The Ethics of Antiphony: The Social Construction of Pain, Gender, and Power in theSouthern PeloponneseAuthor(s): C. Nadia SeremetakisReviewed work(s):Source: Ethos, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 481-511Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640316 .Accessed: 08/03/2012 12:02

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The Ethics of Antiphony: The Social Construction

of Pain, Gender, and

Power in the Southern

Pelop onnese

C. NADIA SEREMETAKIS

This paper explores the relation between gender identity and death in Inner Mani of the Southern Peloponnese. My focus is on the im- provised performance of laments by Maniat women in mortuary ceremonies. The narrative content, aesthetics, and performative dy- namics of the Maniat lament engage issues and concepts pertaining to the social constructions of the self and emotions. I understand these laments as fragments of women's self-reflexivity and as meta- commentaries on the relations between the self and the social and cosmological orders.

From the 18th-century gentlemen traveler accounts to the rare histories, folklore collections, and community studies of Inner Mani in this century, outside observers have agreed on the centrality of mortuary in that region and on the pivotal role of women in these

CONSTANTINA-NADIA SEREMETAKIS is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Vassar College, New York. She also lectures in anthropology at the grad- uate department of Performance Studies in New York University, New York.

481

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performances. This is a perspective with which Inner Maniats con- cur. Death rituals have not been just one life-cycle event among oth- ers (such as birth, initiation, or marriage) but the paramount public event of the culture, and the primary resource for the production of aesthetic forms (music and poetry), of kin ideology and indigenous oral history.

For the Maniats, the singing of moiroloi (lament) connotes "crying one's fate" (moira). The lament is an improvised poetic composition of stressed eight-syllable verses focused on the biographies of the de- ceased and/or the mourner and the history of corporate groups. The Inner Maniats sharply differentiate this lament from song and po- etic genres that have been imported from other parts of rural Greece. The fifteen-syllable epic-heroic ballads and laments, which have nationalistic evocations, are associated with the performances of men, while the eight-syllable laments are almost exclusively iden- tified with the discourses of women. The latter are also considered a genre distinct from official church liturgy (although both narra- tive-musical forms coexist in the mortuary cycle).

Previous studies of the Greek laments consist of the collection of a lament text traceable to an individual author.1 In contrast, this paper is concerned with laments, not simply as psychological or lit- erary artifacts, but rather as self-conscious interventions in a ritual process where self and sentiment are to be constructed. I describe lament performances as being organized around antiphonic dynam- ics and aesthetics that entail the interpenetration of the collective and the individual, the poetic and the affective. I demonstrate that antiphonal protocols and aesthetics in Maniat lament performance determine the presentation of self, emotions, and ultimately gender identity for Maniat women.

Antiphonal performance within the literary canon has mainly been conceptualized as an aesthetic and dramaturgical device (Al- exiou 1974; Adrados 1975). In contrast, this analysis of lament per- formance will describe antiphony as (1) the combined social and af- fective structure of mortuary rituals; (2) the internal acoustic orga- nization of lament singing; (3) a prescribed technique of witnessing and thus a formal procedure for the production or reception ofjural discourse and for the cultural construction of truth; and (4) a polit- ical strategy that organizes the relations of women to male-domi- nated institutions.

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To describe the fusion of performance genres and the social con- struction of the self and emotions is to imply that form and content cannot be analytically separated in discussing the relevant perfor- mance event. Antiphonic protocols and aesthetics in Maniat mourning performances are centered on the expression of a partic- ular content: the personal signification and social (interpersonal) validation ofponos (pain). The Maniat concept of "pain" integrates both physical and emotional conditions, individual and collective references, mourning and jural discourses. The antiphonic con- struction of pain is central to the truth-claiming strategies of Maniat women when in conflict with various aspects of the social structure. Pain is considered indispensable to the production and reception of truthful discourse in lament performances: a value that unites the biographic, historical, and emotional dimensions of laments. Man- iat women's concept of pain entangles the "material" and "ideal," "individual" and "collective," conceptual and performative dimen- sions of emotion (Lutz and White 1986). How women weave the diverse elements of lament performance-pain, biography, gender identity, truth-claiming-into a single ritual event is one of the de- scriptive tasks of this paper.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Foucault (1979), Asad (1983), Scarry (1985), and Taussig (1987) have described at length various political cultures in which pain is a central social construct. Whether understood in its emotional or physical dimensions, the social construction of pain is treated by these theorists as a semiotic practice that objectifies and synthesizes institutional norms and individual sensibility. A main focus here has been the relation between pain and confessional discourse in con- structing truth-claims of a dominant institution through the manip- ulation of the subject (Foucault 1979; Asad 1983; Scarry 1985). Pain as an institutional, jural, and political idiom constructs a subject by fusing emotional or physical states with the ideological organization of the social structure (Morinis 1985).

The above approach is concerned with the domination of the sub- ject by institutions. However, the use of pain by the subject in order to 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:

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the relationship between the force of pain and the establishment of truth-claims.

Any discussion of the ideological organization of pain should take into account those frameworks that deal with the emotions as em- bodied, conceptual, moral, and ideational constructs that place the self in a dynamic relation to the social structure (Rosaldo 1983; Lak- off 1987; Abu Lughod 1986; Lutz and White 1986). Lutz and White refer to situated emotional expression as "languages of the self" that generate or actively reproduce specific social structures and idea- tional configuration (see also Appadurai 1985 and Bailey 1983). Emotional signification is both formative and efficacious and can be included in the repertoire that Foucault (Martin, Gutman, and Hul- ton 1988) terms "techniques of the self." The social efficacy of emo- tional signification is embedded in the "inferential" evocations (Lutz 1987; Abu Lughod 1986). Inferential associations instigated by the emotions entail the fusion of affective force and prescribed communicative emotive exchange, which Brenneis (1987) terms co- narration. It is my suggestion that such emotional, experiential, and semiotic configurations are integral to the cultural construction of truth.

