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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
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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.

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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 

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

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