Evia (Euboea).

Unless otherwise stated or referenced the book relies solely on fieldwork material gathered in the northern part of the island of Evia (Euboea)—with very few exceptions specifically from the village of Ambeli—during the periods mentioned earlier. The time and place of the data are thus highly particular, and I believe that the concreteness of the images provided by this particularity is vital to the invocation of the way of thought. Theoretical generalization is removed from place and moment by abstraction, and so inevitably stands at a certain distance from the people from whom the data were derived. Ethnographic description on its own, on the other hand, is limited to these particularities, and opens itself to being relegated to a moment of history which has no abiding significance. In this book I wanted to write somewhat differently, in such a way as to reveal the enduring linkages in patterns of thought found within an ethnographic cross-section taken from one particular moment. I have found myself seeking to depict a particular Orthodox Christian community in such a way as to reveal, through its particularities, its essential nature, and through this to throw light on the essential nature of similar communities. This nature is defined principally by the people’s way of seeing the world and responding to it both in work and in symbol—in liturgy—for both overlap in the vision of the sacred in this kind of community: the work of the liturgy and the liturgy of work are parallel activities.

The attempt to convey both the particular and the prototype simultaneously is helped by comparing village talk with liturgical texts, as I have done throughout. But I also made a stylistic decision that I would deal in this introduction with topics otherwise omitted, and would eliminate from the main text the kinds of detail which would tend to localize and parochialize the evidence. Hence I have not mentioned myself as observer, and, because my informants are speaking—and very often see themselves as speaking—less as individuals than as people passing on an ancient tradition, I do not cite them individually, even though their individuality emerges with every utterance. Again, in order to reduce distraction from the integrity of the world view described, I have reduced references to comparative material to a minimum, and have omitted for the most part ethnographic variants in other parts of Greece. Most significantly, I have written in the present tense. The reason for this lies in the widespread and long-lasting nature of the thought patterns described, and in the fact that where these patterns correspond to patterns in the Orthodox liturgy, they remain part of a contemporary world view which is retained at the heart of the Orthodox faith, even while many of the agricultural and cosmological implications of that world view may have been reinterpreted.

A further stylistic problem for some may also be my use of ‘man’ to refer to humankind. The problem does not arise in Greek or the Latin-based languages: in Greek a man and a woman are both ánthropos; in Latin, homo. Thus this problem occurs particularly in languages with Teutonic roots. However, the modern alternatives either force English writers into the clumsy s/he, or abstractions such as ‘humankind’, and my purpose in writing in the way I have— using the particular to stand for the general—is better served by the older usage in which ‘man’ was acknowledged to have two senses, one without gender and corresponding to the Greek ánthropos, and the other corresponding to the Greek ándras, a person of the male sex.

THE ONLY EXCEPTIONS I have made in the overall style of writing I have chosen are in the case of the moon landings, whose date is relevant because they were a critical catalyst in exposing the village cosmology, and in the case of local saints where local affections expressed in their veneration are a deep principle of the culture. Because such saints are more likely to be perceived in the West as hagiographic stereotypes rather than as real individuals, I have given concrete historic particulars of some of the holy figures of northern Evia as examples of local saints, ubiquitous in the Orthodox world, to whom the people turn, and whom they regard as peculiarly their own. This apart, though, the emphasis is on the generality and durability of the particular ideas and practices I describe in Ambeli.

To recognize the enduring quality of much that I describe is not, however, to ignore the fact that change has always been a part of village life, and indeed so many changes have happened since I was in Ambeli in the 1960s and 1970s that much of the way of life recounted here can no longer be found. Earlier changes begin with the village itself, which had been built around 1800 by families who escaped there from a lower village which had been devastated by the Turks. Before this some of the big families were said to have come in a boat from the north, perhaps Pelion. These upheavals, however, dramatic though they were, did not necessitate a deep change of values but simply a reinterpretation of ancient themes in the new situation. Similarly, most of the twentieth-century wars and economic shifts which I chronicled in my first book, although affecting farming strategies and bringing prosperity or poverty to the people, did not alter the deeper ideas and values which I describe here; and even when young men and women began emigrating permanently from the village during the 1960s, threatening its demographic viability in the longer term, those who had by then married and settled in the village continued to retain the traditional mentality which made sense of their way of life. Before I left the village in 1972 though, a different kind of change had begun to escalate. This process also I touched on in my former book, yet the significant element was not the advent of change per se, but of a kind of change which began to relegate the people’s sense of who they were from a centre in themselves and in their own village to a centre in an outside world. This outside world, which was more and more making the villagers’ choices for them, was one which defined worth and centrality in completely new terms, and found the villagers wanting—saw them, with a supreme irony, as ‘far from God’.

