Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T18:15:41.773Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social anthropology: openings and expansions in the age of exclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2016

Michael Herzfeld
Michael Herzfeld*
Affiliation:
Harvard Universityherzfeld@fas.harvard.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A sign of anthropology's Greek coming-of-age is the inevitability of omitting significant contributions from this account. In the 1970s, omission would have been perceived as an insult. Today it is the happy effect of a proliferation that makes it impossible to represent the entire spectrum in one short overview. Anthropology's most substantive contributions to Greek studies, then as now, were detailed ethnographies, providing a counterweight to the generalizations of more top-down, model-building social sciences while constituting an important bridge between social-science and humanities disciplines. There has been less interest in meeting the challenge of the discipline's own commitment to cross-cultural comparison, although Danforth's comparison of firewalking rituals in Greece and the United States1 was an early exception – subverted, as Bakalaki points out, by his Greek publisher's omission of the American material.2 Internal comparison was present as soon as anthropologists themselves began to proliferate,3 but few initially questioned the presupposition of a reified common national culture.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 99 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Danforth, L.M., Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement (Princeton 1989)Google Scholar.

2 Bakalaki, A., ‘A different kind of knowledge? Learning anthropology in the Greek university system’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24 (2006) 276CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Dimen, M. and Friedl, E. (eds), Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward a Perspective on the Ethnography of Greece [Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 268 (1976) 1–465]Google Scholar; Herzfeld, M., ‘When exceptions define the rules: Greek baptismal names and the negotiation of identity’, Journal of Anthropological Research 38 (1982) 288–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Papataxiarchis, E., Topali, P. and Athanasopoulou, A., Κόσμοι της οικιακής εργασίας: Φύλο, μετανάστευση και πολιτιστικοί μετασχηματισμοί στην Αθήνα του πρώιμου 21ου αιώνα (Athens 2009)Google Scholar.

5 du Boulay, Notably J., Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (Limni, Evia 2009)Google Scholar; Hart, L. Kain, Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece (Lanham 1992)Google Scholar; Stewart, C., Demons and the Devil: Aspects of the Moral Imagination of Modern Greek Culture (Princeton 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece (Cambridge, MA 2012).

6 Vereni, P., ‘Il potere è passato: riflessioni antropologiche sull’uso della storia’, in Vereni, P. (ed.), Passato, identità, politica: La storia e i suoi documenti tra appartenenze e uso pubblico (Rome 2009) 81–93Google Scholar.

7 Herzfeld, M., ‘Performing comparisons: Ethnography, globetrotting, and the spaces of social knowledge’, Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (2001) 259–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The absent presence: Discourses of crypto-colonialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002) 899–926.

8 Friedl, E., Women and Men: An Anthropologist's View (New York 1975)Google Scholar.

9 Friedl, E., Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York 1962)Google Scholar.

10 Friedl, E., ‘The position of women: Appearance and reality’, Anthropological Quarterly 40 (1967) 97–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford 1964)Google Scholar.

12 See Papataxiarchis, E. and Paradellis, T. (eds), Ταυτότητες και φύλο στη σύγχρονη Ελλάδα: Ανθρωπολογικές προσεγγίσεις (Athens 1992)Google Scholar and Ανθρωπολογία και παρελθόν: Συμβολές στην κοινωνική ιστορία της νεότερης Ελλάδας (Athens 1993).

13 See Bakalaki, ‘A different kind of knowledge?’

14 Papataxiarchis, E. (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας: Η παραγωγή της πολιτισμικής διαφοράς στη σημερινή Ελλάδα (Athens 2006)Google Scholar and Πολιτικές της καθημερινότητας: σύνορο, σώμα και ιδιότητα του πολίτη στην Ελλάδα (Athens 2014); Papataxiarchis, Topali and Athanasopoulou, Κόσμοι της οικιακής εργασίας.

15 E.g. G. Makris, ‘Social Change, Religion and Spirit Possession: The Tumbura Cult of the Sudan’, Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics, 1991.

16 Sanders, I. T., Rainbow in the Rock: The People of Rural Greece (Cambridge, MA 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Peristiany, J. G. (ed.), Mediterranean Family Structures (Cambridge 1976)Google Scholar.

18 Sutton, D. E., ‘Local names, foreign claims: Family inheritance and national heritage on a Greek island’, American Ethnologist 24 (1997) 415–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Athanasiou, A., ‘Bloodlines: Performing the body of the “Demos”, reckoning the time of the “Ethnos”’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24 (2006) 229–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halkias, A., The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece (Durham 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paxson, H., Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (Berkeley 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Sutton, David E., ‘A tale of Easter ovens: Food and collective memory’, Social Research 75 (2008) 157–80Google Scholar and Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Oxford 1998).