Truth-claiming through the force of emotions and shared moral inferences frequently 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 ones. The personal signification of pain, synthesizing emotional force and body sym- bolism, can vividly dramatize the dissonance between self and so- ciety. This discontinuity can attain a collective dimension by ex- ploiting the formative capacity of emotional inference to generate affective enclaves, communities of pain and of healing (Comaroff 1985; Taussig 1987). Composed of entire categories of persons in conflict with the social structure, such communities of shared emo- tional inference and reference correspond to Bauman's (1977) no- tion of performance spaces as disruptive and disjunctive, and as al- ternative social structures within or at the margins of a social struc- ture. This model points to the link between communities founded on the dramaturgy of feeling and the construction of resistance spaces.

Taken as an idiom of either domination or resistance, the use of pain has been identified as a technique for the detachment of the self

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 485

from everyday social contexts and identities (Morinis 1985). Inner Mani death rituals, in the past and present, have been a performa- tive arena, demarcated by gender and the presence of the corpse, where pain (ponos) figures prominently as an orchestrating and pre- scriptive communicative paradigm. In these rites, the antiphonal vocalization and physical display of "pains" construct an affective enclave where alternative codifications of women's relation to the social order achieve a formal status as biographical testimony and oral history.

THE SETTING

Situated in the arid and mountainous regions of the Southern Pel- oponnese, Inner Mani has been known for its endemic feuding, pa- tri-clans, precapitalist subsistence economy, brigandage and social banditry, extreme poverty, and political resistance to encroaching state systems (Turkish, Venetian, and Greek). Many of these struc- tures and tendencies persisted into the early 20th century. The cen- tral unit was theyenia or patri-clan, which mixed patrilineal and bi- lateral kin ideologies and ethics. This organization was augmented by a mosaic of fictive kinship and client relations motivated by the logistical necessities of military alliance, brigandage, and piracy ex- peditions. Maniat villages were and are nucleated settlements cen- tered around multistoried dry-stone war towers and tower-houses, which designated the territory of segmentary lineages. Several such "tower-societies" would comprise a village consisting of related and unrelated clans (Andromedas 1962; Alexakis 1980; Seremetakis 1991).

Prior to the late 19th century, the region had a diversified subsis- tence agricultural/pastoral economy that was necessitated by the arid, rocky ecology and shallow soils. The subsistence economy was supplemented by piracy and brigandage that fed off feuding, adja- cent mercantile centers and commercial sea lanes. Olive cultivation was introduced by the Greek state in the late 19th century, in a prob- lematic attempt to integrate the region with centralizing market economies. Today women are deeply involved in olive tree cultiva- tion, though mainly as a subsistence crop. In the past, women's la- bor dominated agricultural and pastoral domains. Women also shared hunting and fishing tasks with men. Maniat women had a

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task-oriented mobility in the subsistence economy that did not con- fine them to the household space and its domestic chores.

Since the turn of the century, and particularly in the postwar pe- riod, Inner Mani underwent severe depopulation in tandem with intensified contacts with commodity and labor markets and state centralization (Allen 1974; Seremetakis 1991). The nucleation of households that has resulted from depopulation and the incremen- tal disappearance of the cultural, economic, and political authority of the extended family has pushed the social life of women into the confines of the domestic space. Contact with the market economy, understood as a male preserve, has reinforced the traditional low status of women's labor, which is now closely associated with pre- capitalist subsistence strategies.

Two activities counter the increasing privatization of rural wom- en's social life: olive harvesting and mortuary ceremonies. Even ur- ban Maniats will return to natal villages on a regular basis for these events, which function as public performances of clan solidarity and reciprocity. The participation of urban and urbanized Maniat women with their rural counterparts in mortuary rites and olive har- vesting often involves radical code-switching in their dress, dis- course, and demeanor. Mortuary events and the annual olive har- vest are not occasions for romanticizing the past. Rather, they are public events that continue to engage and to articulate contempo- rary issues bearing on kinship, familial, and village politics.

THE CYCLE OF DEATH

In Inner Mani, the advent of death engages a sequence of events and practices beginning with warnings-dreams, visual and acous- tic apparitions-that announce impending death. The event of death itself is observed with elaborate procedures of washing, puri- fying, and the laying out of the corpse. A prolonged period of cere- monial waking and lament singing known as klama follows. From the reception of warning to the wake, women are the ritual actors and managers of the mortuary cycle.

In the klama (wake), the corpse is placed in an open coffin on a table in a prescribed east-west axis. Depending on the number of mourners and the availability of accommodating space, the wake can be held in a private home or in the village church. The latter is used only if a household site is not available. Using the church space

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 487

has recently become a more frequent practice due to the closing of households because of emigration. A wake that takes place in a church does not possess a more sacrilized character than a wake that takes place in a house. In church wakes, the mourners do not inter- act with the religious paraphernalia of the church, and the priest remains outside the space, with the rest of the men, or arrives at the village in time to conduct the liturgical service known as kidhia (fu- neral). When wakes are held in homes, the corpse will be removed to the church sometime before sunset for the church service. It is believed that the dead must be buried before sunset.

