antonis’ wedding: the moment, the music and rites … · and in cypriot culture ... as i...

Ethnomusicology Ireland 5 (2017) Poupazis 117

Antonis’ Wedding: The Moment, The Music and Rites Between Tradition and Modernity in Cyprus Michalis Poupazis Abstract This article takes a journey from the perceived “traditional” of the 1930s to contemporary modernity in Cyprus, seeking to answer how Greek-speaking Cypriots structure their place in the modern world in relation to cultural memory, and their apprehension of what is traditional. Exploring this new viewpoint—with the latest comprehensive study on Cypriot weddings taking place in late-twentieth century (Argyrou, 1996),—the paradigmatic example of Antonis’ marriage ceremony forms a particularly telling environment for the music-led collective enactment of selective ties to ‘tradition’ and the wider memorializing of family and community. In a departure from 1930s tradition (and most Cypriots perceive the 1930’s Paphos-area ceremony to be the acme of tradition) folk music is now reliably to be found only during the bride’s and groom’s adornment rituals, which take place before the crowning ceremony at church. The focus here is on the liminality of a musically-infused memory site, Antonis’ groom adornment ritual in Larnaca, and the micro-focus is on a single song and moment of the paneri (skep) rite. This article explains how Greek-speaking Cypriots draw on cultural resources to summon a remembered or imagined tradition and past while structuring and placing themselves in the twenty-first century. It is a very telling moment, helping to understand how Cypriots comprehend, portray and indulge themselves as contemporary and “oriental” entities locally, in Europe, and internationally. Keywords: Tradition; Memory; Liminality; Ritual; Music; Wedding; Cyprus.

I. Moments: Memory, Liminality and Modernity

It was early September 2011 when my brother, Antonis, called from Larnaca Cyprus saying, “Guess what…? I’m getting married!!!” The sentences were disjoined by a small pause, a silent languishing rite, building his voiced and expressed enthusiasm. Getting married was (not surprisingly!) an important thing for Antonis, and in Cypriot culture (for both Turkish- and Greek-speakers) it is, as in many other cultures, perhaps the most important event in a person’s life. This modern Cypriot expression stems from the 1930’s weddings’ status as “the social events of the village calendar” (Loizos 1981: 27), attended by “customary” and “extravagant” festivities (Surridge 1930: 25). In a way, this paper started taking shape right then, though many observations throughout the years have been incorporated, particularly from the wedding on 10 May 2013, almost two years after that phone call. It was a moment both in my brother’s and my own life, and its importance entailed a rich plurality of social and cultural discourse, enough to confirm my suspicions that several events taking place during wedding days in Cyprus can explain observed contemporary human behaviour and can also be applicable for other demographics.

Apart from Vassos Argyrou’s (1996) work, looking on the Cypriot (Greek-speakers’) wedding as symbolic meaning, there is no literature looking into twenty-first-century discourses for wedding rituals—an event (weddings) that hold and play a pivotal role in contemporary Cypriot society diachronically. This article not only sheds light on the latter while updating twentieth-century examinations like Argyrou’s, but it also adds the metanarrative mode of musical analysis constituting this way a unique academic assessment and contribution. It further forwards an update on ritual studies (a huge field) to ethnomusicology. A notable example is Jane C. Sugarman’s (1997)


work at Prespa and Albanian weddings’ performance of Engendering song[s]. Sugarman, similarly to this article, also analyses human organisation through wedding rituals, yet does not engage with ritual theories to the same extent. An ethnomusicologist who explored exhaustively ritual theories in juxtaposition with (mostly Korean) musical tropes, is Keith Howard. However, and in comparison to his works, the way this article builds (methodologically) on ritual analysis is a unique amalgamation—as I later explain through the ritual profile utilised in my work in Cyprus.

Peripheral (geographically) to Cyprus examples—pointing towards the super-culture of Greek-speaking Cypriots—also engage with but touch lightly on ritual theory. Arguably, the most pertinent example is Kevin Dawe’s (1996) work on wedding music in Crete. This article sees eye to eye when Dawe writes the “weddings are organised around distinct gender ideologies and practices, and the musician makes a large contribution to the shaping of these events” (98). Yet, my work does not limit to gender but it rather expands on human organisation at large. What Dawe does is to examine Cretan wedding music (which to clarify is rather different to Cypriot wedding music) in juxtaposition to the “lyra [líra]… a three-stringed, upright, bowed lute” (94) and masculine performance (for the latter he is largely referencing Michael Herzfeld's [1985] Poetics of manhood). What this article does is to examine Cypriot wedding music on the webs of many significances and meanings (from tradition to modernity, cultural/social memory, gender, sense of family and community, etc), all in juxtaposition to a specific rite/ritual (the paneri) and through the analytical lynchpin of classic ritual theories. With all the above being said, this article comprises a unique and new viewpoint which advances ethnomusicological ritual studies.

