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The Ideological Context of the Search for Continuities in Greek Culture

Very few people are able to write about modern Greek rural culture without referring in some way to ancient Greek culture. The ritual practices of contemporary rural Greece, for example, are often dealt with as if they simply provided a means to learn more about the religious life of ancient Greece. Modern May Day customs evoke "the ancient festival of Adonis;"1 a modern carnival rite is characterized as "an example of the dromena of ancient Dionysiac worship;"2 and the Anastenarides, a religious group in northern Greece, whose members enter a state of trance and dance when possessed by Saint Constantine, are referred to as "a Bacchic thiasos."3 In fact, it often seems that in such cases the real topic under consideration is classical antiquity and not the lives of the people of rural Greece. In this paper I will analyze the discourse with which a variety of scholars, classicists and folklorists, Greeks and foreigners, discuss the folklore, ritual, and religion of contemporary rural Greece. I will argue that this discourse, which is based on the outdated anthropological paradigm of cultural evolution with its attendant doctrines of cultural survivals and cultural continuities, identifies certain elements of modern Greek rural culture as fossilized relics of ancient Greek culture. In this way it reduces the contemporary culture of the people of rural Greece to an exotic anachronism. It creates a distance between them and the scholars studying them by assigning them to a different time, a time long past. I also suggest that in order to understand the power of this discourse, its attractiveness to scholars and the harmful effects it has on the people of rural Greece who are its