The corpse is surrounded by female agnates, affines, and co-vil- lagers. Many of these women will have traveled down from the ur- ban centers to attend the ceremony. It is from this group of women who form a center around the coffin that the lament singers will emerge. There can be considerable contention among these women over the order of precedence for singing and sitting position. Prior- ities are customarily accorded to close female agnates, but more dis- tant kin, affines, or co-villagers can make claims of precedence (par- ticularly if they are known to be skilled mourners). Such claims are usually legitimized by invocations of shared histories of material and emotional reciprocity between the performer and the dead or other members of the deceased's kin. These claims of shared sub- stance with the dead can take the form of prose declarations or can be integrated in the poetic improvisations of the lament. Such con- flict over turn-taking is an early indication of the jural intentions of the mourners' discourse and overall participation in the wake.

The ideology of shared substance in the Maniat wake has a jural and affective inflection. Within descent ideology, shared substance metaphorizes kin relations; agnates are referred to as krea mou ("my meat"). Death is conceptualized as the "theft" or illicit consump- tion of flesh (in the warning, it is symbolized by carnivorous birds). In the klama, the female mourners, while acknowledging the cen- trality of flesh and blood, valorize the relations between the mourn- ers and the dead in terms of metaphors of shared substance based on reciprocity or exchange. The iconography of exchange (the shar- ing of food, shelter, and labor) is prevalent in claiming one's right to mourn the dead. Even for those mourners connected to the de- ceased by descent, the recounting of the past reciprocities is prom-

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inent and demonstrates the extent to which relations of descent are understood to be fully actualized by relations of exchange.

Beyond discourse, the mourners display shared substance with the dead in physical and gestural expressions of intimacy, interior- ity, and care. These entail spatial and tactile contact with the corpse, which in the wider society is considered to be impure (par- ticularly for men and the church). Mourning with full "pain" in- volves touching the dead, caressing the face, forehead, and hair, or holding the forehead (the head being the center of the persona). They talk and sing to the dead as if addressing a sleeping child or an ill person. These gestures, considering the polluting ambience of the corpse and its separate social character, constitute an interiori- zation of the dead and of death. The linguistic imagery of shared substance (food, clothing, shelter, and labor) consists of emblems of the generic kin space, of the inside. In contrast, the metaphors of death evoke the outside: roads, travel, journey to foreign lands, and manifestations of unruly nature, such as storms, strong winds, and rains. For the mourners, death is the passage of the self (mourner and deceased) from inside to outside, or the exposure of the inside (kin and household) to the outside. As a circumscribed space har- boring a polluting material entity (the corpse), the ceremonial wake interiorizes the dead without bringing them back into the social or- der. Rather, the wake mediates opposing topographies (those of so- cial orders and death) by functioning as a third and heterogeneous place.

Male relatives, co-villagers, and the priest (if present) cluster in small groups at the margins of the ceremony, at the entrances of the house and church and in the nearby square. At certain points during the wake or during the service, close male agnates enter and pay their "respects" to the dead, always displaying what is considered a dignified restraint. In contrast to the linguistic, emotional, and tactile intimacies of the women, men (including the priest) maintain a purely visual relation to the dead. In Maniat culture, purely visual relations to others imply the setting of hierarchical distance between the observer and the observed. This visual distancing is also di- rected to the female mourners by men. Women are fully aware of the gender division of space in the ritual and of the value connota- tion of spatial intimacy and spatial distance in relation to the corpse. The mourner, while improvising a lament standing or sitting by the

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 489

corpse, will ironically call to particular men to come close or to vo- cally respond. The men do not cross the boundary set by gender and by death. In contrast, when lament singers name other female par- ticipants and ask them to respond or draw closer, the latter react by bursting into tears and entering into mourning themselves.

The lament sessions, which can occur for several hours, depend- ing on what time they have started and the intensity of the mourn- ing, are interrupted by the men in order to take the corpse to the church, or by the priest as he enters the church singing the official liturgy. Following the ceremony, the body is escorted from the church to the burial site in a ritual procession (unless cars are used, which is now frequently the case). At the graveyard, during and after the burial service, lamenting resumes with full force. Burial is followed by a prescribed sequence of commemoration services dur- ing a several-year period in which lament improvisation will take place. The cycle culminates in exhumation and the secondary inter- ment of the bones three to five years after burial. Laments are also improvised during exhumation procedures, though this is less fre- quent today than in the past.

CATEGORIES OF PERFORMANCE AND PAIN

Lakoff (1987) asserts that emotions are tied to specific "concep- tual contents" and such logical structures as metaphor and metony- my, and it is the ideational organization of emotions that guarantees shared inference (1987:380). In Inner Mani, the practices and tech- niques of mourning are organized by a conceptual vocabulary that fuses categories of performance and categories of feeling. This fusion is accomplished through the division of performative roles in the wake and the different genres and methods utilized to signify pain (ponos). To analyze the performance structure of the Maniat lament session is to also describe the latter's emotional structure.

The collectivity of female mourners is known as moiroloyistres. Each woman who emerges from this collectivity to improvise the ex- tended lament narrative is known as the korifea. The moiroloyistres and the korifea institute the fundamental antiphonic dynamics of la- ment performance and of mourning in general. These roles also bridge the different relations among agnation, affinity, and resi- dence that crisscross the wake. Several women, as close relations to the dead and/or mourners, will assume the role of the korifea during

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the wake. The term korifea comes from the noun korifi, which means peak, top, or summit, and implies "leader" or the most accom- plished. Although 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 in the sense that she attains the deepest intensities of pain and her performance is a symbolic center around which other performances are organized by both dis- cursive and affective dynamics.

