“In the evening, a new recording, in a private space this time. I begged our hostess, Yannakos’ wife, to tell me some lullabies, but she stopped after the first words. – I cannot do it without a cradle, she said. We gave her a chair and when she started shaking it, she got inspired. [….] I asked our hostess to sing a dirge. She refused. Because, a year ago, she lost a son at a very young age, Kanellakis explained to her that with the phonograph she could keep for ever the memory of her child. So she decided to do it.”

 

Ηubert Pernot, 19031

This article focuses on the relationship of Greek Folklore Studies (Laographia) with photographs and, in a more general sense, with audiovisual media which condense its epistemological and ideological premises. I use the term photograph in the plural because, as I will argue below, the desire for materiality, which “translates the abstract and representational ‘photography’ into ‘photographs’ as objects that exist in time and space”, as Ε. Edwards and J. Hart2 note, motivated to a large extent the introduction of the photographic camera, fist, and of cinema camera, thereafter, in the methodological program of Greek Folklore Studies since their foundation.

Folk studies needed photographs since the very first moment that they were constructed as a science of national culture, and included photographs from the very beginning in their methodological research practice as drawn up by N. Politis. What makes folk life pictures so critical to Folklore Studies at the moment of their constitution but even later, since the scientific assumptions and the methodological frame established by N. Politis have remained overall unchanged throughout the last century? In which social, political and moral context does N. Politis decide to refer to the photographic medium already in 1909, although he himself does not work with pictures and the photographic camera is hard to find and expensive? A study of the interrelation of folklore studies with photography, the primary optical technology of modernity3, cannot be carried out without delving into the epistemological developments which took place at the time of its fabrication through the encounter of two emblematic, as I will show, figures, of Nicolaos Politis and Ηubert Pernot. They are emblematic because they personify and encapsulate the complex and projective relationships and strategies which resulted in the establishment of folklore studies as the science of Greek folk culture under the conditions of modern colonialism. To paraphrase De Certeau4, they are at the same time the machines of modernity and its heroes.

This paper in not attempting to write a history of the use of visual technologies in Greek Folklore Studies but a genealogy in Foucauldian sense, focusing on a critical analysis of the relationship between knowledge, power and subjects and problematizing their complex interplay rather describing their linear continuity. The nexus of nationalism and colonialism constitutes a recent theoretical shift in the study of Greek nationalism which has not come about, as one would perhaps expect, in the field of historiography but rather in the field of the theory of literature and cultural theory, in works such as those of  Herzfeld5, Lambropoulos6, Tziovas7 but also of Leontis8, Just9, Gourgouris10, Calotychos11, Chamilaki12, to mention only some of them, which delimited a new field of discussion.

From this perspective, the anatomy of the decisive demarche of Pernot and Politis on the basis of the recording of “images and songs” which we suggest here, would conduce to a micrology of the making of a “indigenous Hellenism”13 and of the processes of the constitution of a native, novel, hybrid and potentially sanctified and sanctifying scientific discourse by the local elite. Alternatively, this submissive process has been construed as crypto-colonialism14, metaphoric colonialism15, colonialization of the ideal16 and, much more aptly, in my view, as self-colonization17. 

Μy purpose then, is not to offer a typical historical review of the ways that the audiovisual methodology has been used in Greek Folklore Studies (Laographia) but to draw attention to the impressive symmetry and complementariness of the two biographical trajectories which originated from a common pool of modern “scientific” artifices. Among them, the photographic (as well as the phonographic) method was intended to foster neutrality, direct and unmediated data and authenticity by virtue of being mechanical18.

Τhe iconographic mimetics of the photographic camera and the exposability of photographs arguably serve the epistemological paradigm of the evolutionary colonialist anthropological practice by dint of the “objective” portrayal of human types and societies, techniques and rituals, their archiving, their cataloguing and their exhibition in European metropolises19. Crucially, however, the here-and-now of the original, which only the mechanical reproduction could offer as a prerequisite of the concept of authenticity against the handmade copy, which is generally depreciated as fake20, intersected with the theoretical assumptions of positivist anthropology, the neutral observer and the observable social fact21. Politis needed the neutrality and the clarity in the collection of data promised by the mechanical media of recording, as a warrant of the scientificity of the new, but still inchoate field of knowledge which he introduced. However, in the Greek case the photographic camera and photographs had already assumed further meanings which were not as obvious as the foregoing. Politis sought a realistic, as far as possible, representation of popular culture since he intended to ascribe to it a tangible material essence, that is, to objectify it. Later on, however, he confined himself, rather, to rescuing it and, finally, to memorializing it. He endorses and establishes, thus, a deep structural correspondence between the here-and-now of the technological recording and the space and time of the “collection of data”, of the “mission”. Let us look closer, however, into the ideological processes of his time.

My aim here is not to proceed to a meticulous and linear analysis of the points of crisscross between his rich work as an author and the work of Pernot but I will try to refer back to the evental origins of the constitution of Greek Folklore Studies in order to answer my initial question: why did Politis introduce so early a machine of visual recording in the methodological toolkit of Folklore Studies. In a country where the Customs officer in Piraeus wrote down “chronograph” when H. Pernot, upon his return from Turkish-occupied Chios in 1899, declared his equipment, a photographic camera and a phonograph. And when, correcting his original mistake, he wrote “φονογράφος” [φόνος: murder + γράφος: -graph, instead of “φωνό-γραφος”, φωνή: voice], Pernot wondered, joking certainly, whether his “innocent” instrument would eventually register murders. “These people, however”, as he wrote later, “are not barbarians like Turks, they are dressed like you and me, and here the difficulties which Europeans face at the Customs have (truly) something cute about them. […] Even when they disagree without reason, they look like irascible Achilles, and then you think that you should congratulate them for remaining so similar to their ancestors”22.

