THESE QUESTIONS I ATTEMPT to answer through evidence from the community described in my Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village. My first period of living in Ambeli lasted from autumn 1966 to spring 1968; then in autumn 1970 I returned to the village for just under two more years, until summer 1972, to engage on a follow-up study. This type of community has a particular value for the issues explored here: the imaginative world I recorded over these six years belongs to a time when many Greek villages, like Ambeli, were still vibrant working communities living almost entirely off their own land. Globalizing influences were discernible, but minimal, and the rich interlayering of folk beliefs and practices with ecclesial customs and precepts made it a place of extraordinary interest for studying the local understanding of religion and cosmology.

In this comparison of local with ecclesial understandings, my guide to the Church’s thinking has been chiefly the Orthodox liturgy. Orthodoxy is known and experienced by the villagers primarily in the visual and verbal symbolism of their liturgical life, which provides a much richer and more authentic touchstone for their faith than conventional dogmatic summaries can provide, though I refer to these, and to some relevant writings of the eastern Fathers of the Church as well. This liturgy of the Church—a term which I use to include all its offices, not just the Divine Liturgy which is the eucharist itself—is the work of early Christian communities, the authors being in many cases little known, though they clearly used not only the words of Scripture in extraordinary richness and profusion but also the words of authors in the patristic tradition who are felt to speak directly out of their experience of God, and are often described as theologians in this sense. Despite the gap between liturgical Greek and village language, this incomparable treasury is a living part of the experience of the Greek villages (as it is of every part of the Orthodox world), whether it has become known to them through immediate knowledge of the services and explanation by the priests, or whether it has penetrated the culture of the people in such a way as to have become, over hundreds of years, part of the oral tradition. The comparison of village imagery with liturgical imagery has a recent precedent; and the systematic use of the comparison which has been attempted here has proved a revealing method for answering the questions of this book, and it is central to its conclusions. (30)

The circumstances which led me to explore the Orthodox liturgy explain why the reflections which I began to make on my material, at a time when the postmodern phase in western thought was at its height, happen now to coincide with the new questions which have recently arisen about religion in the western world. The first draft of several chapters of the book was written using data from fieldwork only, and the book was well under way when, in 1981, I was disabled by a complex spinal problem. For some years after this, writing a book was more than I could handle, though detailed working out of various intricate and difficult questions that were beginning to emerge from my material became possible with the help of a hand held tape recorder and a typist, and I produced a number of articles over that period which were published in anthropological journals.

Then in the 1990s, a new light began to be cast on my material by experience of the Orthodox Church. I had been received into the Church in 1968, between my two periods of fieldwork, but in Greece my comprehension of the liturgy in the village churches had been seriously hampered by my ignorance of the high language of the Greek Church, though there was much in the action of the liturgy that made sense to me on a level deeper than words. In this context it is relevant to say that Church Greek was a difficulty also for the villagers who did not understand word for word what was being said and needed the Gospel of the day to be explained to them by the priest; but they nevertheless knew where they were as the liturgy progressed, and responded spontaneously to the layers of meaning they perceived in it at each stage, and were deeply focussed in the course of it.

In the village, therefore, my own grasp of the liturgy was largely through their intuitions, and with much less knowledge, and this continued for some time to be the case. It was not only in Greece that my ignorance of Church language hampered my understanding of the Orthodox texts, but in England also, for in those days Orthodox parishes, when they did not celebrate in Church Greek, celebrated almost exclusively in Church Slavonic. However, when my husband and I became involved with the start of a small Orthodox community in our early years in Scotland we began to celebrate in English, and from those beginnings a new world opened up, revealing the relationships lying between great areas of folk belief on the one hand, and the insights of the Orthodox Church on the other. Some of these relationships I had already sensed: asymmetric patterns of giving without reward had emerged as important during my first period of field work, and during my return visit in the early 1970s the dance pattern had begun to appear as a constant theme, later linking in with the same pattern in the liturgy; but the number and detail of the correspondences between the life of the people and the liturgy of the Church only began to dawn on me in the 1990s, though they have been developing ever since.

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