of xenitici begins. Personal dissolution, the liquefaction of the self at the moment of separation, is shared substance with the absent other. Personal liquefaction is absence doubled. The estranged other becomes the foreign part of the self. Xenitici is formed by detached parts of the self. These externalized parts, the exiled artifacts of interiority and "collective flesh," demarcate this world from the other, this place from the space of estrangement, and in turn make xenitici an unending interiority. Old women are frequently found staring at the mountains whose horizon surrounds the Maniat cosmos. This is the gaze of xenitici. "Dressing" with the eyes involves close observation of the other to see "from whom he/she took after." This is a search for a genealogy of shared substance, a genealogy of detached parts. For shared substance leaves marks on the body, marks transferred from body to body in time. Other instances of the genealogical ordering of shared substance involve olive trees and towers. When women examine abandoned olive trees or once familiar olive groves now cultivated by a stranger, they remark in reference to the original cultivators: "Where are you - , that you had them with your hands like dolls?" or "like children?" The mark of the hands, of labor, is imprinted and witnessed on the trees. Olive trees, like people, are invested and divested. So are the towers. The ancestors' head sculp-

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tures on towers are not anonymous, abstract apical figures. They are signatures like the hands imprinted on the olive trees. They are the heads of the most cherished dead, the doubles of the living heads of the tower, personifications of shared substance. They are crowns on the "head" of the tower, ornaments of its living body, the clan.

Examining their surround, women constantly search for "tracks" of the past and the future in the present. It is a constant search for signs of the self in otherness. This is an archaeology of feeling. Genealogical inscription (on olive trees, people, gravestones, and towers) connects shared substance to the ethics of ordering and storage. One orders households and fields as places of storage in order to leave in the present artifacts and signs of shared substance for others in the future. The concept of the future is always linked to that of storage as an economy of concern and care. Olive tree cultivation is a projection into the future. Olive trees, houses, land, and gravestones are tended for those "who will find it after," "for those who follow." The ethic of storage extends reciprocity in time and is thus linked to memory. Storage and storytelling in laments and oral history are intertwined. The storage of emotions in artifacts from olive trees to the dead is re-stored by historical narrative. But this is much more than a historiography. It is an archaeology. For the memory of shared substance is concerned with material components, with tangible tracks. Liquefaction of the self in separation provokes a concern for storage, the recuperation of shared substance. Storage, opposed to liquefaction, solidifies shared substance. Storage, as the ordering of artifacts, occurs in the spaces the other has left. Storage counters divestiture by the re-placement of the other with detached parts of the self. The construction of an effigy, on towers or in exhumation, is the replacement and ornamentation of the absent other. Exhumation, as the reordering and re-storing of bones, creates tangible presence: every bone a word, every bone a memory.

From the point of view of modernity, the exchange of artifacts and emotions is reducible to the economic and the psychological. This is a historical process with global ramifications. Modernity has brought a paradigmatic shift in the social construction of reciprocity. The archaeology of emotions has been marginalized and displaced by the literal economies of exchange. These two systems of exchange have been reified into the polarities of male/female, capitalist/pre-

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capitalist, public/private, modernity/tradition. The subordination of Maniat women is expressed in the dismemberment of the archaeology of emotions as a historicizing discourse. It is the reduction of feeling to a psychological condition.

Shadows In the first years of fieldwork, there was something about the women that eluded me. No matter how affectionately they might treat me, there was a tacit attitude that declared "She's still young . . ." I was young not by age but by ignorance of certain knowledge. I was yet to be enculturated in their eyes. Because of the timing of mortuary cycles, the issue of exhumation did not come up for some time, even after I had established a warm relationship with female informants through the sharing of mourning and work. When I first expressed my desire to learn about and to participate in exhumation, one primary informant inquired with affectionate surprise, "Do you really want to know about these things?" By which she meant "You really want to go that deep (into our reality)!" We eagerly scheduled a meeting time to discuss the matter, late at night in the local female rougha. She spoke of her first exhumation (see narrative 53, chapter 9) performed with the help of a close friend who lived next door. Their relationship was that of symbolic kin. I knew that individual well. We called her aunt. She would join us during siesta times, when the men slept, or at night. In the rougha, she always sat in the corner against the wall, never smiling, strong and cynical in her rare comments. That lady resembled a closed book; what the Maniats would call "light shadow", almost invisible yet ever present. When she heard from her friend that we would be talking about exhumation, she agreed to join us. From the next day on, whenever she greeted me her face became expressive. This incorporation, mediated by exhumation, cut across all existing divisions and began my deep entry into "the inside." It was in the exhumation discourse that the secret of women, a certain arrogance based on a special practice, was exposed. They had a cynical wisdom that originated in the domain of exhumation, a secret body of knowledge that was buried with the bones, to be unburied from time to time and possessed like a treasure. Too often, commentators have mistaken the cynicism and fatalism of Mediterranean cultures for passivity, and have missed undercurrents of irony. Exhu-

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mation, by exposing the bones, exposes the finality of the social self, and, as an accumulated experience, it becomes the exposure of the bones of society. Exhumation is the one domain that has yet to be subverted or relativized by the self-conscious stigma of backwardness that accompanies the crisis of legitimacy of Maniat culture. Exhumation is a domain of practice and belief completely silenced in the discourses of men. It is the only domain in which men totally surrender to women, where they completely accept the ethics of care and interiorization as the ultimate principle. And this is what women know well. They understand exhumation as their fatal wisdom over the social order. There is a relationship between exhumation, fatalism, dreaming, divination, and the state of being "light shadow" that needs to be explicated here. In Inner Mani the word shadow (iskios, aposkiadha) can also mean power or the social weight of personality. A person with a big shadow (iskion meghalone) possesses great social power that demands respect bordering on fear (skiazoume: I am scared). The stem verb iski6no(u) means I protect (someone) under my shadow. Iskiomenos is someone who has power or strength because he is under the protection of a big shadow person. The big shadow personality is one who is fully engaged with the social order and particularly with its relations and institutions of power. The light shadow person (alafroiskiotos), in contrast, is someone who is peripheral to secular social life, a personality that appears disengaged and marginalized. Among the Inner Maniats, the shamanistic figure of the maghos, the witch, diviner, and healer, has to be a "light shadow" person. The category of the shadow as used by Inner Maniats is tied to the optical paradigms of social encounter and social power. I have previously commented on the social circuit formed by the eye and the body, which takes precedence over language, as a foundational medium of social interaction. This is evident in the various divinatory readings that the body is subjected to in dreams, birthing, the act of dying, laying out the corpse, exhumation, and in everyday social life. In the past, the elevation of the Inner Maniat tower, and the collective desire for increasingly higher towers, connected visual surveillance with social power and the control of worldly affairs. The tower, like the powerful social actor, casts a protective big shadow. High levels of personal visibility, ocular appropriation of others, social power and hierarchy, and the big shadow persona are all interconnected categories in Maniat thought. The greater the personal investment in ocular objectification, the greater the personal visibility of the viewer. Yet, visual cognition is divided into two aspects: the instrumental, which is concerned with the control of immediate situations, things, and events, and therefore with the surface

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organization of the present; and the divinatory, a mode of knowing that looks beyond the immediate and the apparent to absence and the invisible. What one chooses to look at influences one's character formation. The category of the shadow reflects this division ofknowing into the instrumental and the divinatory. During exhumation, at the moment of "first facing" when the grave is opened, the appearance/disappearance of the deceased's shadow is a sign of both secular (instrumental and residual) knowledge and divinatory knowledge of the dead. The shadow's fleeting appearance points both to the residual social persona of the deceased and the inevitable erasure/transformation of this identity by desiccation. At that point in the exhumation, the shadow functions as the boundary and the hinge between the visible and the invisible, between the past and the present-a present formed by the absence of the deceased. The light shadow person is a figure who both encompasses and plays with the alternation between presence and absence, or visible and invisible. Not to implicate oneself in the visual and material immediacy of the everyday world, one has to look elsewhere. This is the predilection of the light shadow person that connects this figure to the practices of divination, dreaming, mourning, and the ironies of exhumation-practices that never fail to disengage women from the social order. In dreams, in the articulation of pain and desire through lamentation, in exhumation and other modes of divination, the light shadow person looks outside the symbolic order of society, beyond presence to that which is absent. The discourse of the moiroloyistres centers on the corpse, the material presence of what is not there-the persona of the dead; the dreamer interprets the presence of the dream sign in terms of the absence of what is yet to occur; and the woman who exhumes her dead reflects on the erased facades of a residual identity through the presence of bones and the absence of flesh.

Cynics and Others Social power has always been relegated unequally between genders. Men dominated political discourse in the household, the male rougha, and the yerondiki, or male council. Yet, this monophony was checked and contested by the women's "jury" of the klama (mourning ritual). Modernization allowed men to build on their traditional articulation with external centers of power based on mercenary work and seasonal migration. Today they are associated with the economic practice and cultural ideologies of the metropole. In contrast, women are more

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often than men linked to precapitalist, subsistence, and domestic modes and spaces of production. 2 Men have assumed the position of a "modernizing elite"' in Inner Mani, and they contest the symbolic practice of women with the authority of popular forms of scientism, technical rationality, and a "common sense" attitude that insists on the medicalization of pollution, dying, death, and mourning. The penetration of modernization ideologies aggravated and intensified culturally constructed gender divisions that have been in place for some time. These tensions now center on the mourning ritual as site for the production of political discourses. Depending on the participants, certain mortuary rituals display the modernization of death: some participants wear other colors besides black; urbanized kin attempts to silence discursive polyphony and singing; the discord about customary obligations and reciprocities shifts to antagonistic confrontations over the propriety of klama itself. This transgression of the performative integrity of the ritual is accompanied by the ideological shift from customary concepts of pollution and purification to medical rationalities. The latter entails a shift in the taxonomies of order and disorder. The clergy's view that prolonged klama is disorderly, now coincides with the modernization ideology of urbanized men and kin. The transformed notions of pollution, disorder, and orderliness reflect a crisis of normative social relations among the living-a crisis that is expressed through a metalanguage concerned with the relation or nonrelation of the living to the dead. In an ironic fashion, the openness of the klama to antiphony, improvisation, agonistic tensions, and adversarial confrontation accommodates new transgressive behaviors and ideologies. The fact that this conflict achieves a heightened visibility at the moment of death attests to the continuing power and centrality of death rites as a site of social representation. Modernity does not introduce conflict into the ceremony but rather delegitimizes the proper forms for the dialogical construction of conflict. The male ideology of modernization (also enunciated by urbanized women) aims at the censure of female symbolic practice. Confronted with the undeniable efficacy and external legitimacy of the local male ideology of modernization, female symbolic practice can appear fragmented and dispersed because of its stigmatization as superstition, backwardness, and gossip. Polarities advanced by modernization ideology, such as past/present, country/city, ritual/science, extended family/privatization, also generate a reified binary opposition of women to men. This neat dyadic structure is, in effect, a crucial stage and mechanism