The ethnocentric character of Greek Folklore Studies and its constitution as an academic discipline under the urgent circumstances of the creation of modern Greek national culture and of modern Greece as a consubstantial cultural reality, a genuine descendant of Ancient Greece, have already been noted an analysed in depth23. According to Politis, it is not the common language and the common religion but the “similar folkways, […] the community of folkways and customs, (which) is overwhelmingly manifested by the Greek people, sustained in an unbroken continuity from the oldest times”, which shape a unified Greek national community across time; within this community “the longings for the future concentrate the memories of the past”24. He passes over the linguistic and religious differences which existed within the newly founded state, putting forward a capacious category of the “national” which he identifies with the “popular” and he uses the “remains” (“εγκαταλείμματα”), the “survivals” according to Taylor to unify the national imaginary across time and space. N. Politis proclaims the need to create an autonomous scientific discipline, which will exclusively undertake the study of popular culture and should be autonomous thus from both philology and archaeology, the other “national” sciences, which he had studied and he still served in tandem as “Professor of Greek Mythology in charge of archaeological history, that is, of the political and private life of the Greeks”, a title that he held until his death25.

The founding text of the new science, in which he organizes the concepts and sets up an ideal methodology, is published in the first volume of the journal Λαογραφία (Laographia) in 1909, after he had established the Folklore Society (Λαογραφική Εταιρία) in the previous year. Here he states that “The virtues which any scientific folklore collection must possess are precision and clarity. The monuments of speech must be written invariably, as they circulate in the mouth of the people, without the least modification […]. The description of the acts and the deeds requires particularly sharp and secure observation […] To achieve maximum clarity it is necessary, whenever this is possible, to illustrate the description of things, gestures etc. through pictures. The wide spread of the photographic camera makes this easy. The picture of the described is clearer and more instructive than the best description. […] A folklore collection lacking the virtues of precision and clarity is useless for science”26. However, the longing for photography and the trust in its scientific evidence don’t keep pace with the use of photographs within the writings of Λαογραφία, apparently due to the lack of photographic and print equipment and the high cost of such a venture. There are, for instance, two pictures and a ground plan in the Λαογραφικά Σύμμεικτα (Folklore Varia) which were published in 1921, in his paper “Κυλίστρα” (Slide) (1918) nearly ten years after he wrote the essay “Λαογραφία” (Folklore Studies) to which I referred in the foregoing.

S. Kyriakidis was the first to acquire a photographic camera in 1919 for his field research in Komotini, and he issued a directive instructing all teachers about the appropriate manner “to collect folklore material” entitled “Instructions for the collection of folklore and linguistic material.” Ηe notes in it that “description should be plain, unadorned, precise and clear, and where it does not deal with objects (houses, utensils, clothes, ship etc.) it should provide the picture of the described object, wherever possible its photograph and, when this is not possible, a simple sketch will be always required”27. But even in regard to the “recording and collection of songs and melodies”, Kyriakidis in 1922 notes that “to this end, in the last years, in order to achieve an accurate rendition, the phonograph has been used for the recording of folklore melodies, whose plates can replay at any moment the same melody and allow thus to check the accuracy of the written transcription of music”28. However, as it transpires from G. Mega’s paper in 195129, S. Kyriakidis too referred to the utopian method of recording which he wished he had the means to apply: “The National Music Collection (established in 1941) had merged since the 14^th of March 1927 with the Folklore Archive, but in the absence of staff specializing in musicology, it could not operate. As a result, the voice recording machine acquired by the Academy in 1939 at a very high cost has not been put to any use ever since. On these grounds, we owe our gratitude to the Ministry of Education for having seconded two musicians30”. Kyriakids points out, thus, the need for sonic inscription in 1922, and the first such inscriptions become possible in 1951.

Given the lack of photographic equipment, the need for visual description and evidence in the absence of photographic media led D. Loukopoulos to include in his study of popular architecture in 1925, a foremost visualized theme in folklore studies publications, seventy-seven drawings of D. Pikionis, as he mentions on the front page, which he created following Pikionis’ instructions, as he notes. In effect, the systematic use of audio-visual recording technology started in 1962, when G. Spiridakis in his capacity as the director of the Folklore Archive acquires a 16mm camera and two photographic cameras, for which he writes: “The need to collect manifestations of folk life such as customary rituals of worship, forms of social life (marriage, popular dances etc.) as well as of natural life, and to capture them in cinematographic film in order to study them scientifically in greater detail has been long felt. The realization of this work started only in 1962, when it became possible to acquire a cinematographic camera, and thereafter of a special projector”31.

The first shootings were done by Spyridakis himself, with themes which bore mainly on techniques of production and rituals, dances in Macedonia and Thrace, school celebrations, the art of weaving in Kimolos, the customs of sponge-fishers in Kalymnos, basket weaving in Drama etc32. From 1964 onwards, filming is taken over exclusively by Yiorgos Aikaterinidis, who notes in his PhD dissertation: “This study required systematic autopsy since 1969 […] The collection of photographic material, part of which I present, required particular effort. I believe, however, that this was necessary not only as a basic supplement of written news reports but also as a live historical witness of the customs of bloody sacrifices in the area of Greece in our times, which is perhaps its last era”33.

