Reviews
As the first Greek national to be comprehensively trained in American cultural anthropology, Seremetakis challenged entrenched homeostatic binary inversion models of death rituals and gender relations in Anglophone Mediterranean social anthropology. Based on long-term fieldwork and unprecedented linguistic expertise, Seremetakis rejected assumptions of social totality through intricate performance, divination practices, embodied labour, and a feminised material culture. Her integration of the senses and material culture has methodologically influenced recent symbolic and cognitive archaeology. Seremetakis’s linkage of material culture and emotions registered methodological advances in the anthropology of the body comparable to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection…
Reviews & Comments Abroad
(Indicative)
For the overall body of work
30 speakers/videos: World Journeys Through People and Texts, public tribute event, Athens 2019
For the book Recognizing the Everyday
“This book is an impassioned intervention in a changing European and modern political culture. It re-enchants the everyday, the grass-roots, the familial-feminine, and the concrete in unique and important ways…and proposes a new public anthropology of broad use refocused on the sensorium that emerges from the traumatic in everyday life. Drawing on her own continuing fieldwork and cultural participation in Greece, as well as elsewhere in Europe and the US, and inspired by Adorno, Taussig, Benjamin, Foucault, de Certeau, and other critics of a flattening, disembodying modernity, Seremetakis engages the politics of EU “management” and other practices of “modern development” with sensitive attention to their effects on ordinary people living everyday lives. The observations found in this book are rich and exciting, and the interpretations advanced are unpredictably open-minded…”
Judith Farquhar, Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago, and Director of the University’s Center in Beijing.
“A major work that will certainly be discussed and become a reference point for many years …It reveals Seremetakis as an ethnographer of the everyday, strolling the world like a modern day flaneur, with her eyes open for telling details that are then woven into extraordinary anthropological analyses of diverse topics ….that add up to “the study of the quotidian in process.” Her ruminations…exquisitely and sensitively observed and poignant beyond words, reveal also that she has not stopped thinking on pain and death, just gotten better at it…. This is Seremetakis at her finest…”
Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University,
Gold Metal Ander Retzius in Anthropology 2013
“This book is marked by a heterogeneity of micrological ethnographic sites cut across by recurrent themes…such as the spatialization of sensory experience and memory, the critique of the axis of Dominant and Archaicized culture (as formulated by Raymond Williams), a counter concern with Residual and Emergent cultural forms excluded from that axis, and a unique philological approach to sensory experience through an archeology of vernacular language. This framework generates fascinating insights on cultural heritage as sensory archives in relation to the museumification of Greece which is in direct communication with its current debt collapse. …Powerful is also the author’s analysis of rumor as an element of corruption and deceit of Greek public culture.””
Allen Feldman, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University
ANTHROPOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CULTURES–vol.29. no.1(2020)
«…Sensing the Everyday is a reciprocal manoeuvre between theory and practice, affective divinations and verbal deconstructions that anticipate, reshape, and transfigure the daily realm. It is an assemblage, a montage of a complex ethnography that proves the vividness of the senses and scrutiny of its author…
`…The variety of the examples and sources used from the media an d multi-sensory interrogations are overwhelming. This effect, however, is what gives the book its main strength…
…Every intimate moment is carefully analyzed. Her observation of micro-affections, the feminine appropriations of everyday life, and her self reflections are mesmerizing. The ambiguous identities in the face of multi-sensorial modes of everyday life and the omnipresence of shattered identities are both transmitted by the richness of ethnological reflections and the writing style.»
Işıl Karataş University of Vienna
For the book Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
““This invaluable textbook introduces cultural anthropology while also setting this American approach within a global context where there are competing national traditions of anthropology. Still more importantly, American-trained yet intimately familiar with Europe, professor and fieldworker Seremetakis is both an insider and an outsider to Cultural Anthropology proper and this makes her presentation unusual and most insightful.””
Charles Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University College London (England)
“An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology is a stunningly original and important introduction to contemporary cultural anthropology. Written in clear and compelling prose, this work places anthropology squarely within its powerful historical context. Seremetakis demonstrates powerfully how prominent anthropologists from Franz Boas to Michael Taussig have variously told the tale of social and cultural differences that have made a difference in our comprehension of the human condition. In these troubled times, Seremetakis has produced a work that shows students how anthropologists produce works that mark a path toward a better life, a path toward wisdom.”
Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University
Gold Medal, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology
““Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, ‘An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology’ would well serve as a basic text book for introductory courses in cultural anthropology and is to be considered as an essential, core addition to community, college and university library Anthropology collections and supplemental studies reading lists.”
Midwest Book Review Library Bookwatch (vol. 12, no. 9, Sept. 2017).
