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 StatesFootnote ¹ was an early exception – subverted, as Bakalaki points out, by his Greek publisher's omission of the American material.Footnote ² Internal comparison was present as soon as anthropologists themselves began to proliferate,Footnote ³ but few initially questioned the presupposition of a reified common national culture. A lively, interesting internal comparison appears in the volume by Papataxiarchis, Topali, and Anthanasopoulou, who examine the work and life trajectories in Greece of immigrant domestic workers from several countries; this inverts the cross-cultural comparative model within a single-country locality.Footnote ⁴ Attempts to bring Greek material into juxtaposition with research from elsewhere have been sporadic, mostly framed within a Mediterraneanist or Balkan paradigm, while a weakness of the ‘post-Soviet’ literature has been its failure to account for resonances among Greek, Russian, and Serbian religious revivals and purist movements despite the rich possibilities offered by anthropological writings on Greek religiosity.Footnote ⁵ Like Vereni's overview of the politics of heritage in Greece and elsewhere,Footnote ⁶ my comparisons of Greece and ThailandFootnote ⁷ came late in the day.

Anthropological writing on Greece has generally followed rather than led theoretical innovation. An early (and under-appreciated) overview of the anthropology of gender by Ernestine Friedl,Footnote ⁸ whose Vasilika Footnote ⁹ launched serious American ethnographic research on Greece (and who, sadly, passed away while this article was in preparation), analysed female power in the Greek context,Footnote ¹⁰ but did not focus predominantly on Greek data. J. K. Campbell's Honour, Family, and Patronage – like the ethnographic writings of E. E. Evans-Pritchard – enriched the static paradigm of Durkheim's sociology by recognizing both historical context and social performance, but in a richly descriptive rather than theoretical idiom.Footnote ¹¹ Anthropology's capacity to transcend the exceptionalism of Greek ethnographies – and of nationalistic claims – emerged slowly.

The rise of a talented pool of Greek and Cypriot anthropologists followed the founding of the first anthropology programme at the University of the Aegean in 1987, celebrated with a major conference in the preceding year,Footnote ¹² and the emergence of the second one at the Pandio University a few years later. This has overshadowed folklore studies in Greek universities, although the decade-old Konitsa Summer School has partly reversed that destructive conflict. Anthropology's success was predominantly, though not exclusively, marked by an overwhelming focus on the ethnography of Greek-speaking communities and institutions. This sometimes appears to reinforce the ethnocentrism of the old folklore paradigms, and perhaps to feed on the residual nationalism of students and, more disturbingly, of non-anthropologist academics.Footnote ¹³ The several excellent volumes of Greek research that followed the 1986 conference – most of them attractive, meticulously edited collections of essays from the Athens publisher AlexandriaFootnote ¹⁴ – all reinforced the focus on Greek themes.

There was little danger of reversion to a nationalistic paradigm, however, thanks in part to the failures of Cold War politics and irredentism, especially after the 1974 Cyprus debacle. Research on neighbouring countries in the Balkan region and further afield (such as Gerasimos Makris’ work in SudanFootnote ¹⁵) has emerged alongside ethnographic attention to overseas migrants. Yet such activity is still halting and limited. Oft-cited reasons include the scarcity of funding and research leave, the dearth of language-learning options, and a national crisis that has, unsurprisingly, directed Greek anthropologists’ attention to matters of immediate concern – now, however, with a critical perspective honed by catastrophe and resistant to populist models of genetic purity and Eurocentric essentialisms.