So far, I have stressed the concept of moments, and this article is itself one such moment, telling something of how people structure themselves within their own locales as contemporary entities in juxtaposition with past traditions and the translocal and transnational realities of modernity. The creation of experience in the moment, as I understand it here, involves settings, habits, desires, memories, feelings, and actions combining to add new layers to human experience or imagination. In relation to a music-infused event, these build incrementally to answer this article’s enquiry: how do Cypriots structure their place in the modern world through such moment-experiences? I am passively including from these moments the habitus (as commonly understood within the humanities since Bourdieu, 1977; see the next section, which explains this further) as a major constituent, determining which of the above qualities shape every different moment separately.

Within such moments, time and space are interlinked by the individual’s habitus with various patterns and formulations of semiotics and notions, but mostly memory. Why mostly memory? And why do we speak so much of it? Pierre Nora (1989: 7) says this is “because there is so little of it left”. Nora’s (1984-92) body of works on les lieux de mémoire offer empiricisms for tracing how tradition (history) moves through time and space. Paul Ricoeur’s (1983) work is also telling in regard to the relationship of history/narrative, time and space. My ethnographic work in twenty-first century Larnaca, Cyprus is deployed “Between Memory and History” (as Nora titled his 1989 article). Social and musical phenomena reveal the crystallisation of what is perceived as tradition (by Nora) and authentic (by local informants), and the neo-modern approach to these elements. All these transpire between negotiations, both internal and communal, through rites of passage and rituals that remain constant from past to present. Individualism and private choice, as well as native Cypriots’ willingness to engage in perceived “traditional” and “authentic” movements (perhaps ephemeral phenomena), emerge as vital tools for the maintenance of socio-cultural memory in Cyprus, thus creating liminality in between the transactions of one memory site and the next.


By taking a rite-journey from the perceived ‘traditional’ of the 1930s to contemporary modernity in Cyprus, this article offers a case study of how Cypriots structure their place in the modern world. In Antonis’ marital ceremony, we see a particularly telling music-led collective enactment of selective ties to “tradition” and the wider memorializing of family and community. In contrast to the 1930s Cyprus, folk music is now reliably to be found only during the wedding adornment rituals; and as a male, I could actually participate in the groom’s adornment (in fact I underwent one myself years later), hence the particular focus of this work. This article places itself within the liminality of a musically-infused memory site, Antonis’ groom adornment (Greek: το στόλισμα—to stolisma) ritual in Larnaca, and its micro-focus is on a single song and rite, the paneri (skep). By illustrating how natives draw on cultural resources to summon a remembered or imagined past tradition while structuring and placing themselves in the twenty-first century, this work illustrates a moment. It contributes to understanding how Cypriots comprehend, portray and indulge themselves as contemporary and “oriental”, firstly locally, secondly in Europe, and then, thirdly, internationally; creating a contingency of translocal, and transnational identity layers in the construction of self in modern Cypriot life.

Arnold van Gennep’s (1909) foundational work Les rites de passage (The Rites of Passage) takes a pivotal role here, not only because of its devising of liminaire (liminality)—which is an ingredient of the moments I discuss—but also due to its tripartite rite of passage schema. Both concepts possess a usefully ambiguous quality for explaining contemporary anthropological and ethnomusicological observations, and seem to “tell the story” as it is. Liminality, for van Gennep, was merely a stage in the flow of his work; however, for Victor Turner six decades later, it became a whole body of work (1967: 93-111; 1969: 94-130; 1977: 36-52). Turner talks about liminality firstly in 1967 in The Forest of Symbols (93-111), secondly in a chapter he published in Secular Ritual (1977: 36-52), and thirdly in The Ritual Process (1969: 94-130), where he finds it in an ambiguous sum of time and space around ritual (modern or sacred) and those “undergoing it—call[ing] them ‘liminaries’—betwixt-and-between established states” (1997: 37). The “states” to which Turner refers are linked to liminality's derivation from the Latin for ‘threshold,’ and the term describes the time and space when one is on the doorstep but not quite in or out yet.

