Genres of recollection: History, testimony and archive in contemporary Greece.

This dissertation examines the politics of historical representation in contemporary Greek society through an ethnography of archiving and documentation. Against the backdrop of the dramatic political and economic transformations of the 1990s, this study considers how people, working outside of official historical institutions, have been attempting to define and reform public understandings of the past. While it touches on major events of twentieth-century Greek history---labor migration, the 'Asia Minor Catastrophe,' World War II, civil war, urbanization---this study focuses not on these historical processes, but on the social and political circumstances, textual forms and archival arrangements in which they have been documented. This dissertation is comprised of four ethnographic case studies: (1) the writing of local history by amateur historians in the provincial city of Volos; (2) the collecting and archiving of the oral testimonies of Greek Orthodox refugees from Anatolia; (3) the reception and poetics of the controversial documentary fictions of the Greek novelist, Thanassis Valtinos; and (4) the writing and editing of the memoirs of a repatriated Greek migrant laborer. This study demonstrates how the emergence of particular 'plots' of modern Greek history is linked to shifts in the local and global political economy and to struggles over the boundaries of community, citizenship and class. This analysis also shows how narratives about the past are naturalized by the linguistic conventions of genre (local history, autobiography, biography, letters, fieldnotes, novels), 'institutions of memory' (from the family to literature) and historical epistemologies (from the positivist to the postmodern). Through the figures of testimony, archive and genre, I examine the ongoing social mediation of the relationship between personal experience and national history, state structures and diasporic networks, and oral and written discourses. By looking to the margins of Europe, to personal rather than state archives and to the acts of transcription and archiving practices of non-professional historians, this study illuminates the power relations between and within societies, as well as the intersection of people's lives with contested processes of public recollection.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyLanguageLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern historySlavic literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123769/2/3001024.pd