The capacity to preserve is also pointed out in an article of the daily Kathimerini (30 January 1966), with the telling title: “The modernization of the scientific work of the Academy of Athens: Folklore Studies fosters the understanding of ancient culture through cinematographic films”. The first paragraph notes: “Interesting and exemplary collaboration between the Folklore Archive of the Academy of Athens and the American Archaeological School. G. Aikaterinidis, who is a partner of the Archive, discovered and preserved through his film the traditional representation of Saint George’s feat in a village of the district of Serres. A young man riding a white horse appears in an ancient tunic, with a spear and an outfit similar to the one borne by the trophy-carrier saint in his icons. Many authentic rituals were preserved in cinematographic films under the care of the director of the Folklore Archive of the Academy, Mr. G. Spyridakis. The provision of modern equipment for the timely preservation of the last traces of our disappearing national culture is an urgent national need”.

The argument of the neutral medium is extended beyond the Folklore Studies Archive, which has been already established as a national and central institution of collection, copying, clipping, classification, cataloguing and storing of “folklore material” that is either deposited by the authorized collectors themselves after their “folklore missions”, collectors who are divided into the different grades of classifiers, scribes and permanent and temporary collectors, or they are donated by amateur collectors. The latter are offered “folklore awards for the best and richest collection of monuments of people’s speech, as the Academy of Athens wishes to contribute to the work of collecting and preserving the heirlooms of the soul of the Greek People”34. Αwards are accompanied with money prizes or simply with honorary commendation. However, the need to establish the authenticity of the material pushes folklore researchers outside the Folklore Archive towards photography, especially those who dispose of the financial means, since photographic equipment is still expensive although its use is more widespread in post-war Greece. Aggeliki Chadjimichali, for instance, collector of works of folklore art, founder of exhibitions of handicrafts and of Folklore Art schools and ardent fieldwork researcher, uses a great number of photographs both in her publications, in order to describe landscapes, objects, costumes, houses, and in the exhibitions that she organizes. Her monograph Sarakatsani (1957) is the richest in photographs folklore study, since it includes 452 “pictures” (“ikones”), as she describes them, and drawings by herself35. Here she writes: “The peculiar life and customs of Sarakatsani are part of our immense national heritage, a continuation of the Greek race –which gradually succumb to attrition. However, they turn us back to very old times, they pass through deep historical changes and they weld together the pagan with the Christian worldview, demonstrating the unimaginable stamina of human beings, the deep roots of the popular soul. Living and customs of Sarakatsani are an eternal part of our life and history, and it is our duty to render them a conscious lesson in order to seriously research and study the infinite wealth, in countless varieties of forms and elements, which every inch of the Greek territory holds within itself”36.

Photographs are systematically published also in the papers of K. Kakouri, where they are assigned again a salvage task but they bear evidence, furthermore, of the embodied observation and presence of the researcher in the field, to autopsy: “The autopsy of the event made it possible to supplement the earlier fragmentary testimonies and to preserve all the stages of the custom by taking photos. It disclosed the as yet unknown to science connection of the wishing good year ceremony with the Bacchic troup of Anastenaria. The crux of this study lies in the chapters on the autopsy, the first-hand data. The rapid vanishing of popular cults calls for a nearly total commitment to the preservation of their remaining folklore elements”37.

In this period, through the post-civil war urbanization, industrialization, migration and impending commodification of tradition under the “tourist gaze”38, the emphasis shifts away from the precision and objectivity of the audio-visual recording technology towards the urgent need to preserve by immortalizing “popular life” in its “ultimate spark of life.” As visual media become more accessible, taking photographs as a first stage, prior to archiving and future study in due time, appears more crucial than ever. However, since the beginning of the ‘70s, cinematographic filming is reduced, and in 1975 only “three topics filmed on site” are deposited by Aikaterinidis, who continues however his recording of “song melodies” and his writing on the numbered pages of his notebook. As he mentions in the Folklore Studies Annual Yearbook of 1977 G. Aikaterinidis “worked for 20 days (4-23 August) in the district of Rodopi and more specifically in the villages […] During the foregoing mission we wrote down information about housing, food, agricultural and animal farming life, marriage, birth, social organization and popular religion. 150 melodies of songs and dances were recorded” (manuscript no. 3800).

What makes Aikaterinidis to lose his interest in “filming on site,” whereas he continues his missions and the collection of folklore material? Was it indeed the annoying inspections for the quantity of celluloid that he used because of military dictatorship’s persistent suspicions for its contraband, as he mentions today, the real reason that led him to give it up? Or was it rather the fact that what he observed in the field was not worth filming? Or, alternatively, what if the “traditional” that he had taken up to capture and to preserve was not that “traditional” any longer and, thus, not so interesting and worth saving and preserving its moving picture? In the same Folklore Studies Yearbook of 1977 it is mentioned that “the writer E. Alexakis went to the villages of the North-Eastern part of the Grevena district […] As the collector observes, the popular culture of the said district is in decline despite its relative insulation, due mainly to internal and international migration (large urban centres), which has brought about the dislocation of small villages and settlements and the discontinuation of tradition”. Likewise, writer P. Kamilakis who “worked for 32 days (15 September-17 October) in the communities of Galatini, Dryovounio, Eratyra, Pentalofos and the municipality of Siatista in the Voios district notes the panhellenic phenomenon of the waning of popular culture on various grounds, which is manifested more starkly in material life in which technical developments have altered the forms of housing, clothing, agriculture etc. In comparison to the other villages of the research, the preservation of the traditional style of life is witnessed more vividly in Galatini, which is isolated and located far from urban centres and transport nodes” (p. 188). After the 1980s, in the next published Folklore Studies Yearbooks of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre, as the Folklore Studies Archive was renamed in 1966, it is mentioned that every mission is accompanied by a large number of photographs, and it becomes evident gradually in the reports of folklore missions that the quantity of photographs, videos and (cassette) tapes has multiplied and that many collectors use autonomously their own recording equipment.