The korifea is the "soloist" in "pain" and the moiroloyistres are the chorus whose responses to the performance of the korifea socially val- idate both her pain and their own. As the korifea improvises her eight-syllable verses, the chorus generates an antiphonal response by a multiplicity of verbal and nonverbal significations. These in- clude the singing of refrains, such as doubling on the last word of the verse or on the last verse of the lament, stylizing sobbing with which both soloist and chorus punctuate the ending of each impro- vised verse, and prose speeches addressed to the dead that occur simultaneously with the singing of the korifea and in counterpoint to it. This acoustic interplay between soloist and chorus is accom- panied by a physical interplay of gestures that also serve as validat- ing responses to the solo improvisation. Antiphonic interplay occurs in the successive alternation between soloists as they "take" the la- ment from each other. The gender dichotomies of the lament ses- sion-in which women are vocal and emotionally demonstrative in public and the men are silent, inhibited, and spatially segregated- 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 mourn- ers; they function like a silent chorus.

The linguistic, acoustic, and corporeal interplay between the ko- rifea and the moiroloyistres is considered crucial to the performance of the korifea. Lament singers feel they cannot attain the proper emo- tional intensity and reality outside of the antiphonic structure and thus outside of the ceremony itself. In the latter case, 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

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 491

is considered "absence" of kin support and a sign of "bad death." The relation of the solo/chorus antiphony to "good" and "bad" death is based on formalized acoustics of pain.

The various forms of mourning, including the improvisation of lament, are considered to be "a screaming of the (individual) dead" (na ton skouxo). "Screaming," which invokes the passage of breath and sound from the inside to the outside, is also a metaphor of the disruptive and violent passage of the self from inside to outside, that is, to the domain of loss, separation, pain, and death. Screaming is linked to the condition of anastatosi, or "the upside down," which implies emotional and social inversion and disorder. In standard Greek, epanastasi means revolution (stasi means the stoppage of nor- mal order and revolt or uprising, while anastasi means resurrection, "bringing the down up"). Among Maniat women, strong emotions linked to death are often characterized as epanastasi, a revolution of emotions. Especially in the past, "the upside down" (anastatosi) linked emotional disorder to the disordering of the body. With the announcement of the death, and later during lament sessions, women beat their chests, took their scarfs off, pulled their hair out, and scratched their arms and face. Each level of corporeal disorder meant deeper and deeper dimensions of pain and separation of the women from the social order.

For the Maniats, death and decay involve transgression of bodily integrity in which the body "liquefies" and "melts" (lioni) in the grave. The mourner is said to "melt," "burn," and "liquefy" (revi) because of her "pain." For these women, the expression of pain is initially a divestment of residual social identities, norms, and rela- tion (as registered by the "screaming," stripping off of the scarf, physical violence, and exposure and heightening of feminine pres- ence). Today the violent physical expressions of pain are rare, but the emotional force still prevails. In the same manner that the korifea produces biographies of the dead in her lament, the postures and gestures of the mourners function as a corporeal text that repeats the experience of death as passage to the "outside" and as "exile."

Screaming constructs the public dimensions of any individual death to the extent that it carves out a topography of defilement through sound. All those within hearing are implicated. Screaming is a collectivizing act that can collapse social and cosmological dis- tance within its perimeters:

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I began mourning and like a madwoman I screamed: God is a merciless criminal to have killed the orphan! [her son]

My voice burst forth like thunder to reach my Nico's ear to come back from America2

The acoustics of death embodied in screaming and lamenting as well as the presence or "appearance" (fanerosi) of kin signify the "good death." The silent death is the asocial "bad death" without kin support. Silence here connotes the absence of witness. It implies the deceased was alone, without clan. The silent death is a public shame, for it is considered a "naked" death. Nakedness refers to so- cial divestiture, the absence of the Other(s), and implies the isolate. Trees in winter, without leaves or fruit, are perceived as "naked" and "burnt." The person who is left alone is also described as "burnt." The naked death is also a symbol of poverty, for poverty is not simply lack of material wealth but the absence of witness, of a large turnout of mourners. "Poverty" and "nakedness" are soli- tary conditions that imply the "uncovered," the "unsheltered," the "abandoned," the "unprotected," and the "outside." "Screaming the dead" counters the isolation of death. It separates the mourner from residual social contexts, yet registers her entry into social re- lation 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, emo- tional ethics, and memories of reciprocity, "screaming" is a wit-

nessing of "pain."

WITNESSING

In Greek, the concept of antifonisi (antiphony) possesses a social and juridical sense in addition to its aesthetic, musical, and dra-

maturgical usages. Antiphony can refer to the construction of con- tractual agreement, a creation of symphony by opposing voices. It also implies echo, response, and guarantee. The term strongly infers

dyadic, musical, dramaturgical, social, and juridical relation. In Greek, the prefix anti not only refers to opposition and antagonism but also implies "in place of," equivalence, reciprocity, and face to face. These meanings are embedded in the vocabulary of lament.

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Mourners in their performance of laments claim to "come out as representative" (na vgho antiprosopos) of the dead (prosopo meaning face or person and antiprosopos meaning representative). A related and emotionally laden phrase is "to witness, suffer for, and reveal the truth about" the dead (na tine martyrisoume). The concept embod- ied here does not necessarily evoke Christian liturgical belief among Inner Maniats. The term itself has pre-Christian usages that possess antiphonal and dyadic inflections. The term marturion (witness) ap- pears in Herodotus and is associated with the oracles of the dead (nekromanteion) (duBois 1988:113). The marturion was also a message composed of two incomplete codes, each in the possession of a sender and recipient respectively. Completion and decipherment of the message required the joining of the two parts (duBois 1988:113).

To "witness," "to suffer for," and "to come out as representative for" are narrative devices in laments that fuse jural notions of reci- procity 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 "judgment of the dead," the notion of ordeal, and the last opportunity to be witnessed and represented by the living.