In my student years, there were few serious ethnographic works on Greece. Friedl's and Campbell's ethnographies were joined by Irwin Sanders's more generalizing study and a trickle of essays.Footnote ¹⁶ At the Nicosia conference that produced Mediterranean Family Structures,Footnote ¹⁷ which I attended at Peter S. Allen's perceptive urging, I learned of the emergence of doctoral theses by American and British (and, later, French, German, and Italian) anthropologists. The terrain was still sparse, making it relatively easy for a student with fluent Greek to prepare for fieldwork by mastering classic works and broader social theory rather than regional studies. Because Oxford – where I then studied under Campbell – was still in thrall to E. E. Evans-Pritchard's legacy, I experienced a heavy dose of Africanist anthropology; and, as I was happily assigned for supervision to an India specialist (Ravindra K. Jain), I could hardly miss homologies between Greece and India, most notably in questions of female chastity and hypergamy. From such beginnings emerged a lifelong fascination with comparison.

I soon felt that good ethnography not only should focus on local detail but must also address the ‘big picture’ of encompassing entities such as the nation-state. David E. Sutton's demonstration of how the transmission of baptismal names illuminates the politics of ‘national’ names (more particularly that of Macedonia) and later works on the politics of natality and demographic panic all drew on ethnography to address such broader concerns.Footnote ¹⁸ Sutton's subsequent work on food and memory, following his earlier research on the role of narrative in suturing the spaces between national identity and local interests,Footnote ¹⁹ opened new windows on inter-generational and inter-experiential aspects of cultural identity.Footnote ²⁰

In fact, however, the reciprocal resonances of nation and local community are already adumbrated in Campbell's and Friedl's ethnographies. A lingering functionalist suspicion of ‘impure’ methods that recognized the role of historical contingency and of the longue durée had nevertheless blocked recognition of the necessity, in research on a country held hostage by official and foreign models of its history, of linking archival with ethnographic research. Maria Couroucli's use of historical documents to explain the current configuration of property and kinship in a Corfu community was thus highly innovative.Footnote ²¹ Her identification of a patrilineal clan structure, like my own contemporaneous ethnographic account of the same phenomenon in Crete,Footnote ²² provoked some initial scepticism. Campbell's work had firmly and persuasively debunked Kavadias’ claims that the Sarakatsani had inherited an ancient Greek patrilineal structure.Footnote ²³ Only thorough archival and ethnographic documentation could dissipate doubts that patrilineal social organization nevertheless existed in rural Greece.

The rural focus of anthropological research gradually yielded to greater emphasis on urban life, in turn generating more inter-scalar perspectives. Migration to the cities, fuelled by consumerism and the promise of greater comfort,Footnote ²⁴ was redesigning the cultural cartography of the nation-state, and anthropology had to adjust. But fully ethnographic studies in urban contexts emerged slowly; as elsewhere, the urban had generally been a sociological preserve. Renée Hirschon, whose study of an Asia Minor refugee settlement in Piraeus dispatched that bias, was quick – and right – to decry the idea of a separate subfield of ‘urban anthropology’, especially given the rural origins of so many urban residents;Footnote ²⁵ and her prescient collaboration with an Indian architect in examining the impact of rural dowering practices on the constricted spaces of the city deserves recall and emulation as a model of focused, interdisciplinary methodFootnote ²⁶ (as has happened subsequently with archaeologyFootnote ²⁷). Several years later, James Faubion was the first to attempt a full-scale ethnographic study based on the capital city of Athens, although his goal was less that of trying to create a local ethnography than to explore the construction of Greek historicity as it appeared in the social and material fabric of the capital city.Footnote ²⁸ Most recently, cultural sociologist Rodanthi Tzanelli has launched a critical feminist analysis of the complex heritage of Thessaloniki.Footnote ²⁹

While an early study of Athenian social practices was more historical than ethnographic,Footnote ³⁰ ethnographic attention to the nuances of cultural production and social life in the cities soon followed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Athenian studies addressed the symbolic core of the city, the Acropolis,Footnote ³¹ and the modern settlement of Anafiotika on one of its flanks;Footnote ³² symbolic struggles over the self-definition of Greekness preceded the exploration of suburban conflict – for instance, over the construction of a mosque in the once predominantly Arvanitiko area of Paiania,Footnote ³³ immigration, and changing conceptions of space under the pressure of social movements.Footnote ³⁴

