The Dowry in Greece: Terminological Usage and Historical Reconstruction

Ethnographers advocate participant observation as the basis of all anthropological fieldwork, but often overlook the extent and effect of their own participation in discourse. Their questions, in particular, may be derived from tacit presuppositions which have no direct equivalent in the culture under investigation. This situation can lead to serious distortion, especially where the reconstruction of social history is concerned. To illustrate the problem, a question about the supposed institution of dowry is pursued through a series of ethnographer-informant interchanges in a Greek village. This detailed exploration points up the dangers inherent in adopting prescriptive (or legal) definitions of village terms, especially the risk of 'creating' institutional history. The recent introduction of dowry may, according to the linguistic evidence, actually be a very old perception of events in some rural Greek communities. Such a perspective, moreover, gives greater precision to the concept of cultural continuity.