In talking about modernity in Cyprus, one has to understand that severe and paradoxical cases of xenophobia and xenophilia are reflected in elements incorporated in modern rituals and life on the island, especially since it has been exposed to the European mainstream after a long period in which the only external influence on Greek-speaking Cypriots originated in or was mediated through Greece. The eroticising of Greece (a super-culture for Greek-speaking Cypriots), the archaising of the East and the Mediterranean, and the exoticising of the West (for example through Hollywood) are also strong constituents of Cypriot contemporaneity, mostly for younger natives. However, the anathematising of Western influences is still sustained in much native life (mostly promoted by elders, but also practised by younger natives), rejecting whatever is not Greek or Cypriot. That would also be the case for national romantics, or, purists, and pronounced nationalists. Similar and contemporary observations have found structure within academic frames dealing with urban and transnational challenges, and these parallel my observations on Cypriots within the modern urban of Larnaca. They include contemporary natives understanding of tradition—a ‘crystallisation’ of it—sometimes taking the form of fiction and, to some extent, imagination; you need to be inventive in order to be traditional nowadays. This crystallisation adds fragments to Cypriot xenophilia, and this xenophilia comes to agree with an “imagined cosmopolitanism” as understood by Ioannis Tsioulakis (2011: 176-179) for the Greek example, mediating Cornelius Castoriadis’ (2000: 21) understanding of human imagination as a “new form [that]


utilises elements that already exist”, and Thomas Turino’s (2003:63) “cosmopolitan subjectivities” as a “crucial site of the local–trans-local dialectics”. Furthermore, Martin Stokes’ (2007: 6) sees “cosmopolitanism” as an ethnomusicological empiricism that “restores human agencies and creativities to the scene of analysis, and allows us to think of [the] music [event] as a process in the making of ‘worlds’”. It is exactly this imagined cosmopolitanism (as a term) that this article will be using to explain both the anthropological and musical phenomena challenged by its enquiries.

II. Antonis, Reflexivity, Modern Cypriot Weddings, and the Ritual Profile

Antonis (the liminary) is my brother, a thirty-year-old male living in Larnaca Cyprus (see Figure 1). He has closely followed the common social, educational and career pathways that men at his age usually have, conforming to Cyprus’ social norms and structures. He finished school, did military service for two years, studied in higher education outside Cyprus, and then repatriated to work, marry and build his life. This is the modern perception of the structured way to live your life in twenty-first century Cyprus (for the modern/young Greek-speaking Cypriot), and his is a representative case for this article’s enquiries explaining and challenging socio-cultural theories.

Reflexivity around the inevitable facts of life has been (and still is) a normalised process for me, being a Greek-speaking Cypriot myself, undertaking research on my extended family, and navigating the complexities that these two components entail. As Antonis is my brother, and being myself a native researcher here, questions of ethnographic reflexivity have mapped my immersed interaction and observations of the rite in question, from the perspective of an outsider who also has an insider’s organic knowledge. Defying the demonization of ethnocentrism, romanticism, and relativism as forbidden ethnographic fruits, I embrace these emotions and notions as ethnographic tools, making a rather personal moment in my life—my brother’s wedding—also an academic case study.

Figure 1 – Antonis with his wife bride, Chara, on their wedding day. Photo: Author.

When these -isms threatened to turn into crises, my professional self engaged

with ethnographic practices evaluated and validated via reflexive self-critique (Clifford-Marcus, 1986), utilising Pillow’s (2003: 175) four themes of “reflexivity as recognition of self”, “reflexivity as recognition of other”, “reflexivity as truth”, and “reflexivity as transcendence.” Prior reflection on participants’ likely ethnocentricity conditioned my approach methods, enabling me to recognise and isolate similar


tendencies in myself, and there were some ethnographic moments when I had to separate my research persona from my own family in the field. As a partially native researcher, I took an ambiguous stand as a “chameleon” (Mascarenhas-Keyes 1987:182), a chimaera of native and researcher, while aiming to avoid the false complaisance criticised by Geertz (1974: 27) under the term “myth of chameleon” in his critique of Malinowski’s (1967) A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.1

Modern Cypriot weddings take place on Friday (occasionally), Saturday or Sunday, unlike the ‘traditional’ ones of the 1930s that always took place on a Sunday. On the chosen day the groom and bride have to spend the night before in their parent’s houses, where the next morning preparations for the adornments take place. The adornment rituals begin an hour or two before the couple goes to church for the ceremony, where they meet in Western fashion (the groom awaits the bride with a flower bouquet, while the bride’s father walks his daughter towards him). What follows is a total departure from tradition, as the celebrations are very much what one would observe in any Western wedding party; these are, as Argyrou (1996: 11) puts it, “champagne” ceremonies. However, even if they depart from ‘tradition’, modern weddings in the island are commonly observed as initiation-rites (Argyrou 1996: 62), as well as a format that funnels family, age and social groups into their rites of distinction and separation (Poupazis 2013: 74).