The answer to the conundrum “Why did Politis choose photography in 1909 as one of the basic methodological tools of Folklore Studies” can prove to be interesting not only because it can convince us of his modernist aspirations but also because it can shed light on the ideological trends that ferment in the underground of Greek Folklore Studies at the turn of the 20^th century, or, to put it otherwise, on the relationships of modern Greek national ideology with colonialism.

Politis offers a critical example as to how the idealized Western construction of Hellenism as the archetypical ancestor of European culture intertwined with its domestic version, expressed mainly through the thesis which posited the continuity of ancient Greek culture and its survival in the rural mode of life and speech. The institutional positions39 that he assumed, enabled him to communicate with a large number of intellectuals at European universities, to become an intermediator and interpreter between the Western and the domestic representation of contemporary Greek culture and to be able to construct an image of popular culture fully desirable and compatible with and European models, and more specifically with the French models, as I will show here. His extensive correspondence and the relations that the journal Laographia maintained with European Hellenists, archaeologists, philologists, historians and antiquaries, exchanging essays and books, demonstrate his desire to align his work with the Western scientific trends of his time40. Until now, however, only the relationship of N. Politis with E. Taylor has been noted41, as well with some other British scientists, such as J. Lawson, E. Edmonds, Η. Tozer42 on the basis of the theory of survivals which Politis recast as “remains.” At the same time, however, he exercised a domestic oversight through his correspondence with a large number of teachers, who assume the task of collecting “folklore material” when they accepted his invitation in 1887 in the circular that he issued as the General Inspector of Primary Schools of the Ministry of Education. As Skouteri-Didaskalou puts it43 “he was situated at the centre of a world where groups, gatherings and companies of learned men, networks and collaborations among scientists, teachers of all grades from everywhere, men of letters, of the art mainly of writing and of printing houses, moved around the axis of Athens, its foundations and its institutions.” In this context, which he himself created to some extent in his effort to realize “the strategic project of folklore studies,” Politis metabolized the Western expectations and representations of the modern Greek self in a mirror reception and rhetoric of the national/popular/traditional. His exchange with Hubert Pernot (1870-1946), a person of equivalent institutional standing in France and, to a certain extent, in Greece, too, reveals tellingly the influence of Western philhellenism on the ideological and, by extension, methodological conception of Greek Folklore Studies. I will focus here on the subtle theoretical and contextual nuances of the methodology that he adopted (and on their modernist dimension in the specific historical context), while I will leave aside his extensive philological work.

Pernot, a student of Emile Legrand with whom Politis also corresponded44, studied Greek literature in a strongly philhellenic ambience in France, which was nurtured by politicians such as E. Venizelos and Th. Deliyiannis and was expressed through scientific research trips and exchanges, the establishment of associations such as the Αssociation pour l’Encouragement des Etudes Grecques en France (Association for the promotion of Greek Studies in France) and the Ligue Française pour la Défence des Droits de l’Hellénisme (French League for the Defence of the Rights of Hellenism) as well as through the recognition of Greek intellectuals such as Y. Psycharis, who in 1904 succeeded Legrand as professor of Linguistics at the School of Oriental Studies, a position that was contested also by Pernot. In 1912, he was appointed assistant professor of Modern Greek Language and Grammatology at Sorbonne when, as N. Veis points out45, in Athens there was not yet any Chair of Modern Greek, and this led to a rise in the number of his Greek students in Paris. Pernot, as a student of local Greek dialects and of the language of the New Testament books took up in 1912 the Chair of Greek Language and Literature in the Modern Greek Institute of Sorbonne, which he established in collaboration with Venizelos in 1920. In 1925, he inaugurated a series of publications devoted to the Modern Greek language and literature, which amounted to 18 volumes, the Collection of Modern Greek Institute, to which he donated in the end his own rich library. Following in the footsteps of his professor, Legrand46, who was the first to organize the study of Modern Greek literature in Turkish-occupied territories47, visited Chios as part of a linguistic research mission funded by the Ministry of Public Education. He was equipped with Columbia wax cylinders for recording and reproducing sound, weighing 9 kilos, and a camera. Based on the material that he recorded, he published in 1903 the book In Turkey, The island of Chios with 17 folk melodies and 188 photographs-taken by the author himself, as stated in the subtitle. The book begins with the following words: “Travelling through the island of Chios, on a scientific mission, I found out that its appearance, its political situation, its morals and the thoughts of its residents were, by their nature, very interesting for the public. The present book includes observations that I have made from different angles during the summer of 1898 and 1899” (p. 1).  