20 See also Seremetakis, C. N., ‘Memory of the senses: Historical perception, commensal exchange and modernity’, Visual Anthropology Review 9.2 (1993) 2–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Couroucli, M., Les oliviers du lignage: Une Grèce de tradition vénitienne (Paris 1985)Google Scholar.

22 Herzfeld, M., The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton 1985)Google Scholar.

23 Kavadias, G. B., Pasteurs-nomades mediterranéens: Les Saracatsans de Grèce (Paris 1965)Google Scholar.

24 Friedl, E., ‘Lagging emulation in post-peasant society’, American Anthropologist 66 (1964) 569–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Hirschon, R., Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar.

26 Hirschon, R. and Thakurdesai, , ‘Society, culture and spatial organization: An Athens community’, Ekistics 178 (1970) 187–96Google Scholar.

27 E.g. Sutton, S. B. (ed.), Contingent Countryside: Settlement, Economy, and Land Use in the Southern Argolid since 1700 (Stanford 2000)Google Scholar.

28 Faubion, J. D., Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism (Princeton 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Tzanelli, R., ‘Domesticating the tourist gaze in Thessaloniki's Prigipos’, Ethnography 13 (2012) 263–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/thessalonikis-illdefined (accessed 19 October 2015).

30 Cassia, P. Sant and Bada, C., The Making of the Modern Greek Family: Marriage and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Athens (Cambridge 2006)Google Scholar.

31 Yalouri, E., The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim (Oxford 2001)Google Scholar.

32 Caftanzoglou, R., ‘The Sacred Rock and the profane settlement: Place, memory and identity under the Acropolis’, Journal of Oral History 28 (2000) 43–51Google Scholar and ‘Shadow of the Sacred Rock: Contrasting discourses of place under the Acropolis’, in Bender, B. and Winer, M. (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Oxford 2001) 21–35Google Scholar; cf. also Herzfeld, M., A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton 1991)Google Scholar. The research portrayed in the last of these books led to my more general interest in the politics of heritage and research on related topics in Italy and Thailand, with a possible extension to China now in prospect.

33 Antoniou, D., ‘Muslim immigrants in Greece: Religious organization and local responses’, Immigrants and Minorities 22 (2004) 155–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Vradis, A. and Dalakoglou, D. (eds), Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come (Oakland and London 2011)Google Scholar.

35 Panourgiá, N., Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity: An Athenian Anthropography (Madison 1995)Google Scholar.

36 Herzfeld, M., Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York 2005)Google Scholar. This is the second edition. A third edition is due out in 2016. Each iteration draws from new ethnographic materials and widens the scope of comparison.

37 See especially Dubisch, J. (ed.), Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton 1986)Google Scholar; Loizos, P. and Papataxiarchis, E. (eds), Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Bakalaki, A., ‘Για το κοινωνικό φύλο στην ανθρωπολογία και την ελληνική εθνογραφία’, in Kantsa, V., Moutafi, V. and Papataxiarchis, E. (eds), Φύλο και κοινωνικές επιστήμες στη σύγχρονη Ελλάδα (Athens 2010) 51–87 [51]Google Scholar; ‘Gender-related discourses and representations of cultural specificity in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 12 (1994) 75–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ortner, S., ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ in Rosaldo, M. Zimbalist and Lamphere, L. (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford 1974) 67–87Google Scholar.

40 Hoffman, S. M., Cowan, R., and Aralow, P., Kypseli: Women and Men Apart – A Divided Reality (Berkeley, CA 1974)Google Scholar. See also Dimen and Friedl, Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus, 382–4.

41 Anthropological film-making in Greece and Cyprus has made a distinctive if sporadic contribution to ethnographic knowledge. I would especially cite the pioneering films of Colette Piault (see http://www.der.org/resources/study-guides/colette-piault.pdf, accessed 20 October 2015), the Cretan visions of Barrie Machin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDtKx-rzJYw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GebV6FsYsc), and the emergent work of Athina Peglidou, especially her visual study of cross-border migration (http://www.onlinefilm.org/en_EN/film/27229#!search). In 2011, Peglidou and Riki Van Boeschoten organized a film festival to address the relative reluctance of Greek anthropologists to incorporate visual media – see http://calenda.org/203507?lang=en (accessed 20 October 2015). Peter Loizos’ Sophia's People and Life Chances, both about Cyprus, have become ethnographic classics. Outstanding among the still photography are the fine photographs, enhanced by a suitably analytical text, in Danforth, L. M. and Tsiaras, A., The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton 1982)Google Scholar. For a new approach, see Kalantzis, K., ‘Crete as warriorhood: Visual explorations of social imaginaries in “crisis”’, Anthropology Today 28.3 (2012) 7–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Gefou-Madianou, D., Εννοιολογήσεις, ταυτότητες και πρακτικές στην Ελλάδα και την Κύπρο (Athens 2003) 125–32Google Scholar.

