PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
Friday, May 2, 2014
Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103
Reguina Hatzipetrou-Andronikou
All traditional music players are men… or not Greek traditional music and gender bias
Abstract
When it comes to Greek traditional (folk) music, both rural and urban, before the 80’s, it seems that “women do not play folk music instruments”. All professional or semi-professional players met by ethnomusicologists and presented through publications or recordings are men. Thus, during the 2000’s, three female traditional instrumentalists, born in the 1920’s and 1930’s, appear in two academic publications. The first one is Cretan lyra player Aspasia Papadaki born in 1932, a “semi-professional” musician according to ethnomusicologist Kevin Dawe (2007). The other two are tampouras players and friends Maria Kefala and Petroula Kotzampasi from Northern Greece, both born in the early 1920’s (Rompou-Levidi, 2004). Their rarity is underlined in both articles; Papadaki is described as “one of the few female lyra players” and the other two as a “precious and unexpected discovery”, for “female instrument players in the field of Greek traditional music are an unusual phenomenon”.
The present paper aims at a critical presentation of the main sources establishing the assertion that traditional instrument players are men. It goes on to examine the (in)visibility of women players and puts forward their eventual existence and actual concealment. The material analysed and discussed here includes academic and music press articles, as well as online databases on traditional music and musicians.
The research process that made it possible to find women instrument players inside the Greek traditional music field enabled the description of some of their main characteristics, such as their identity, their instrument, their performance conditions etc. Moreover, these findings renegotiate significant questions on gender norms existing in the musical and professional spheres; for instance, how does women’s invisibility occur inside ‘male-only’ fields, and do the social sciences participate to this process?
Through this geographically and temporarily situated example on gender and music, the methodology of the social sciences will be questioned. By deconstructing the presuppositions producing women’s invisibility (such as looking for universality, professional musicians, public performances etc.) it is possible to better understand gender blindness within both the social sciences and the construction of legitimacy in the musical world.
Reguina Hatzipetrou-Andronikou is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She studied Sociology at Bordeaux 2 University, and received an MA in Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her dissertation, “The folk music revival in Greece. Gender, educational structures and professional socialization”, deals with women playing traditional instruments in today’s Greece. Through in-depth interviews, ethnographic research and historical sources, she focuses on how, during the 90’s and 2000’s, music education, society and musical milieu evolutions made it possible for women to learn, teach and perform Greek traditional instruments. Her research interests include sociology of gender, education and music, as well as women’s access to male-dominated professional fields.
Abstract
Tracing Early Modern Coexistence: Jews, Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox in the Venetian Island of Corfu
The Venetian island of Corfu, posited in the Ottoman-Venetian border, hosted in the 18th century a religiously and ethnically diverse population: Orthodox Christians that were either natives or travellers and immigrants from the Ottoman lands; a much smaller community of Catholic Christians consisting mostly of local civil and military officials, the latter coming at times from as far as Germany or Ireland; two distinct and antagonistic Jewish communities, one of Greek origin and the other of Italian and Iberian origin; and Ottoman Muslims or converts from Islam to Christianity, who were mostly slaves or servants in local households. This rich and diverse mosaic of people is virtually nowhere to be found in mainstream historiography. Greek and Italian histories of Venetian Corfu treat the island as a predominantly Christian space, engaging mostly in discussions on the legal and institutional status of the two denominations. In this context, the Jewish communities of Corfu, when studied, are largely treated as a unified community completely detached from the Christian milieu, while the Muslim presence is invisible.