In 1930, he founded in Athens the Society of Folk Songs, under the direction of I. Athanasakis, who does electric voice recordings using metal matrices, which had replaced wax cylinders. Recordings take place in the Alabra theatre, under the supervision of M. Merlier. Octave Merlier’s student writes: “In 1930 (Pernot) came to Athens with two engineers from Pathé Films and attended the recording of many hundreds of folk songs, particularly from Asia Minor and other areas of ‘unredeemed Hellenism.’ Recording was prepared by Ms Melpo Merlier. Pernot asked to record texts in dialects, along with the songs. He listens carefully to Cappadocians, Pontians, Dodecanesians and Tsakonians. His dream is to become the linguistic Atlas of Greece. […] Dialectology, like archaeology, is a valuable aid to history”48.

In France, however, Hellenist Pernot is known mainly because in 1924 he took over the direction of the Archives of Speech (Αrchives de la Parole) in Sorbone,49 which are renamed in 1927 into Museum of Speech and Motion (Μusée de la Parole et du Geste), a fact which is related to the expectation of introducing cinematographic recordings in addition to the already existing sound recordings. These films, however, were never realized50. Pernot, although a philologist, did not simply promote recordings, but he also directed them towards traditional music and songs at a time when “Popular Arts and Traditions” (des Arts et des Traditions Populaires) were instituted in France.51 Before 1930, when he organized the recordings in Athens, Pernot had taken part in two other missions for “the collection of material”: in 1928 in Romania and in 1929 in Czechoslovakia. His findings are presented in the First World Conference of Popular Arts in Prague in 1928, which was organised on his initiative. As the director of the Institute of Phonetics and the Museum and in view of the Colonial Exhibition in 1931, he suggested to the Governor of Colonies, Léon Cayla, that since so many singers, dancers and true natives would come to Paris they could organize recordings in the Exhibition, which they could continue thereafter in the colonies themselves. In 1928, he writes thus to him that “the work of the Institute could promote science, on the one hand, and French propaganda, on the other […] fixing on the records the music and the dialects of the colonies”52. Pernot’s project about the colonies is dismissed as very expensive. Cayla asks from the commissaries of the colonies to declare if they possess “colonial recordings,” and the administrator of Morocco writes that Οdeon and Columbia companies possess a hundred of records with Arab music, which could be deposited in the Institute. Pernot dismisses these records saying that they are commercial and without any scientific value. Pernot sought obviously to assign recordings exclusively to the French company Pathé and to leave out the German company Οdeon and the American company Columbia. In a letter to the Ministry he wrote that “if we do not act fast (asking later funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Colonies in order to take up recordings in Morocco) we will be forced to buy the recordings of our own colonies from Berlin”. Under the pressure of the foreign menace, he demands to acquire for the Museum the copyright of the recordings that will take place in the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, of the natives at least who would travel with funding from the French government. However, before the exhibition, Pernot quits the Museum of Speech and Motion to take up the Chair of Post-Classical and Modern Greek Language and Literature in which he is elected professor. His partner, Philippe Stern, will take up the recordings in the special stand of the Museum at the Colonial Exhibition (although, in effect, recordings took place in the studio due to the noise in the exhibition), bringing large profits to Pathé at a time of high demand for “exotic melodies”. Pernot, however, even away from the position of the director of the Institute of Phonetics and the Museum, explains to his former partner the “appropriate” way of recording: “These recordings must be based initially on a meticulous study of the natives. Only if we discuss with them, will we inspire trust and will we be able to acquire interesting archives”53.

But let me return to his exchange with N. Politis. In the correspondence between Politis and Pernot (1884-1921), in P. Moulla’s archive, I could single out the following.

(11 January 1910): Pernot congratulates Politis for the journal Laographia, he informs him that his third daughter is named Lenio and the second, Annie, but he usually calls her Annoula, he informs him also about the progress of the Greek Bibliography of the 18^th century and the Ionic Bibliography, but he confesses also how hard it is to work far from Greece since he lacks so many books.

(16 June 1911): he writes that due to his many obligations he omitted to take a picture of Politis’s two children as he had requested, but as a result he himself (Pernot) feels more punished and would very much like him to send him a picture of them if he has one.

(13 January 1914): he thanks him for Laographia, but he mentions that he regrets that he has not sent anything and he asks him to write how much money he owes for the 1913 subscription fee. He also writes that his plans include the establishment of a Modern Greek Institute in which students will feel at home, he enumerates the Greek volumes that he lacks. He addresses his unsuccessful endeavours to raise funding for the establishment of the Institute by requesting donations from King George, Princess Maria Bonaparte and Eleftherios Venizelos.

(1 Μay 1915): Pernot congratulates Politis for his participation in so many interesting committees and organizations and asks Politis, in his capacity of the director of the Folklore Archive, to provide a metallic bookcase in order to store some archives in Ithaca, and he adds that he would also rejoice “at the idea of a phonograph and a cinematograph for the dances, but do not take this as a pledge before I am duly informed. Since there is now in Greece an official institution, it would be better if it gets into contact with the Archives of Speech at the University of Paris, which were established by the company Pathé. Brunot, as the director of the Archives, will immediately understand the importance of your project. The company Pathé should be also notified. I will take care of this personally, and I hope that I will be able to achieve something if the company is not very absorbed in other concerns”.

(7 September 1917): he thanks him for Laographia, which Politis sends him regularly, and he explains to him the structure of the French university as Politis expressed his interest in sending his son to study in France.

(5 December 1919): he expresses his idea of writing an anthology of modern Greek Poets, which would be entitled “Contemporary Greece through its poets” and he adds “No doubt, you would ask me if folk songs will be included. But this requires some thought. Although I know well that popular songs are a valuable treasure, they should not have a double presence in the Popular Anthology that I am putting together. But I look forward to hearing your thoughts because you can always offer wise counsel and you could recommend an appropriate book”.