The interaction between the wake's emotional and performative structure is reflected in lament narratives that often comment on the performative and emotional dynamics of "witnessing" and "repre- senting" the dead. The following lament extract concerns the mourning for a woman who had emigrated from her natal village at an early age. Her body was brought back from the urban center for burial, but there were no women of her generation left who remem- bered her well and who would mourn for her. Her few urban rela- tives, mainly in-laws from other parts of Greece and young grand- children who had traveled from the city to the village for the funeral, were either ignorant or indifferent to the local ethics of mourning. There was one exception, a niece who, although living in the city for years, had retained all the skills of lament improvisation. She la- mented and talked to the dead for hours without rest in order to avoid a "silent death" for her aunt. The central theme of her dis- course was precisely the absence of witness, of choral antiphony, of other women to "help" with the mourning. The performative ten- sions of the wake were highlighted in the following verses:

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eh aunt, I got tired since last night, yesterday [mourning] for the other women don't know to witness you I've been talking alone and my head aches . . . pitiful job [her solo mourning without "helpers"] it lit a fire inside me for I remembered a lot I got burnt, aunt, I got burnt3

In the following lament, the mourner appeals 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" her:

I married my Andreas off 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?'

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 his validation is also an appeal addressed to the chorus of women. The phrase "come close" in laments always implies the establish- ment of physical contact with the dead and/or the metaphorical space of mourning (constructed by the presence of the corpse and amplified by the mourner). This is also an invitation to affirm shared substance, and it is a preliminary ritual gesture in establish- ing the truth of the mourner's discourse through dialogical perfor- mance.

The mourner rhetorically appeals to the affine to "come closer" in order for 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

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hear" is to play an active role in the production of a juridical dis- course. The act of hearing carries the juridical value of the soloist's discourse. "Hearing" in an antiphonic relation is not external to speech but in metonymic relation to it. "Hearing" is the doubling of the other's discourse. Through the hearing of the chorus, the dis- course is disseminated to the rest of society. The absence of hearing is equivalent to the silent death, the asocial death. The silent death, with no transfer of its signs through an antiphonic circuit, is also the social death of the mourner without witness.

In the following lament, the close linkages between social death, biological death, and the loss ofjuridical status in the kinship struc- tures are explicit. Here the silenced death is the preeminent sign of absence or loss of status. The deceased woman who is the subject of this lament had three daughters and no sons. The moiroloi of the sis- ter of the dead indicates that her brother-in-law at some point be- tween the burial and before the forty-day memorial ceremony, re- married. It seems that the husband sought to suppress all mourning and gathering of kin for the commemoration. In ironic tones, the sister of the deceased protests this desocialization of her sister's death and the implicit erasure of her sister's juridical status as the female head of the household; both of which the mourner codifies as absence of witness and of public dramatization of suffering through mourning:

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 sufferfor her?5

The status of this moiroloi (lament) in the klama is evident in the last verses. The phrases "to say anything" and "to witness and suf- fer for her" (na dine martyrisoume) 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 discourse's juridical aspect, insofar as it is ac-

496 ETHOS

cusatory and points to the improper behavior of the husband. The husband who sought to silence the dead by silencing her mourners is in turn reduced to silence in a discourse enunciated from the fe- male space of the klama. It is doubtful that the husband would vo- cally respond to accusations originating from this space. His silence is the antiphonic completion of the mourning discourse.

COUNTERPOINT AND THE CONCEPT OF PAIN

Perhaps the most dramatic and content-intensive antiphony in the klama is the poetry/prose counterpoint that emerges between the singing and prose monologues. The following contrapuntal mono- logues took place in a ceremony where the bones of the long-de- ceased son were exposed in the klama of his mother. The monologues are sung by the two daughters of the deceased in coordination with the lament, which is sung by an elder mourner of the mother's gen- eration.

Lament

. . . Athena [the dead] suffered from many matters

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

[son's death]

Monologues

[First Sister] 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. 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 dis-

cussed]

The burning pain my mother consumed you.

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 497

her daughters kept her in feathers

... she will come no more She is going to find her son.

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. 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 here [dead

mother] away from us.

[First Sister] We, my mother, we wanted you to be here on your corner

498 ETHOS

even if only to see you. My sweet mother, my crown.

[Second Sister] Mother, did you decide it?6

The moiroloi 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 have to bear during the course of their lives. Ponos

(pain) is plural. It refers to a multiplicity of pains that at the mo- ment of death cohere into a metaphor for the deceased's life and the mourner's life. Maniats understand pain as "burning" and "fire"

(imagery found throughout Greece). Grief, pain, and memory burn, as does anger. "Burning pain" (kaimos) "melts" the subject, "liq- uefies the self' (lioni, revi). Crying and tears as material signs of liq- uefaction 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 experience and the labor of enduring pain. This labor is understood as the deceased's (and by inference the mourn-

er's) "fate," "share," or allotment. The endurance of fate is concep- tualized as a labor task. To endure or complete an arduous task in the agricultural and domestic sphere is often described as martyrisa, a concept that links labor, suffering, and pain.

Just as the mourner witnesses or "comes out as representative" for

others, 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 agricul- tural and domestic economies. Thus, by deploying an emotional

concept, "pain," Maniat women link kinship, the division of labor, and agricultural and domestic economies (all male-dominated in-

stitutions) 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 dia-

logue, 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 sac- rificial payment of a share that is consumed. This subtraction, sac-

rifice, or removal of part from whole is experienced as burning pain

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 499

and as an "incurable wound" that leaves a gap, a rupture. The use of orificial symbolism encodes a subtle inversion where the experi- ence of birthing (as the painful separation of mother from child) is rendered analogous to the death experience (as the painful separa- tion of mother from child).

In this prose/poetry counterpoint, the two sisters as chorus to the lament singer construct a discourse that is halfway between the po- etics of the lament and everyday speech. Their 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 la- ment singer occupies a mediate position between what is said in the ritual and what will be said in the social domains outside the ritual.