For the book The Last Word
“A remarkable book. Anyone who thinks they already know how to address the relationship between death and the social order – or relations between men and women for that matter – should read this book. It is a powerful invitation to think again.”
Michael Taussig, Columbia University (Professor of Anthropology)
“…The last word in contemporary anthropology’s efforts to link the linguistic with the sensory, the analytical with the aesthetic, the structural with the experiential…”
George Marcus, Rice University (Chair, Anthropology Dept.)
“…A fascinating book and a work of exemplary learning… It constitutes the perfect bridge (between the present and the past), an anthropological perspective on the Other and a sense of continuity and discontinuity between archaic and contemporary Greece…”
Page duBois, University of California (Professor of Classics)
“…The Last Word must become the first word in our re-listening to Mediterranean societies”…
Catharine Stimpson, New York University (Dean, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences / Professor of Comparative Literature / Women’s Studies)
“…A work that combines a ‘most meticulous scientific anthropology with turns of imagination reminiscent of Baudelaire’…”
Paul Friedrich, University of Chicago (Professor of Linguistics)
“…Let us read Seremetakis between Marija Gimbutas and Julia Kristeva… Striking is the continuity between the Neolithic goddesses of birth and death revealed by Gimbutas’s archaeological excavations in the Balkans and the exhumation rituals performed a little further south by the women of Mani. Likewise, between the polyphonic laments of the Maniot women and the bodily polyphony celebrated by Kristeva’s poetics”…
American Ethnologist, Margaret Trawick (Massay University, New Zealand)
“A remarkable book. Anyone who thinks they already know how to address the relationship between death and the social order – or relations between men and women for that matter – should read this book. It is a powerful invitation to think again.”
Marilyn Strathern, University of Manchester, England (Professor of Anthropology)
“Seremetakis’s book which I enjoyed teaching…, is a passionately conceived ethnography of death as social experience.… Imagery, writing style, argument – all are explosive. There will be no dispassionate responses, but few will forget the effect.”
Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University (Professor of Social Medicine / Anthropology)
“…With this book, the term ‘participant observation’ takes on ‘new meaning’, while the author’s ‘analysis illuminates the dynamics of gender politics in a way that has not previously been researched in Greece or anywhere else’…”
Modern Greek Studies Yearbook
For the book THE SENSES STILL
“…“I am quite taken by the breath and depth of Seremetakis’s… The Senses Still.
…This volume provides a detailed anthropology of the way that memory has been shaped and shapes us through our technical means of cultural memory… A solid, intellectually daring book!”
Sandor Gilman, Cornell University (Professor, Germanic Studies)
“A thick satisfying soup of a book, with new flavors and new routes to rewriting a history of the senses. …A book to prod the anesthetized body of theory on modernity via a tour from early Hollywood camerawork on war to contemporary videowork on Rodney King, from newly opened body of Swedish interwar gymnasiums to the lost tastes of Grecian peaches…”
Catharine Lutz, University of North Carolina (Professor of Anthropology)
“The Senses Still explores areas of cultural life too complex, too experimental to be contained within the bounds of a traditional ethnography… An understanding of culture must include an examination of the role of the senses. Seremetakis…confronts us with this necessity.”
Jay Ruby, Temple University (Professor, Center for Visual Communication)
“…In most treatises, the body is examined as a text that is ‘read’ and ‘written’. In Seremetakis’s work, the body… is also experienced through the senses… Social science has much to gain from adopting her poetically sensual approach…”
Paul Stoller, Westchester University (Professor of Anthropology / Ethnographic Film)
“…I feel delighted to be part of the elaborate composition of this important volume…”
Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell University (Professor, Government Studies)
“…This book will loosen many anchored thoughts… It is clear that The Last Word was not and will not be the only text by Seremetakis that opens new horizons for us…”
Allen Feldman, Dept. of Culture & Communication, New York University (author & Professor of Anthropology)
*These reviews from abroad are from the archive of the University of Chicago Press publishing organization.