The Ritual Profile

Returning to van Gennep, his concept of rites de passage illustrates three constituents (rites) by which an individual departs from one social habitus and enters another. This ‘tripartite schema’ consists of the three stages of separation, transition and integration—preliminary, liminaire (liminality, a stage explained above), and postliminaire (post-liminality)—corresponding in sequence to before, during and after. This schema has been the favourite contemporary empirical toy of ritual-related studies, mostly for its flexibility, and the schema’s suppleness deciphers a narrative which is central to this article, unfolding an individual’s placement within a ritual’s luminosity.

After van Gennep’s innovating landmark in ritual studies, several other prominent researchers evolved his fundamental work and introduce a whole new series of multi-layered rite descriptions, such as ‘rite of distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1977) and ‘rite of initiation’ (Belmont, 1982), which also symbolise transition of all participants from one social stratum to the next. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) devoted a big part of his work to examining the rites of such distinctions as social status, and other social binaries such as power and genre. In la distinction (1979:101), he takes a step further in providing cognitions to answer distinctions; he denotes the interrelationship of habitus (customs, habits, etc.) with capital and field thus: “[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice”, and uses habitus to underpin “generative structuralism” (1977:22-30). (This is, of course, a very minimal explanation of Bourdieu’s ideas.) I engage here with rites of initiation to describe Nicole Belmont’s (1982) extensive work on rituals, and to describe societies like Cyprus where weddings also function as initiations and additionally reproduce hierarchical interrelations between age groups; in Antonis’ case, primarily the interrelation rites between boyhood and adulthood (youths and men).

Almost a century after van Gennep’s (1909) work, Catherine Bell (1992) challenged the body of ritual studies in a celebrated publication, expanding on an ethnographic geo-cultural platitude from the Akitu festival to the African Mukanda, and to the enthronement rite and coronation of Queen Elizabeth II from the Swazi Newala. She (118) provides these examples to showcase Ritual Traditions and Systems, and with the incorporation of van Gennep's (1909/1960) tripartite schema for rites de passage amongst others (like Bourdieu and Belmont), emerges


with a methodological proposition for analysing and understanding modern ritual. It was Bell’s publication that illustrated that every ritual is idiosyncratic (generating local understanding and matching local ethos), thus needing a distinct incorporation of ritual analytic modes from the above-mentioned works.

I here term my own distinct incorporation of ritual-analytic modes the ritual profile, creating a methodological pick‘n’mix for analysing Antonis’ groom-adornment ritual and his self-construction. This paper’s ritual profile analytically foregrounds only one of van Gennep’s stages, the rite of separation, and chooses to replace the other two with Bourdieu’s rite of distinction and Belmont’s rite of initiation. These three rite-analysis modes seem adequate to capture Antonis’ narrative and self-construction during his special day. I will also be using ritual to describe the groom adornment in its totality and rite(s) to identify the distinct legs and micro-rituals constituting that same totality.

III. Understanding the Groom-Adornment Ritual

In the 1930s, groom-adornments took place (as today) at the groom’s parents’ house. The performing space was the groom’s chair and its immediate surroundings, and tables or stools were there to hold the skep with the groom’s costume and shaving utensils. The 1930s rite sequence appears somewhat ambiguous from literature accounts, and the nearest approach to consensus is given here.

The first rite was the shaving. The musicians (otherwise known as the zygia in local folkloric language – from ζυγον (Gr.), a yoke in English) [in Greek: lit. ’a pair of instruments’] sang the wedding tune, advertising what was to follow, and then called the barber to shave the groom. The groom was now pampered, as the most important figure of the ritual of adornment in his honour, ready for the paneri rite. The literature places the paneri after the shaving, as a mother’s symbolic last chance to prepare her son’s clothes. For the 1930s “traditional” groom adornment sequence of rites see Table 1.

Most 1930s traditions are now declining, and the bride- and groom-adornments and the crowning in church are the only ones maintained in 21st-century Cyprus. Like the 1930s version, the modernised groom-adornment is opened to scholarship here for the first time. The contemporary Cypriot ritual still takes place on the day of the wedding at the groom’s parents’ house; in the 1930s, when marriages usually involved neighbours, the zygia could walk between the bride’s and groom’s parents’ houses, but contemporary organisation seems to change to suit marriages’ frequently intercommunal or international character.

Table 1 – The 1930’s “traditional” groom adornment sequence of rites.

Sequence No. Name of rite Participants i.

Ksiourisma (shaving)

Groom & local barber.

ii.

To Paneri (the skep) – clothes-

dancing (traditional vraka costume)

Groom, mother and single males

(close friends or family).

iii.