43 Seremetakis, C. N., The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in the Mani (Chicago 1991)Google Scholar.

44 See Bakalaki, ‘Για το κοινωνικό φύλο στην ανθρωπολογία και την ελληνική εθνογραφία’, 65.

45 Handman, M.-E., La violence et la ruse: Hommes et femmes dans un village grec (Aix-en-Provence 1983)Google Scholar.

46 Herzfeld, M., Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge 1987)Google Scholar; The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (Chicago 2004).

47 Lambiri-Dimaki, I., Social Change in a Greek Country Town: The Impact of Factory Work on the Position of Women (Athens 1965)Google Scholar.

48 Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge 1977) 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood, 52–3.

50 Gefou-Madianou, Εννοιολογήσεις, ταυτότητες και πρακτικές στην Ελλάδα και την Κύπρο, 163–4.

51 See also Herzfeld, M., A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton 1991) 125–7Google Scholar.

52 Knight, D. M., History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (New York 2015) 125Google Scholar.

53 Herzfeld, M., ‘Semantic slippage and moral fall: The rhetoric of chastity in rural Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1 (1983) 161–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Friedl, ‘The position of women’.

55 See Hirschon, R. ‘Open body/closed space: The transformation of female sexuality’, in Ardener, S. (ed.), Defining Females(London 1978) 66–88Google Scholar.

56 Dubisch, J., In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton 1997) 227Google Scholar; M. Herfeld, ‘Silence, submission, and subversion: Toward a poetics of womanhood’, in Loizos and Papataxiarchis (eds), Contested Identities, 79–97.

57 A. Bakalaki, ‘Για την ποιητική της ομοιότητας’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 383–406.

58 Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood, 10–11.

59 Friedl, ‘The position of women’, 97.

60 Herzfeld, M., ‘Gender pragmatics: Agency, speech, and bride-theft in a Cretan mountain village’, Anthropology 9 (1985) 25–44Google Scholar.

61 Friedl, ‘Lagging emulation in post-peasant society’.

62 Cowan, J., Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Malaby, T. M., Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City (Urbana 2003)Google Scholar.

64 Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy.

65 Özyürek, E., ‘Wedded to the Republic: Public intellectuals and intimacy oriented publics in Turkey’, in Shryock, A. (ed.), Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (Stanford 2004) 101–30Google Scholar.

66 On which see Malaby, T. M., ‘Making change in the New Europe: Euro competence in Greece’, Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2002) 591–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage, 212–62.

68 Panourgiá, N., Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (New York 2009)Google Scholar.

69 Herzfeld, M., ‘Anthropology and the inchoate intimacies of power’, American Ethnologist 42 (2015) 18–32 [26–7]CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood, 106–11; Loizos, P., The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village (Oxford 1975) 235–88Google Scholar.

71 Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece, 145–8.

72 See Fernandez, J. W., ‘Afterword: At the center of the human condition’, Semiotica 46–2/4 (1983) 323–30 [324–6]Google Scholar.

73 See also Plantzos, D., ‘The kouros of Keratea: Constructing subaltern pasts in contemporary Greece, Journal of Social Archaeology 12 (2012) 220–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 E.g. Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage, 2–3; Schein, M. Dimen, ‘When is an ethnic group? Ecology and class structure in Northern Greece’, Ethnology 14 (1975) 83–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Karakasidou, A., Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990 (Chicago 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Tsibiridou, F., Les Pomak dans la Thrace grecque: Discours ethnique et pratiques socioculturelles (Paris 2000)Google Scholar; V. Yiakoumaki, ‘Περί (δια)τροφής και εθνικής ταυτότητας: Οι διαστάσεις μιας νέας “πολιτισμικής ποικιλότητας” στη σημερινή Ελλάδα’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 105–38.

77 Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage, 287; Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass, 67.

78 E. Papataxiarchis, ‘Τα άχθη της ετερότητας: Διαστάσεις της πολιτισμικής διαφοροίησης στην Ελλάδα του πρώιμου 21ου αιώνα’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 1–85.