Recognizing the Everyday by C. Nadia Seremetakis
Travelling the World with People and Texts
Reviews & Comments in Greece
(Indicative)
Newspaper TO VIMA, 19/4/98,
Aris Maragkopoulos, Critic – Translator – Author
” …The three books, The Last Word, The Senses Still and Crossing the Body, of the anthropologist Seremetakis map an inexhaustible anthropological topos: the senses. …If the investigation of the unknown topos of the senses explains to some degree the enchantment that Seremetakis’s work exerts, the subversive way by which she achieves this enchantment, completes the picture – a picture that is heretical and unorthodox in the context of conventional anthropology. Seremetakis places the researcher to the position of the anthropological subject and visa versa. She in turn plays with the symbolic, emotional and performative use of everyday language. She reads sensory forms where classical anthropologists read mummified stereotypes, (in terms of her research subjects) she recognizes “donors” where others see mere “informants”, she moves through experiential fragments of the private which retrieve the collective memory that was fragmented by modernization, she mixes narrative tropes invisible to common scientific discourse; in short she merges the ethnographic with the biographical in the persona she herself terms “hybrid figure, the native anthropologist.” Following this dangerous route – dangerous because she does not adopt the neo-colonial gaze of the dominant discipline, the author is forced to constantly translate or, more accurately, transmute her voice… Seremetakis proves to the reader that she knows the origin of language in the senses as much as she knows the anthropological code… Those who will look into her texts will learn it through a most enjoyable reading…”
In the second book, entitled Repatriation of the Senses, the anthropologist initiates a dialogue with foreign thinkers on this terrain: What happens with the senses and sensory forces that haunt contemporary culture, memory and our identity? She herself outlines the parameters for a detailed discussion of the issue in Greek reality. Susan Buck-Morss addresses the same subject in its cinematic version, Jonas Frykman in Sweden during the interwar period, Allen Feldman in television, while, finally, Paul Stoller summarizes the dialogue with the previous contributors, emphasizing the necessity of sensory anthropology. The author’s third volume advances the same dialogue, but this time on the ground of the History of Culture and Gender in Greece. Bypassing the chronic issue of historical continuity, Seremetakis depicts a different continuity, one owed to the interventionist power of woman and gender… If the exploration of the unknown landscape of the senses explains to some extent the fascination exerted by Seremetakis’s work, the subversive way in which she achieves this completes the captivating picture…
Seremetakis renews the object of her science from the ground up, boldly shifting the subject / researcher into the position of the anthropological object. She plays with the symbolic, emotional and performative use of everyday language, reads artifacts where classical anthropologists read museum stereotypes, recognizes female and male donors where other anthropologists discern informants (informants, that is, traitors to their culture), turns to empirical fragments of the private—which nevertheless retrieve collective memory butchered by “modernization”—and finally mixes narrative modes not adopted by conventional scientific discourse; in short, she merges the ethnographic with the biographical in this genre that she herself calls “the hybrid figure known as the native anthropologist.”
Yet by following this dangerous path—dangerous insofar as it does not adopt the neo-colonial gaze of dominant science—the author is constantly compelled to translate, or more accurately to disguise, her discourse…
Seremetakis demonstrates to the reader that she has a sufficient command both of the explosiveness of the language of origin—that is, the senses—and of the endurance of the target language—that is, the anthropological code. She therefore confronts the problem through a process of repeated translations-disguises.
The discourse of the senses is, first of all, renamed; the sensory paradigm drawn from collective everyday life—the peach, the greens, the embroideries, coffee, dust, the sitting room, the shadows—dynamically renames collective sensation, “speaks by itself” the language Seremetakis seeks. On the other hand, the authentic discourse of the donor women of the Peloponnese, which she allows to penetrate her text actively and subversively, reinforces the fidelity of this first transposition…
This linguistic discourse is then translated once again: into the scientific/personal discourse of the anthropologist herself, who, as I said at the beginning, takes particular boldness in shifting herself between the position of a multiple subject (anthropologist, woman, Greek, etc.) and that of an anthropological object at the same time, insofar as she is involved in the sensory process of memory of her donors…
The third and final translation concerns the dominant anthropological code—that which, among other things, certainly does not speak Greek. Here, the author’s primary concern is not to conform to the rule of anthropological idiolect, but, on the contrary, to emancipate herself from it. Faced with this challenge, having traversed the two previous stages of translation and therefore of self-consciousness, discourse has only one possibility if it is to utter the ultimately unspeakable yet existent voice of the senses: to arrive at that same uncanny mode of expression generated by the archetypal mother of every language: poetry…
…We live in times when transaction is equated with cheap modernization, at every level; in literature this has taken the form of an epidemic. I therefore recommend Seremetakis’s anthropological mythistories as the most interesting, most vivid novels, compared with most of those circulating today…”
Newspaper KATHIMERINI, 9/10/91
“The Last Word inaugurates the perspective of “native anthropology” in European ethnography and especially in the anthropology of Greece. It opens the door to diachronic analysis of Greek culture and the investigation of self – knowledge that such analysis presupposes…”
Stoa tou Vivliou, March 12, 1998
Maria Damanaki, Member of Parliament / President, “Observatory for Women’s Rights”
“… In THE LAST WORD, a really remarkable piece of work by Seremetakis, ….one understands that pain is the lament itself – the lament is not the description of pain – it is the necessary tool …of pain. Pain unites speech with ritual movement, the sob… The mourning singer in her improvised lament presents the dead… just like the corypheus in the ancient tragedy – a parallelism successfully drawn and analyzed by Seremetakis. Precisely because she understood so deeply that pain – substance, that poetry – pain; and saw it not only with the eyes of her discipline but also through her own personal poetics…”
Stoa tou Vivliou, March 12, 1998
Katerina Angelaki-Rouk, Poet
“…In the ethnography The Last Word…, in this truly exceptional work, the ‘exile’ of the dead, which the author analyzes so fascinatingly, becomes simple, familiar, almost concrete.