Zimbouni (waistcoat) – dressing

up.

Groom & best man.

iv.

Zosimo (a red kerchief)

Groom, parents, grandparent, aunts and uncles.

v.

Kapnisma (literally “smoking” –

Averof 1996, 65)

Groom & mother and rest of family.


Many elements of the 1930s ceremony are very striking to an ethnomusicologist,

but space limits further discussion here to the rite of paneri as encountered in Larnaca in May, 2013. On that day, Antonis’ adornment ritual took place first, as the zygia happened to be able to walk to the bride’s parental house for her rite of separation. Because his marriage happened to be intracommunal, Antonis’ adornment was automatically rather more ‘traditional’; it was nevertheless different from the 1930s one, as back then the bride’s adornment ritual would have preceded his. The traditional order was inverted because the groom and his bride-to-be adopted the Western tradition of the groom waiting for the bride’s father to deliver her to him at the altar, which happened in most weddings that I encountered during my Cyprus years. Unavoidably, this Cypriot social modernisation affects the sequence and process of the adornment ritual.

Before the paneri, the first shaving rite takes place (see Table 2 for the modern sequence of rites during the groom adornment ritual). In the 1930s the skep held the zimbouni, the shirt, the gold chain, and other customary ornaments. The groom already wore his vraka (a type of breeches worn by men at the time) and his under-shirt; now shaved, he waited for his best man to dress him.

Table 1 – Twenty-first century sequence of the groom adornment rites in Cyprus.

Sequence No. Name of Rite Participants

i.

Prelude Music

All participants.

ii.

Ksiourisma

Groom & Best Man.

iii.

To paneri (the skep) –

clothes dancing – dressing up

Groom, mother, best man, friends and

family.

iv.

Zosimo (red kerchief);

Groom, parents, best man and as many

participants as want to be involved.

v.

Kapnisma

Groom, best man, mother, rest of family and as many participants as want to be involved

(usually older participants).

IV. Music of the Adornment and To Paneri

As a musician, I was able to analyse and transcribe the music that was performed during Antonis’ adornment ritual, which also acts as a general representation of twenty-first century adornment rituals in Cyprus. Being also an ethnomusicologist yet disseminating for a rather more anthropological purpose here, I will keep musical terms simple (perhaps too simple!) The tragoudi tou gamou (wedding song) remains the groom-adornment’s dominant tune, maintaining the traditionally-structured 1930s melody, and both precedes and follows the Paneri tune (or better, interlude). Modulation and remodulation between the two tunes is achieved with a violin improvisation from the fiddler, otherwise known as a varatsiona.

The Tragoudi tou Gamou (Wedding Song) is a simple 2/4 tune with repetitive melodic phrases. Stanzas were nine-bars long, and verses eighteen. Each stanza had different words, according to the instructions the musicians wanted to convey to the participants. The range of the song was from low A to middle G, and melodic phrases concluded on a middle C with a transient E note. Each verse ended on a


fermata minim C. The wedding tune, classically structured with a distinct extension in the melodic phrase, has the same tune and analogous four- (or more-) versed stanzas (according to participant numbers). The transcription presented in Figure 2 is carried out in a way that captures the stereotypical way in which Cypriot folk musicians are performing the song nowadays.

Figure 2 – Tragoudi tou Gamou tune - Transcription: Author.

As in the 1930s, the paneri’s homonymous tune provides the only melodic variety.

The music of the Paneri song is presented here for the first time, transcribed from field recordings made in Larnaca and further informed by semi-structured interviews with Cypriot folk musicians (see Figure 3). As soon as the ksiourisma words finish, the Paneri tune commences, as an instrumental interlude. There follow some basic music-analytical aspects of the tune, necessary for the later description of patterns observed.

Figure 3 – The Paneri Tune transcribed from an audio-visual recording in Larnaca, Cyprus, 10 May 2013. Transcription: Author.

The Paneri has two musical phrases (themes). Theme A (E–D-C♯-G–A) runs from bar 1 to its final D note in bar 5; there is another repetition of theme A, ending in bar


8. Theme B (F♭-E–D–D) uses the last two quaver-notes of the eighth bar (A and

G♯) and lasts until the crotchet D in bar 10; there is one further repetition, up to the final meter of the transcribed example, ending on the tonic (D), as commonly encountered in Western classical music. I have observed for most zygias encountered during my field recordings that an A note is performed at the beginning of every repetition of the tune, an ephemeral note present merely to warn non-musician participants that the first cycle of the song is over and a new one is about to commence (the song is repeated as many times as necessary according to the number and pace of the participants). The whole composition is, in fact, symmetrical, and though ephemeral, this A note does add a certain extra ‘flavour’ to the melody.

