Crossing Borders
A documentary series about prominent figures who excel in their respective fields and help create a better tomorrow for us all. It captures their lives and thoughts, “steals” a few moments from them, and offers the joy of the meaningful connection we were able to share with them.
The book Creating Tomorrow, like the television documentary, enters into dialogue with people who live the future as the present and who have shaped its coordinates according to their own inner sense of time, regardless of age. These are people whose contribution, dynamism and work concern us all, not merely on an informational level but in a deeper and more meaningful sense. Contact with them can help make us better human beings. For this reason, such a record of words and thoughts becomes especially important today, in the course of an era that, amid its speed, is forgetting its deeper self.
The guests featured in the documentary and in this volume have demonstrated through their lives and work that they are capable of resisting the sweeping emptiness and the allure of easy solutions.
They all possess the gift of genuine generosity and had the openness to share it, engaging tirelessly with us throughout the many demanding hours of television filming, as well as during our lengthy meetings for this publication.
Papaioannou Publications
– You have published numerous books and articles in Greece and abroad. One of them is the well-known ethnography The Last Word at Europe’s Edge: Sensory Experience, Death, Women, a foundational work in the field of Greek anthropology. How would you define it?
An ethnography about the border and as a border. It stands at the threshold between life and death, dream and waking reality, tradition and modernity, periphery and centre. It is a book of concentrated, unresolved historical tensions.
– This book is the result of many years of fieldwork. What important lessons did the women of Mani teach you over all those years?
The Greek concept of poetry.
– What does that mean?
It signifies both material creation and imagination. For the poetics of the periphery always concerns the imaginary dimension of material worlds, objects and persons that come into being and pass away. In Inner Mani, for example, this imaginary dimension emerges from women’s relationship with death.
– You write poetry yourself. You once surprised us at an international scientific conference of palaeoanthropologists in Mani when, instead of the customary opening address we expected, we heard you improvise—like a traditional woman from Inner Mani—an eight-syllable poem-lament, which was even hailed as a “masterpiece” and published in various print media…
(Laughs…) Yes, it was entitled Response Speech. It was another inscription of The Last Word. Incidentally, in anthropology this is called ethnopoetics.
– The Last Word is a book that deals, among other things, with the subject of death. How did you come to choose such a theme when you yourself were still so young at the time?
(Laughs…) I did not choose the subject. Rather, the subject chose me… When I began my fieldwork, I intended to study the pirates and bandits of the region. Before long, I found myself attending three or four death rituals every week. “Here is the subject of the story,” I thought.
– And yet you often speak and write about love.
Love and death: concepts inextricably linked in Greek thought and culture…
– You write with passion. What does passion mean to you?
The point at which love and death converge—by death, I mean here the death of the self.
– What, ultimately, is anthropology for you?
It is “the study of people in crisis by people in crisis.”
– What would you compare such anthropological research to?
To a poem. What about Cavafy’s Ithaka?
You embark on the journey young and emerge with white hair…
– How do you “edit” all these experiences into the text? I use the term because you speak of “montage,” something that, among other things, has also made your work popular in the field of documentary filmmaking.
The process of assembling and editing the text reflects the dynamics of ethnographic research and inquiry, imitating the unexpected juxtapositions of ethnographic field experience. The ethnographer might be described as a “detective.” Entering a society from a particular place or perspective and suspecting one “culprit,” a series of unexpected “signs” and clues leads the researcher elsewhere, to an unforeseen place and to a whole range of other “culprits.” The combination of these “signs,” and the dynamic movement through what appears to be disconnected, reveals the underlying social and historical structure.
– You began with literature and poetry. How did you go on to pursue the social sciences, specifically sociology and anthropology?
The Social Sciences, and Sociology in particular as a new form of critical discourse, held great promise in Greece after the dictatorship. I pursued this path and undertook postgraduate studies at New York University. The particular school placed strong emphasis on quantitative research methods, such as statistical analysis and computer programming, skills that later proved useful in my life, although they did not inspire me at the time. I was experiencing cultural difference on a daily basis and searching for a way to interpret it… I turned to Anthropology, where I completed another M.A. and continued on to a Ph.D. This involved four years of postgraduate study and one year of fieldwork before beginning to write the dissertation. During the course of study, one trained across a range of disciplines concerned with the study of “humanity,” including archaeology, sociolinguistics, biological and physical anthropology, cultural and social anthropology, and ethnological theory.