The woman lamenter presents the dead person, describes him, like the coryphaeus of Greek tragedy—a parallel that Seremetakis draws and analyzes so successfully and so beautifully. Precisely because she herself understood so deeply this poetry-essence, this poetry-pain. And she saw it not only through the eyes of science, but also through her own personal poetic sensibility. This is, after all, also proven by the exceptional writing of her book The Last Word…”
Stoa tou Vivliou, March 12, 1998
Giannis Sakellarakis, Archaeologist, Professor & Author
“…I can speak about two of the most significant books of Nadia Seremetakis, THE LAST WORD and CROSSING THE BODY, from my own angle, that of a woman who very early in her life got actively involved in the androcentric social and political life of Greece and in this long process I had the opportunity to experience, observe, evaluate and reevaluate facts and events of gender behavior. Today, looking back I conclude with sadness that we lacked a scientific guide, a scientific base of “Women’s Studies” that women activists, women politicians would be able to go to and draw documentation and, why not, self knowledge.…
Checking ,out of personal interest, the international bibliography…and seeing the significance that gender had acquired in the various disciplines, I became aware of our gap and terrible lack in Greece… Given all this, I must stress the importance of the Greek publication of Seremetakis’s books. Nowhere in the international bibliography do we encounter anything parallel to her work. In my opinion her books do not simply add but they create a base of scientific quality and validity valuable to Greek researchers on gender issues…
Stoa tou Vivliou, March 12, 1998
Giannis Tsiolis, Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University
“… When referring to the work of Nadia Seremetakis we actually speak of the poetry of human science. And in this book presentation – event today we are presenting the poet – anthropologist Seremetakis… Specifically her ethnography THE LAST WORD is a highly original and exciting work that radically invigorates existing theories of the last two decades in anthropology, literature, sociology, performance studies, and changes the ethnographic writing bringing it closer to poetic discourse in the context of European Studies and beyond… Characteristic of her book is that rare position of the writer – researcher both inside and outside the culture under study… This gives a… richness in her writing which carries not only the strength of persuasion but the dynamics of imagination and daring…. Thus she opens horizons that her discipline itself has not yet thought of existing….”
Stoa tou Vivliou, March 12, 1998
Giorgos Andreopoulos, former Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Political Analyst
” …Looking at Seremetakis’ s work in general, we can say she always experiments and pioneers methodological and thematic exchanges between disciplines. There one discovers her extraordinary ability to investigate difference but also connections between apparently unrelated phenomena, issues and spaces and to masterfully montage scattered fragments. For her original, invigorating theory on montage we must read and reread THE SENSES STILL… Her writings which began appearing abroad since 1991, pose questions and answers that concern the most crucial problems in Greece today. And her answers which are not easy, are given to the reader poetically, opening horizons we did not know before….”
Archaeology magazine, no. 66, March 1998
“The Senses Still:
Α very interesting, path breaking for the Greek context, book…
The texts of the volume lead us to the understanding of culture through the senses that shape it…””
Theseis magazine, no. 55, 1996
“…there is one thing that makes her work unsurpassable: the development of her theory of performance as poesis. In THE LAST WORD the concept of poesis is restored to include all three realities: the ritualistically material, the social-functional and the imaginary. This synthetic conceptual foundation points to the interpretation of poesis that Diotima realized in Plato’s Symposium. After Diotima… Seremetakis is second in the history of ideas and the first after the domination of religious…misinterpretations of the Middle Ages… to restore poesis as material praxis, as social intervention and as imaginary conception of human social past, present and future.… THE LAST WORD is… a foundational work in Greek anthropology.
Eptakyklos magazine, May 1998
“…Unlike all other anthropological works …Seremetakis’s work is not a unidimensional anthropological study but combines scientific interest with poetic sensibility and realistic documentation with philosophical interpretation… Undoubtedly this intermarrying of science with poetics in her books created a work that represents a theoretical and methodolical break in the context of Humanities and Social Studies…”
Magazine POLITIKA THEMATA, 22/9/95
“…The Last Word:
Uniqueness and absolute originality in its methodological approach…
It highlights the social foundation and the scientific basis of the legal theorem that ‘custom, where it prevails, has the force of written law’…”