This writing exhibits a steady increase in the number of Greek names (and Greek texts) cited. A strong cohort of Greek anthropologists enriched the discourse about Greek society and culture and put foreign scholars on notice that they could not ‘just get by’ with poor language skills and historical knowledge. This was not a ‘nativist’ but an epistemic critique. Moreover, Neni Panourgiá astutely attributed her privileged access to potentially embarrassing information, not to a reified national identity, but to her membership in a conflicted family.Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, resentment of foreign research did exist in more conservative quarters, leading me to my formulation of ‘cultural intimacy’ – now substantially re-thought through its extension to other cultural traditions in which anthropologists have conducted critical research in recent years.Footnote ³⁶

A distinctive style of anthropological research in the Greek-speaking world emerged in the study of gender.Footnote ³⁷ This work transcended earlier preoccupations with the values usually glossed as ‘honour and shame’, but with the distinctive edge given to the Greek materials by a nationalistic imagery replete with notions of defending a feminized land from masculine attackers. Despite these peculiarities, which are intrinsically interesting both ethnographically and epistemologically, we should not over-emphasize the distinctiveness of the Greek gender studies scene. Alexandra Bakalaki has sagely observed that the trajectory of gender studies in Greece fits the larger framework of gender in anthropology more generally, especially in its rejection of biological determinism in cultural matters; she has also suggested that the image of Greek morality was affected by Victorian ideals from abroad.Footnote ³⁸

That said, the earliest recognizable theoretical contributions of Greek ethnography to the larger development of the discipline arose from the convergence of a structuralist focus on symbolic oppositions with the development of increasingly nuanced gender studies. Sherry Ortner's challenge – ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ – fell on especially fertile ground.Footnote ³⁹ The ethnographic film Kypseli: Women and Men Apart,Footnote ⁴⁰ criticized for its adherence to structuralist orthodoxy, did at least show that a temporal dynamic allowed women and men to move into each other's stereotypical spaces at (admittedly somewhat rigidly allocated) times.Footnote ⁴¹

Later research was to undermine the simple binarism of male-female still further. While Gefou-Madianou's analysis of her ethnographic data shows that the roles of men and women are placed in mutual opposition,Footnote ⁴² they are contrapuntal in precisely the musical sense (see also Seremetakis’ discussion of antiphonal lamenting as resistance);Footnote ⁴³ they can be reversed when women enjoy the privacy of all-female company and feel free to mock their husbands’ baby-like helplessness in the face of ordinary domestic tasks. Moreover, men and women report on each other's conversations, so there is more permeation of the basic boundary than the actors will usually admit; and external fashions have also had a considerable impact.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is not to say that analytic binarism collapsed overnight, or to deny the gendered violence that, according to Marie-Élisabeth Handman's account, is sustained by both external economic pressures and a local system of male domination.Footnote ⁴⁵ Binarism is about power; gender complementarity maps onto a larger tendency to produce symbolic dichotomies, of which inside/outside and West/East are perhaps the most oppressive.Footnote ⁴⁶

Such analytic realizations do not in themselves free women from confinement to the domestic sphere, either conceptually or in practice. Today, however, women even in the most conservative places more openly cross public spaces, apparently because, especially at a time of increasing economic desperation, their engagement in productive economic activity is as vital as their domestic labour to the survival of their households and reputations. This is a far cry from when rural women avoided doing ‘work’ – that is, something different from ‘study’ (dhiavasma, ‘reading’) and domestic activity – because people assumed that those who laboured in non-domestic spaces could not hope to remain chaste, although the economic advantages of this shift were apparent as soon as factory work became open to women.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such transformations remain rooted in the structures of earlier attitudes but involve a fairly radical semantic shift. In rural communities, for example, timi could mean both ‘chastity’ and ‘price,’ and this implied some measure of interchangeability where dowry calculations were concerned. As economic change reduced many kinds of value to ‘economistic’ terms,Footnote ⁴⁸ so the semantic lability of the seemingly rigid ‘honour code’ slowly, almost imperceptibly, yielded to the ineluctable temptations of lucre.