Pernot’s trip to Chios in the 1898 and 1899 summers belongs to the new form of the literary, indolent and aimless touring, the “voyages d’étude”. Between 1897 and 1912, as Della Dora points out, a curious and heteroclite French-speaking multitude flooded the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor in order to see for themselves a “living museum,” which combined the lucid Greek landscape, the glorious classic antiquities and the everyday life of contemporary Greece. Amateurs or scientists, mainly from the natural sciences, but also wealthy lawyers, astrologists, archaeologists, aristocrats and priests, teachers and housewives, members of the General Review of the Pure and Applied Sciences (Revue Générale des Sciences Pures et Appliquées) took part in the educational tours in order to “satisfy their scientific curiosity and to improve their individual technical knowledge”54. As the modern representatives of French cosmopolitanism, they started their journey from Marseille not only attending seminars and lectures before and during the cruise, since the ship was always equipped with a deck for walking, a library, laboratories for processing and printing photographic plates, a lecture and conference hall, but carrying also a heavy equipment of binoculars, stereoscopes and photographic cameras. Crucially, the ship itself afforded them the possibility of a panoptic, distanced and protected observation from on high55. In 1902 Louis Olivier, a botanologist and pioneer of microphotography, editor also of a journal which promoted the popularization of natural science, organized a contest in which the photographs of the participants “would constitute one of the most valuable collection of documents for the scientific study of both Ancient Greece and the modern Greek world. […] Greece in its entirety, both ancient and modern, revives on these luminous pages from which nothing of interest to the artist or the archaeologist has been omitted”. The award was, of course, a ticket for a much desired travel to Greece, and the contest was announced in a column entitled Geography and Colonialism56. 

The visual technology did not simply represent and illustrate in a pure manner the idealized Greek landscape, following a past generation of painters and literary writers, but they immediately turned this venture into a “scientific” and “modern” one. The pictures, however, were taken by the tourists (this term is used by the editor himself) and were destined for viewers in Paris, since the award-winning photographs were on display in the offices of the journal, as the new lingua franca which conveyed the embodied knowledge and experience from travelling. European travellers to Greece, as Peckham57 notes, imagined that they could move both within a familiar past and within a primitive and “wild” present58. The photograph could function thus as the most unifying gaze between the two: it could modernise the past and transform the ancient Greek background in a modern experience; it could add depth to the exotic present, endowing it with an origin and a concrete content.

Already in the introduction of his first illustrated book In Turkey, The Island of Chios, Pernot reveals the influence that the methods of natural sciences exerted on theoretical sciences and mainly on anthropogeography. The common factor was scientific naturalism, that is, the study of both natural and social phenomena in their organic context by means of observation. At the turn of the century, the French geographers were the first to make photography and film an integral part of their research and education program59. He states that his objective is “scientific”, a fact which is confirmed by his many observations on the morals and the costumes, from different angles, and by the new machines that he carried in his luggage. He writes that the events which he will narrate are absolutely true and that he does not intend to write a novel but to narrate a true travel. However, his case is highly interesting on the grounds that a Hellenist scholar who does not deal with photography and music and had “a great ignorance, collected the popular melodies of the place roaming around Chios”60. Starting with the usual photos on the deck mentioned by Della Dora61, the rest of them are mostly panoramic photos of the areas he visited and cliché pictures of natives and their costumes, front and side, sitting or standing, individual or group, all of them outdoors. “I beg the reader not to take these as specimens of ancient Greek beauty. In Greece, Pericleses are not all great men, and beautiful women are not all of them Aphrodite of Melos”62. Although they don’t particularly like his pictures, because their faces appear grey, and this forces Pernot to remove the shades and to process the plates many times, these people are alive, they speak and they sing, as shown in the last part of the book which includes a transcription of the melodies by Le Flem. In this spoken language and the living traditions, as he writes elsewhere, “we can trace elements of antiquity”63. The media produce a new tangible, material and embodied reality in which the locals, “natural products of earth”, as De Bovet64 says, turn into living heirs of the ancient, living traces of the national past. Their culture should be surrounded with the halo of sacredness that only antiquities deserve. However, Pernot sees in technical media the possibility of rescuing it: “Greek is dying because we let it die and we do not use in our teaching archaeological discoveries and the diffusion of photography. A country, people, ideas –this is the basis of a language, and to direct the thought of students towards it I use multiple photographs in this volume”65. In addition to enriching the Greek and the Ionian Bibliography, and to writing dictionaries of dialects and phonological catalogues, Pernot’s encyclopaedic ambitions on French territory are focussed on enriching the Sonic Atlas, the Archive of Speech which is renamed as Museum of Speech and Motion, on the desire to constitute a national heritage using materials from the everyday life of ordinary people in rural France. The sound archives are “collected” during trips which he calls “missions” in the face of an impending extinction. His successor in the direction of the Archive, Roger Dévigné, who sometimes called the “missions”, “folkloric cruises”, writes that “the importance of these monuments of sound can be compared as to its value, if they are collected in a scientific manner, to those of other monuments of stone and marble bequeathed to us by past centuries and proudly conserved”66.