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in the current internal colonization of women's consciousness. Many areas of female symbolic practice and representation were not organized around male/ female binary sets in the past. The plurality of cognitive and practical domains where men and women interfaced through binary categories, albeit in a hierarchical manner, were relativized by the many domains in which women did not work with gender-bifurcated codes. There was an entire domain of autonomous female cognition and symbolization that was not a mirrored refraction of male representations and was not carved out of male/female dyads. 4 The discourses of mourning, exhumation, and dream interpretation were performatively and semantically autonomous of male/female symbiotic codes and were effectively used by women to cQmtru_cUt female imaginary that exceeded male/female dualism .. It is this divinatory complex (mourning, exhumation, and dreaming) that is currently subjected to cultural erasure by ideologies of modernization. The contemporary compression of female identity and representation into male/female binary sets should be understood as an emergent and coercive modernizing discourse, and not necessarily as a direct continuation of an earlier gender relation. This process of compression takes a particular form. In the past, we could identify two, distinct, male and female domains of social practice and cognition in Inner Maniat culture. These domains were not totally contiguous or mirror images of each other; although at places were they did intersect, binarism may have been to the fore. The central characteristic of these domains is that they were basically classificatory spaces. Although largely associated with the social practices of respective genders, individual members could cross back and forth between female and male domains. Women could kill and men could mourn. With the penetration of ideologies of modernization, the rigidification of the division of labor between genders and between city and country, and the magnification of the social distance between public and private spheres, male/female dichotomies have been essentialized. The formal characteristics of male/female domains have become conflated with the biological markers that once functioned as metaphors of different arenas of social practice and cognition. This conflation of form with substance has been the central mechanism for reifying gender difference and for compressing those differences into exclusive binary polarities. In comparison to the antiphonic dynamics and cosmological reference of divination in klama and dreaming, this locking of women's identities in symbiotic male/female representations offers limited opportunities for dialogical autonomy and empowerment.

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The categories of the big and light shadow persona are another expression of the traditional division of the cultural order into two discontinuous modes of cognition, which now, as never before, express a relationship of historical transformation and cultural displacement. The divinatory complex is the domain of the light shadow, which relates to the moiroloyistra, the dream interpreter, and the exhumer. Their discourses occur outside the social construction of normative ~~n. They are part of the feminine imaginary. The dream reality accepted sign, the dream visitations of the dead, the truth that appears and is witnessed in klcima through poetics and pain, and the ironic message of the bones when they are brought back from the xenitia of the grave into the personal reality of the exhumer-all represent an outside.

by

Throughout the ritual process of mourning, particularly in the interstitial periods between performative dramas, women pass back and forth between divinatory cognition and cynicism, a sense of futility that appears as acceptance of the male discourse of "common sense." 5 This supercession of ritual cognition by a "common sense" attitude thus appears as the fading of a distinct domain of feminine cultural production and a ritualized return to the male dominated social order and its appropriate modes of cognition and representation. This implies a gender-inversion scenario. But to simply read this as an inversion obscures the ironic derealization of all social order and normative constructs that originate in the semiologies of pain and in the material contact of exhumation. Exhumation defamiliarizes the entire social order for women. This is reinforced by the subsequent institutionalization of mourning discourses and performances as oral history, and by the continued engagement with the dead, after formal mortuary events, in the dream life of the light shadow person. The cynicism of women that comes with exhumation is not indicative of a newly acquired biological positivism generated by contact with the bones. It is an ironic posture that echoes the turning away of the light shadow person from the immediacy and legitimacy of the normative order. This cynicism is based on the immersion of the mourner in all that which eludes conventional social constructs and which exceeds the boundaries of the everyday. The exposure of bones metaphorizes the invisible and the outside, whose entry disinters and then decenters the given anchorages of social life. The exhumer's irony is intimately connected to moira and xenitid. Moira places an outer limit on all activity, including ritual enactment. The female

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mourner, as singer or exhumer, departs from ritual spaces as if returning from xenitici, but brings her exile with her. This is the exile of the dead, stripped of all customary accoutrements and familiar conventions to be found in the world of the living. The xenitici of the dead has been depicted in laments as a locale formed by the convergence of roads in an empty landscape; the social space of the transient, the passerby, and the nonsedentary. The mourner who returns from the spaces of death and reencounters the living and their everyday construction of reality treats her reentry as a replication of the meetings of the dead in the otherworld. Her return is without any permanence; it is merely another temporary convergence with other exiles on an empty road. The mourner constructs an ongoing xenitici, an internal exile, in which the everyday construction of reality often appears as foreign and even duplicit. [66] Listen, my golden Koula, you must philosophize, this is a fake life and a temporary world, may your sisters live while you fake passing the time, living with the sigh and the knife at the throat, now, at the end of life.

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Aghrfka, Kotila mou hrisf, prepi na to filoso{fs etsi in'i pseftiki zof ke o prosorin6s dounicis na zoun i adherfcidhes zou na pseftovghcinis to ker6 na zis me anastenaghm6 ke me maheri sto lem6 t6ra sto telos tis zois.

-, The cynicism that accompanies accumulated exhumation experiences makes this practice a particularly threatening one to all those who are not participants. Earlier I stated that exhumation is never subjected to the disparaging critiques of the ideology of modernization. There are specific reasons for male silence on the subject. Exhumation is a practice and a discourse that men cannot argue with, they have to submit to it, for it is their fate to be exhumed. At that moment they are totally in the hands of women. Through bone reading and laments, women rewrite biographic and clan history. They have the last word. Men may dominate the visible domains of social power, but with exhumation, women control a domain of collective representation that is particularly invisible to men-a domain from which they are excluded when alive, and in which they are silenced when directly subjected to its practice after death. Exhumation is literally beyond men, in terms of both their cognition and their life cycle. The crucial component of the irony of women who have exhumed is their tacit as-

sertion that the last word is mine! This declaration, which never has to be organized into a formal discourse, determines women's critical distance from the normative order of social life. For them, the male social order, when viewed from the various perspectives of the feminine imaginary of exhumation, dreaming, and mourning poetics, is indeed a "fake" and impermanent world with margins that are clearly visible.

Cosmological Construction Death is the event that discloses the invisible in the visible. This involves the cosmological construction of death through various narrative genres ranging from oral or life history recitations, and riddling, to the poetics of the lament. In previous chapters I have cited laments where the death event is represented as activating the entry of an undomesticated nature into the interiority of the social and household order. The death event functions as a nexus, a point of intersection that discloses the patterns of time, space, nature, and even historical causality-linkages that are not accessible to the cognitive structures of everyday social life. These patterns exceed the existing order and yet exert a determining influence over it. The otherness of these patterns is indicated not only by the moment of their appearance, that is, the time of death, but by the narrative genres which historicize their appearance: mourning singing, dream interpretation, and bone reading. Much in the same way that the dead are not to be left alone and unattended at the time of passing, the death event itself is not to be a solitary occurrence. There is a series of convergences that emerges with the advent of individual death. These convergences transform the time of the death event into polyphonic history. Polyphony, which is constructed out of dreams, mourning poetry, and the prose discourses of mourning, reveals a cosmological order that is adumbrated by the specific death event. This order is invisible, latent, and even subject to a passive cognition in everyday social life, but becomes an active force at the time of death. Analogous to the occurrence of death, the cosmological order appears and is experienced as a rupture, as a breach, and as the forcible entry of the outside into an interior space. The cosmological construction of death is a series of narrations that contextualizes the individual death within a transcendental order. The cosmological position of the individual death establishes the moral status of the dead. The death event permits the divination of

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moral order and disorder by creating, or at least pointing to, the perceptual rent through which the cosmological profile or shadow of the world leaks into the social order. The following narrative is a prose recitation that both anticipates and refracts the more overt poeticizing of mourning songs, to which it can serve as a prelude or as a coda. The narrator recollects her husband's death in Athens. [67]

In 1974, on his father's name day, the celebration of the local patron saint, the day that my own father was killed [prior to her husband's death], God took his soul. It was eight o'clock. . . . The day of his burial war is declared, the coup d'etat of Cyprus. [With gestures and voice signifying disorder:] The church bells are ringing, an alarm takes place, one is looking for his child, another for her husband, but fortunately we managed to complete the burial . . .

Here, the individual death is subjected to a narrative order that has its diachronic and its synchronic dimensions. In the diachronic continuum, the narrator constructs the metaphorical value of her husband's death by tracing a sacred patrilineage. He dies on his father's name day; the name day of the patron saint often coincided with the name of the mythic apical ancestor of the clan. Thus, the timing of the death links the deceased through the name day of his father to the origins of the clan. Her timing of the death expresses and recapitulates the historical time of the deceased's lineage. The convergence of the date of her husband's death and the earlier death of her father confirms a cosmological pattern. Death creates both a spatial and a temporal metonymy between the local and the universal. Here the miasma of anastdtosi (the upside down) is evoked by the spatial disorder of people running around, the ringing church bells (both of which indicate death), and the declaration of war. War reorganizes the historical character of the narrator's world, amplifying and sealing the significance of her husband's death. By tracing these various linkages in historical time and social space, and/or between the social world and the domain of nature (in other narratives), the mourning singer fulfills her mission: to establish the cosmological position of each death. The individual death functions as a sign of deeper and more widespread pattern that would have eluded ordinary cognition if the mourner had not made her interventions. The identification of these events taps into sign relations that lie outside the representational systems of daily life, just as the image of international war evokes external forces beyond local control. The discourses and practices of divination are informed by a historicizing

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vocation on the part of the mourner or dreamer. Exhumation is the literal bringing up of the past, and, like warning signs and dream signs, it generates a disordering mix of temporalities. In the divination experience, past and future are literally in the present. When the sleeper awakes from a dream she smells, tastes, and hears the negative. These sensory experiences metaphorize crucial affective states. To move from one temporal dimension to another is not a matter of moving from A to B for the Maniats. Exhumation and foretelling are the entry into polysemic time. Historical reconstruction of the past and the future emerges out of the performative space as an interpretive process propelled by temporal disorder. The emergence of a disordered, anomalous, and heterogeneous temporal dimension is the "appearance" of the cosmological domain as a contrasocial reality. After klama, the apparent return of women to the cynical common sense posture appears as abandonment of cosmological perception for the secular time of social order, where the past and present are separated by boundaries as rigid as those that "logically" separate the living from the dead. But the consciousness formed by divinatory experience never ceases to anchor the temporal closures of secular social time in a wider semantic dimension where all such closures are subject to rupture and reorganization. Just as the veteran exhumer is condemned to see the bones beneath the flesh of the living, the diviner, as the light shadow person, always visualizes deep structures of temporal connection, of which the bounded time of society is but a symptom.