However, even if initial analysis of the song shows Western influences, Byzantine performance elements (fermata technique) and the fortissimo endings of the two musical phrases (Themes A & B) manage to capture emotionally the importance of this rite by hybridising Westernism with European orientalism (as elements from Eastern Europe)—a common Cypriot folkloric musical phenomenon that takes a particular aesthetic of a European imagination of the Orient, or non-European elements filtered through European perception. This hybridisation is a musical manifestation of the modernising process that Cyprus has undergone since the mid-late twentieth century, and it can be quite telling in understanding contemporary Cypriots and how they structure themselves socially.2

V. The Paneri’s Ritual Profile

Symbolic meanings ooze from this rite. It testifies to an ability of a symbol to act as a memory sensor (of past and present) and to enable members of a society both to communicate heritage and connect with one another, while giving the social group a distinct character (tradition and customs). Symbolic reminders can be found transiently (for example in food and drink), perpetually (music on vinyl, pictures and icons), or intangibly (sounds and smells); all three were present in Antonis’ adornment ritual and his paneri rite.

Traditionally, the paneri involved only single male family members and close friends, who held the skep high above the groom’s head while dancing three circles around the chair. As soon as the musicians called the groom’s mother to get the skep, she gave the basket of clothes to the most senior single male (usually best man or brother). In Antonis’ rite, the skep was handed to the best man and then to me (as the eldest single male and brother).

The symbolic meaning of this, apart from conspicuously displaying the clothes and ornaments, was also for the single men to advertise themselves to potential mates in the audience. The purpose of the three circles and their cultural or premonitory meaning is unclear. In the recently observed form of the paneri, the participants, apart from the groom’s mother (whose role is limited to handing over the clothes-basket), are all single males. The contemporary paneri also subsumes the traditional zimbouni rite, as the groom is already wearing his trousers and undershirt, waiting for his best man to dress him. The paneri is followed by the zosimo on the Tragoudi tou Gamou tune. Contemporary adornment rituals end with the kapnisma (see Table 2).

Not only the participants’ and musicians’ performance, but also the addition of a stronger constituent such as tangible symbols comes to crystallise and give more meaning to Antonis’ paneri rite. The spatial and furniture arrangements, the small plate in front of the musicians, icons on the walls, various ornaments and of course the skep itself containing objects were laid on a traditional handmade cloth known as klostro (a literal translation is ‘curved mat’).


Figure 4 – (Left) Traditional Cypriot handmade skep (paneri) or otherwise known as tsiesto / (right) To paneri during Antonis’ rite containing objects laid on a traditional

handmade cloth known as klostro. Photos: Author.

The performing space was Antonis’ chair and its immediate surroundings. The east-facing chair is a cultural ‘good luck’ superstition, according to the anecdotal testimony of local octogenarians, but its meaning is lost. The placement of the participants was: groom seated on the chair, as the protagonist; the direct family of the groom standing behind him; zygia to the right or left side of the performing space, facing the groom; and other participants and audience/guests gathered around in a circle. In 1930s, a klostro handmade by the groom’s mother was also placed under the chair, its own symbolic meaning lost in time (no octogenarian testimony could be recovered about this, unfortunately). The klostro is found nowhere in previous Cypriot folkloric accounts, and is recorded for the first time in my work. In front of the zygia, a white plate was placed for the ploumismata (ritualistic money offering to the musicians), resting on top of a white handcrafted tablecloth.3

Figure 5 – The performing space before the groom adornment ritual began. Antonis’ chair in the middle with the klostro, and on the right a short stool with the white plate

for the musicians’ ploumismata. Photo: Author.

In 1930s the skep carried the groom’s wedding suit and shaving utensils. In May

2013, the tables and stool at Larnaca were there to hold the paneri containing Antonis’ costume (see Figure 6), shaving utensils, cuff buttons, watch, and belt (see Figure 4) for the rites that were about to take place. However, there was one more symbolic item, which was very telling about the imagined cosmopolitanism of Cypriots, and at the same time an unstructured and irregular occurrence, one might say, for that setting. It was very surprising even for an insider like myself (the brother) to see a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower alongside Antonis’ costume, and even more remarkable that touristic memorabilia of Paris (almost another cosmology) was incorporated in this modern crystallisation of a traditional Cypriot rite. The mini-replica was there because Antonis proposed to his wife under the Eiffel Tower during a trip to Paris in early September 2011 (placed next to the paneri, with a photograph capturing the moment of the proposal). This touches both the defragmentation


process by which natives understand and newly crystallise of what is perceived as “tradition” in twenty-first century Cyprus (by using imagination) and also Antonis’ imagined cosmopolitanism that reflects on to other natives participating in the rite. This appears to be an everyday phenomenon in Cyprus life, and does not wait for special occasions such as wedding adornments. Symbols like the Eiffel Tower are romanticised by Cypriots everywhere and in any way possible, causing and feeding into their imagined cosmopolitanism.