In Greece, Nicolaos Politis, having already absorbed the romantic principles and the realistic expertise of French Philellinism through the influence of Emile Legrand and Ηubert Pernot, turns into a “National Treasurer”, as P. Nirvanas calls him, who “hellenized our literature and our thought”, according to K. Varnalis67. Thus the plausible representation of the national fantasy was promoted through the institution not only of Folklore Studies but also of the Greek realist prose which was concerned with contemporary Greek reality, mostly with customs and manners and found its most representative expression in ethographia (ηθογραφία).

After publishing the Study of the life of modern Greeks (1871-1874) in two volumes, some modern Greek tales in Estia and Greek traditions in the journal Parnassos, Politis launches in 1883, in collaboration with the owner and editor of the journal Estia, J. Kasdoni, “a Greek short story writing contest”. In the call, he writes that Greek writers should be turned away from “European topics” towards Greek ones. Hence, the short story can exert a positive influence “on the national character” and reinforce “the feeling of love for the homeland”. He suggests two sources, the Greek people who has very rich and noble customs, traditions and myths compared to other people, and Greek history, which also contains scenes capable of “providing topics for the writing of exquisite short stories and novels”. The contest, as it incited writers to draw inspiration from the glorious history, made them “to create monstrosities, by obscuring the difference between history and traditions”, as Vitti68 mentions, “short stories inspired from Kleftika songs and magic spells against the spectres of Fallmerayer and About”.69 Around 1880 the “rural romance” becomes the prevalent form of novel, featuring Greek peasants and laying emphasis on the detailed description and the natural and smooth narration of a simple plot, with unforced and lively dialogues, which follow frequently the rhythms of folk songs. “Greek novel makes the most of the national character by describing the place and the local costumes with as many folkloric details as possible so as to compose works which cannot be confounded with the works of other people by any means”, and he adds, “until the moment of this great discovery Greek novelists seemed condemned to write stories which looked like failed imitations of the foreign ones”70. At their early stage, before the inward turn of Zitianos (The Beggar) (1896) and Fonissa (The Murdereress) (1903), information about rural life was so awkwardly inserted in the text that Greek novels seemed like a “show of folklorism”, as if they tried to comply with an imperative, to meet the formal standards of the “Greek short story”. Vitti71 adds that “traditions turned out to be a valuable treasure to which village boys dressed in French clothes directed their attention in awe and admiration when they had a literary bent, as they all followed Politis’ recommendation to describe in simple words persons and incidents of their village life”. Accuracy in the depiction of the rural world and the language of “simple-cunning villagers” (Palamas Collected Works 2, 155)72, of Demotic Greek or the dialect they spoke in their everyday life, were among the required qualities of the essay for the 300 drachmas award, a practice that was followed also in the Folklore Archive and the collections deposited by “non-commissioned collectors”. Hence, in the name of authenticity, the Demotic language was introduced in dialogues in a narrative written in Katharevousa (purist Greek).

Politis, however, while he envisioned a pure and native Greek novel, which would rescue tradition from extinction and would bear witness also to a sound, modern state, translated regularly French books of times gone by, of exotic and science fiction literature73. Moreover, he used to comment on Greek translations of foreign literature or he chose particular series for translation. In 1886, he writes in Nea Estia with regard to Verne’s translation “each generation needs its own fairy tale […] this dream of our times, the inclination towards science fiction was admirably captured by Jules Verne who renewed fiction, inventing a new chimera that extended its golden wings on a largely heinous reality”74. On the way to bourgeois modernization through a “heinous reality”, Politis seems to oscillate between a mythomaniac romanticism, fiction, the imaginary, the unfeasible and the potential, on the one hand, and objective realism, authenticity, the real, the feasible and the existent which restore a balance and bring Greece symbolically closer to colonial Europe.

According to Politis, to address my initial question, mechanic visual recording can produce neutral “pictures” through its mimetic capacities. In this way, it can serve the need to provide a realistic description of popular life but it can also naturalize its timeless relation with the indefinite past and the national narrative rather than with the socio-historical process of community75. Photography and photographs as objective visual testimonies of the here-and-now offer a unique opportunity because they materialize the idealized and admirable Greece as a real landscape and they revive it in present time. Photographs and recordings situate convincingly and accurately the Greek world, both ancient and modern, in an actual and real place and time. Broadly speaking, they make it evident, they render it aesthetically and sensorially perceptible and they revive it by knitting together the two temporalities. Furthermore, since the new identity had been constructed in terms of purism, modernization, truth and accuracy, it required both literally and symbolically transparent and modern methods for its study. Folklore Studies were organized hence according to the rationalist criteria of a modern science which should employ modern scientific methods in order to draw a dividing line between itself and the nearly fictional narratives of travellers. It assumed also the task of transforming the immaterial and invisible residues of the past, language and popular life, into material and visible, vesting them with meaning and symbolic value and assigning them to a “sacred” category equivalent to that of the “archaeological”, the “traditional” this time. National cultural heritage as a new semantic framework would encompass henceforth not only classical antiquities76, but also popular tradition. In order to do this, however, it would have to “exoticize” its own familiar which had been appropriated by the West as the cradle of its modernist renaissance. After exoticizing it, it would have to appropriate it again and to domesticate it symbolically by civilizing it. It is not insignificant that, initially, the commissioned collectors were teachers who recorded folkloric material and, at the same time, they taught Katharevousa (the purified language), that is, they simultaneously preserved and destroyed.

