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Golden Oranges and Silver Ships: An Interpretive Approach to a Greek Holy Shrine

Victor Turner, a pioneer in the anthropological study of pilgrimages and shrines, has called our attention to the ways in which pilgrimage sites serve to integrate the local, regional and national levels of a society (Turner 1974).1 Such sites offer the anthropologist a means of moving beyond the narrow boundaries of local communities, which usually define the parameters of ethnographic fieldwork. At the same time, research at shrines also poses special problems of method and analysis, problems which are highlighted by current anthropological concerns with interpretation, "deconstruction," critical reflexivity, and the production of texts. This paper examines some of these problems in connection with fieldwork at a contemporary Greek shrine and suggests an interpretive framework as one means of understanding the significance of such a shrine in the context of the modern Greek state. Turner himself proposed a Durkheimian approach to the study of shrines and pilgrimage, "by regarding social facts or collective representations, like the ideas, values, and material expressions associated with pilgrimages, as being, in a sense, like things." For Turner "... a thing is whatever imposes itself on the observer. To treat phenomena as things is to treat them as data which are independent from the knowing subject" (Turner 1974: 183). The actors' interpretations and explanations constitute another set of "social facts," as do the anthropologist's own feelings and thoughts as a participant-observer (1974: 184). The existence of "data independent from a knowing subject," however, has been challenged by recent thought in both anthropology and other fields. One of the sources of such a challenge has been the development of new methods and theories within literary criticism (Culler 1982; Marcus and Fischer