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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2008
My very first encounter with Sohos, a small market and agricultural town in the mountains northeast of Thessaloniki, a few days before the start of Lent in 1976, is recorded in a set of black-and-white photographs. Their harsh contrasts evoke the chill bleakness of late winter while the images tell a story of social marginality. To my eye, as a young female American university student exploring the central marketplace, men and youths were visible everywhere – in the streets, the shops and restaurants – yet women and girls were difficult to find. My camera captured them hovering at the margins: leaning out of windows or standing in doorways.
1. The gender associations of food and drink, and of sites of consumption and sociability are explored in Cowan, Jane K., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton, 1990), pp. 64–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Such notions are widespread in Greek society: see also Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra, ‘Exclusion and Unity, Retsina and Sweet Wine: Commensality and Gender in a Greek Agrotown’ in Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra (ed.), Alcohol, Gender and Culture (London, 1992).Google Scholar
2. On shepherd's bells as symbols of masculinity see Herzfeld, Michael, The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar and Stewart, Charles, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton 1991), p. 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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6. Cowan, ‘Japanese Ladies and Mexican Hats’.
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11. This term was by the mid 1980s very rarely used. It derives from the South Slav language, which locals call ‘Vulgarika’ (but non-Greek linguists call ‘Macedonian’) spoken by the majority of Sohoians before Hellenisation in the early part of the twentieth century. Representatives of the Greek state have been attempting to wipe out the use of the language for many years, with substantial (but not total) success.
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15. On the relationship between politics, nationalism and the thesis of survivalism, see Danforth, Loring, ‘The Ideological Context of the Search for Continuities in Greek Culture’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 2, no. 1Google Scholar and Herzfeld, Michael, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, (1982).Google Scholar
16. See Cowan, , Dance and the Body Politic, pp. 144–6 and passim.Google Scholar