STYLES OF SINGING

Antiphony is inscribed as collective discourse in the klama through a polyphony of musical, linguistic, acoustic, and corporeal signs. Antiphonic alternation not only circumscribes a social struc- ture within the ceremony, but also constitutes the internal structure of the mourning singer's solo discourse. The latter is communicated through (1) acoustic and (2) corporeal means. In turn, the acoustic means are both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Thus, the acoustic sig- nification in the lament can be presented as a single tripartite struc- ture: sob/discourse/sob. The movement from the nonlinguistic (sob) to linguistic media is antiphonic. This antiphony seals the jur- idical value of speech through nonlinguistic expressions of "pain" in a manner analogous to the acoustic and corporeal techniques by which the chorus confirms, resonates, and memorializes the juridi- cal authenticity of the entire performance of the korifea.

In this movement from nonlanguage to language to nonlanguage, the sob or nonlinguistic signifier occupies a pivotal position; it func- tions as a hinge in the soloist's improvisation. The function can be easily overlooked if one is to treat moiroloi only in musical terms. In an ethnomusicological framework, the sob appears as stylized weep- ing, as an affective ornamentation of linguistic discourse. A Dur- kheimean approach would interpret the sob as a conventional sign or trigger for the representation of induced affectivity. A perfor- mance analysis can interject that the sob appearing at the end of the verse is a stylized technique for taking a breath in preparation for

500 ETHOS

the next verse. The latter would be very close to the truth, but it overlooks the fact that the technical dynamics of breathing in moir- oloi communicate with the moral connotations of breathing. Heavy breathing or the state of being out of breath is a corporeal sign of disorder (anabouboula) and connotes death. The expression variana- seni, "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 an emotional intensifier in the context of spoken conversations. The word xepsihismeni means (she is) out of breath, dying, or loss of the soul (psihi); soul is equivalent to breath here. The term refers to the effects of strenuous activity, struggle or fight with death.

Heavy breathing, breathlessness, and syllabic prolongation es- tablish semantic shifts between units of discourse. Anger in conver- sations, 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 the acoustic dynamics of heavy breathing, breathlessness, and syllabic prolongation as emotional intensifiers and as keying devices for en-

try into the next sequence of improvisation. There is a correlation between the passage into cathartic emotions, the passage from life to death, and the condition of breath loss. The loss of death 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 toward 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. This analysis of stylized sobbing establishes the aesthetic-acoustic

structure of moiroloi as a signifying system autonomous and independent of any specific verbal content. The positioning of a unit of discourse after the sob is highly significant, whether this occurs within the nar- rative 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 sob is musically, semantically, and emotionally a sign of per-

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 501

sonal termination, either as an expression of breath loss or over- whelming pain.

The enunciation of discourse after death constitutes an inversion 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 klama: an acoustic condensation of all representation that takes place after death.

SCREAMING AND DIVINATION

"Screaming" the dead, which involves literal screaming, lament improvisation, ritual sobbing, and prose monologues, is considered a discourse of the "outside" (placed in demarcated times and spaces). The disclosure of "fate" and "truth" through screaming, witnessing, and pain suggests that these practices are understood as divination. In turn, divination (as the disclosure of fate and truth) is equated with the dangerous entry of signs and meanings from the outside. In Maniat society, divination is also associated with the ex- egesis of warning dreams (often delivered by the dead) and the ex- humation of the bones of the deceased as they are brought back from the outside (the grave) and into the social order (inside) after their ritual purification.

The dangerous entry of signs, artifacts, and discourses from the outside into the inside is dramatized by mourners as "pain," "burn- ing," and "wounding." This iconography of the body that links "screaming," open wounds, and the labor task of bearing pain forms a symbolic continuum:

Teachers and educated ones and knowledgeable doctors I ask you one question: What? In the woman's insides blooms 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.

502 ETHOS

The mother bears the child and moira becomes the midwife whatever she writes will be written [will be done]7

Birth and the bearing of "burning pain" (that cannot be extin- guished by "inexhaustible water" or tears) are again equated in the above lament. This relation between birth and the bearing of pain points to the productive dimensions of mourning as performance practice and discourse. The newborn child is considered to be a dan- gerous and liminal entity in Inner Mani. Just as death is encoded as the passage from inside to outside, birth is understood as the entry of the outside into the inside. This lament equates the latter process with the bearing of pain, which is linked to the orificial symbolism of the female body by the metaphors of wounding and birthing. The disclosure of fate and of truth is associated with the appearance of pain. Moira (fate) as "midwife" appears at the moment of birthing- wounding as a record keeper, just as the lament singer and her cho- rus mediate and transform pain into an oral text.

The material symbolism of "birthing," "wounding," the orifice, and the female body provides the emotional and conceptual dimen- sions of pain with physical coordinates. The material and acoustic symbols of emotional conditions and context function as thresholds, points of entry and exit where the outside and the inside-moira, truth, and the social order-meet in a disordering contact.

The presence of fate and truth intensifies when the orificial im- agery and functions of the female body intensify (including speech). In everyday social life, men associate this orificial presence with the generalized polluting ambience of the feminine. In lament sessions, women convert and invert this polluting ambience into media of cul- tural power that contest the sureties of everyday social existence. The female body in mourning and in performance, in gestures and speech, in "screaming" in birth or death, becomes the preeminent conduit for the disturbing passage of moira and truth into the social order.

THE MOURNING CEREMONY (KLAMA) AND THE COUNCIL OF ELDERS (YERONDIKI)

My analysis of antiphony has demonstrated that in the klama there are formal procedures and techniques that establish the cri- teria for the production and reception of discourse as both litigious

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 503

and true. I have attempted to describe the performative construc- tion of juridical discourse and dialogue by focusing on form, genre, aesthetic techniques, and the interplay between the verbal and the nonverbal. These elements establish the truth content of all dis- courses in the mourning ceremony. The Maniats' concern with form, protocol, and legitimating strategies 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 in- stitutions.