Dream Time, Labor Time, and Power The mourning ritual, the exhumation, and the death event are dramatic public / events that disinter the invisible and wrench it away from the cognitive constraints imposed by the visible. But the styles of cognition which these events represent and mobilize are "secularized" and almost routinized in dreaming, where the feminine imagination is liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints of public ritual. Dreaming provides the conventional symbols that connect the individual to a collective imaginary. Dreaming is the presence of the / social in the individual consciousness and informs the relation of the individual to society and cosmos. The force of dreaming blurs Durkheimian dichotomies between individual and collective cognition, between private emotion and public performances, between the ritualistic and nonritualistic, the sacred and the secular. The analysis of Maniat dreaming reveals pivotal forms and sign relations

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that codify negative transformation of the person in time and space. Dreaming deploys a repertoire of codes discussed earlier: directional polarities, the opposing forces of the heavy and light, the orificial dynamics of food, shared substance, and the open mouth, constrained spaces, breathlessness, alphabetic metonyms, and roads. All these codes reappear in representations of birthing, women's labor, dying, burial, exhumation, and in the poetics of mourning. Dreaming does not only offer a comprehensive index of the symbolic objects of the feminine imaginary, but also the mechanisms of symbolic transformation: defamiliarization, inversion, object exchange, the inscription of space and direction with moral force, the economic and juridical character of the symbolic. Dreaming supplies the elementary structures and rules of women's symbolic thought that permeate specific social practices of the waking world. Further, dreaming constructs and reproduces intimate passageways to the outside, the source of divinatory knowledge. These corridors are not totally dependent on the logistics of public performance. Yet the dialogical validation and negotiation of dream signs is dependent on the social structure of gender defined space, the rougha. This space can be understood as a more informal extension of the klama and takes its political authority partly from this ritual. Dream interpretation (exiyisi) founds the ethical thrust of other feminine interpretive practice. Dream interpretation opens up novel fields of reference and consequence. It establishes the moral relation of sign to event. By linking sign and event, dream interpretation establishes the imperative of appropriate, consistent, and consequent behavior. Most importantly, dreaming and dream interpretation collapse the temporal distance between the present (sign) and the future (event). Collapsing the distance between sign and event is the initial stage in establishing the juridical and positive authority of women's discourse in rougha, klama, and exhumation. (See the discussions on the power of denotation and sound, low voicing, screaming, antiphony and pain in chapters 4, 6, 7-) Mastery over time in divination is at the very least an interpretive, if not an instrumental, mastery over the events that occur in time and that are structured by time. Here it is evident that the cultural power both of women's collective discourse and of the light shadow persona have a foundation in interpretive control. To this, one may add that women's temporal power is best substantiated by their control over oral history and biography. The singer's improvisation of

poetic discourse, her sudden presentation of unexpected and even transgressive sign relations and layers of meaning, her unparalleled control over language,

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sound, and senses, are further demonstrations of women's mastery over time in its fullest polyphony. In archaic Greece, the concepts of moira (fate) and time were interdependent. Moira was understood as a due share or allotment. There was a moira that each individual could expect as her/his appropriate "share." Moira could be taken, given as due, and lost. Moira itself was understood as being embodied and as measurable in status-producing material artifacts (Adkins 1982, 2 23- 26). The exchange of such artifacts was the circulation of due shares. These shares were not evenly distributed throughout the cosmos; some beings had more than others. The share of moira itself was a unit of honor. Entities could lose their due share of moira and honor by theft and death. Moira differentiates social actors from each other. The dead of the archaic Hades who have lost their memory, and thus the knowledge of their moira, are depicted as an anonymous, deindividualized mass (Vernant 1981). They have lost time. The dead have no memory, because "recollection can only take place within time. The dead do not live within time ..."(ibid., 290). Odysseus, when visiting Hades, restores temporary order, individuation, and memory to the otherworld by introducing the concepts of number, sequence, and hence time: "To call forth the dead as Odysseus undertakes to do . . . is to introduce order and number into their formless magma, to distinguish individuals by compelling them to fall into line one behind the other, each one stepping forward in turn on his own to speak i~ his own name and remember" (ibid., 290). We find an analogous concept of moira at work in contemporary Maniat divination. In dreaming and dream interpretation, the continuum created between sign and event establishes the particular moira or quality of time due to the individual whom the dream targets. Dream interpretation is a collective act that basically distributes qualitative units of time to designated persons and households as their due share. The dream signs themselves are economic units that point to a particular chronology between sign and event, a particular value of time. One cannot avoid the allotted moira, but to undergo a fateful event without knowledge and recollection of moira's foretelling is to lose time. Exhumers who expose and discuss blackened bones and white-yellow bones also endow the dead with time or separate the dead from time. The exhumed black bones with residues of flesh are tied to the past. They have remained static and outside of time and show no purifying transformation in time. In the mourning ritual, the most crucial task of the moiroloyistra (singer) is salvaging personal history; the history embedded in the transcient materiality of the dead as the

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231

resynthesis of women's experience constitutes a system of shared moral inference (i.e., ethics of reciprocity and shared substance) that is formalized into a jural apparatus. The externalization of the impure in the ceremony through the presence of the corpse, and female speech and body also constitutes a material force. All the above are the elements that compose the cultural power of the women of Inner Mani.

latter dissolves and is effaced. Here, the structured relation between language and memory as units of time and as constructing time is crucial. The body is a divinatory unit displaying heterogeneous temporalities (see discussions of dream imagery, laying out the body, birthing beliefs, and exhumation). The body, like language, is a carrier of moira and time. Death gradually effaces the body_ as _a receptacle of a specific moira. The moirol6i (lament) in turn reconstructs mdividual biography as a substitute symbolic unit of time. Through antiphony, the mourner transfers her embodiment thematized as wound, pain, and labor to the mourning song as the new carrier of personal time. In klama, it is difficult to shake the impression that the lament, as it passes from mourner to mourner, becomes a substantive, tangible object, an artifact that is taken from mouth to mouth. In the singing and the "taking" of laments, mourners exchange time

Dreaming in the Field EXCERPT FROM FIELDWORK JOURNAL

I drove alone in the midafternoon to a nearby deserted village. I walked slowly and contemplatively through the empty houses, the way one does when backtracking in time and space. It was a village empty of sound and movement, hot, windless, with the blazing light of a desert. Now and then I heard a distant bird. The village was overgrown with tall, standing weeds but architecturally intact with towers and towerhouses and narrow pebbled streets. Crossing under a dry stone arch, I stopped abruptly, feeling a piercing look from behind and above me. On top of a towerhouse, on an open terrace, stood a black figure, nailed down at the center, at a right angle between tower and attached towerhouse. She was in the usual half bent female posture, between sitting and standing, rocking her body with a slight movement. She was staring at slopes and abandoned olive terraces extending endlessly into the distance with the sun glaring off a thousand rocks. The only shadows were those formed by the towers and the woman. She had turned from that scene to glance at me. I greeted her. I could not tell whether she nodded back or her head had simply followed the motion of her body rocking back and forth like an eternal clock. She seemed sedentary and permanent, as if she never left that terrace. Keeping time, she stood over and above her world, her "culture." I was with the "culture" below.

among themselves.

The lament, with its metaphorical interplay between mortuary labor and women's domestic and agricultural labor, is a meditation on women's shared moira and a recovery of the efaced labor time of women's work in the mourning ceremony, graveyard, household, and field. Here the body as the carrier of moira and pain is central to the translation of experience, metaphor, and meaning from one domain of feminine practice to another. This multiple transfer of time and pain from body to language and from language to body liberates women's moira and labor from fragmentation and specifies it as the basis of women's cultural power.6 These poetics publicly resist the male dominated institutions that fragment female practice, and their discourse that endows women's labor with a low social status. Women's collective labor in klama can be characterized as the expressive self-assertion of marginals. But the notion of collective expression is a far cry from the construction of effective cultural power. There is an ensemble of effective practices in the Maniat lament session that transforms expression into intervention. Pain is materialized by the acoustics of "screaming" and the poetics of the body. This material character of pain endows it with force. The metaphorical link between the work of mourning and agriculture transforms women's work into a labor relation and thus adds to the material force of ritual practice. The labor of pain, witnessing, representing, burning, wounding, and the endurance of fate organizes the relations between self and others, the living and the dead, women and men, the collective and the individual (chorus and soloist). This

VISIBLE

INVISIBLE

!

I ..

One afternoon at a local rougha, I nonchalantly spoke of a nightmare I had had recently. "Nightmare?" asked an old lady. I recounted the dream. She stared at me. After a moment's pause signifying instructive disagreement, she corrected my language. I had experienced a vision. Later, the "dream was proven." Dream-

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TEN

ing became for me a personal training in moira. The time of personal dreaming and shares of time revealed in dreams and dream discourse provided me with passageways into the culturally specific time of Inner Maniat women. There was an unmediated interplay between dream experience, dream discourse, and my process of entry into the field and into the culture. The warning dream produces a powerful socialization into death. Within the symbolic experience of warning, death is not in the future; sign and event are collapsed and death is there at that moment. Moira is not a particular discrete event, but an encompassing temporal continuum, which in my situation became co-extensive with the time of fieldwork and cultural passage. My confrontation with death occurred through the mediation of dream categories as much as it occurred through the mediation of ethnological categories. I kept both a fieldwork diary and a dream diary. Read together they traced an interlocking historiography of death in the field. In turn, my personal development of dreaming paralleled my participation in mourning. Between dreaming and mourning I travelled back and forth along a uniform chain of sign relations. Perhaps the central contribution of dreaming was the erasure of most of the voluntaristic ethos that characterizes scientific inquiry. Personal dreaming enculturated me into the autonomous force of women's symbolic practice. One does not control dreaming. Dream signs have an autonomous emotive power of connotation. From the beginning of my dreaming, which coincided with my entry into the field, I experienced the plethora of conventionalized dream signs, the full exegesis of which I lacked. Because of my urbanization, I had been removed from the social structure and interpretive frameworks that translate dream experience into everyday cognition. Dreaming with the conventional signs of Inner Mani disclosed my inherence in a temporal order with which I was personally intimate and yet from which I was culturally distanced. Participation in divination sessions deepened my understanding of the performative culture of women and ultimately transformed my "nightmare" into their "visions." In time, the system of dream denotation, which was originally devoid of reference, facilitated the construction of context. This involved the interpersonal negotiations, mediations, and interplay of the fieldwork process, and entailed a voluntary dimension. But in my relationship to dreaming itself, I can entertain no notion of play, freedom, or choice. The issue of self-reflexivity in the field became bound to my dreaming process. As my initiation into moira and time, dreaming gradually deconstructed the Western ethic of a rationalized self. The initial moment of this process involved my understanding of the total irrelevancy of Freudian logic to my dream

VISIBLE

233

INVISIBLE

symbology, the distance of my dreams from Western and "northern" paradigms of psychologization. . In dr_eamin~ and in klcima one functions as an involuntary interpreter. The antiphomc environment of kldma promotes the spontaneous exegesis of the mourn_ing di_sco~rse in its fullest polysemy, and the dream sign operates like a collective vmce mflected with shared meanings within the individual consciousness. Here the visiting dead ancestor, representative of the collective introduces an antiphonic dimension into the dreamer's present reality. '

. The following is the first dream that I could identify as a divination text. I d1d ~ot know this at the time, but the dream stuck in my mind, and later dreams and mterpretation sessions clarified its message. I saw this dream early in my fieldwork.