Such semantic lability is a feature of all languages. Too literal an interpretation of basic terms occludes changes that, precisely because they appear to reverse earlier moral values, are not openly recognized. Thus, for example, the meaning of ikoyenia (‘family’) is surprisingly flexible. Gefou-Madianou notes that the term can imply a private space that expands and contracts according to the frame of reference, and that it may sometimes even – as in highland western CreteFootnote ⁴⁹ – be used to mobilize a woman's patrikin in opposition to those of her husband,Footnote ⁵⁰ a reminder that patrilineal bias has not entirely disappeared from the realm of the everyday.Footnote ⁵¹

This has consequences for our understanding of how space is used in Greek communities. The lability of the term ikoyenia reflects a larger flexibility in the mapping of public and private spaces. Pighadhakia (‘little wells,’ clusters of people gossiping among confidants in a large crowd) have long been a feature of public spaces. As Daniel Knight reports, groups of friends – mostly, but not exclusively, women – are finding home, with its physically confining walls and the growing evidence of bare cupboards, to be an oppressive space, and are increasingly inclined to eat out for an evening of friendly debate. Such spaces can be defended as private against unwanted intrusions by ‘outsiders’.Footnote ⁵²

Thus, the classic complementary oppositions may continue to structure discourse and social interaction, but they, like all signifiers, lack fixed meaning; their appearance of rigidity may, as I argued for an earlier phase of the rhetoric of chastity,Footnote ⁵³ conceal big attitudinal changes. The same is partially true of the rhetoric of Greekness, which used to revolve around a fairly clear distinction between the introverted Romeic and the extroverted Hellenic models, the former a culturally intimate invocation of the more recent past, the latter a neo-classical model of the Greek self tailored to Western assumptions. Today, the terms associated with Hellenism often carry ‘Romeic’ meanings, while the terminology of Romiosini sounds old-fashioned and folkloric.

Lability is generally characteristic of complementary oppositions despite their apparent formality on the printed page. The reason is simple: symbols are used, or performed; even something that the biogenetically inclined treat as immutable, such as gender, is reversible and mutable. In viewing women as completely powerless, as Friedl pointed out, we are suppressing what we would now call their agency;Footnote ⁵⁴ cosmologically relegated to interior spaces,Footnote ⁵⁵ they wield a domestic power that is the greater for not being obvious or visible. They engage in subtle forms of management that Jill Dubisch and I have both acknowledged as a ‘poetics of womanhood’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This may take the form of creative silence, complaint, or parody; a poetics of imitation, as Bakalaki has subsequently suggested, speaks to the management of hierarchy of many kinds.Footnote ⁵⁷

The larger concept of social poetics, which I also developed in relation to that of cultural intimacy, emerged from my research on the often extravagant performance of masculinity in a west-central Cretan community.Footnote ⁵⁸ There, even syntax could be inverted in order to symbolize the actual performance, rather than the formal arrangement (Friedl's ‘social structure’Footnote ⁵⁹), of gender relations.Footnote ⁶⁰ While that analysis was consistent with the earlier literature, inasmuch as it expressed male competition over feminized objects (cards, animals) and actual women (brides), it also enabled more flexible approaches in which the twin meanings of ‘performance’ – staging an event, or making something happen – merge in the active semantic transmutation of symbolic oppositions. Jane Cowan's groundbreaking study of dance (and more generally of the performance of gendered selfhood) in a Macedonian village tapped into a moment of semi-rural embourgeoisement in which the emulation of urban and ‘European’ style – an emulation no longer ‘lagging’, to invoke Friedl's telling termFootnote ⁶¹ – had ceased to evoke the condescending hilarity of urbanites.Footnote ⁶² The ‘instrumental nonchalance’ of gamblers similarly translated effectively into the stance of adventurous Greek businessmen facing an uncertain economic world.Footnote ⁶³ But it seems that the capacity for such transmutation was ‘always-already’ present; what has changed most is the speed of change itself, an acceleration now further intensified by the electronic media.