There were two kin-based institutions that assumed those politi- cal-legal functions currently taken by the state: theyerondiki, 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 positions in the social structure. Among its other functions, the yerondiki was also a jural institution with a for- mal legitimacy. This was in contrast to the "informal," indirect po- litical and jural power of the klama. This dichotomy, in conjunction with the gender divisions of these two institutions, guaranteed that the klama would construct a dialogical relation to theyerondiki.

This is not to imply that klama is an informal event. It has always been more ritualized and public thanyerondiki, which was often held secretly. Klama was officially defined as a mortuary event. Based on the particular context of each death (i.e., revenge code feuds, land disputes), the participants in the klama knew beforehand that they would be engaging in a performance where juridical issues would be exposed and contested by formal systems of litigation (i.e., anti- phonic discourses).

Earlier I described the gender oppositions at mourning sessions in terms of spatial symbolics. I also presented an episode in which a woman exploits the boundaries of the impure and the pure in order to deliver antagonistic discourses directed at male domains, against which men cannot respond without incurring pollution. These dy- namics are refractions of the political relationship that once existed between klama and yerondiki. The vocality of women and the silence of men at mourning sessions is a direct inversion of the discursive relations between genders once promoted by the yerondiki and cur- rently by other components of the male domain.

What unitedyerondiki and klama was also the source of their struc- tural tensions. The same issues and acts were discussed and sub-

504 ETHOS

jected to different valuation: revenge code killings, inheritance and other property disputes, marital relations, and kin obligations. The conflictual relations between yerondiki and klama often expressed the inherent political tensions between the maximal lineage, the social unit represented by theyerondiki, and the minimal lineage or house- hold, whose interests were frequently advanced by women. The klama could reinforce the decisions of theyerondiki as much as it con- tested 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 theyerondiki.

The klama has survived theyerondiki in modernity, but their struc- tural opposition and political tensions are currently replicated in the adversarial positions taken by the male-dominated ideologies of modernization and urbanization, which are frequently deployed to delegitimize the residual symbolic systems of women (Seremetakis 1984, 1989a, 1991).

In the following laments, the content is explicitly antagonistic to males and the political interests of the male domain. The first la- ment presents an explicit opposition to a reconciliation mission of a yerondiki after the killing of the narrator's husband. The narrator ex- ploits the symbolic space of the klama, which underlines her dis- course with a moral authority while immunizing her from a punitive male response. Her sarcasm is directed against the representative of theyerondiki who has attended the klama in order to promote a rec- onciliation between the killer's and the victim's clan. The mourner counters this representative with her own status as a representative and witness of the dead. She rejects the implied reconciliation and further propels the clans into feuding by scandalizing and stigma- tizing the mother of the killer. As the narrator puts it: In the old days, when killings occurred, reconciliations were attempted. So, a woman whose husband was killed says the following [lament] when someone from

Katopagi [area of Inner Mani], who was serving as an elder, appeared: Welcome my Michalako elder of Katopagi 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

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 505

to reach eighteen to give him the gun hanging in the kremandalas [gun rack] to hunt the killers Mourmouras and Karkis and the child of the whore8

In the following lament excerpt and narration, a male informant recounts the effect of a mourner lamenting her dead sister and ad-

monishing her brother-in-law against remarriage:

Beware Skilakoyianni do not do an unthoughtful job to gather me a fox here [another wife] to spoil the nest and scatter the birds [children]

Indeed he stayed unmarried. "I will not spoil the advice she gave me," he said. They were listening to good mourners. If she said it to him casually talking some- where else, that is not in the moiroloi, in klama, 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 dis- solved your family."9

In the neighborhood rougha, during a regular evening gathering, three women remembering and exchanging stories and laments dis- cussed the killing of a young girl by accident when her father and a male representative were examining a new gun. From the relative's side, a female representative arrived at the mourning ceremony at-

tempting a reconciliation.

she [reconciliator] takes the lament because, you see, politics characterize some families, and it is kind of hereditary:

Let me speak and don't oppose me, Nikena [mother of dead girl] come close and make your heart like stone Nikena I beg you not to put a curse on the ill-fated Vasilio [the relative who brought the gun] for he did not mean to do such evil in my 's path

Aa! She [mother of dead girl] did not let her finish it. She lit and burnt! (anapse ke kaike).

506 ETHOS

Close your mouth and leave the politics aside you, the child of an honored father and of good origin, for politics were also taught to me by my aunt Yiorgulena the precious and honored one. Listen it was not my mule nor was it my oxen that was killed it was my little girl and you knew it well that was a good child quiet and well loved, and I knew it well from the past that he was an old hunter. [implying here an earlier killing committed by the same man] Where are you aunt Yiorgulena who brought me here in these households... bring me now the divorce I don't want [her husband] this day that I am left with no child Let my others be well

[One of my three informants interjects, amending the version just recited:] Get lost from my eyes you, [husband] I want the divorce I will scream it out loud! Where are you aunt Yiorgulena

And the whole world was shaking! And poor Vasilio [the blamed relative] was there, silent.l?

These laments and narrations demonstrate the extent to which the antiphonic construction of pain and mourning did not solely display a self-referential trajectory, but was a process that intentionally in- tervened in the institutional order, outside the mortuary rite.