– Do you represent the American School of Anthropology?
(Smiles thoughtfully.) It would be better to say that by now I represent my own school… Yet even a glance much earlier, back to my postgraduate years, reveals that the boundaries between schools, like all boundaries, are permeable. I studied at a graduate university in New York, The New School for Social Research, which, although located in the United States, had been founded by a European diaspora of intellectuals exiled by the Nazis, among them Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Hannah Arendt and others. Their experience across two continents left no room, either in their politics or in their theories, for naïve Europhilia and anti-Americanism, or for Americanophilia and Europhobia. Like every diaspora, they unfolded their identities and theories through multiple cultural codes. It was an ideal environment for an advanced anthropology of its time.
The British, French and other schools of anthropology, as they had developed within their national contexts, were not merely known there but were closely followed and studied at this university, which promoted a broad and comprehensive understanding of anthropology, always in relation to current global events.
This was not the case in European schools of anthropology, which were far more clearly defined by and connected to their national political and linguistic identities. In Greece, categorising anthropology by schools tends rather to indicate an inadequate knowledge and experience of the discipline. It also reveals the absence of a cross-cultural perspective on the history of anthropology and on its methodological differences from the other social sciences.
– Do you consider your research in Mani or Messenia a “return home” after a long journey abroad?
There is no going back.
– Your books were received with enthusiasm by the international academic community. What about the Greek academic community?
(In a measured tone.) By those members of the academic community who are not content with mediocrity and do not feel threatened by excellence…
– Beyond their scholarly authority and literary style, your books have also been widely commented upon for their overall aesthetic qualities…
Ugly books? (She almost becomes angry.) It is like giving birth to children and allowing others to dress them in rags…
– You often speak about the book’s “other languages”…
(Pacing as she runs her fingers over one of her books.) A book is a “speaking object” that activates various internal and external languages. Most readers, especially readers of scholarly books, read a book for what it says; in other words, they consume the content of the internal text. But in how many other ways can a book be read? Through how many different means and voices does a book communicate? I do not mean only the different forms of writing used by the author, but also how these are presented. What is the book’s internal structure, and how is it externalised? How is the body of the book dressed? A book therefore has an “inside” and an “outside”: pages and cover, an underlying structure of ideas and their visual realisation. At the same time, a book is a cultural artefact, a material object with form, shape and colour, and with a history connected to the history of other books, to publishing history and to the history of reading within the particular culture in which it is produced. I remember, for example, that when I once explained to my foreign publisher that, until recently, books in Greece did not include a publication date, he was left speechless… He had assumed that some dates from older editions that were “missing” from my bibliography had been omitted by me.
– The book’s “other languages” also raise the question of translation. What is it like to translate one’s own books into Greek?
Someone who has lived across many places does not simply operate through multiple linguistic codes, but through multiple cultural codes as well. When bringing a book—or any creative work produced abroad—back to Greece, one moves from one code to another and from one social understanding to another. In such work, cross-cultural experience has already been used as an essential element of the creative imagination.
For that reason, I was not merely carrying out or supervising the technical act of translation. I had to create a new work out of the old one—one capable of translating and transferring my foreign cultural experience so that it could be constructed, understood and received within Greece.
Το ίδιο συμβαίνει όταν μεταφέρω ένα δημιουργικό ελληνικό έργο μου στον αγγλόφωνο κόσμο. Όταν μεταφέρω έργο μου από τη μια γλώσσα στην άλλη δεν νοιώθω ότι μεταφράζομαι…
– This book of yours has followed a trajectory that is both interesting and significant. It was first published in 1991 by the distinguished academic press the University of Chicago Press, and it was also the first monograph on Greece that the press had published. Your research work was recognised abroad at a very early stage by major academic funding bodies. Your next book, published in 1994, became the subject of negotiations among publishing houses. Your books and articles have been taught in university courses not necessarily concerned with Greece, thereby crossing the boundaries of anthropology and, clearly, those of Greek Studies as well. How important were these developments then, and how important are they now, for Greek Studies and for the “Greek” book?
For Greek scholarship abroad, it was perhaps significant that, in a field such as Anthropology and the Humanities—where Greece had until then largely been an object of study for foreign researchers—a Greek name, presenting a study on Greece, was making a strong and visible contribution. This was especially important at a time when contemporary Greek books, scholarly or otherwise, enjoyed neither wide recognition nor broad circulation and were therefore unable to cross the boundaries of the “Greek ghetto.”