This capacity for transformation gradually emerged in my own work. It is hardly coincidental that I conceived of the notion of ‘disemia’ and then the more dynamic concept of ‘cultural intimacy’ in Greece;Footnote ⁶⁴ but it is also true that I initially invested the specific realia of cultural intimacy with too much fixity, as Esra Özyürek wisely notes in an article on the partially mirror-image Turkish case.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a sense, my work was a reflection of the times. One was all too easily lured into relatively static readings of the boundaries of national culture and identity during the intensely nationalistic phases of military rule and indeed up to the point where the euro crisis undermined Greek confidence in the unilinear evolution of the country toward a true European identity and economy.Footnote ⁶⁶ Warned not to say anything that could embarrass the country but privy to the sometimes lacerating self-criticism in which Greeks privately indulge, I found myself mapping the classic public-private dichotomy, as well as its ethical counterpart honour-shame, onto larger questions of cultural representation. Especially during the junta years (1967–74), the obligation to defend the country's classical past and its incarnation in the present generated furious attacks on anyone who even seemed to suggest alternative visions. The bogey of ‘Fallmerayerism’ – of foreigners challenging the Greeks’ classical pedigree – enjoyed a final, vivid resurgence at that time.

The revival of democratic political life provided both continuities and decisive breaks with the brutal Cold War and militarist past. On the one hand, the patronage systemFootnote ⁶⁷ that had sustained the ‘liberal state’Footnote ⁶⁸ (and that was often disingenuously attributed only to Ottoman influence) and, with it, the Great Powers’ control of Greek political and economic life, reappeared; the Mitsotakis government of 1990–3, for example, might never have happened without New Democracy's assiduous cultivation of the livestock-raiding clans of Crete.Footnote ⁶⁹ On the other hand, the legalization of the Communist Party and the spectacular rise of PASOK (a feat repeated three decades later by SYRIZA) unravelled these connections, using the very structures of democratic governance that had hitherto been managed by powerful patrons. Early studies in Greece and CyprusFootnote ⁷⁰ revealed the manipulation of electoral structures to serve party, patronal, and clan interests, while the pervasion of social activity by party-political factionalism has been documented by CowanFootnote ⁷¹ in a demonstration that helps to understand how and why, in more recent years, as the polity gradually tipped away from interest-group alliances and toward ideological alignments, institutions such as universities became increasingly factionalized along party-political lines. Greece and Cyprus have thus been rare, dynamic theatres for the anthropological analysis of electoral politics, a topic that in most other nation-state contexts has been relatively slow to emerge.

The fall of the junta, its members already mocked for their sometimes spectacularly poor command of katharevousa, also had major implications for the politics of national culture. In particular, it exposed the entire edifice of neo-classicism to ridicule, and also made it easier to perceive the ‘shiftiness’Footnote ⁷² of the tropes of cultural intimacy. The outcome would have astonished anyone living in Greece before that watershed event. Classical symbols, once exclusively associated with official power, became instruments of protest against the national government and the ‘troika’ (European Union, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank) that seeks to direct its financial policies – as when protesters hurled chunks of neo-classical marble façade at the police during at least one phase of the anti-troika rioting in Athens.Footnote ⁷³

The crisis may also have accelerated the realization that the official non-recognition of ethnic minorities, which had always been anthropologically visible,Footnote ⁷⁴ was not serving Greece well. The initial outcry against Anastasia Karakasidou's controversial but meticulously documented depiction of ethnic diversity in the history of Greek MacedoniaFootnote ⁷⁵ gradually yielded to subtler positions, and anthropologists increasingly investigated ethnic diversity (see Tsibiridou's nuanced Pomak study and Yiakoumaki on food politics).Footnote ⁷⁶ Against the extreme nationalism of Golden Dawn, some elements of which even reject Orthodox Christianity as ‘Jewish’ in contrast to the worship of the Twelve Olympians, the growing rejection of essentialism, and especially of neo-classicism, has reorganized the old binary oppositions into flexible new instruments of political and social regeneration.