Photographs and sound recordings acquired also an archival and exhibitionary value, on top of their rhetorical one, they turned into unique art objects, like everyday objects, that is, into future exhibits. However, as Benjamin77 puts it, “what is important for these figures is that they are present, not that they are seen”. We can discern here a further implicit paradox which bears on their national significance. Although they were destined for reproduction, the visual and audio archives of popular culture were preserved and upheld as authentic material tokens of the past. Hence, the criterion of authenticity, a necessary component of nationalism, ruled out the possibility of an infinite number of copies which the “new” technical means was capable of producing.

Shortly after the construction of the epistemological basis of Folklore Studies, Politis founded the Folklore Archive (1918), a totalizing classificatory grid of census, map and museum in Anderson’s terms78, in which folklore material is numbered, codified and catalogued and at times exposed for future study. It assigns automatically to the present the sacred mission of collection and preservation. To a present riddled with contradictions it opposes the vision of the future, in the name of which the monuments of speech and material life must be preserved in different guises: tactile, textual, photographic, film and audio. Consequently, the dialectic nature of the present consists in the fact that the past remains latent within the present and the future inheres in it potentially. These projections make the present constantly transitional and “inadequate” according to Gourgouris79. In the dualist project of Folklore Studies, one side of it turns towards the past in order to trace out the roots of popular tradition, and the other turns towards the future in order to rescue it, setting aside the present as significantly irrelevant.

Following the reversed mechanism of Archaeology “which recollects fragments and reassembles dismembered ruins in order to produce a site of memory or a site of oblivion”80, Folklore Studies in the last century fragmented and broke traditional life to pieces, producing multi-sensory folklore archives and monuments through “objective” processes of collection. As Edwards81 has pointed out “colonialism was profoundly material and that colonized and imperial centres were critically linked by a traffic in objects that was the sensorially figured: raw materials, crafted artifacts, foodstuffs, photographs, documents, bodied and body parts”. Crucially, we argued that colonialism was experienced through multiple forms of sensory perception.

Three points are interesting, in my view, and deserve further analysis. The Folklore Archive did not constitute a collection of already existing “monuments of the life and the language of the Greek people”, although it could include such monuments but only from first-hand collections, photographs, filming and audio recording. Accordingly, audio-visual recordings are considered “means” rather than “products” of collection. The question of “recording” raises here interesting stylistic questions regarding distance, camera angles, the choice of framing, movement etc. Footage was never edited with a view to producing films or narrative except for very few cases in which it was used for documentaries for public television. It was shot, in other words, so as to remain an archive, unprocessed material, rushes, for future potential editing and assemblage. The Archive was organized and preserved as the “ark of popular culture”, as stated on its website, in view of an imminent destruction of popular culture. Only then would it make sense to assemble and to edit unedited folklore material82.

The modern age, “which first arose out of a methodic effort of observation and accuracy that struggled against credulity and based itself on a contract between the seen and the real” as de Certeau83 puts it quite succinctly, helps us to understand Nicolaos Politis’ Folklore Studies as a process of thought and work. He draws from it not only his ideology, as already noted, but also the practices, as I showed in the foregoing. No doubt, the one creates the other as there is no a-theoretical methodology, even if it is mechanic and laden with aspirations to unmediated “recording”. At the same time, in the tangle of colonialist mimicking, Folklore Studies tried to produce on the local level and to reproduce on the colonial “the aesthetics of native authenticity”84, an aesthetics which celebrated the autochthonous and the native as genuine and authentic, generating a peculiar “domestic exoticism”85. However, “under the European oversight and supervision”86, the production of appropriate self-images was more or less predetermined. The visual obsessions of modern colonialism were accepted by Politis as a metaphor of pure reason, originally, and of archival materiality and exposability later on. What he brought initially to the villages was a look and not the feet of a collector. Henceforth, placed in a decorative frame, aestheticized, pacified by the picture, immersed in fiction as a background, popular culture was given over to stereotypes, to a codified picturesqueness full of “typical” elements: customs, costumes, utensils, rituals, constructions, folk art, songs and dances. Greek Folklore Studies assumed the task of providing fair copies, of reconfiguring them into archived residues and of depositing them to a safe national archive upon indelible pictures.

Ηubert Pernot, having started recordings and the taking of photographs in Chios in 1898 as a new Hellenist, in 1931 he champions the recording and the commercial use of “exotic melodies” by the company Pathé in the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris, a miniature of exoticism, an apotheosis of recreational exoticism, of the aestheticization of the gaze, of the spectacularization of the Other. Every colonized country was represented by a monument, a temple or a house out of proportion, a characteristic sample of local architecture made with random materials, with cement or plasterboard87. The “grotesque Luna park”88 included grandiose Buddhist temples from Indochina and earthen huts from Sudan, Moroccan palaces and Algerian mosques, entire “negro villages”, the “Kanaks cannibals”, the Museum of the Colonies (what is now the Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie), a zoo, restaurants with exotic food, the stall of Catholic missions and the Protestants’ stall. “Around the world in one day” was the motto of the exhibition. “Real” natives were transported by ship from the colonies, animal farmers encaged with their animals, local festivals and rituals, colonial products, costumes, dances and songs filled the stage. At the central entrance of the exhibition stood a statue of the goddess Athena, decorated with a Gallic helmet, a symbol of colonial and imperialist France as noted in the exhibition brochure. There, in the Information Stall (Cité des Informations), a sign in the small stall of a country, which according to the organizers deserved to occupy the first position and from which every visitor ought to start their tour in the exhibition, read: “Greece, the mother of our civilization, isn’t also the mother of Western colonialism?”89.