Ethnography of Greece: History, regions and issues of interest, methodological tendencies

Specific Foundation / Core

The course is also offered to exchange programme students.

It is expected that students who take this course will acquire a working understanding of: a) the aims, principles, means and methods of ethnographic research. b) the conceptual and procedural differences between ethnographic fieldwork traditions c) the relations between the ethnographic and comparative aspects of anthropological praxis d) the arguments of the reflexive critique concerning the moral and political dimensions of fieldwork and the textual practices deployed in the representation of alterity e) the approach of historical ethnography and its contribution to the study of the past and the values and meanings attached to memory in different social and cultural contexts

The history of Greek ethnography is punctuated by shifts that both register broader theoretical and methodological changes within the field of social and cultural anthropology and constitute a perspective from which these changes may be critically analyzed. Anthropological interest in Greece began during the early 1960s and was part of the then emergent turn toward the study of Mediterranean societies as exemplary specimens of the “complex society” category. Like most of the texts generated by fieldwork in the Mediterranean, John Campbell’s emblematic monograph on a community of transhumant shepherds in western mountain Greece centered on the honor-and-shame cultural code as the core principal for the organization of family and kinship gendered relations within the community as well as for the relations between the latter, the neighboring villages and the state. Most of the ethnographers who came later followed Campbell’s steps in they conducted fieldwork in rural sites. However, they distanced themselves from the structural-functionalist paradigm and the holistic ethnographic tradition, attended to gender and class as bases of hierarchical divisions within rural communities and described the effects of the state’s nationalist discourses and bureaucratic power practices on the local level. These ethnographers also used new analytical constructs like “gender”, turned to emergent and radical anthropological theories, experimented with the yet “unorthodox” practice of “ethnography at home” and often tried to combine synchronic ethnographic research with the collection of historical material. Since the beginnings of the 1980s the scope of Greek ethnography to include urban contexts. Gradually ethnographers turned to timely and internationally “hot” issues concerning, for example, the scope and consequences of globalization, ethnic and sexual minority politics, new forms of family and marriage and the uses of new reproductive technologies. Much of the anthropological research nowadays carried out in various parts of the world focuses on different aspects of the economic crisis and the refugee crisis. In this context, Greece has been cast as a specially fertile ground for anthropological study and has attracted many ethographers.

Ethnography of Greece, Mediterranean etthongraphy, historical ethnography, holistic ethnography, multisited ethnography, globalization, economic crisis

21-09-2018