Figure 6 – (Left) the paneri containing Antonis’ suit / (right) the framed picture capturing the proposal in Paris, and the mini replica of the Eifel Tower next to the

paneri. Photos: Author.

VI. The Ritual Profile of Antonis’ Paneri and the Metanarratives of Music

With these historical facts and ethnographic observations in mind, I will now apply the previously explained ritual profile to Antonis’ adornment and the paneri, using the rite of initiation as the middle passage linking the other two stages—rites of separation and distinction—while also covering some socio-cultural phenomena beyond this tripartite and its three components of the before, during and after.

The paneri was the first rite of separation that Antonis went through on this important day. It is the symbolic last chance for the son to be mothered for one last time, before the metaphoric severing of the umbilical cord.

It is not hard to understand the whole groom-adornment ritual as a rite of distinction for Antonis. It was his moment, as the central special one at the top of the day’s ephemeral social pyramid (also see Figure 7). He had been groomed and treated especially well by his family and friends, who were in several ways subordinated to his social supremacy during the series of rites. The habitus was the wedding day (a new one-day reality separate from everyday life) and the platform of distinction, the luminosity of Antonis’ maternal house. His distinction was advertised firstly by male family and friends participants conspicuously displaying the clothes and ornaments of the special one in the skep, and then his best man dressing him up as royalty would have servants dress them up for special events. Further, the fact that other single males were afforded the platform during the paneri rite to advertise themselves to potential mates in the audience illustrates how Antonis’ aura on the day could even ‘benefit’ his fellow single relatives and friends, subordinated as they were to his new empowering and transient social peaking.


Figure 7 – (Left) Antonis with his mother, Eleni, during a symbolic last chance for her to say goodbye / (right) Antonis dancing during his adornment ritual, symbolically

embodying his rite of distinction. Photos: Author.

Following his rites of separation and distinction, Antonis now found himself in the

middle, ‘during’ phase departing from the youthful past to be initiated into the ‘after’ of manhood. Separated from his mother and enjoying the distinction of topping the social order, Antonis was now considered by elder males in the crowd (including myself) to meet the requirements to be called a man on his own individual terms. This initiatory middle passage usually involves the participation of single men (here, his best man and myself), and was executed in a playful way. We both made sure that during our circular dance with the skep over his head, the groom was (humorously) being punished for deserting the bachelor club, by physical and verbal teasing. This also reveals another side of the paneri rite, beyond its separation/distinction/initiation function: displaying the bond between best man, brother and groom. One might think that the first rite (in a patriarchal society such as Cyprus) would be dominated by leading actors, who would portray masculinity through power and competition; on the contrary, the paneri rite shows a gesture of affection from one man to another. However, these two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive in Mediterranean societies, where affection from one man to another (especially if they are family) is by definition contrasted to hostility (or let’s say less affection) towards others. Inclusivity and exclusivity are two sides of the same coin, and both are strong elements of patriarchal masculinity.

Figure 8 – (Left) Andreas, Antonis’ best man dancing with the paneri / (right) myself dancing the paneri. Photos: Author.

As always, music conceals much more meaning than the merely obvious; when performed in significant ways—which in Antonis’ adornment ritual it was—it can function as the metanarrative of a story. It is also a connector of worlds, real (of what


was actually happening) or imagined (what the participants thought was happening), and it is the latter that might make the final passages of this article durable for some readers and enigmatic for others. In musical language one might narratively connect all three of Antonis’ rites with the Paneri tune, and further metanarratively analyse these. The three space components of the before, middle/during and after were to be found in the two themes, A & B, with the middle being musically represented by the modulation from the main adornment tune to the Paneri, achieved with a varatsiona. In full agreement with the three stages of ritual discussed, and looking deeper into the Paneri tune, a musical liminality is also sounding clear, that of the A note: ephemeral, imaginative, and in an ambiguous sum of time and space, betwixt-and-between the established duality of themes in a symmetrical composition, and on the doorstep of expressing “tradition” but not quite in or out yet.

The remodulation back to the regular wedding tune by the end of the rite signals agreement with the elder participants, who now considered Antonis a man ready to integrate and structure himself within the hybrid modernising Cypriot society. I still remember Jimmy (nickname for Demetris), Antonis godfather saying to me “look at our boy… he is grown into a fine man!” And all this while the paneri tune was ending and the wedding tune commenced.