Drawing on recent works of social and cultural history, this paper revisits the historiography of the island of Corfu from the perspective of ‘contact zones’, engaging in a broader discussion on coexistence. This notion has attracted renewed interest since the end of the cold war, when the narrative of the nation-state was challenged by a new paradigm influenced by the ideas of globalization and multiculturalism. In this framework, the qualities of hybridity and fluidity of identities were emphasized as a prerequisite for early modern cross-cultural encounters and coexistence. The case of Corfu, however, shows a different reality, one that posits at the core of coexistence sustained and meaningful cross-faith social networks. Based on sources ranging from conversion narratives to examina matrimoniorum and marriage registers, this paper sheds light on the agents behind these networks of coexistence, restoring the invisible Muslim presence in the city of Corfu, and traces the social networks that wove together a Corfiot fabric of Christians and non-Christians.
Daphne Lappa studied history at the Universities of Crete and Athens in Greece, and is currently completing her PhD in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her doctoral project aims at historically contextualizing the religious conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity in 18th century Venice, while it also explores the modes of cross-faith interaction and network-building in the wider early modern eastern Mediterranean. Tracing the cross-cultural networks of coexistence in the eastern Mediterranean as well as revisiting the notion of early modern fluidity forms the core of her current research interests. Daphne is also especially interested in the use of new technologies in history, with an emphasis on historical GIS applications, as a way of minimizing the gap between academic and public history. In 2013 she was a Fellow of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, NY working on the development of a visual narrative of Nicosia as a shared and contested space, in an effort to redress the multiple fragmentations that the city’s body and memory have undergone.
Abstract
Fear and Trembling in the Mediterranean: The Cretan Civil War and the Breakdown of Ottoman Rule, 1895-98
The last major Cretan conflict under Ottoman rule (1895-1898) has mostly been treated as a nationalist revolt against the empire. With the help of documents from Ottoman, Greek, Cretan, and European archives, I reinterpret the strife as a civil war between Muslims and Christians from 1895 through 1898. I argue that the reluctance to regard the conflict as a civil war derives partly from seeing Muslim and Christian Cretans as alien to one another. My paper, however, presents a vista onto the ways contemporary observers perceived the conflict either as emfylion (internecine/civil war)or mukatelat (reciprocal killings).
The Cretan civil war destroyed countless lives. The devastation, however, proved transformative. It provided many with an opportunity to acquire vast amounts of land in abandoned villages. It, therefore, altered the old Ottoman pattern of land tenure, in which Muslim minority held more land than Christian majority. In light of this transformation, I discuss several aspects of the conflict, which I argue are crucial in understanding its denouement. First, both Muslims and Christians attempted to remedy the highly volatile situation in their country. As with the turmoil, the distrust between them deepened as well. Eventually, any remaining willingness to compromise on creating a new administration disappeared. Second, the Great Powers of Europe carried out a collective military intervention with a view to put an end to the chaos. This turned out to be only a limited and timid policy amounting to occupying a narrow stretch of land along the coast. In addition to demonstrating how this further complicated the imbroglio, my paper examines the reasons for Europe’s aversion to encounter rebels on Crete’s mountainous terrain. Third, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing their villages across the island took shelter in cities. It was through their wretched lives that the civil war made its painful impact felt on a great number of people. I investigate their plight as another dimension of the humanitarian crisis and discuss the fateful role they played in the conclusion of the disturbances in Crete.
Uğur Z. Peçe is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Stanford University. He holds a BA in Economics from Boğaziçi University. Before he embarked upon his doctoral studies, he obtained an MA degree in History from Sabanci University and another MA degree in Southeast European Studies from the University of Athens. During the academic year 2013-2014 he has been working on his dissertation as a Geballe Dissertation Award recipient from the Stanford Humanities Center. His dissertation discusses the Cretan civil war (1895-98) and its socio-economic ripples in the Ottoman Empire through the Balkan Wars.