79 E.g. du Boulay, J., Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village (Oxford 1974) 82Google Scholar.

80 V. Kantsa, ‘Οικογενειακές υποθέσεις: Μητρότητα και ομόφυλες ερωτικές σχέσεις’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 355–81.

81 See also Kantsa, V., ‘“Viζιbility”: Women, same-sex sexualities and the subversion (?) of gender’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 18 (2010) 213–40Google Scholar.

82 Kirtsoglou, E., For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relationships in a Greek Provincial Town (London 2004) 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Riedel, B., ‘Forlorn, ancient district: Gazi as gayborhood?’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 18 (2010) 241–64Google Scholar.

84 See Kantsa, V., ‘An interest in silence: Tracing, defining and negotiating a research project on women's same-sex sexuality in Greece’, SQS 1 (2011) 23–40Google Scholar (http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sqs/sqs1_11/sqs12011kantsa.pdf, accessed 20 October 2015).

85 See Cowan, J. K., ‘Ambiguities of an emancipatory discourse: The making of a Macedonian minority in Greece’, in Cowan, J. K., Dembour, M.-B. and Wilson, R. A. (eds), Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge 2001) 152–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86 Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage, 258; cf. Athanasiou, ‘Bloodlines’; Just, R., ‘Triumph of the ethnos’, in Tonkin, E., Chapman, M. and McDonald, M. (eds), History and Ethnicity [ASA Monographs, 27] (London 1989) 71–88Google Scholar.

87 Theodossopoulos, D., ‘Infuriated with the infuriated? Blaming tactics and discontent about the Greek financial crisis’, Current Anthropology 54 (2013) 200–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island (Oxford 2003).

88 Halkias, A., ‘Alzheimer's, national bankruptcy, and hegemonic masculinities in Greece’, Medische Antropologie 24 (2012) 97–114Google Scholar.

89 On which see Hart, J., New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance, 1941–1964 (Ithaca, NY 1996)Google Scholar; Panourgiá, Dangerous Citizens.

90 Green, S., Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border (Princeton 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hart, L. Kain, ‘Provincial anthropology, circumlocution, and the copious use of everything’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 27 (2006) 304–45Google Scholar; Papataxiarchis (ed.), Πολιτικές της καθημερινότητας; Vereni, P., Vite di confine: Etnicità e nazionalismo nella Macedonia occidentale greca (Rome 2004)Google Scholar.

91 Danforth, L. M. and Van Boeschoten, R., Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Chicago 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Danforth, L. M., The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton 1997)Google Scholar.

92 Davis, E. A., Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Durham, NC 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Bryant, R., The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (Philadelphia 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Demetriou, O., ‘To cross or not to cross? Subjectivisation and the absent state in Cyprus’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007) 987–1005CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loizos, P., The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge 1981)Google Scholar and ‘Intercommunal killing in Cyprus’, Man, n.s., 23 (1988) 639–53; Papadakis, Y., Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide (London 2005)Google Scholar; Papadakis, Y., Peristianis, N. and Welz, G. (eds), Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict (Bloomington 2006)Google Scholar.

94 Cabot, H., On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (Philadelphia 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; K. Rozakou, ‘Όρια και αντιφάσεις των συναντήσεων Ελλήνων εθελοντών και προσφύγων’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 325–54.

95 Bakalaki, ‘A different kind of knowledge?’, 274.

96 Voutira, E., ‘Refugees: Whose term is it anyway? Emic and Etic constructions of “refugees” in Modern Greek’, in van Selm, J.et al. (eds), The Refugee Convention at Fifty: A View from Forced Migration Studies (Lanham, MD 2003) 65–80Google Scholar; ‘Ανάμεσα σε δυo πατρίδες: Ετερότητα και παλιννόστηση από την πρώην ΕΣΣΔ στην Ελλάδα – Η περίπτωση των “Ρωσσοποντίων”’, in Papataxiarchis (ed.), Περιπέτειες της ετερότητας, 267–95, ‘Post-Soviet diaspora politics: The case of the Soviet Greeks’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24 (2006) 379–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 See also Antoniou, ‘Muslim immigrants in Greece’.

98 Albahari, M., Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World's Deadliest Border (Philadelphia 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feldman, G., We Are All Migrants: Political Action and the Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood (Stanford 2015)Google Scholar.

99 See Herzfeld, M., ‘Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstrom’, Anthropology Today 27 (5) (2011) 22–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vradis and Dalakoglou (eds), Revolt and Crisis in Greece.