| Testimony of: | money |
| Source | Jane K. Cowan, Dance and Body Politic in Northern Greece, Oxford 1990, s. 101-106 |
| Original text | To an unmarried celebrant, the recipient will say, "To yours [your own marriage; sta dhika su]." He or she then takes a drink, and hands the bottle back to the celebrant. An onlooker may be offered many bottles in succession. The kerasma [...] is a conventionalized exchange within many contexts of Greek sociability that establishes the relationship between host and guest. […] The individual who receives is always contextually inferior, whether that person is a guest in someone's house or is the man who enters a coffeehouse and is treated by an acquaintance already "sitting" there [...]. Despite this clear implication, the kerasma is conventionally described by Sohoians as a gesture of largesse, of un-motivated generosity. It is, moreover, considered insulting to refuse the kerasma. Refusal is seen as a demonstration of arrogance, a refusal to become beholden to the giver and thus a refusal to engage in what should be reciprocal relations of exchange over time. In the patinadha, though the motivation for the kerasma is said to arise from the "joy" (hara) of the groom's family at the upcoming wedding, the element of raucous coercion in the offer of ouzo is striking. When a vehicle drives down the road toward the celebrants, for instance, they block its way. Several youths from the procession approach the driver, and usually any passengers, as well, and thrust a bottle of ouzo through the window. Until the driver toasts (sometimes simply by wordlessly raising the bottle in front of him) and then drinks, the vehicle is not allowed to pass. At later stages of the pro-cession, particularly on Sunday, as the celebrants themselves become progressively more drunk, the kerasma becomes increasingly physical and brusque. The driver may have the bottle pushed into his mouth and upturned, so that he splutters and chokes as ouzo runs down onto his shirt. Even here, the onlooker is obliged to indulge the desire of the celebrant, and these assaults are endured with good humor most of the time. A third mode in which the groom's party imperiously displays its collective masculinity inheres in its interaction with the daulia. While the group processes, offering the kerasma, the daulia strike up an almost nonstop stream of tunes, mixing popular songs gleaned from the radio with a few local songs. It is the responsibility of the primo to keep the songs continuously flowing. Celebrants often sing along with the tune initiated by the zurna. A celebrant can also "request" [...] a song he particularly likes. Requests are made most frequently in two contexts: during the "circle" dances that occur at cross-roads and in the road below the central square22 and during the later stages of the patinadha. The encounter between the celebrant and the daulia over a song, and the dance that goes with it, embodies relations of domination in a graphic way. In other dance contexts, this process is called parangelia, "ordering" a song. "Ordering" is a peculiarly apt translation. Parangelia in a night-club, for instance, involves a negotiation between a male dancer and the musicians, which entails both an "order" for a particular song that he (or his table) alone will have the privilege to dance to, and a place in the "order" (sira) of these requests. Celebrants in the patinadha only occasionally refer to their song "requests" as parangelia (though musi-cians do call them this), perhaps because the sense of competition within the group cannot be explicitly acknowledged (a subject to which I will return below). The encounter is structurally the same, however. Once the tune appears to be finishing, the male celebrant approaches the primo, shouting into his ear and telling him to strike up a particular song. When compared with the often awkward and reticent conditionality of English, the Greek grammatical imperative is starkly direct, but this form is appropriate in all except the most formal of situations. Ordering a song with such directness is not in itself considered rude or presumptuous. What marks the encounter between celebrant and the daulia as one of domination are several other features. First, the process of ordering is shaped by the attitudes that Sohoians hold toward the daulia. In referring to the musicians as daulia, "the drums," or orghana, "the instruments"—a "disembodied" usage—Sohoians emphasize their interest in the sounds they make. They are viewing the musicians "instrumentally." Indeed, I rarely heard towns-people refer to these men as "musicians" (musiki) or even use the less respectful title of "instrument players" (organopektes). It is true that older people, particularly those most familiar with the traditional rep-ertoire of Turkish songs, appreciate the differences in skill among these musicians, and may be on friendly terms with a few of them. Yet few Sohoians know the names of more than one or two of the perhaps fifteen musicians (about five troupes of fairly stable membership) who play, year after year, for nearly all of the community's weddings, its Carnival, and its summer feast days. Though often labeled "circle" dances (kikliki hori), these in fact comprise a line of dancers who circle (in most cases) in a counterclockwise direction, typically around musicians standing in the center. All Sohoian "circle dances" are open circles, with the first and last positions clearly distinguished. The Sohoians' tendency to ignore the humanity of the musicians is also linked to the fact that the musicians are Gypsies. Some people call them Yufti (a coarser and more intimate form of the word Yifti). The derisive overtones of this term were underlined by a young man who, after using the word Yufti in his own commentary, advised me (as a relative outsider, and potentially unaware of such nuances) that I should never say this to their faces, that it would make them angry. Most of the musicians who play in Sohos come from two farming villages, Anthi and Flambouro, about an hour's drive by car. These settled Macedonian