Abstract
“Truth be Told”: Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf and Adorno’s Truth Content
In this paper I use the critical theory of Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) to engage the novel Kassandra and the Wolf (1974) by the Greek author Margarita Karapanou (1946–2008). Kassandra and the Wolf, published in the year of the junta’s collapse, is a highly subjective rendering of the childhood of the precocious narrator, Kassandra, in an upper class Athenian home. Literary critics, for the most part, have been oblivious to the political aspect of the text, preferring to read it as an exposé of the dark sexualised energies that pervade childhood. However, I argue that the novel offers an example of writing that complicates our understanding of what constitutes political literature, particularly in the cultural and aesthetic context of Greece’s Seven Black Years (1967–1974). I suggest that an analysis of the novel’s content and form through its inherent “truth content”, a concept central to Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) and Notes to Literature (1958–74), grants Kassandra and the Wolf a political status, and serves to widen our interpretation of resistance literature. For Adorno, “truth content” does not mean that the text explicitly expounds upon a specific historical moment or event, but rather relates to how history is intrinsically embedded within the text. Owing to this historical authenticity, the text may inadvertently or unconsciously express a political viewpoint or perspective quite distinct from the author’s explicit intention, or the text’s manifest content, both of which may appear politically indifferent. In essence, this paper asks two major questions: “How do we conceive of political literature?” and “How can Adorno help us dismantle our preconceptions of political writing, especially during the Greek military junta, to give us a fresh and enduring perspective?”
Eleni Philippou is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at New College, Oxford University. Her thesis, entitled “Speaking Politically, Not Politics: An Adornian Study of ‘Apolitical’ Twentieth-century Fiction”, explores the implications of Adorno’s critical theory for literary studies, particularly in relation to texts that emerge from situations of political extremity. This thesis is funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship. Eleni is currently a visiting lecturer in the English department of Royal Holloway University (London). She is on the editorial committee of The Mays (an Oxbridge arts magazine) as well as a practising poet, with her work published in a number of journals and anthologies.
Europeanization Frozen? Greek Business and the EEC during the Dictatorship, 1967- 1974
During the current euro crisis, Greece's Europeanization has repeatedly come to the forefront of the global debates over European integration. While the European question in Greek politics forms an unexplored terrain for scholars in the field of European integration history, Greece's European prospects have been widely debated in the social sciences fields. Within political science scholars such as Kevin Featherstone and Stathis Kalyvas have explored the constraints on Europeanization after 1974, highlighting low reform capacity as a key factor that led to the current crisis. However, these works have not adequately addressed critical developments of the dictatorship era (1967-74) and relevant problems bequeathed to the Third Hellenic Republic (1974-) that largely shaped the conditions of Greece's Accession to the EEC in 1981. In my paper, I will explore Greece's Europeanization into historical context, addressing the under-researched issue of the relations with the EEC during 1967-74, and paying special attention to the domestic impact of the “freezing” of the Greek Association on public-private relations. In particular, I will investigate the political implications of the EEC stance towards the Greek dictatorship, in order to show that the “freezing” of the Association epitomized the political problem of the colonels, namely the lack of international and domestic legitimacy. Furthermore, I will discuss the attitudes of Greek business towards Greece's prospective EEC-membership since the early 1960s and their reactions to the looming breach with the EEC, especially after Greece's compulsory withdrawal from the Council of Europe, in December 1969. In my paper, I argue that the failure of the colonels to launch a transition process to Democracy and the following breach with the EEC largely determined the regime's gradual isolation from the Greek economic elites. Although the Greek industrialists and shipping tycoons had proved to be pillars of the dictatorship during its early stages, the progressive Europeanization of the Greek foreign trade of industrial goods during 1967-74 forced them to seek alternatives to the dictatorial regime. Utilizing insights from policy analysis, business history and European integration history, this paper will be based on extensive archival research and semistructured in-depth interviews with leading usinessmen and high-ranking officials of the regime. In conclusion, this paper, by closely examining the EEC-Greece relations during the dictatorship era, will shed light on the political, economic and ideological aspects of the European question bequeathed to the Third Hellenic Republic.