These shifts reflect a larger transformation in which old taboos no longer stand. As a result, writing ethnography does not face the constraints that previously restricted its purview. When Campbell feared offending the Greeks by describing the Sarakatsan prohibition on women's running as based on fear that they might shamefully fall and expose their private parts, he was reproducing the symbolic defences of a deeply gendered nationalism.Footnote ⁷⁷ Embarrassments about what observers wrote in English were arguably less acute when Greek was thought to be an impossible language for foreigners to learn – a situation that the advent of fluent Greek-speakers with Asian and African faces has now radically disrupted. Thus, the defence afforded by a supposedly impenetrable national tongue has largely been destroyed – but it no longer seems to matter much, except, perhaps, to those on the extreme right wing of the political spectrum.

Binary structures provided a vehicle for sometimes surprisingly fluid transformations. Efthymios Papataxiarchis, in a magisterial essay, rightly saw the origins of such change in tolerance predicated on the appearance of conformityFootnote ⁷⁸ – a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ stance that recalls the privileging of appearances over reality in traditional Greek social life.Footnote ⁷⁹ In other words, it was possible to accept transgressive categories as long as the perpetrators could recast their transgressions as conventional behaviour – notably, lesbian couples who, by adopting children, could adapt their lifestyle to their parents’ expectations of having grandchildren to perpetuate their names.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even this was a radical move; the biogenetic folk theory whereby foreigners ‘could not’ master the intricacies of the Greek language continued to hold strong sway even in the face of the contrary evidence just mentioned, so that conceding that adopted children could ‘resurrect’ their grandparents represented a major departure in popular Greek attitudes.

Indeed, the lability of binary conventions is most obvious in the arena of sexuality.Footnote ⁸¹ In a provincial Greek town, intellectually inclined women could find considerable leeway through the traditional group of friends (parea).Footnote ⁸² Since James Faubion first addressed modern Athenian homosexuality (the ill-educated but Classics-worshipping Colonels had kept very quiet about the ancient varieties), the taboo has thus faded away in anthropology as in life; among new work, Brian Riedel has focused on gay activity in the newly fashionable gasworks (Gazi) district of Athens.Footnote ⁸³ Perhaps not surprisingly, sexuality seems to be one encouraging area for theoretical, comparative, and methodological innovation.Footnote ⁸⁴

Conversely, changes in the expression of values may disguise entrenched conservatism. The discourse of political correctness sometimes places an unctuously anti-racist mask over the face of racist attitudes, much as the sanctimony of some human rights discourses – including those critical of Greek policy – may be far from disinterested.Footnote ⁸⁵ Moreover, the aggressive discursive styles of yore still persist alongside the new courtesies. One such is the traditionalizing claim that Greeks will never allow themselves to be pushed around and therefore resist accepting others’ authority. The agonistic idiom of Greek social life still, as Knight's ethnography shows, infuses much of the talk about how Greece should respond to the bullying of the troika and its local establishment stooges. As for these unpopular politicians, the contempt that is now their lot similarly draws on an older stratum of complaint noted by Campbell and also based on a binary opposition – in this case, that between the nation (ethnos) and the state (kratos).Footnote ⁸⁶ Dimitrios Theodossopoulos has shown how important it is to displace analysis from top-down perspectives to a local focus, and within that focus to shift the emphasis from a romanticized notion of resistance to the rhetoric through which perceptions of the ongoing crisis are articulated and debated; as in his earlier work on the local reaction to environmentalist interventions that threatened traditional lifestyles, Theodossopoulos suggests that understanding of global processes requires attention to local value systems and their impact on the perception of external interventions of any sort.Footnote ⁸⁷ The state remains distinctly masculine, the implicit weakness of its dependence on bravado so humiliatingly exposed in crisis that Alexandra Halkias could movingly compare it with male self-performance in the grip of Alzheimer’s.Footnote ⁸⁸

