Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Every third weekend of June a large crowd of Pontic Greeks gathers on the pasturelands of Aghios Dimitrios, in Greek Macedonia for the festival “The Call to the Pasture Mother.” The festival, performed since the 1990s, has a clearly articulated cultural heritage agenda. It focuses on the performance of traditional Pontic songs from the Pontic sub-region of Matsouka and on the commemoration of the pastoralist way of life these song mediate. Recently the festival has been linked to a broader trend of a return to the agrarian community in response to the ongoing economic austerity. This phenomenon entails visions of self-sustainability through environmental entrepreneurship. In this paper, I examine how the festival’s affective and musical commemoration of Pontic pastoralism enables new visions of livelihoods. Based on extensive fieldwork among Pontians of Greek Macedonia and drawing from theories of pastoralism, emotionality, and collective memory, I account for three interrelated cultural processes: (i) the musical and poetic imagining of an “ethnically Pontic” natural environment; (ii) the function and character of this imagining as “re-membering” of a collective past; and (iii) the role of these memories and imaginations in new forms of economic agency. In my analysis, I demonstrate how the festival shapes a musical politics of affect that brings together essentially different discourses and experiences of pastoralism. I also show how these politics index Pontic and broader national Greek narratives about nature, economy, and identity presenting idyllic representations of the past as sources of timeless values and hence possibilities for the future.