Gypsies have since Ottoman times provided music for Sohoian celebrations: they constitute a hereditary group of semi-professional musicians. Because of the traditional contempt of Greeks for Gypsies, these musicians do not always embrace this label. They insisted to me that they were "indigenous" (dopii). Those who acknowledged the designation Yifti gave their own etymology of the word. They saw it as a corruption of Eyiptii, or "Egyptians—See? Our skin is black, like the Egyptians," they remarked—who had been brought to Macedonia by Alexander the Great. Whatever their real origins, they differentiate themselves fiercely from the itinerant, landless, and often Moslem Tsingani, whom they despise. Sohoians also make this distinction. They point out that "their" Gypsies are Christians, not "Turks" (that is, Muslims), and have houses, and that their sons serve in the army. They see "their" Gypsies as "good" Gypsies. Nonetheless, though interdependent and even intimate (in a typically Ottoman sense), the relation between the townspeople and Gypsies is clearly hierarchical. When a youth orders a song during the circle dances, he takes the position at the head of the line of dancers. In Sohoian dance-events generally (and also elsewhere in Greece), this position is considered the most important. The person occupying it is called "the first," "[the one in] front," and occasionally, "the standard-bearer" (bayraktar). The person (usually male) who orders the song has the privilege of dancing first (or of choosing a substitute, for example, a female relative or his '' Two troupes that I knew came from Iraklia (previously called Djumaia), an industrial town near the Bulgarian border. These men did not farm but instead made their living almost entirely by playing music for celebrations throughout central Macedonia. In many areas of Greece, especially the mainland, and throughout the Balkans, Gypsies have dominated the ranks of musicians. Family troupes (almost exclusively male) are common, and particular families have established powerful reputations over generations as unusually gifted musicians within a region [...]. At the time of my fieldwork, no particular troupe had achieved special preeminence among Sohoians, though some pointed out to me who they thought was the "best" zurnadzis. Is Bayrak, a Turkish word meaning "flag" or "standard," alludes to the white kerchief (mandili) used by the lead dancer during the stately sighanos. […] The first dancer is thus set apart from the other dancers; for the watching public, this dancer is the object of vision and of commentary. "Everybody watches the first one," people say, and as I explore here, the experience of being watched can give rise to complex and ambivalent emotions [...]. For most first dancers, being set apart is an ephemeral condition, lasting only until he or she pulls up a new first dancer. But some dancers are set apart in a more enduring sense, by their exceptional skill, confidence, and imagination: a good dancer or "master" [...] is one who "somehow sets himself/herself apart" (kapos ksehorizi) (see figure The male youth who has ordered the song takes the position as first dancer, and dances for as long as he likes.26 The daulia ensemble stands in the center of the circle; usually, the daultzis walks along with the lead dancer, facing him and beating the rhythm in a sort of incitement to more enthusiastic improvisations. During this dance, or just after, the first dancer throws a bill or two onto the ground—Too and 500 drachma bills were most common—which one of the troupe eventually stoops down to pick up. This practice is not considered payment. It is called "gifting money" (dhorizume lefta). The individual gifts of money are called "[things of] chance or luck" (ta tihera) [...]. "Gifting" is crucial to understanding what dancing means in this context, and how it is structured by and reproduces the hierarchical relations between Sohoians and the Gypsy musicians. […] "Gifting" occurs elsewhere in the wedding celebrations, for example, when the bride gives small gifts to her close relatives on Sunday just before she leaves the house for the church, a custom referred to by Kiki. She gives a hand-towel to her mother and socks to her father and close uncles, laying the items on the right shoulder of the recip-ient and kissing his or her hand; each gifts her by slipping a coin or a bill in her hand [...]. Similarly, when a young man leaves for the army, he bids farewell to his father and his father's colleagues and male relatives in the market, and they gift him. It would appear that these involve the same relation of hierarchy between giver and recipient. They involve hidden, almost secret gestures (for example, placing the coin in the bride's hand), however; they do not involve the extravagant display that one sees in the patinadha. [...] "Only the first dancer counts," Sohoians say. One friend leads another in a kalamatianos during an evening celebration for the feast day of the Twelve Apostles, Sohos's major religious festival ding, they do not normally promise them any money at all, except for traveling expenses. The musicians accept this because they know they can usually make between 40, 000 and 60,000 drachmas in a wed-ding from tihera. The musicians I spoke to consider Sohoians to be particularly extravagant in their celebratory habits and thus they rarely insist on an explicit financial agreement (simfonia) with them, though I found that sometimes a family would promise to pay a minor sum—no more than 10,000 drachmas, or about eighty dollars, for three men working two full days, usually in cold, inclement weather. This tends to be offered in situations where the daulia have reason to believe they will not be able to earn an adequate amount from "gifts." Eleftheria [...], for example, a young Sohoian woman who had immigrated to Thessaloniki as a child and wanted to have a "Sohoian" wedding with daulia at the Saturday evening celebration and before setting off for the church ceremony in Thessaloniki, guaranteed this sum they often do when performing in other places. For