Christos Tsakas is a PhD student at the University of Crete and external
researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies-Foundation for Research & Technology. He holds a B.A. in History (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and a
M.A. in Contemporary Greek and European History (University of Crete). He is
currently working on his thesis titled 'The European Aspect of the Greek Transition to
Democracy: Greek Business and the Strategy of the Accession to the EEC during the
1970s' with a full PhD scholarship by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY).
His dissertation project is based on extensive archival research in Greek and foreign
Archives, including the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (Politisches
Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts) that he visited with the support of a German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD)-Scholarship. He has also conducted interviews with
protagonists of Greek political and economic life of the 1960s and 1970s, aiming at
the compilation of an “Oral History Collection” under the auspices of the Institute for
Mediterranean Studies-Foundation for Research & Technology.
Abstract
Icon‐painting and its reception in the Adriatic during the Ottoman‐Venetian wars (15th‐17th centuries)
The aim of this paper is to address the issue of the mass production and circulation of Post‐Byzantine icons that was observed in the Adriatic area during the period of the Ottoman‐Venetian wars, and was indicative of the cross‐cultural exchange between Italian and Dalmatian port‐cities, as well as the dissemination of taste from the Venetian mainland to its provinces and the Adriatic periphery.
Although the appropriation of Byzantine culture in the Adriatic traces back to the Middle Ages and the time of Byzantine dominion, the radical transformation of the political status quo in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Fall of Constantinople, catalyzed an unprecedented diffusion of Post‐Byzantine works of art between the two shores of the Adriatic. The consecutive wars between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and the consequent mass migration of Christian Orthodox populations from the Eastern Mediterranean to the West, resulted to the creation of a vast new market for icons in the Adriatic and the Western Balkans. Apart from Venice, the centre of Greek Orthodox culture in the Adriatic, numerous Greek communities were established from the 15th to the 18th century in coastal and hinterland cities and villages of Istria, Dalmatia, Montenegro and the Italian Peninsula, often with the participation of Orthodox populations of Slavic or Albanian origin.
These Greek communities of the Adriatic and its immediate hinterland served as the primary recipient of Post‐Byzantine icons, commissioned in order to decorate the newly founded Orthodox churches and monasteries, as well as the private residences of the Greek émigrés. On the other hand, Post‐Byzantine icons also appealed to the devotional needs of the local Roman Catholic peoples of the Adriatic cities, and held a foremost place in public and private devotion.
Capable of mastering both Byzantine and Western iconographic traditions, Greek icon‐painters adapted their works to the demands of their vast clientele that transcended national, religious and socio‐economic borders and included Orthodox and Catholic institutions, lay confraternities and military orders, merchants, mercenaries (stradioti) and even members of the elite. Icons from Crete, Cyprus and the Ionian Islands reached the Adriatic ports through maritime trade routes and were further distributed in the Italian Peninsula and the Western Balkans. Meanwhile, a significant number of Greek icon‐painters settled in Venice or other cities of the Adriatic coast, such as Barletta, Otranto, Dubrovnik and Zadar, where they established flourishing workshops, often interacting with local artists and artisans.
Based on the results of an extensive field and archival research in the Adriatic and the Western Balkans, the proposed paper attempts to retrace the routes of the itinerant Greek artists of the 15th‐17th centuries among the Adriatic littoral, and for the first time evaluate their work within its historical, ecclesiastical and socio‐economic context, by exploring the terms of its reception, and taking into account the most significant aspects of its production and patronage.
Margarita Voulgaropoulou is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Art History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She holds a degree in History and Archaeology and an MA in Art History, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation, funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. Her thesis deals with the reception of Greek Icon Painting in the Adriatic from the 15th to the 17th century and investigates the cross-cultural exchange between the Italian Peninsula and the Western Balkans. She has presented papers at conferences and symposiums of Byzantine Art and Archaeology and has published articles on Post-Byzantine art of the 15th-17th century. Her research interests include Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Culture, Venetian Renaissance Art, History of the Adriatic and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Last updated 4/30/14