Hybridities are clear within the examined rite and its homonymous Paneri tune. As aforementioned, the symmetrical composition of the tune points towards Western scales and structures. Yet when the fermata technique and fortissimo ending of the two themes’ phrases are expressing these, they reveal a hybridity of Westernism with European orientalism (as elements from Eastern Europe). As this is a common Cypriot folkloric musical phenomenon—taking a particular aesthetic of a European imagination of the Orient, or non-European elements filtered through European perception—it falls into a musically expressed grand narrative of the modernising process that Greek-speaking Cypriots have undergone since the mid-late twentieth century, but is also productive for understanding contemporary natives and how they structure themselves socio-culturally. For modern, younger-generation Cypriots (both musicians and the liminaries of events—in our case Antonis) the popularisation of these hybridities and their normalisation as traditional sound is filtered through the Western rationality/Oriental emotionality dichotomy, which is part of the orientalist gaze. The musical totality of the Paneri composition, in paraphrasing Dimitris Lekkas’ (2003) discussion on Geek musical traditions, is:

…a meeting place “between official and unofficial ideologies on tradition within an Occidental context. It is this orientation, rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments, that has channelled… [Cypriot folk] music into its new tracks. This Occidental turn, or Westernisation, involves the inflow of many new elements and the simultaneous abandonment of many old ones; as such, it incurs breaches and decay (56; translation mine).

I would not call this reversal ‘occidentalism’ myself, as the latter term implies a conflict with representations of the West (albeit in the context of a “western-derived” West-versus-East discourse). I would call it self-orientalism or response to self-orientalism and not occidentalism, especially on the musical level as there is already an obvious and admitted use of Western elements in Cypriot folk music from its first folkloric transcriptions and (folkloric) literature conceptions onwards (Averof, 1989). Nonetheless, the observed hybridity proves that Cypriots have the reflective and paradoxical practice of xenophobia/xenophilia, and in creative ways construct their imagined cosmopolitanism. It is a new crystallisation of an “almost” new tradition that we see and hear in the paneri rite. To Paneri is a prolific example of how modern Cypriot creation and performance can be a product of imagined cosmopolitanism’ a story of “cosmopolitan musical affinities and practices... constructed simultaneously... [to] reality and myth, experience[,] …fantasy, [and] harmony” (Tsioulakis 2011: 179).


The elements pointing towards self-orientalism—the oriental compositional elements in flux between the Western canons—also reveal further cosmopolitanisms within the examined moment, Antonis’ adornment. Although cosmopolitanism points towards a universal collectivism, it often adopts the particularism of individual self-identity expressions. Antonis’ wish to include the “otherness” of the Eiffel Tower next to the “traditional” and “local” of the skep changes the “space” of the adornment ritual into one that is cosmopolitan, but also real, connecting tangible and romanticised miniature replicas of Western landmarks with the intangibles and transient of music’s self-orientalism. Not only do Antonis, and by extension other young Cypriots, find empowering meanings and definitions by objectifying music tropes, traditional and not-so-traditional artefacts, and modernising rituals of a past tradition, they also turn into the authors of the milieu story of modern Cyprus: one of personal choice, particularism, and the self-identification of modern Cypriot life. ]

Concluding remarks

Since I started collecting dispersed and fragmented socio-cultural elements in September 2011, this article has come to answer and illustrate how a music-infused event or ritual can align academic research between history, memory and modernity, still constituting les lieux de memoire in the twenty-first century. My suggested tripartite ritual profile with its three space components of the before, middle/during and after, when applied to the paneri, reveals a novel crystallisation of what is perceived as traditional and authentic by locals with the neo-modern approach to these elements. It is a proposed empirical cultural model for answering how Greek-speaking Cypriots, or other ethnic groups with their own idiosyncrasies and thus their own tailored ritual profiles, structure their places in the modern world and their apprehension of what is traditional, while crystallising new liminalities of tradition and heritage and their wider memorializing of family and community. It is only moments like the one this article negotiates that have the capacity to talk of new realities in every-day modern ritual and life.

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1 Geertz (1974) critiques Malinowski as being a ‘bad’ chameleon, who is outwardly pleasant to his research subjects while treating them disrespectfully in his diary. 2 For more on the music of the Cypriot groom’s adornment in generals see previous work (Poupazis 2013: 67-88). 3 Ploumismata are discussed and analyzed in previous work (Poupazis, 2013) as potlatches of gift conversations and offerings, sensu Marc el Mauss (1967: 172).

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