Excerpts from the dream diary DREAM: A big picture book is in my hands, its pages turning slowly by themselves, from last page to first. Each page has simple drawings of enlarg~d h~ads leaning gently against each other like big grapes. All pages are Identical. They turn till the last page, the back of the front cover, is reac~ed. A rectangular window runs across the top of the page, an actual openmg, traffic can be seen through its aperture. (Below, at the bottom of the page, rests the same drawing of heads bunched like grapes.) At the left cor~er_ of the ~in dow appears the youthful head of my dead grandma, with a d1gmfied haudo and an imperceptible smile of contentment. Her head slides slowly through the window to the other end of the page till the book is closed. EVENT: A few days after this dream I was notified that the last "head" of

t~e c~an, my ~ra~dmother's husband's brother, had died. My grandmother d1ed ~~ her ~m~ties, so she always was old to me, with dark, dry skin and very httle hau tied to the back of her head in the fashion of rural women dressed in black, and rarely smiling. This can be contrasted to the unfa: miliar, youthful, gay grandmother of the dream. INDEX: The dream book was the "account book," the written moira of the entire clan (see lament II, chapter 3); its closing symbolized the end of the clan. The heads bunched together like grapes are a symbol of the clan as collectivity (see also lament 57, chapter 9). Grapes here must also be

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understood as shared substance. The head is a symbol of dead ancestors. [See earlier discussions of tower and grave sculptures, and head and skull imagery.] Now, I also understand the account book as a reference to my writing of an ethnography.

THE

VISIBLE

235

INVISIBLE

names from the George in the dream to the uncle George involved in the actual event.

DREAM: I am walking in Mani's narrow paths, which are flooded by dirty DREAM: My long dead Latin American friend visits my home. His face is

unfamiliar. My house is small-red stone or claylike constructionchanging here and there into a hut. I open the door and embrace him. While doing so I have the thought and the fear: "My home will fall, please go." I woke up with the sense of having been far away in another land. EVENT: In a week or so I heard about the terrible earthquakes in an area

of Mexico I had just left the month before. I had been living in a thatched hut. INDEX: Defamiliarization of known spaces and persons; visitation of the dead. Waking up with feelings of disorientation, of trepidation.

water. I cross one path with houses on both sides that suddenly resemble the narrow streets of Kalamata [a city to the north of Inner Mani]. I enter a house in which a group of black-dressed women are talking about others "who abruptly died and will never be seen again." EVENT: This dream was preceded by a series of short, scattered dreams during a period of a month. These dreams featured the appearances of dead ancestors, once in Mani and once in Kalamata. The dead appeared in the context of very upsetting activities: large social gatherings where people cooked, offered, and ate bad, rotten food. In these gatherings adults appeared as if in their childhood, wearing short dresses and displaying ugly faces resembling African masks. A few days after the last dream in this series [cited above] the city of Kalamata experienced a devastating earthquake that killed hundreds of people, destroyed most of the older buildings and sections of the town, and forced a partial evacuation of the city.

DREAM: I am driving a small, old car towards my family's country house.

INDEX: Difficult paths, constrained spaces, defamiliarized locations, chro-

Difficult road, dangerous narrow paths, muddy. In agony, whether I will make it or not. On my way, I meet my mother in a large foreign house. She is baking sweets with my dead grandma. I kiss my grandma on the cheek, she is sour and pensive. We all rejoice at our meeting as my father arrives too. Soon my cousin George appears-sad, wilted-and leaves.

matic symbol of death (black robes), rotten food, adults appearing as children, distortion of body parts.

EVENT: A few days later, in the area of my country house, two accidents occurred. My mother was notified and she had to be driven by car to the scene. My uncle George was a close friend of the one family which experienced the accident-the husband had mistakenly been shot. The second accident occurred in the family of my father's brother.

All our lives, women of the Mediterranean have lived with a tradition of institutionalized male and civilizational discourses imposed from the outside that have fragmented and rendered irrational the experience of divination. Divination is consigned to backwardness and superstition and conflated with gossip and other frustrated expressions of the desire for social weight. This judgement informs the way existing generations of women experience divination. We ourselves consider this practice only through its isolated fragments. We ourselves never experience it as a total system, as a unity. This is the subtext in the communication of women involved in divination that is never allowed to appear. The divinatory practices are like fragments of a dismembered and submerged female body. To make a structural analysis of the modes, techniques, and dis-

INDEX: Difficult, tortuous road resisting the traveller; constraining space

[the car], muddy, dark-colored and wet road; presence of sweet food, which is always negative; the presence of my dead grandmother in a bad mood; the defamiliarization of the country house; the celebratory family gathering which is an inversion of the foretold event. The unfamiliar appearance of my cousin George, as old, tired, or prematurely aged; the transfer of

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11

CHAPTER TEN

course of divination, therefore, is to identify the scattered fragments as a system, and in the context of contemporary Mediterranean cultures this is to make a political statement. The marginality of cognitive modes rooted in divination was the basis for my interaction with women. Like myself, they have been struggling between two conflicting epistemologies. From different ends of a similar historical process of modernization, my informants and I have been decentered from the sense and effectivity of divination experience. We encountered the arbitrariness of history from divergent but interlocking cultural positions. The experience of dreaming was also arbitrarily imposed on my consciousness. I had no control of these culturally constructed and highly conventionalized symbols that I knew spoke a language for which I had no translation-signs that were both alien and within me; signs that spoke in reference to an internal Other I did not know. Maniat women, in turn, experienced modernity as a process that imposes psychological and medical discourses that attempt to rationalize certain sensibilities or to explain them away. Popular forms of psychological and medical explanation, as well as the idea of progress, are the counterdiscourses to divination. Maniat women have also experienced the erosion of the local social structures and institutions within which divination had a performative context. The privatization of women's social interaction in both urban and rural settings accompanies the attrition of collective social space beyond that of the ritual. At the beginning of my fieldwork, I, too, was without a social and performative context for my dreams. These women and I had been incompletely barred from certain levels of validating and validated symbolic experience. This internal exile, undergone from different poles of the same historical transformation, was interpersonally relevant.

ESCHATOLOGY

I am the Verga of Almyros I hold and withstand all ill-fated attacks For I have the rounded belly of a storage vase, 1 I can open the earth and bring all that is up down I can throw it in the deep ocean as well.

Egh6 fm'i Vergha t'Almirou ki 6sa me vrousi ta borou t'ehou kilici ti pithar6s

ki 6la ta kcino harab6 ta rihnou ke sti thcilasa.

Verga and Almyros are the locales where a famous battle took place between the Maniat clans and the invading Turkish army during the Greek Revolution of 1821. In all histories the battle of Almyros is valorized as a male victory at which women aided by fighting with their sickles against a second Turkish army at Diro. The above verses recla~m the battle as women's history. In the first verse, the female mourner becomes, not just the battle, but the place where the battle was fought. Men occupy places, women become spaces. She comprehends the particular event and place through her body-her body surrounds the event and the space. The second verse states that no matter what violence and evil assaults her, she will hold, contain, and devour affliction in the same manner that the Maniats "devoured" the invading Turkish army. Like a levendisa (fighter), she remains erect in contrast to all the bodies that have fallen. The lament deals explicitly with cosmological imagery. In Maniat memory this battle is an event of cosmic proportions. The metaphor of the belly, of the interiority of women in the third verse, engenders cosmos and history as female. The continuum of historical destruction is thus comprehended through a metaphor of ingestion, eating, and forceful interiorization. Historicization as an oral practice replicates this process of cosmic injestion. The female body, like the 237

~

I I

238

CHAPTER ELEVEN

\

"opened earth" and the cosmos itself, is the ultimate vessel of storage and memory. If the cosmos is conceived as a gendered space of interiority, then likewise each woman's body is a detached interior, a separated part of the cosmic whole. Each woman's interior replicates the cosmos as a fragment of the whole. The cosmos never attains full presence. It is always presented through fragments, through each woman's individual interiority. The gathering together of women in lament performances is the assemblage of these fragments of the cosmic. Lament performances, divination, oral history, women's logos and bodily practices are the acting out of exchanges between the detached part (women's interiority) and the whole (cosmological interiority). Women translate individual experience into cosmological generality, and return cosmological totality to the particular. This is Maniat women's cultural power. The linkage between historical destruction and cosmological ingestion in women's poetics demonstrates a self reflexive awareness of the historical disappearance of Maniat reality itself. For those women who are the record keepers of cosmological process, historical finality remains embedded in their poetics and written on their bodies.

SHADOWS

I

through female eyes . . . (1984)

2

Coastline in the Southwest of Mani ( 1982)

3

Multi towered village with terraced infields ( 1983)

4 Abandoned terraced outfields ( 1982)

5 Towerhouses; the house on the right features gunholes ( 1986)

mahalds

6

Village neighborhood (1982)

sten6

8 Alleyway; lower section of a tower with arch construction ( 1981) 7 War tower with prickly pears in the foreground (1986)

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the tower, like the powerful social actor, 11 Tower surrounded by tower houses ( 1986)

casts a protective, big shadow

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liotrivio 12

Male space: olive grinding room ( 1981)

13

War tower with fortified windows and new house attached; small headcarving on the right wall (1981)

'

14

Woman with her daughters newly arrived from Athens, resting in the rough a ( 198 5)

16

Kitchen interior in a tower house ( 1986)

code switching

Same woman, two hours later

Making soap from olive oil (1984)

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now I don't want to tum to look, 21 20

Two friends (1982)

for all I see is ruins . ( 1981)

we Maniats, as you know, encounter with fate ... 22

Old lady on the road (1983)

2

j

3

View from a tower window ( 1981)

have the inside and the outside face ...

mazema 24

Ingathering for the ceremony: mourners in rougha (1981)

the women's cafe 25

Gender division of space (1982)

tender encounters 27

Ceremony at the peripheries (1982)

00 N

31

29

Managing conflict at a klama taking place in church (1981)

pombi 30

The priest, the first to exit from the ceremony at the cemetery, followed by the men (1985)

The procession: on the road to the cemetery (1981)

those in exile united in pain ... (1985)

for this is my blood 34 The ethnographer as witness (1985)

and my meat [kin] for blood springs up crosses fields and mountains makes bridges and passes through

reading 33

The cemetery as cognitive map (1985)

in the foreign land 35

Talking to Others (1984)

people are rude, like the dead they do not respond . . .

... yet the dead are confined to the road . .. (1981)

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a mosaic of discontinuous interiors ... 39

Stone-wall terracing: land "cleaned" for cultivation ( 1981)

she threshed them, 40

Interiorization (1982)

in one pile she gathered them in the middle of the threshing floor

41

Cynics and others (author and friends, 1985)

N 0 T E S

CHAPTER

ONE

1. For a further discussion on constructing power in the margins, see Comaroff 1985 and Taussig 1987. 2. Deritualization and privatization take place in symbolic practices other than death rituals, i.e., feuds (Seremetakis 1986, 990-91). 3· For a critique of the polarity between editing and dialogue, see Feldman 1991. 4· For Bloch and Parry, the resources of life, such as fertility, constitute a "limited good." Death introduces and thematizes scarcity, for it is the loss of life, productivity, and fertility. The central concern of mortuary rites is the recuperation of this loss. Death rites dramatize the cycle of loss and regeneration for the living. In this framework, one person's or group's loss is another's gain. There is a logical connection between the conception of life resources as a limited good and the necessity of insuring controlled reproductive continuity (ibid., 7-9). This model is based on the notion of predatory egoism in which the negation of one social actor is transformed into the affirmation of another social actor. Social life revolves around both symbolic and material competition for scarce resources. Bloch and Parry affirm that the central principle animating mortuary rites is analogous to "positive predation" wherein the appropriation of the Other's life essence is the pervasive logic. The Hobbesian thrust of their assumptions compels Bloch and Parry to advance a model of premodern agrarian death rites that recapitulates the Enlightenment analysis of early capitalism.

