University of Western Macedonia Cultural Studies: Semiotics & Practices Michailidis, Elias & Papoutzis, Lazaros 15th Early Fall School of Semiotics "Sociosemiotics III" Sozopol 2009

Greek urban folk music ( ) The representation of gender in Rebetiko Culturalists The first studies of culture in its widest possible sense of 'way of life' were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s by British critics and historians strongly influenced by Marxism and the U.S. anthropological school of Malinowski and others. These 'Culturalists' included Raymond Williams ( ) Culture and Society (1958); The Long Revolution (1962) Richard Hoggart (born 1918) The Uses of Literacy (1957) E. P. Thompson ( ) The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

The culturalists' work involved a revaluation of words like 'democracy', 'art', 'culture', 'literature'. To a great extent their work was based on oppositions such as elite ('top down') and popular ('bottom-up') culture. High culture was text and performance- based; the popular was process and practice-based. Since popular culture can also have a 'top-down' element, as in tabloids run by millionaire newspaper proprietors, culturalists further divided it up into mass and vernacular, or culture for and by the people.

Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), emphasised that commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities and pleasures as for their material function. From 1964, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies studied subcultures, emerging alternative ideologies, texts of meanings challenging the dominant culture, the culture of the subordinate who resent their subordination.

John Fiske maintained that popular culture is made by disempowered people out of the resources, discursive and material, provided by the social system that disempowers them (Understanding Popular Culture (1989).

Social & Political Context In this field our research focuses on Greek urban folk music called Rebetiko. The period we researched is between , called “the Classical period of Rebetiko”. The social and political context of this period is the uprising of capitalism in modern Greece and the dictatorship of Metaxas with the imposed censorship. Rebetico is one of the most interesting phenomenon of the Greek culture.

It is inherent in the new conditions of the industrialized Greek society of the early 20 th century and contributed significantly to the shaping of the personality of modern Greeks. The new conditions created by capitalism are followed by the unequal change of the balance of power in Greek society, the creation of new social groups and the new interactions between them. In urban areas, the lumpen proletarians have common characteristics: their way of life, their continual poverty and their total lack of regularity in their activities. Relating to the function of Rebetiko, Damianakos(2001) says: It encodes in a comprehensive system of sign messages, the entire judgmental and moral world of the lumpen proletarian groups.

The roots of Rebetiko Rebetiko is related to prison songs and the first reports come from the mid 19 th century. These songs come mostly from urban areas and especially ports such as Izmir, Istanbul, Syros, Thessaloniki and Piraeus. The origin of the term dates back to the period of the Turkish rule in Greece ( ) and it signifies the outlaw and those who are outside the dominant norms of life, the political ideology and the culture of a society. The music roots of Rebetiko go back to Byzantine music, folk songs from Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.

BOUZOUKIA

REBETES

Women in Rebetiko The woman that moves the love interest of men, is the one that inspired rebetes and became the main subject of their songs. The role of woman as a lover, is presented through a man-centered language, focusing on the relations of power developed between the two sexes. The love affair is attributed in terms of competition, domination and subordination. It is apparent from a brief review of songs written before the WW2, the status of women, though not equal to that of men, is definitely better than after it.

Methodology Our method is Semiotic analysis and in particular Greimasian structural semantics.

We analyze the lyrics of the songs in order to find out the stereotypes on the representations of gender. We locate the isotopies and create the paradigmatic axis by finding the words having the same semantic context (seme). On the syntagmatic axis, we find how isotopies are connected, the relations between them and how they are developed structurally.

An Example The Song: Woman tramp from Piraeus (Alana Peiraiotissa)

Song Analysis Written in 1936 by Markos Vamvakaris, is a love song, which talks about a woman tramp from Piraeus. The song title refers directly to a woman from Piraeus and informs us about a lifestyle, messy and light-hearted, «Alana Peiraiotissa». In the syntactic level, from the first verse of the song, we see that emotion «I love you...», is articulated with femininity «... my dapper». The femininity for the male lyricist, expressed through external features «your eyes...», but is dominated by the playful erotic behavior of woman. The combination of femininity and emotion, present in three of the four verses of the song, it is followed by the isotope of relationship which is the basic aspiration of man. The woman portrayed by femininity is presented dominant and is one that controls the erotic game between the sexes.

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