As Margaret Kenna states at the beginning of Greek Island Life. Fieldwork on Anafi, ‘this book gives a picture of one particular year in the life of a community on a small Greek island in the mid-1960s.’ However, the present volume (an updated and partially rewritten version of the book published in 2001 and reviewed in BMGS 27 by Jane Cowan), does much more than that. The material that the author chooses to present, ranging from reports to her supervisor and extracts from field notes to personal diary entries and letters to her parents, takes the reader behind the scenes of an ethnographer's work. The choice of word is deliberate because it is ethnography in the raw that is presented here, combining ‘objective’ notes with personal reflections on agricultural cycles, kinship, religion, and the military coup of 1967, which ushered in a seven-year dictatorship.

This is the story of an anthropologist whose life has been marked forever by her fieldwork on the tiny, remote Greek island of Anafi in the 1960s. The book provides an unvarnished account of the hardships of life on one of the islands of the ‘non-profit line [άγονης Γραμμής],’, so-called because the ferry routes connecting them were not commercially viable. Indeed, its very remoteness meant that Anafi was one of the places where political dissidents were sent into exile during the two military dictatorships (1936-1941 and 1967-1974). Greek Island Life provides a wealth of detail about life on Anafi in the years preceding the second dictatorship. In many ways, this book could be described as a work of social history, tinged with nostalgia. It follows the lives of the subjects of Kenna's fieldwork and the changes brought about by the passage of time. It also charts the course of her research as she obtains funding to continue studying this fast-changing place. The recollections stop in around 2014, with a glimpse of the depressing situation in Athens, as Kenna makes visits to meet people from the Anafiot community who have moved to the neighbourhood of Anafiotika on the slopes of the Acropolis.

In the course of her subsequent work with the political exiles sent to Anafi in the 1930s and ‘40s, Margaret Kenna amassed an impressive photographic archive, and indeed her narrative unfolds like a series of snapshots, snippets of history frozen in time, recording a past that is ‘a foreign country’ even for those who lived through it. Kenna has done an extraordinary job of compiling materials, including census data, and casting a critical (and self-critical) eye on the gender bias that marked some of the anthropological writing of the time.

The focus of this book is definitely not on anthropological theories; nor does it provide an ethnography of the military junta (dictatorship). Greek Island Life is a collage of materials that depict lived experience in the field. It could be used as a guide – albeit from another age – to conducting fieldwork, with all the unexpected happenings (and intrusions of ‘real life’) that can beset anthropologists. Letters to Kenna's supervisor become emails, and telegrams to family members morph into Whatsapp messages and email conversations, but the sense of isolation during the author's initial period of fieldwork is unique to a particular time and place (a remote Greek island in the last quarter of the twentieth century). Thus, Kenna lays bare the unromantic but entirely human side of the ethnographic experience.

This book will appeal to students embarking on fieldwork for the first time. It will also be of interest to a broader public, curious about what anthropologists really do in the field, as it provides insights into how their personal trajectories become bound up with the lives of those who are kind (or trusting) enough to let them in. It is a labour of love, showing Kenna's commitment to and personal connection with the people of Anafi, and with an island that has changed almost beyond recognition over the past fifty years. It is beautiful and moving to read between the lines her unflinching commitment to keeping these memories alive. This work is a picture of what anthropology used to be like before the pressures of administrative deadlines and career milestones kicked in. As such, it is not only about social history in island Greece, it is also a temporal window into anthropology and one cannot help but feel a pang of nostalgia for this bygone age.