5· The Durkheimian model and its contemporary advocates perpetuate what Fabian calls the "theoretical socialization of the death" (Fabian 1973, 191), which he identifies with "functionalism" and systems adaptation theory. He interprets the thesis of functional integration of death through ritual as symptomatic of the disruptive, repressed, and disjunctive character of death in the society where these theories originate. Harris echoes Fabian in contesting the Durkheimian model of the functional relation of death rites to other social institutions. Assessing death rites among the Bolivian Laymi, she concludes:

I am the Verga of Almyros 43

Maniat woman with her sickle

Many anthropologists have written of the victory of society over the deaths of individual members. The victory is a victory of symbolic inte-

242

NOTES

TO

PAGES

15-50

gration, of the harnessing of the potential anarchy of death to the moral organization of society. For the Laymi today such integration is only partial. For them it would perhaps be more accurate to talk of an uneasy truce. (Harris 1982, 69) 6. For further discussions on the theory of death in anthropology and social history, see chapters 3, 8, 9· CHAPTER

TWO

1. The earliest human occupation of the Maniat peninsula has been dated at 4000-2700 B.C. (Late Neolithic). This dating is based on excavations at the Glifada cave at Cape Tenaro(n), the southernmost point of Mani. The areas adjacent to the cave's entrance were used for working and living arrangements (food processing, consumption, and toolmaking), and the deeper chambers of this extensive underground network were reserved for burials and religious rituals. This burial site has an enticing symbolic-historical significance when one considers that in the classical geography of the Mani, the caves of Tenaron are supposed to harbor a direct passage to the otherworld, and that folk belief holds that the souls of the dead travel southward to Cape Tenaron where they are judged and pass into the underworld. The cave complex provides a geographical coordinate for the symbolic origins of a still pervasive belief in a separate and extensive territory of the dead under the earth's surface. The thick residues of burnt pine resin adhering to the walls and ceilings of the caves also indicates that Neolithic Mani was considerably more forested than the contemporary topography, which is almost completely deforested (Greenhalgh and Eliopoulos

1985, 64-65). 2. The dowry system prevails in the rest of rural Greece with some exceptions, i.e., Thrace, Epirus, Thessaly. 3· Several strategies were developed for mediating a childless marriage or one that produced only female children such as the taking of a sigria by a man whose first wife had not produced male children. The sigria functioned as a cowife or second wife.

CHAPTER

THREE

This would imply that along with the tripartite rites of passage model, we would have to modify the inversion model. All these frameworks imply that the symbolic efficacy of the performances in a ritual are limited to the time and space of the ritual and do not penetrate the social order. The inversion model in particular, assumes a return to a homeostatic condition, thus erasing any longterm effects of the reversal of roles and values. For an example of an inversion ritual whose temporal and spatial boundaries have been broken, see Le Roy Ladurie 1979. 2. This diffusion of the signs of death blurs any clear-cut distinctions be1.

NOTES PAGES

TO

243

64-73

tween private and public mourning; thus calling into question the Durkheimian formalist analysis. For a discussion of this distinction between private and public mourning see Rosaldo 1984. CHAPTER

FOUR

The Maniat mind/body dualism is the direct opposite of the western religious-philosophical concept. For Maniats, the mind (with the exception of divination) is tied to the immobility and immediacy of the present, while the body participates in the past and the future. In western religious-philosophical thought instead, the mind is transcendent and the body is circumscribed by material conditions that link it to the present. These relations between time, mind, and body indicate divergent concepts of history. This explains why, in Inner Mani, historical transformation itself will be symbolized through the medium of divination, i.e., the shift of mind outside of the present. 2. See discussion of Hertz's concept of the new body in chapter 9· 3· Another concept of the good death is the challenging of death, which can be expected in a society organized around warrior ethics and revenge. (See for instance lament excerpt no. 3, in chapter 2, according to which a man is offered a xevghartfs or "protector" to escort him home and he rejects the offer, thereby challenging death. For as the story of my narrators has it, he was indeed killed on the way; something he knew in advance). The challenge of death has been usually linked to men. But it can be demonstrated that women practice it as well in Inner Mani (see for instance the records of the local doctor, Papadakis, discussed earlier as well as chapter 6). This issue, of course, requires further study involving a re-evaluation of the concept of competitive exchange as promoted by Herzfeld in the context of modern Greece. For further discussion, see chapter 5, p. 88. 4· Kopandki means little k6panos. K6panos is a wooden paddle whose contours resembled those of the swaddled baby. The k6panos was used to clean clothes in the ocean by beating them. The acts of the mourning woman as she beats her chest and pulls her hair out is described as kopaniete. 5· For Maniats, death comes from the outside, and effects the destruction of all containing boundaries. Structuralists (see, for instance, Danforth 1982) conflate the outsiderhood of death with nature and thus reduce the relation between death and society to a nature/culture opposition. In Inner Mani death is not coextensive with nature, although it is linked to elements of the natural domain through the iconography of the outside. Death is the entry of the outside into the social domains of kinship, language, and the territorial domains of the household, village, and the human body. It is also a coerced movement of opening the inside to the outside, a movement of the social into what is essentially experienced as contrasocial. 6. In the mourning ceremony, divestiture signifies intense mourning and intimacy with the dead. Outside of the ceremony, however, the more covered a 1.

244

NOTES TO PAGES 74-99

woman is, the more she displays mourning. The scarf in general, and the different ways of wearing it, signifies one's state in everyday life. The scarf, called tsembera or tsemberi, is a square piece of cloth (1 X 1 meter approximately) folded diagonally in a triangle that covers the head (one end at the back, two at the front). When worn with its two front ends tied or folded, in the usual Mediterranean way, it signifies a normal emotional state. When the two front ends are crisscrossed behind the neck and then tied on top of the head (the back end left free), it is known as fakioli. This shows that the woman is working intensely (i.e., in the fields). In any other occasion, the fakioli would be considered transgressive. Finally, if the scarf is tied tightly all around the head, that is the two front ends crossed in front of the mouth and then tied together at the back of the head leaving only the eyes visible, it signifies disorder, mourning, or intense emotional distress. The chorus wears it this way in the ceremony, while the soloist takes it off and pulls her hair out. At no other instance is a woman seen without a scarf (with the exception of bedtime, birth, or illness). Girls would put on a scarf as early as the age of three. Girls and women not in mourning wore brown scarfs that left the front of their hair above the forehead uncovered (the hair always combed with the part in the middle). These practices are not strictly observed in the present day. 7· Caraveli (1982) in a different context analyzes this process as divestiture but interprets it as the lowering and loss of female status. In Inner Mani, however, this process of divestiture is a prelude to the assertion of female identity and separatist cultural power. CHAPTER

FIVE

This phrase is also applied to other situations of crisis. This view on xenitia is different from Danforth's (1982). In his model, xenitid as journey and passage bridges the opposition between life and death. Inner Mani shows instead that xenitid organizes the opposition between life and death as that of inside and outside. 3· The extent to which this androcentric agonistic exchange emerges as axial paradigm for the interpretation of Greek performative practices is evident in the similarity between Beidelman's (1989) and Herzfeld's approach; a resemblance promoted by Beidelman's unwarranted conflation of Homeric and modern Greek exchange codes as evident in the epigrams that open his article. The discussion of exchange in this book seeks to rectify and critique this ethnocentric perspective. 1.

2.

NOTES TO PAGES 102-178

2. See also Geertz ( 1983) on the relation of witnessing to the social construction of legal facts. 3· The Southwestern wind is known as gharpis. 4· Past analysis of the lament tradition has emphasized the linguistic efficacy of mourning (Alexiou 1974; Danforth 1982; Caraveli 1981, 1982, 1986). But in the mourning ceremony power is invested not only in the content of the discourse but also in the forms of singing (of which the narrative discourse is but one component). The korifea (soloist) and the chorus in the Maniat ritual are constantly intensifying, constraining, and managing this acoustic power in order to create the total mortuary performance. 5· Although the term antiphony is not part of the everyday Maniat discourse, the archaeology of the term korifea indicates antiphonic relations. Further, the verb antistomizo ("mouth to mouth" or "mouth against mouth"; anti meaning against or face to face, and stoma meaning mouth) is a local idiom for antiphony (foni meaning voice; voice to voice, or voice against voice). (See lament in narrative 49, chapter 7.)

CHAPTER

SIX

Lakoff (1987) asserts that emotions are tied to specific "conceptual contents" and logical structures such as metaphor and metonymy, and it is the ideational organization of emotions that guarantees shared inference (ibid., 38o). 1.

SEVEN

1. Poulos was the name given to the male child born immediately after the death of the first born child at birth. Poulos (or Poulimenos) means sold. This was a "message" to Death and the dead child that the new child did not belong to that family but (had been sold) to someone else, so the new child would not be "dragged" to death. 2. High school teachers are referred to as "professors" in Greece. 3· In ancient Greece it also referred to a piece of land appropriated by violence and given by lottery to the conquerors. The related term klironomia which combines "share" and "law" (nomos) means inheritance, specifically partible inheritance as a lawful sharing of property. The term kliros also refers to a group of fortune-tellers.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

The desire (pathos) for the absent person is often expressed with the verb pono (the noun p6nos means pain) as in the expression ton p6nesa (I missed him). Klama is also referred to as parapono. 1.

CHAPTER CHAPTER

245

NINE

1. According to models derived from Van Gennep's theory, the function of exhumation would be the finalization of the separation of the living from the dead and a complementary de-individuation of the persona of the dead. This model poses numerous problems for the anthropology of death in Inner Mani.

246

NOTES TO PAGES 209-237

2. This term means "lady of the house" (oikos meaning house) and "with a house," "from/of a household," or house-proud. 3· The connotation is to "carry one through the night," that is "to care for him." The same word is used when "mourning the dead all night" (ton xenih-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

tizo). CHAPTER

TEN

1. In contrast, in standard Greek the noun hard means joy, while lipi means sadness: these are psychological categories. 2. For an analogous division in France, see Reiter 1975a. 3· For a discussion of this concept in the context of Sicily, see Schneiders 1976. 4· For a list of these oppositions in other parts of Greece, see duBoulay 1976. 5· In contrast to this view, Danforth interprets the alternation between ritual cognition and ideology of common sense as women's ~ational and "r~alistic ~c­ ceptance" of the biological separation of death. He Ignores that this polanty between ritual cognition and common sense is gender-based and that the local male ideology coincides with that of western scientism. For an earlier discussion on gender-based systems of cognition, see Seremetakis 1987, 1987a. 6. For a different perspective on women, cultural power and cosmological time in the Trobriands see Weiner 1976. CHAPTER

ELEVEN

See Page duBois (1988) for the same image of the female body as vase, earth, and place for cosmological storage, in fifth-century Athens. 1.