A sign of this change which is relevant to the present book was that the villagers had become sensitive to the devaluing of their traditional cosmology by the literate outside world, and thus they were increasingly likely to be reticent about earlier beliefs and to refer to them as ‘lies’. This devaluing, of which significant agents were the young children with the crass literalism of their newly-acquired school knowledge, was already apt to lead, in conversations with older people about the cosmos, to such defensive pronouncements as, ‘the world is round like an orange’. The sense of embarrassment, almost of shame, about such topics, with which the older people began to be afflicted around the beginning of the 1970s, made details about the earlier cosmology surprisingly difficult to obtain. However, the moon landings from 1969 to 1972 created such a furore in the cafés among men both young and old, and such a stir in the houses, and there was so general a rejection of the American claims, that the subject became the issue of the time and for a period ‘the old mind’ became more accessible.

A second sign of the new unease was that the 1970s saw the beginning of the departure from the village of some of the settled married householders. In the autumn of 1971 a road was built, and with it came electricity, transport, machines. The chance to mechanize farming, which had already come to other mountain villages and was making Ambeli feel left out, was now available, and 1973 was the last year in which the use of animals for the threshing—insisted on by the old grandmother of one of the last conservative families as the right way to do things—was carried out. The road also brought the possibility of commuting to salaried work in the plains and of bringing a certain prosperity and a greater ease to village life. Yet in spite of these new possibilities of local work, the flight of working householders steadily gathered pace after I left, and in the course of the last thirty years has virtually eliminated the working basis of village life, leaving only a few ageing couples still gaining their livelihood from the village. Now, however, a fresh impetus is bringing a different sort of life to Ambeli: one or two newcomers from the towns have bought and renovated a village house as a weekend cottage, one new couple has arrived and settled permanently, old people return from their children’s homes elsewhere to spend the summer at ‘their own fire-side’, and the village has an appearance of prosperity with many of the houses being re-roofed and modernized by the children themselves, some of whom are returning to their once-deserted houses to use them as holiday homes.

This study thus took place at the end of a long period of stability in the patterns of thought I describe in this book, and on the verge of a great change—one occurring at that time throughout Greece. (39) It depicts the world shared by the married householders of the village, and still sustained there even as young single people were leaving. Most of the customs and beliefs discussed with these settled couples, as also with some of the young, were current during my residence in the village. Many I witnessed personally, though there are some which were described to me which had already lapsed, and to avoid misrepresentation I have identified these in an Appendix. But after I left, the departure of most of these couples was to make the village unsustainable as a centre of communal work, and thus starved of the people who in each generation could validate and create their communal thought patterns afresh in carrying out that work. Undoubtedly the memories they took with them have influenced their way of dealing with the Greek and foreign cities to which they went, but at the time when they began to go many younger people felt they had to catch up with a world that was leaving them behind, and many older people felt unequal to sustaining the culture I have described in this book, against the onslaught of a world constructed by global media, and with recourse only to cultural tools which they had not yet learned how to handle. How far they or their children have in their subsequent lives been able, using new skills in those tools, to adapt or recreate elements of the culture they grew up in, whether in whole or in part, is a story I have to leave to them or to others; but if this account gives them back any part of it, I will feel that I have not written in vain.

As for the generality of the thought patterns I describe, my avoidance, for the most part, of explicit reference to other evidence from Greek ethnography, which I have felt necessary for readability, creates a risk that superficial particularities will be taken as general where they are not. Thus it must be said that variety is of the essence in this culture: there are minor differences in the customs even between neighbouring villages, and people will firmly identify with their own way of doing things as opposed to the way that others do them—‘We take exception to that here.’ Differences also multiply with distance. For instance, the village of Ambeli is a Greek mountain village with inheritance of land through the male line and a pattern of marriage in which women move to live with their husbands, and this has given rise to a particular configuration of kinship and inheritance practices. However, in many of the Aegean islands the female line becomes more significant, and here these shifting elements will be arranged in a different pattern consistent with their reality. (40) But it is arguable that both societies will reveal, even though with different materials, the same underlying patterns constructed in accordance with the unchanging elements of their belief. Both will be recognizable as taking part in the same Orthodox tradition. Recently, I have tried to give an example of how such analysis can be supported by comparing the symbolism of everyday life in Ambeli with that of the Sarakatsan shepherds of northern Epirus, where in spite of sharp differences in communal imagery, a continuity can be shown with the same source texts of the Orthodox liturgy. (41)