– It is said that your work, in general, is entirely self-made…
(With a penetrating gaze.) If you mean that it never had male “mentors,” whether fathers or husbands, then yes.
– The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, first published in 1994, addressed at an early stage a subject that is highly relevant today: the senses. Could we describe it as a prophetic book…?
I would call it inter-sensory. Senses – emotions – aesthetics: the core of Greek identity. The book examines what has happened to our senses and to the sensory forces that shape our culture, memory and identity. What happens when perception and memory are globalised through the homogenisation of material experience? What role do television, cinema and the EEC play in all this?
– But can the senses be placed in a museum?
The past, once collected, encased and framed, becomes a past emptied of semantic possibility, because its meaning has been completed, exhausted and consumed. In other words, it has been transformed into historical dust. The historical and cultural difference introduced into the museum is installed as a surface without depth, without any record of the exchanges that produced it, and is therefore emptied of emotion, memory and the senses…
– Dust, you said?
(Smiles knowingly.) Dust does not settle only on the object, but on the eye as well…
– I remember the presentation of three of your books at the Stoa tou Vivliou. On the one hand, there was a very large and diverse audience and, on the other, seven distinguished speakers—archaeologists, poets, literary authors, legal scholars and politicians—a combination that reflected precisely the multidimensional character of your texts. These are texts that travel across many places. Which place is dearest to you?
The border.
– You have travelled to many places for research and related activities. When did your journey begin?
(In a calm, measured tone.) From childhood, I divided my life between the southern Peloponnese—Laconia and Messenia—and Athens. Later, between New York and Athens. Research, comparative studies and other activities were added, and the journey from the so-called centre to the periphery and back again continued… the United States, Mani, Mexico, Ireland, Albania, Zagreb, Krakow, Vienna, Italy, Tunisia, Kalamata, Copenhagen, Athens…
– Your teaching career in academia also began early. You have taught in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at renowned universities, including departments of Anthropology, Hellenic Studies, Theatre Studies, Women’s Studies and Communication (Mass Media), and you have often combined appointments in two schools simultaneously. What is it like to cross boundaries?
Dangerous. (We burst into laughter.) You have to bring into dialogue two disciplines or specialisations that often ignore one another. Just think, for example, of Anthropology and Hellenic Studies ten or twenty years ago! Or… Women’s Studies and Hellenic Studies today!!! (Loud laughter.)
– Was this something you actively sought out yourself—that is, did you apply to teach in two schools at the same time—or was it dictated by circumstances? And when did you first apply for a university position?
I have never applied for a university position. Wherever I taught, whether for a short or a long period and in one or more schools, it was always by invitation. I began teaching during my postgraduate years, in 1983, if I remember correctly…
– Reading or listening to letters and evaluations from your students is deeply moving. For many of them, you “opened windows” onto thought and life. What did you, in turn, gain from your “students”?
My theoretical approaches, for example, as they appear in my writings, would not have emerged without these dialogues—whether expressed or silent—with friends and students across two continents over all these years…
– From early on, you have also taken part in major international gatherings, where we encounter you variously as a keynote speaker, co-organiser or organiser, almost always by invitation. On the Internet, you are cited by international organisations and aggregators alike. Does this make you a “public figure” in the world of letters?
There are certain hierarchies of substance in the world of letters, as there are everywhere. There are also certain international codes… (She smiles, shaking her head.) Your question is a good one, given the realities of Greece…
– Do such rules apply within the Greek academic world?
Many things are disregarded within the Greek university system. Speaking of education, there is something noteworthy about Greek television: the exemplary way in which journalists refer to their colleagues. Today, it seems that the ethos and respect due to people with recognised work and many years of professional activity are taught more by Greek television journalists than by academics.
– The university is supposed to be “the space for the free circulation of ideas,” as you also write in your thought-provoking article “Interconnected Information or Knowledge” in the newspaper TA NEA. In your view, what distinguishes a true intellectual, a person of letters?
Generosity of spirit. The creator does not hold back… The administrator does.
– The body is another theme that runs through almost all of your work. In brief, what has become of the body in our time?
Fast food. Rapid consumption for momentary release.