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INDEX

Acoustics. See Sound Abu Lughod, L., 4 Adkins, A., 229 Adornment. See Ornament(s), ornamentation Adrados, F., 124 Agency: of the dead, 38, 53, 194; and dreaming, 231-33, and head symbolism, 188-90; and the involuntary, 57; and labor poetics, 205-8; the shadow, 218-20 Agriculture, 21-22; aesthetics of, 206-7; and death, 95-96, 204-8; and emigration, 206-7; and exhumation, 201-6; and pain, 115; purification in, 206-7 Alexakis, E., 26, 34, 161, 190 Alexiou, M., 124, 125, 169, 171, 245n Allen, P., 16 Alliance, 29-36, 40-41; adoption, 31-33; blood and soul brotherhood rites, 31-3 3; and marriage, 30-31.See also Kinship Andromedas, ]., 19, 31, 33, 36, 40 Antiphony, 99-105, 112-16; in antiquity, 124-2 5; body symbolism in, 100; as conflict, 129-40, 15157; counterpoint in, 112-16; definition of, 100, 102; dreams as, 233-36; as exchange, 100; gender in, 100, 104-5, 126-27, 145-52, 156-57; as historicization, 105, 120; juridical aspects of, 99-106,

116-17; labor of, 100-101, 22931; the senses in, 103-5; and time, 230; and truth, 120-21; vernacular term for, 245n Appadurai, A., 4 Apparitions, 50-54, 83. See also Warnings Archaeology: as comparative analysis, 11; of feeling, 213-18; of symbolic systems, 2, 11, 124-2 5, 169-72 Aries, P., 14, 15, 48, 63, 171, 172 Artifact (material): in exhumation, 178-79; lament as, 119-20; pain as, 119-20 Asad, T., 4 Bailey, F., 4 Bauman, R., 5 Beidelman, T., 244n Binarism, 5; and deritualization, 221-22; and dialectical analysis, 6; and gender, 5; historical formation of, 221-22; and inversion, 5; in local taxonomies, 221-22; as male ideology, 221-22; and modernization, 221-22; and power, 5; and public/private, 5; and rural/urban dichotomy, 6; and social totality, 6, 221-22 Biography: and fieldwork, 7; and Greek folklore studies, 7; and lament, 7; and performative context, 7

266

IN DE X

Biology, and emotions, 13 Bird of the dead, 50-52, 83. See also Warnings Birth, birthing, 32-33, 59, 64, 6872, 79; and truth, 121, 123 Bloch, M., and J. Parry, 14, 178, 241n Blood, 27, 38, 88 Body, body symbolism: in antiphony, 39, 64-71, 100; in architecture, 190; burning pain, 115-16; and collectivity, 215; desiccation, 18689; divestiture and investiture, 214-15, 243-44n; divinatory readings of, 188-90; and essentialism, 222; in exhumation, 177-85, 187-95, zo6-7; in Greek antiquity, 246n; head, skull, and face, 188-90, 233; and historicization, 237-38; liquefaction, 115; mind/body dualism, 243n; and mimesis, 70-75, 116-zo, 215-17; and mourning ritual, 109-11, 120-23; nakedness, 76, 79, 101, 21 5; new (second) body, 177-78, 188-89; the orifice, 51-52, 59, 65-67, 70-74, 115-16; and pain, 72-75; pollution, 57; as power, 230-31; of priests, 162-65; and sacrifice, 11 5-16; the scarf, 71, 243-44n; the shadow (in exhumation), 188-89; stigma on, 157-58; of women in church, 164. See also Pollution; Women Bones. See Exhumation Braude!, F., 21 Breath: in antiphony, 116-18; and the road, 84; as soul, 64-65; and sound, 11 7-18; and wounding, 115-16. See also Sound Brenneis, D., 4 Brigandage, 20-21 Cafe, 2 3; women's, 98 Caraveli, A., 214, 244n, 24 5n

Care: and estrangement, 216-17; ethics of, 119-20; of graves, 175, 186-87; memory as, 216-17 Cemetery: architecture of, 186-87; grave artifacts, 188-89; grave as house, 185-87; grave site ceremonies, 174-75; history of, 160-61; reading of graves, 175 Ceremony. See mourning ritual Children, 30, 68-72, 79, 86-87, 138-39, 15 5-56, 242n; as ornaments, 215-16; swaddling of, 243n Chorus, 99-102, 104-7, 112-16, 118-zo, 123-25; absence of, 101; in antiquity, 124-25 Church: architecture of, 160-61; Byzantine chant, 165; divestiture of icons, 21 5; hegemony of, 167; history of, in Inner Mani, 18-19, 159-61; and modernization, 221; and mourning ritual, 159-69, 171-74; priests, 159, 162-69, 194-95; sacred/secular opposition, 166; separating kin from dead, 165-67; siting of, 160-61; and the state, 160-61; and women, 17175 Code-switching: and ecology, 6; and economy, 6; and residence, 6; and symbolic capital, 6-7 Colonization: and binarism, 221-22; of death, by church, 162-67; of death, by state, 160-61, 163, 167, 169-71; of everyday life by death, 203, 207-8; and power, 2 Comaroff, J., 5, 24m Corrington, G., 171 Cosmology: and death, 50-51, 22 527, and eschatology, 237-38; and exchange, 216-17, 238; and fate, 61-63, 120-23; and historicization, 2 37-38; and interdiction of social totality, 225-27, 237-38; and miasma, 49, 226-27; and the

orifice, 2 37-38; and pollution, 2 57; and power, 2 38; and the senses, 227; and space, 2 38; and time, 61-63, 225-27, 237-38; and truth, 120-2 3; and the warnings, 48; and women, 226-27, and woman's body, 2 37-38 Danforth, L., 13, 59,178, 243n, 244n, 245n, 246n Daskalakis, A., 19 Death: anthropological theories of, 12-15, 241-42n; and agriculture, 95-96, 204-8; apical ancestor, zz6; the bad death, 76, 8o-81; and birth, 64, 68-72, 115-16; burial procession, 147-48, 170, 172-74; challenge of, 110-11, 243n; coffin, 81, 171-72; colonization of, by church, 162-67, 171-72; colonization of, by state, 160-61, 163, 167, 169-71; colonizing everyday life, 203, 207-8; commodification of, 12; concealment of the dead, 171-72; and cosmology, 50-51, 225-27; and culture/nature opposition, 243n; and defamiliarization, 14; depersonalization of the dead, 16 5-66, 178, 190; desire for the dead, 17172, 190; diachronic, 12-15; and desocialization, 104-5; disynchronicity, 15; divination, 48-56, 62-63, 68-72, 120-23, 219-26, 229, 2 3 5-38; domestication of, 14; and dreams, 54-63, 78-79, 23233; and ethnography, 232; exhumation, 177-85, and everyday experience, 4 7-50; the good death, 69-79, 243n; and historical consciousness, 207-8; and history, 105; and houses, 203-7; inside/ outside, 243n; and labor; 203-12, and longue duree, 14; medicalization of, 12, 76-79, 110-11; as

metalanguage, 221; miasma, zz6n; mimesis of, 70-75, 116zo, 215-17; naked, 101, 215; ossuary, 179; otherworld, 195-201; and pollution, 49, 57, 100, 11011, 121, 221, 226-27, 230-31; public versus private mourning, 242n; rationalization of, 12; as rites of passage, 48; and roads, 224-2 5; sacred/secular opposition, 166; in self-reflexivity debate, 13; separation ofkin from dead, 16566, 174-75; silent, 101; and social organization, 13-14; and sound, 72-76, 79, 101, 117-20, 163-65, 245n; structure versus event, 14; and synchrony, 14; as trial, 102; visual representation of, 107-8; witnessing, 99-105 Death ritual. See Mourning ritual Deleuze G., and F. Guattari, 62 Deritualization: in antiquity, 169-71; and binarism, 221-22; in Byzantine period, 121-72; of death, 162-6 3, 165-66, 169-72, zz1zz; in early modern Europe, 17172; men as agents of, 221-22; and mourning, 221-22; of women's labor, 207-8 Derrida, J., 177 Diachrony: and community studies, 12; and death, 12-15, zoz-8; and symbolic systems, 12 Dimitrakos-Mesisklis, D., 36, 40, 44 Discontinuity: versus holism, 2; between archaic and modern Greece, 11 Divestiture. See Body, body symbolism; Ornament(s), ornamentation Divination: of bones (in Greece), 68-72, 189-90; and defamiliarization, 188-89; and ethnography, 218; in exhumation, 194-95; and history, 226-27; and the light shadow, 218-zo; as metacommen-

268

INDEX

Divination (continued) tary, 2; and modernity, 62-63, 222; reading the body, 188-90; the senses in, 219-20; and truth, 12123; and warnings, 48-57, 61-63; and women, 120-23, 219-26, 229, 235-38 Dreams, Dreaming: and agency, 231-33; and ancestors, 233; as antiphony, 2 33; as autonomous, 232-33; and capitalism, 62-63; codes of, 58-6o; and the dead, 54-55; deritualization of, 236; economy of, 61-63; ethics of, 228; and fate, 61-63, 232; in fieldwork, 231-36; and head symbolism, 233; and history, 236; and the light shadow, 220; and modernity, 6263, 232-36; and performance, 2 36; politics of, 2 35-36; and pollution, 56-57; and psychology, 232-33; and social totality, 22 325; and time, 62-63, 228-29; and truth, 121, 227-28; and women, 56-57, 227-28, 235-36. See also Divination DuBois, P., 102, 246n Du Boulay, J., 246n Ecology, 16-18, 20-21, 24, 41-45 Economy, 20-21, 29-32, 34-39, 41-46; inheritance in Greek antiquity, 245n; and dreaming, 6163; partible inheritance, 30-31, 43-44, 152-54; precapitalist, 21, 61-63; and time, 61-63; women's labor relations, 43-46, 205-8, 215-17, 229-30 Eliopoulou-Rogan, D., 16, 19 Emigration, 45-46, 84-86; and agriculture, 206-7; and cultural ideologies, 220-21; and death, 159, 161; and men, 224-25; and xenitid, 85-86