The authority of public discourse grounded on "pain" and the so- cial validation of the chorus can be understood as a fundamental component of women's cultural power. The mourning ceremony as an affective enclave, as a community of pain and wounding, is not a total withdrawal from the social order, but rather it involves the construction of a value-charged site from which women address and

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 507

characterize the social order. This is particularly evident when la- ment performances construct a metaphorical equivalence between mortuary labor, "pain," and economic labor. This equivalence con- veys experience, emotions, values, and meaning from one domain of feminine practice to another. This unification of women's work ex- perience publicly resists those male-dominated institutions and dis- courses that fragment female practice and devalue the social status of women's labor in the field, household, and lament performance.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: CONSTRUCTING TRUTH

The tension between klama and yerondiki, as female and male in- stitutions, indicates that the claiming of truth had a plural character in Maniat society that demanded both antagonistic confrontation and dialogical construction (this also occurs between women in the ritual). Even today the plurality of truth-claims expresses the gen- der-inflected divisions of modernization ideologies, segmentary kin- ship, urban and rural, capitalist and precapitalist, and folk belief in relation to church ritual and/or medical rationalities. All of these elements converge with particular visibility on the death event and its subsequent ritualization by women. My concern in this paper has been on how Maniat women constructed and still construct their particular truth in ritual process. The focus carries a contemporary pertinence today, as the ritual process itself, its credibility and ra- tionality, is being challenged by men, the church, medical codes, and other exponents and expressions of modernity (Seremetakis 1989b).

For the Maniat women who actively participate in lament ses- sions and the improvisation of lament poetry, discoursed pain and dis- course in pain constitute truth. This is an antiphonic construction pre- cisely because its expression is invested in prescribed contrastive modes of signification such as poetic improvisation, prose mono- logues, ritual sobbing, "screaming," and iconographies of the body. The pivotal relationship in lament performance is the relationship between "pain" and truthful discourse. This in turn is objectified in the polyphonic media listed above and in the social relation of so- loist and chorus. The former primarily narrates and the latter re- sponds with linguistic and extralinguistic expressions of pain. The chorus collectively and later individually reconstructs an oral his- tory of what was said and done in the mourning ceremony and re-

508 ETHOS

produces it in everyday social interactions, outside the ritual perfor- mance.

The truth-claims that arise from the ritual depend on the emo- tional force of "pain" and thejural force of antiphonal confirmation. By stating that they cannot properly sing laments without the "help" of others, Maniat women point out that pain has to be so- cially constructed in antiphonal relations in order to be rendered valid. Antiphony is an inherently jural and historicizing structure. Its dyadic organization (soloist/chorus) guarantees a built-in rec- ord-keeping function. Antiphonal performance entails both the orig- inal 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 merely to hear one person sing, but to hear an entire social ensemble vocalize.

This formation of collectivity can be characterized as the expres- sive self-assertion of marginals. But the notion of collective expres- sion is a far cry from the construction of effective cultural power. This paper has delineated an ensemble of effective practices in the Maniat lament session that transform expression into intervention.

In the mourning ceremony, pain is represented materially through the acoustics of "screaming" and the poetics of the body. This material character of pain endows it with force. The meta- phorical linkage between the work of mourning and of agriculture transforms women's work into a labor relation and thus adds to the materialist dimension of ritual practice. The labor of pain, witness- ing, representing, burning, wounding, and the endurance of fate or- ganizes the relations between self and others, the living and the dead, women and men, the collective and the individual (chorus and soloist). This ritual resynthesis of women's experience constitutes a system of shared moral inference (i.e., ethics of reciprocity and shared substance) that is formalized into ajural apparatus. The rep- resentation of the impure in the ceremony through the presence of the corpse, female speech, and embodiment also constitutes a ma- terial force. These are all elements that make up a practice of cul- tural power on the part of women in Inner Mani.

The performative-affective synthesis of pain situates the female mourner (with the "help" and "witnessing" of others) into an emer- gent social structure (antiphony) through which the self is placed in a critical relation to the male-dominated social order. The deploy-

THE ETHICS OF ANTIPHONY 509

ment of pain to detach the self and body from residual social con- texts is but a prelude to the staging of women's reentry (as individ- uals and as a collectivity) into the social order on their own terms.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. Part of the research on which this paper is based was supported by grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation/Charlotte Newcombe and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1985-86. My sincere thanks to Allen Feldman and Talal Asad for their careful reading of this paper. I want to express my appreciation to both the anonymous reviewers for their sophisticated readings and the editor of Ethos for his deci- sion to publish the present article without revisions.

Portions of this paper were presented at the colloquium, Greek and Greek American Women in Voice and Text, which the author organized and chaired at New York University (sponsored by the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies). Excerpts were published in the So- ciety for the Anthropology of Europe Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989.

'See for instance Caraveli 1981, 1986. 2The first excerpt is from a lament recited in the neighborhood rougha during an afternoon

gathering by elderly women in southwestern Inner Mani in 1981. The second excerpt was recited by an elderly woman in Piraeus-where she has been residing for decades-in 1984.

3Excerpt from lament improvised in a mourning ceremony that took place in southwestern Inner Mani in 1981.

4Recited and validated by middle-aged women during an afternoon gathering in south- western Inner Mani in 1983.

5Recited by an elderly woman in southwestern Inner Mani in 1982. 6Lament and monologues improvised and collected during a mourning ceremony that took

place in southwestern Inner Mani in 1982. The lament is sung at a much slower time signa- ture than the monologues.

7Recited by two elderly women, exchanging verses, in an afternoon gathering in south- western Inner Mani, 1981.

8Recited by a middle-aged woman (residing in the city since the age of 17) in the local rougha in southwestern Inner Mani in 1982.

9Narrated by a middle-aged man during a house gathering in southwestern Inner Mani in 1986.

'?Middle-aged women (some residing in cities) during an afternoon gathering in south- western Inner Mani in 1982.

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