Editorial

In our March 2012 issue of the journal we published Egyptian scholar Nashaat H. Hussein’s account of the Aragoz puppets and the attempts by contemporary puppeteers to revitalise the tradition of performance after a period when its form appears to have been deserted in the face of new technological assaults, particularly on young people. In this issue we take up the story from a complementary yet rather different perspective: the Hellenic shadow plays usually identified with the character of Karaghiozis. Readers will note the etymological basis of the two forms can be traced back to a common ancestry, the Ottoman Karagőz. While the two manifestations retain some of the subversive characteristics of the Aragoz/Karaghiozis persona, particularly in its capacity to attack and satirise the privileged and to offer support for the socially underprivileged, the two forms travelled in different directions. In Egypt the Ottoman shadow puppet tradition was rejected in favour of real wooden puppets displayed in a portable theatre not dissimilar to the Punch and Judy booths. In Greece, the shadow puppet format appears to have been retained and Ioanna Papageorgiou describes the inclusion of the highly ambiguous character of the mountain bandit into the play form, a figure that mixes historical reality with fictional constructions and that may incorporate the qualities of a partisan fighter with the attributes of a Robin Hood. The Egyptian puppet version is currently struggling to reinvent itself as a form of entertainment that includes both adults and children; whether there is some resurgence of the Hellenic tradition remains to be seen given that its heyday was in the period 1890 to 1960. The article however clearly demonstrates the cultural transportability of popular entertainment forms.