the musicians, however, the price of this insecure if potentially profitable arrangement is, as they admit, acceptance of the indignities of a plainly sub-ordinate position. Distinguishing these "chance gifts" from "payments," the Sohoians do not "pay" the musicians for their labor in making music. The relationship between making music and its remuneration is much more contingent. Many Sohoians insist that they are not obliged to give a gift and that they will not give one unless they like the way the daulia play. And even the money "thrown out" is not seen primarily as a gift in appreciation of a satisfying performance by the daulia. Rather, it is thought to be an expression of the dancer's kefi, a term difficult to translate but perhaps best rendered as "high" or "high spirits."3° What the daulia receive depends entirely on how successfully they are able to inspire the dancer's kefi. As will be discussed more extensively below, the notion of kefi has both private and public dimensions. Kefi is per-formed as well as felt, and gifting is one means of performing it in the highly public context of the patinadha. It is a display of the expansiveness of not only the dancer's mood but his wallet. Moreover, it is not just the extent of his wealth being displayed but the extent of his willingness to part with it [...]. Both in the circle dances and in the requests that occur as the patinadha moves along the road, male celebrants "throw out" money in a very dramatic way. One method is to hurl a slightly crumpled bill onto the ground, where it is left for a while to be observed by the crowd. Another method is to spit on the bill (often a higher-denomination bill, perhaps 500 or 1,000 drachmas) and stick it on the forehead of the primo zurna or place it behind his ear. Dancers also lay bills across the zurna bell or twist bills into cones and stick them into the holes on the bottom of the zurna, a gesture that does not affect the musical notes being produced. Dancers may, finally, tuck bills into the ropes which bind the drumhead to its frame. Musicians cooperate in this display by leaving these bills where they are stuck for a minute or so, and then they remove them and put them in a coat pocket so that other bills will be proffered. One zurna player often took the bills he received during a dance and folded them around his fingers, so that they stood upright as he played. But however clever the musicians' flourishes, it is the 30 Kefi derives from the Turkish keyif or keyfi, whose range of dictionary meanings includes "health; bodily and mental condition; merriment, fun, good spirits; pleasure, amusement; inclination, whim, fancy; slight intoxication" [...]. 3 The different denominations of Greek paper money are distinguished by size and color, so it is possible to identify them from a distance. I saw the 5000-drachma bill, which is a dark blue, used in gifting only a few times, and never in the context of a wedding. […] As the patinadha moves beyond the marketplace and onto the road leading to the bride's house, it remains a public spectacle, yet its intra-group dynamics begin to intensify. The physical interaction among the young men is rougher and rowdier, yet at the same time individuals are becoming increasingly self-absorbed. Sohoians recognize that this is a consequence of the quantities of ouzo the youths are drinking, and so they say "they are becoming drunk" (methane) or "they are drunken men" (ine methismeni). The altered state that they are striving to achieve 32 Sohoians acknowledge that grandiose gestures of gifting may at times be cynical and unrelated to kefi (therefore "inauthentic," pseftiko). This is indicated in the assertion I heard several times that some youths throw down large-denomination bills, then secretly ask the musicians to give the money back (something I myself never observed). Kefi is a centrally important cultural construct in Sohos, as in many other Greek communities. Throughout Greece it is a term particularly, though not exclusively, associated with celebratory occasions, where feasting, drinking, dancing and music making occur. In Sohoian celebrations alcoholic "spirits" are complexly linked to the psychological "spirits" of kefi. Despite the importance of convivial drinking in the creation of kefi among men, kefi is not really an alcohol-centered notion. Indeed, though a specific kind of kefi, tsakir-kefi, is defined as a "slight inebriation" and is seen by some as the first stage of kefi, alcohol is not absolutely required for kefi to be created. Kefi is a much broader notion. More than just a label for a kind of high spirits, kefi has philosophical dimensions, particularly concerning the relation between self and collectivity. Some who have written about kefi have recognized this. Most have stressed kefi as an ideal state in which individual and collective interests are happily congruent (but see Auerbach 1984:144-74) . Thus, Caraveli emphasizes kefi as a "heightened form of experience," whose correct expression (according to the Karpathiot Olymbites) nonetheless involves disciplined adherence to "precise and well-articulated rules and patterns"; these enable, rather than inhibit, a deeply satisfying emotional engrossment (1985:263-64). Similarly, in his examination of notions of male personhood and emotion in the fiction of twentieth-century Eastern Aegean writers. […] Although the sense of kefi as an ideal state of communal sociability is extremely important in Sohoian contexts, too, kefi is a more ambig-uous notion than this implies, and one that has gendered nuances. For Sohoian men, kefi is a mode of both action and feeling in which male individuals explore tensions and boundaries of their social world as men. These tensions and boundaries concern particularly the conflict between individual will and obligations to the collective. This conflict is one that emerges |
| Time/occasion of occurence | wedding |
| Region of occurence | Sohos, N. Greece |
| Function | payment, |
| Dance name | various |
| Symbol in Kinetography score |
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