Emotions: archaeology of, 213-18; biological determination of, 1213; cultural construction of, 4-5; as embodied, 4, 72-75, 213-18, 229-30; exchange of, 216-17; in funeral, 166; as ideational, 244n; and labor, 216-17; as language, 4; and liquefaction, 115, 21 7-18; and literary canon, 125; as material artifact, 216-17, 229-30; and memory, 21 5-1 7; and modernity, 217; and performance, 3-5, 7275, 99-100, 107-8; and philosophical anthropology, 13; politics of 3-5; and shared substance, 8889, 107-8, 216-17; and sound, 119-20; and universalism, 13 Endowment. See Exchange; Ornament(s), ornamentation Estrangement. See Xenitid Estyn-Evans, E., 21 Ethnography: and antiphony, 123; and cynicism, 218-19; and death, 232; and divination, 218; and dreaming, 231-36; and exhumation, 218; inteviewing dynamics, 9; and labor, 216-17; and literary canon, 124; and mourning ritual, 8-12, 107-16; and narrative, 4950; and time, 229-30; and women's space, 216-17 Exchange: critique of agonistic models of, 88, 244n; between the dead, 109; between the living and the dead, 109; cosmological, 21617; and emotions, 216-1 7; and estrangement, 216-17; and ethnography, 107-8; of laments, 107; material artifacts of, 216-1 7; and memory, 216-17; in mourning ritual, 99-102,112-16,118-20, 122-23, 125; and ornamentation, 213-18; and the senses, 216-17; and time, 217

Exhumation, 110-11, 177-85, 18795; and agriculture, 201-6; anthropological theories of, 177-79; body symbolism in, 177-85; bone divination in Greece, 188-89; bone reading, 189-95; and burning, 187; and cynicism 223-25; desiccation, 186-89; divination in, 189-95; earth/stone symbolism in, 206-7; grave artifacts, 188-89; Greek exhumation, 178-79; new (second) body, 177-78, 187-95; ossuary, 179; as purification, 2067; as women's labor, 205-8; as women's power, 205-8; 223-25 Exile. See Xenitid Fabian, J., 13, 24m Fate, 56-63; and cosmology, 61-62; and cynicism, 223-25; and dreams, 2 32; economic metaphors of, 61-63, 138, 152-54; and pain, 115-16; and the road, 83-84; as share or allotment, 61-63, 15153; and time, 229-30; and truth, 121-23; and women's labor, 205-6 Feldman, A., 24m Feuding, 28-29, 32-36, 38-42, 126-29, 144-57. See also Violence Fieldwork: and alliance, 10; and editing, 7; and emotions, 10; and the involuntary, 10-11; and kinship, 10; and rural/urban dichotomy, 6. See also Ethnography Foucault, M., 4, 48 Fragments, fragmentation, 1; and deritualization, 2; of divination, 235-36; of women's labor, 207-8 Funeral: coffin, 81, 171-72; definition of, 99; emotions in, 166; location of, 159-61; versus mourning ritual, 169; spatial organization of, 162-64

Garland, R., 124, 170 Gasparini, E., 190 Geertz, C., 245n Gender(s): ancestral sculptures, 190; as antiphony, 100-105; in the big and light shadow, 218-zo; and birth, 69-72; in burial procession, 172-75; in church, 161-69; 17175; division of labor, 39-40, 4446, 201-5; and essentialism, 222; in history of death rites, 169-72; juridical conflict between, 12627; male/female domains, 222. See also Men; Women Gernet, L., 102 Graveyards. See Cemetery Greece: antiquity, 49; bone divination, 188-89; exhumation in, 178-79 Greenhalgh, P., and E. Eliopoulos, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 40, 160, 242n Harris, 0., 241n, 242n Hearing. See Senses; Sound Hertz, R., 47, 48, 177, 178 Herzfeld, M., 11, 88, 189, 244n Hirsch on, R., 82 History. See under all entries Honorifics, 87-88; as subversive, 215 House(s): and the body, 190; and death, 203-5; classification of, 24-25; death of, 206-7; grave as, 18 5-87; mourning ritual in, 1596o; rituals of, 2 5; and the road, 83-86; symbolism of, 50-52, 138-39; tower house, 24-25; and weather, 203-5. See also Ornament(s), ornamentation Huntington, R., and P. Metcalf, 14, 178 Improvisation, of laments, 99-100 Impurity. See Pollution

270

INDEX

Inheritance, 43-44; female sole heir, 30, 144-45, 152-54 Inner Mani: Battle of Almyros, 23738; in the Bronze Age, 1 7; and Byzantine Empire, 18; Cape Tenaron, 242n; and Christianity, 18, 159-69; church architecture in, 160-61; church and state in, 16061; ecology of, 16-18, 20-21, 24, 41-45; geography of, 16; Gothic invasion of, 18; and Greek Revolution, 2 37; jural institutions of, 126-27; mapping of, 17, 19-20, 46; and Ottoman Empire, 19; and piracy, 17-18; 20-21; preChristian, 19, 16o; religion, 1819; and Roman Empire, 17-18; settlement of, 17-20, 22-26; Slavic Confederacies in, 18; and the state, 20-21; and Venetian Republic, 19; violence in, 29, 3236, 38-42, 45, 126-29, 144-57· See also Social organization. Inside/outside: and cosmology, 22 325; and death, 243n; in exhumation, 185-87; and mourning ritual, 87-92, 95, 98; and otherworld, 195-201; and the road, 8o-86; and sound, 72-73; and truth, 51-52, 68-69, 71-72, 76, 122-23; and women's labor, 2023· See also Local taxonomies lnteriorization, 87-92, 95-98; as care, 92-93, 95-98; and the sob, l1 7-18; as visual, 18 5 Inversion, 72-76, 78-79; critique of, 223 Kallidonis, P., ix Kapernaros, V, 36 Kassis, K., ix, 86-87 Kinship, 22-29, 33-36, 38-39, 4344, 46; ancestral cult, 159-61, 190; and alliance, 29-3 5; bilateral, 26-27; blood tie, 27; and

INDEX

Christian hagiography, 16o-61, 226; clan churches, 160-61; disappearance of lineage, Ill; feuding/revenge code, 28-29, 32-36, 38-42, 45, 126-29, 144-57; fictive, 31-34, 139-40; genealogy, 25-26; and graves, 174-76, 18687; history of, 2 5-26; household, 26-27; and life cycle, 86-87; and marriage, 31-32; and mourning rituals, 86-89, 91-95, 126-40, 154-57; naming system, 26-28; and ornamentation, 214-15; patrilineal, 26-29; priests in, 160-61; reading graves, 175, and residence, 22, 2 5-29; segmentation, 26-29; separation of kin from dead, 165-66; and social stratification, 35-37; and towers, 22-23, 190, 216-1 7; and witnessing, 103-5 Korifea. See Lament soloist Labor: in antiphony, 100-102, 22931; and death, 203-12; deritualization of, 207-8; as empowerment, 207-8; and ethnography, 202-3; and exile, 205-7; and fate, 205-6; fragmentation of, 207-8; gender division of, 39-40, 44-46, 201-5; in lamenting, 101-2, 203-12; mimesis of, 215-17; and mourning ritual, 95-97; pain as, 101-2, l15-16, 208-12; as performance, 202-3; poetics of, 203-12, 22931; and resistance, 206-8, 23031; spatial organization of, 202-6; as time, 230-31; and witnessing, 207-8. See also Economy Lakoff, G., 4, 244n Lament(s): acoustic structure of, l17-18; in ancient Greece, 12425, 169-71; collecting of, ix; counterpoint in, 110-16; definition of, 3; versus church liturgy, 3,

164-65, 174; versus folksongs, 3; history of, 11, 124-25, 169, 171; improvisation of, 99-100, 11220, 228-29; memorization of, 105; as oral history, 105, 137-40, 144-58; about the otherworld, 195-200; and pollution, 72-76, 101, l18-21, 156- 58, 2 30-31; and power, 1-5, 118-19, 126-29, 154-58, 228-31; and the road, 83-84; sacrificial motifs in, 11516, 157; transliteration of, ix Lament soloist, 99-103, 106-7, 112-20, 122-25, 130-47, 15456,203-4,208-12, 228-29;definition of, 99; pain of, l16-2o; and the road, 84 Lawson, J. C., 189 Le Roy Ladurie, E., 242n Local taxonomies: and binarism, 221-22;dry/wet, 178-79,185-89, 206-7; heavy/light, 59-60; male/ female domains, 222; Maniat mind/body dualism, 243n; up/ down, 6o, 186-87, 203-6. See also Inside/outside Loraux, N., 170-71 Lutz, C., 4, Lutz, C., and G. White, 4

Marriage, 30-31, 87, 90-95, 128, 138-39; childless, 242n; and dowry, 242n Martin, L., H. Gutman, and P. Hulton, 4 Martines, L., 35 Medicalization: of death, 77-78, 110-ll, 221;andmen, 221;of mourning ritual, 111; of pollution, 221; Memory: emotions as, 21 5; exchange as, 216-1 7; and exile, 2 15-1 7; and laments, 105, 137-40, 144-58; poetics of, 214-17; shared sub-

271

stance as, 21 5-1 7; and time, 22930; and truth, 12 3 Men, 19-21, 24-33, 35-39, 41-42; in antiphony, 100, 105; as big shadow, 219-20; and binarism; 221-22; council of elders, 38-39, 126-27; challenging death, 243n; and deritualization, 221-22; and economy, 20-21, 43-46; and exhumation, 219, 224-25; godfatherhood, 33; male choir, 164, 19495; as modernizing elite, 45-46, 220-22; priests, 159, 162-69; rites of passage of, 31-32; and violence, 19-21, 28-29, 326, 38-42, 126-29, 144-57, 161; visual hierarchy of, 164. See also Gender(s) Mexis, D., 19, 36 Miasma. See Pollution Mimesis. See Body, body symbolism; Death Modernity: binarism reified, 221-22; and death 221; and divination, 62 -63; and emotions, 21 7; and gender, 220-22; and political geography, 45-46; and pollution, 221; and social time, 62-63 Moira. See Fate Morinis, A., 4, 5 Morritt, J., 21 Mourning ritual: and agriculture, 95-96; and antiphony, 3; in antiquity, 124-25, 169-71; body symbolism, 110-11; burial procession, 174-75; center of, 108-9; and church, 159-69, 171-74; conflicts in, 101, 103-5, 107, 111, l18-l9, 127-40, 145-49, 151-52, 154-57, 221; counterpoint in, 110-16; and cultural imagination, 3; deritualization of, 221-22; discourses of, 100, 107, 112-17, 175-76, 194-95; entry into, 85, 87-88; ethnography of, ll0-11; and exhumation, 177-

272

INDEX

Mourning ritual (continued) 85, 187-90; exile imagery in, 175-76; and folklore research, 3; versus funeral, 99, 159-69; and gender, 97-98; grave site ceremonies, 174-75; and Greek history, 11; as interiorization, 87-92, 9598; and interviewing, 8-9; juridical status of, 126-2 7; and labor, 95-97; language of, 11; and literary approach, 3; locations) 1 5961; and men, 97-98; monologues in, 101, 108, 110-16; and residence, 8, 86-87; performance of, 99-103, 106-16, 118-20, 12425; and polyphony, 3, 11, 106-7; polyphony versus monophony, 112; procession in, 147-48, 17274; prose and poetry in, 112-16; and regional limits, 8; and residence, 8; riddles in, 175-76; ritual cognition in, 220-2 3, 246n; as screaming, 107, 110-11; and segmentary kinship, 86-89, 91-95, 126-40, 154-57; the senses in, 109, 215-16; shared substance in, 87-90, 96-98; social death, 11o11; spatial disruption of, 163, 165; spatial organization of, 95-98, 108-9, 127, 162-64; temporal structure of, 68, 161-62, 178-79; as trial, 102-5, 174-75 Naming system, 26-28 Nature, 48-49, 76; interiorization of, 95-96 Orifice, the, 51-52, 59, 65-67, 7074, 11 5-16; and cosmology, 23738; and truth, 121-23 Ornament(s), ornamentation, 83, 213-18; children as, 21 5-16; in exchange, 21 3-18; and kinship, 214-15; and labor, 215-16; and