Perhaps the greatest limitation that the anthropology of the Greek-speaking world faces is that it still sits athwart some politically problematic classifications. As a nation-state, it has served as a conceptual and territorial buffer zone between East and West. Not only has this perpetuated doubts about Greeks’ Europeanness, an essentialist game in which Greece again finds itself locked in combat with northern European states, but it has discouraged more adventurous kinds of comparison. Greek exceptionalism is not confined to nationalists; and the ostensibly reasonable justifications for the lack of overseas research – we don't have the money, we don't teach the languages, and so on – have become, with some notable exceptions, a self-fulfilling prophecy, mirroring in scholarship the exceptionalism of the state.

Another challenge, in part made possible by the lifting of the taboo against critical appraisals of the Civil War and the role of the ‘liberal’ state,Footnote ⁸⁹ concerns the relevance of the state's territorial borders as defining an equally territorial ‘anthropology of Greece’. Sarah Green, Laurie Kain Hart, Papataxiarchis and Piero Vereni have all variously, and critically, challenged the prevailing assumptions.Footnote ⁹⁰ In a related vein, the oral accounts recorded by Danforth and Van Boeschoten capture the agency of children caught up in the travails of inter-ethnic war, the same war that created the configurations described by Danforth in his earlier, innovative exploration of ‘the Macedonian question’ from the perspective of the Australian diasporas.Footnote ⁹¹ Elizabeth Davis offers a particularly searing analysis of the mutual entailment of territorial boundaries and social norms, mediated by both stereotypes and the dynamics of suspicion and lying under conditions of neoliberalism.Footnote ⁹² Similarly daring ethnographic studies have addressed the violence and identity conflicts on Cyprus.Footnote ⁹³ The Greek world emerges from this work as a site of painful and sometimes fatal engagements with identity and subjectivity.

In a world of intensifying connectivity, work like Cabot's and Rozakou's analyses of migrant interactions with Greek volunteersFootnote ⁹⁴ suggests that we should abandon ‘the anthropology of Greece’ for ‘ethnography in Greece’. Even though, as Bakalaki notes, identifying the ‘others within’ raises the spectre of exoticism,Footnote ⁹⁵ the alternative is an even more dangerous ignorance. The twentieth-century drive toward ethnic purity has generated a failure to see immigration as endemic rather than extraneous. Migration has long interested Greeks, but usually as Greek migration to wealthier lands. Eftihia Voutira's critical appraisals of the ‘return’ of diasporic Greeks to a land never previously theirs offers a countervailing perspective.Footnote ⁹⁶ Treating ‘foreign’ immigration as integral to the countries of reception will conversely allow anthropologists to resist the allure of essentialism.Footnote ⁹⁷ Cabot's research and activism have been especially fruitful here, joined now by the critical endeavours of Maurizio Albahari and Gregory Feldman in challenging national exclusivities and ‘fortress Europe’.Footnote ⁹⁸

Greece's relations with that fortress reveal a fundamental paradox. Forced to obey more powerful states in policing the Schengen borders, Greece was poorly rewarded. But the resulting disillusionment with ‘Europe’ may have finally begun its liberation from crypto-colonialism.Footnote ⁹⁹ What other Europeans saw as rebellious and irresponsible electoral behavior was, for many Greeks, heroic defiance against unelected regulators. Perhaps this was predictable; the Greek name for the Olympic Games (Ολυμπιακοί Αγώνες, ‘Olympic Contests’) conveys a resurgence of those ‘agonistic’ qualities that have long featured in the anthropological portrait of Greece. These now serve the search for new identities and escape from a Europe that affects to hold its nose and avert its eyes when conflict is in the air.