– With your book Crossing the Body, you initiate, among other things, a methodological and thematic exchange between disciplines that use ethnological models in exploring ancient and modern Greece. More specifically, you bring Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies into dialogue, thereby offering the Greek reader a kind of “curriculum” in the anthropology of women and gender. Referring to your work, a well-known politician remarked that “there is nothing comparable anywhere in the international literature. Your books do not simply add to the field; they establish a foundation of scholarly quality and authority that is invaluable to Greek women and men researchers working on issues of women’s social gender…” What do “Women’s Studies” mean to you?
Women’s Studies constitute the institutional memory of the women’s movement in particular and of women’s culture more broadly.
They provide historical and cultural comparability, thereby promoting intellectual exchanges among women living in different times and places.
– How did Women’s Studies emerge?
At a certain point, as women wrote—and inscribed—themselves into history through political mobilisation, they became aware of the extent to which they had been written out of history in the official records. This gave rise to the need for the study of women.
– What do you believe should be one of the central concerns of the “European women’s movement” today?
How the otherness of women’s everyday experience can be reclaimed as a political force. And when it comes to the political recovery of the validity of women’s everyday structures, there is a wealth of material from the periphery—in Greece, the rest of Europe and elsewhere—that can serve as a valuable source, allegory and form of symbolic capital.
Perhaps, with this capital as a guide, Greek women would not so readily assimilate into a male culture of the public sphere, which, after all, seems to place men themselves under suffocating pressure…
– You have also maintained an intense sphere of activity beyond the university… In addition to serving as a consultant to international organisations, ministries and other institutions, we also find you involved in Greek local government. The Municipality of Oitylo in Mani, together with the Prefectural Authority of Laconia, invited you to deliver the ceremonial address for the national anniversary of the Battle of Diros and presented you with an honorary plaque in recognition of your work. The Municipality of Kalamata, in collaboration with the Prefectural Authority of Messenia, commissioned you to create a series of cultural events, and so on. This, of course, is not the usual role or activity of an anthropologist—at least not as we know it in Greece…
That is not the usual role or activity of an “academic”; for an anthropologist, however, it is—or ought to be…
– Those who followed your cultural programme in Kalamata closely regard it as “exemplary”. In the newspaper Kathimerini, a well-known journalist wrote that you had overturned the rule that “one swallow does not make a spring” in the provinces… What exactly happened there? Give us an idea, for example, of the thinking behind the event on the 1986 earthquakes, which you organised in 1996, and the celebrated “exhibition of objects of memory” in Kalamata.
The act of preserving the popular memory of the earthquake was an intervention in culture. It was an exhibition of how we remember our history—and memory is an artefact of culture. If the earthquake’s assault was an affront to culture, then the memories and their material traces, salvaged by citizens excavating their own lives and past, constituted a restoration of the place’s cultural trajectory: an archaeology of the present… These were events, then, through which I wanted to create space both for public memory and for alternative memories. And… memory is not merely a source of ideas; it also has material and sensory dimensions. Memory can be located in the emotional attachment to particular places—places with their own bio-history, carrying biographies within them. Memory can be found embodied, in miniature, in objects that trigger profound emotions and narratives. Memory is connected with sounds, smells, sights…
– Back then, in 1996, you also said something that, like anything ahead of its time, may have sounded excessive: “Although the 1986 earthquake in Kalamata, given the scale of the destruction it caused, was quickly inscribed in the popular consciousness as an isolated event in the modern history of one region, when Enceladus struck Aigio, Grevena and Athens, we realised that the earthquake is a national experience.” Soon afterwards, of course, the earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan and once again Greece confirmed your observation that “we live in the age of earthquakes”.
(After a brief silence.) Perhaps we need new methods for apprehending historical experience and transforming it into public knowledge, into education. Today, our built environment and architectural space may need to relinquish their aspirations to eternity through ancient monuments. Perhaps the built environment should become a more living membrane within which citizens can inscribe and grasp the fluidity, immediacy and indeterminacy of everyday life. Perhaps we must learn to live in unfinished cities, in cities of polyphonic history. Perhaps this is precisely what the present condition of the entire ecosystem demands. Here, geography and history mirror one another: shifting tectonic plates are the geological counterparts of the constantly changing foundations of historical consciousness.
– Your related essay, The Other City of Silence, published in a volume produced by those involved in the “Vienna International Festival 2000”, is striking. It could have been written today, in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attack in New York… What would you say to young people today, amid all these overwhelming events through which we are living?
We live in the age of earthquakes… “The future is certain. What is unpredictable is the past.”
See the ET1 documentaryCreating Tomorrow»