INDEX

memory, 215-17;andpain, 11618; in shared substance, 214-17 Otherworld, 195-201; versus church concept of afterlife, 195; and exchange, 109; grave as, 186-87; juridical aspects of, 201; and laments, 195-200; in Maniat geography, 242n; pre-Christian aspects of, as riddle, 195; roads in, 196-97, and truth, 121 Pain: and agriculture, 11 5; and burial, 175; as burning, 115-16, 120; communities of, 5; and desire, 245n; and discontinuity, 5; as embodied, 5; and exhumation, 178-79; as fate, 115-16; and ideology, 5; and labor, 115-16, 20411, 229-31; and legitimacy, 3, 99-100,117-18, 120-23;metaphors of, 115-16; as ornamentation, 116-18; and performance, 5; as plural, 115-16; politics of, 3-4; as power, 3-5, 101-5, 110-11, 118-23, 126-29, 154-57, 23031; and resistance, 45; social construction of, 3-4, 115-16, 12021, 204-11, 230-31; social validation of, 3, 99-100; and time, 187; and transformation of self, 5; and truth claiming, 3-4, 99-100, 117-18, 120-23, 230-31 Performance: of burial procession, 147-48, 172-75; and ethnography, 107-8; of funeral, 162-67; Greek, 88, 244n; history of mourning performance, 124-2 5, 169-72; labor as, 202-3; of mourning, 99-103, 106-15, 1182o, 124-25, 161-65, 169-76; transformation of self in, 5 Petrounias, V., ix Piracy, 17-18, 20-21 Poetics (poesis), 1; of fate, 204-5; of labor, 120-23, 203-12, 215-16,

230-31; and memory, 215-17; of the periphery, 1, 95, 97-98; as resistance, 206-8 Pollution: and cosmology, 49, 57, 121, 226-27; and lament, 72-76, 101, 118-21, 156-58, 230-31; low voicing of, 56-57; as miasma, 49, 153, 156, 158; as power, 23031; transformation of, 221; and witnessing, 102-3 Population, 17-20, 24-26, 30, 4042, 45-46; and emigration, 45-46 Poverty, definition of, 76 Power: between genders, 220-2 3; of the big shadow, 219-20; the body as, 230-31; and colonization, 2; and cosmological exchange, 2 38; cultural, 230-31, 237-38, 246n; and divination, 120-21, 227-28; of dreams, 120-21, 227-28; of exhumation, 22 3-2 5; jural character of, 230-31; of laments, 15, 11819, 126-29, 154-58, 228-31; material character of, 2 30-31; and modernity, 220-22; pain as, 3-5, 101-5, 110-11, 118-23, 126-29, 154-57, 223-25, 230-31; and the periphery (margins), 2; and poetics of labor, 207-8; pollution as, 230-31; and polyphony, 229; sound as, 72-76, 101-5, 110-11, 118-23, 126-29, 154-57, 22831; and temporal mastery, 228-29; ofwomen 1, 72-76, 101-5, 11011, 118-23, 126-57, 194-95, 207-8, 223-25, 227-31 Purification: agriculture as, 206-7; of bones and the dead, 188-90; of the body, 64-67; in exhumation, 188--90, 206-7; the pure or immaculate, 89 Reiter, R., 246n Residence: and cultural, ideological orientation, 6; and fieldwork, 6, 8;

273

and fissioning, 27-29; and rural/ urban, 6 Resistance: labor and poetics of, 206-8; of women 12, 72-76, 101-5, 110-11, 118-23, 126-57, 167-75, 194-95, 207-8, 223-25, 227-31 Revenants, 51, 64, 70, 83 Revenge code. See Violence Rites of passage: anthropological theories of, 48, 177-78, 242n; desiccation as a rite of passage, 177-85, 187-95; and exhumation, 177-79, 186-90, 245-46n; and the otherworld, 195-201; witnessing as a rite of passage, 102-3 Ritual: as material practice, 2; narration of, 47-48; rites of passage, 48, 177-78, 242n; ritualization, 47; of witnessing, 102-3. See also Mourning ritual Road(s): in the otherworld, 196-97; symbolism of, 8o-86, 91-92, 172-74, 22 3-24 Rosaldo, R., 4, 12, 13, 47, 243n Sacrifice: in feuding, 38, 156-57; as holocaust, 115-16 Scarry, E., 4 Schneider, J. and J., 246n Screaming. See Sound Segmentation: as action, 88; and fissioning, 27-29; and mourning ritual, 110-11; and social death, 92. See also Kinship Senses, 1; archaeology of, 213-18; burning pain, 115-16, 120; and burial, 185-87; and cosmology, 227; and dreaming, 227; and divination, 219-20; and emotions, 213-18; and exchange, 216-17; hearing, 103-5, 107-8; high voicing, 72-73; and inside/outside, 72-73; and labor, 216-17; low voicing, 56-57; male gaze, 97,

274

INDEX

INDEX

Senses (continued) 164; and material artifacts, 21617; and memory, 216-17; and mourning ritual, 109; and the shadow, 219; vision as hierarchical, 64, 68-69, 97, 219-20; visual interiorization, 18 5. See also Sound Seremetakis, C.-N., 9, 11, 13, 127, 2410, 246n Shadow: and divination, 218-zo; in exhumation, 188-89, 220; and social power, 218-20 Shared substance: absence of, 107; antiphonic structure of, 117-18; as blood tie, 27, 38, 88; and the breath, 116-17; versus church ethic, 116-67; and dreams, 8790; and ethnography, 107-8; and exchange, 88, 90, 98, 215-16, 2 38; in exhumation, 178-79; and interiorization, 58-6o, 87-92, 9 5-98; as memory, 21 5-1 7; and ornamentation, 214-1 7; and time, 215-17; and witnessing, 101-3 Social organization: agnation, 22; alliance, 29-3 5; bilateral kinship, 26; chieftainship, 29-30; division of labor, 43-46; fissioning, 2 5-26; household, 24-25; and modernization, 22, 45-46; neighborhoods, 22; nuclearization of family, 22; patrician, 2 5-29; political divisions, 22; public space, 2 3-24; residence, 26-29; settlement pattern, 17-20, 22-26, 28-29, 34-37, 41-42, 45-46; slavery, 21; in social history of Mani, 17-26, 34-37, 39-42, 46; stratification, 34-37; village pattern, 22-2 5 Social totality, 6, and binarism, 6, 221-22; and cosmology, 225-27, 2 37-38; derealization, 22 3-2 5; interdicted by divination and truth,

6, 121, 22 3-2 5; women's perception of, 226-27 Soul, 64-65, 79, 84, 117-18; church concepts of, 165. See also Breath Sound, 50-53; Byzantine chant, 165; of death, 76, 79; and exchange, 119-20; high voicing, 72-73, 101; juridical aspects of, 101, 103-5; low voicing, 56-57; and mourning ritual, 110-11; and pain, 118-zo; power of, 118-zo, 245n; and the road, 83; the silent death, 76, 101; the sob, 117-18; soul as breath, 117-18; suppression of screaming, 162-65; violence as, 118-zo; and witnessing, 101 State, the: in antiquity, 169-71; and church, 160-61; and death, in Maniat history, 18-19, 21, 34-35, 42, 44, 169-71; women's resistance to, 169-71. See also Senses Taussig, M., 4, 5, 47, 2410 Time, 58-65, 105; and antiphony, 2 30; as burning, 187; and care, 216-17; and cosmology, 61-63, 225-27, 237-38; of death, 138; and dreams, 61-63, 227-29; and embodiment, 230, 243n; and emotions, 21 5-1 7; and exchange, 21 7; and exhumation, 177-79, 187, 229-30; and fate, 61-63, 152-53, 229-30; historical finality, 237-38; and labor, 229-31; and laments, 229-30; in material artifacts, 21 5-1 7; and memory, 229-30; and performance, 227; and power, 228-29; and shared substance, 21 5-1 7; and weather, 138, 203-5; women as, 231 Topping, P., 19 Towers, 34-35; and agnation, 22-23;

architecture of, 2 3; and feuding, 24; history, 24-2 5; and maximal lineage, 2 3; and settlement pattern, 22-23; symbolism of, 42; tower houses, 24-25; tower societies, 34-35; and transhumance, 24 Truth: social construction of, 4-5, 118-23; truth claiming, 99-100, 102-9, 117-18 Van Gennep, A., 47, 48, 245n Vernant, J.-P., 49, 219 Violence, 28-29, 32-36, 38-42, 45, 126-29, 144-57; lament singing as, 118-zo; of priests, 161; revenge code, 28-29, 127-29, 14457· See also Sound Wagstaff, J. M., 16, 17, 18, 20, 36, 41, 160 Wake. See Mourning ritual Warnings, 47-63; and cosmology, 48; low voicing of, 56-58; and time, 62-63. See also Divination; Dreams, dreaming Weiner, A., 246n Witnessing, 99-100, 102-6, 108-9, 245n; ancient and modern parallels, 102-3; and desocialization, 104-5; and divination, 120-23, 194-95; as exchange, 102-5; hearing as, 103-5; historicization, 105, 120-21; juridical aspect of, 102-5, 139; and kinship, 103-5; and labor, 207-8; and pollution, 102-3; as representation, 102,

275

139; as rite of passage, 102-3; as shared substance, 101-3; as truth, 120 Women: autonomous practices of, 221; and birthing, 115-16; body and cosmos, 2 37-38; challenging death, 110-11,116, 243n;and church, 161-69, 171-75, 194-95; and cosmology, 226-27, 237-38; cynicism of, 22 3-2 5; and dream time, 227-29; and houses, 246n; the imaginary of, 223-24; and internal exile, 223-25; as jury, IOI5, 126-27; and labor, 44-46, 9597, 100-102, 202-12, 215-17; and pollution, 52-57, 68-74, 9698, 102-3, 110-11, 118-21; power of, 1-5, 118-19, 126-29, 54-158, 207-8, 228-31, 246n; and resistance to state, 167, 16971; and the road, So-83; the scarf, 71, 243-44n; and social totality, 226-27; and violence, 39-45, 144-53, 156-57. See also Gender(s) Work. See Labor

Xenitia: and care, 216-17; animals of, 50-51; and defamiliarization, 188-89; definition of, 85, 101, 244n; and exhumation, 179-86; as exile, 17 5-76, 22 3-2 5; and memory, 215-1 7; as otherworld, 195-201; and travel, 138; and women, 223-25 Yemeniz, E., 17