THE 30 QUESTIONS
Newspaper TA NEA, 23 March 1998.
THE 30 QUESTIONS by NATASA BASTEA to NADIA SEREMETAKIS.
Interview
Natassa Bastea
A researcher in the fields of Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies, Nadia Seremetakis recently saw three of her major books, first published in the United States, appear in Greek: “The Last Word”, “The Senses Still” and “Crossing the Body”. These works enrich both Livanis Publishing’s Anthropology series and Greek scholarship more broadly.
BORN: Ageless
THINKS: In many codes
READS: Everything
WRITES: From inspiration
IS FASCINATED BY: Communion
WOULD LIKE TO BE: A donkey
FAVOURITE PLACE: The border
WOULD INVITE TO DINNER: A Man
The human body as fast food…
– Anthropology?
“The study of people in crisis by people in crisis.”
– You wrote three books that were received with great enthusiasm by the international academic community…
By those members of the international academic community who are not content with mediocrity and do not feel threatened by excellence.
– «The Last Word»?
An ethnography of the border and as border. It is situated at the boundaries between life and death, dream and waking everyday life, tradition and modernity, periphery and centre. A book of concentrated, unresolved historical tensions.
– What did the women of Mani teach you?
… the Greek concept of poetry.
– Death through their eyes?
A lens through which you behold the Bone of History.
– «The Senses Still»?
Intuitions – Emotions – Senses: the core of Greek identity.
– Our senses…
… represent inner states that are not visible on the surface.
–Can the senses be placed in a museum?
The past, collected and encased, framed, is a past emptied of semantic potential, because its meaning has been completed, exhausted and violated. It has, in other words, been transformed into historical dust.
– Dust?
Dust settles not only on the object, but also on the eye.
– The human body in the modern age?
Fast food
– «Crossing the Body»?
You discover the structures of domination, but also women’s resistance, in the poetics of the body, language and ritual.
– Women in Greece in the past?
Trapped within kinship.
– Women in Greece today?
A lack of professionalism.
– Do Greek universities, for the time being, disregard Women’s Studies?
They disregard many things…
– Two decades in America…
Two decades in a multicultural society and reality.
– A return to Mani?
There is no going back.
– Have you travelled all over the world?
Yes, in dreams and in waking reality.
– From New York to Mexico, Ireland, the Caribbean and Albania, and back to New York…
From the so-called peripheries to the so-called centres, and vice versa.
– People seem…
Unfortunately, very much so.
– And they differ…
Fortunately, very much so.
– Has anyone, somewhere in the world, ever said something to you that you have always remembered?
Whoever escapes once will escape again.
– Humanity facing the third millennium?
Without vision.
– Is technology the enemy of tradition?
Tradition often appropriates and uses technology for its own purposes.
– For centuries, intuition served as a compass. What about today?
Intuition, whenever and in whomever it operates, serves as a compass.
– Olga Broumas writes in one of her verses: “What I do not understand keeps us apart.”
And what I understand does not necessarily bring us closer.
