Book Reviews

Monday, October 15, 2001

A Greek Island Cosmos is about kinship and community in the village of Spartokhori on the island of Meganisi, near Lefkadha in the Ionian Sea. Roger Just, an Australian social anthropologist who lived on Meganisi from 1977 to 1980, turns the relationship among these seemingly banal abstractions (kinship, community, village) into a question worthy – one might say, still worthy – of examination. Why and how, given all that we know about the past and present mobility of populations and individuals in rural Greece, are claims made and supported locally that the village is one family, that there is a solidarity of a distinct kind that characterizes Spartokhori, that the village community, bluntly put, exists? As Just defines it, community is not a function of a uniform cultural mentality or geographical isolation but an idea that people have about themselves as people who share particular values. His book traces a compelling story of how this works out in practice, how the rhetoric in part constitutes social life, how different rhetorics of identity compete.

In the wake of a flurry of village monographs from the Fifties through the Eighties, accusations were made by critical scholars that village studies are exoticizing and anachronistic in an urbanizing society, and that researchers should turn their attention to other contexts (urban, elite, migratory, etc.) – which indeed many subsequently did. Just makes a strong argument for leaving the village in the picture: it isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the only significant location, but it’s an enduringly significant one for Greece. A village study must be properly understood, and properly carried out, however. What this means according to Just is that the local site has to be analytically framed by a double process. On the one hand, the analysis has to be, as Just puts it, “historical and deconstructive.” The village isn’t a natural and indelible feature of the landscape but a thing that has an origin in time, experiences immigration and emigration, dissolves and is reinvented, and therefore – in sum – has none of that primordial quality subjectively attributed to it by its inhabitants and romantic observers. (Susan B. Sutton’s work has demonstrated the mutability of villages beyond a shadow of a doubt; see her 1994 “Settlement Patterns, Settlement Perceptions: Rethinking the Greek Village,” in P. Nick Kardulias, ed., Beyond the Site: Regional Studies in the Aegean Area.) The researcher’s job is to document that process.

On the other hand, however, a good analysis must also be “sociological and constructive.” That means that the research must also show how despite this historical fragmentation and entropy, cohesion and solidarity are socially regenerated through the local interpretation of everyday life (where they are, and one cannot assume that they always are). The key to all this is, of course, kinship – but how kinship does this is more complex than we might think. While this double agenda is not entirely original in current anthropology, I would argue that less attention has been paid of late to the second factor, sociological reconstruction, than to the first one, historical heterogeneity. It may be that Just’s book comes at a moment when the pendulum needs a slight correction in the direction of a sociology of interaction.

Just is, arguably, a classic social anthropologist whose questions about solidarity are not classically structural-functionalist. Fundamentally, he wants to know what the effects are on social reality of what people say they believe. For example, what if they say that their village is a good one, filled with a good people who look out for one another, but also that their fellow villagers are pimps and liars? Just gives this famous paradox of village life the most careful, balanced, and revealing scrutiny it has yet received in the literature. By indicating when something is said, he tracks the social impact of such assessments. They begin to make sense as acts. In one of his finest stories (pp. 246-254), he describes the minute gestures that constitute this elusive solidarity. In order to calm a fellow villager, a number of people (normally not his patrons) make a slight deviation in their routines to stop by his coffee shop for a drink. Nothing much is said, but the gesture is effective; not in resolving the longstanding conflict between the main antagonists, but in providing the context for suffering conflict – support in hard times. People do this because while they believe that their neighbors are roufianoi, they also say that their people are good people. Consequently, in social life, even the “charades” (p. 167) can heal wounds.

When Just went to Spartokhori looking for a “village” and “villagers,” he quickly found that the Spartokhoriots were a diverse lot. Some families had been on the island for a long time, some had immigrated quite recently; some had a good deal of experience of the greater world from Athens to Australia (a few, quite disconcertingly, even had doctorates). The history of the island revealed quite dramatic shifts in class structure and subsistence from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with a postwar economy that had thrived on emigration and employment in the merchant marine. Despite this complexity, the villagers themselves proclaimed their solidarity. Peculiarly, they did so by asserting two apparently contradictory things. First, “We are all foreigners here”; and, second, “We are all one family.” Just did not think the sense of community was an illusion (either his or theirs), and set about discovering how it was produced. In closely argued chapters, he examines, in turn, the kinship system and its terminology; godparenthood; friendship; household and inheritance; romance and dowry. The chapter on kinship terms argues that the idiom of consanguineal relatedness extends to include even relatives by marriage – thus incorporating, sometimes retrospectively, new immigrants through marriage ties. Godparenthood ties together just about everybody else into a further network of complementary relatedness. Thus kinship and spiritual kinship networks are so extensive and overlapping that they cannot distinguish ipso facto corporate groups; but this is not to say that they do not create group identities, because Just’s argument is that collective groups may exist even where they are not corporate (that is, discrete kinship bodies that act as a unit in all, or several, areas of life.) It turns out to be no exaggeration that Spartokhori is one family, given its system of reckoning. At the same time, because kinship is everywhere, it can’t be the main determinant of social actions and interest groups; so Just devotes a good deal of attention to where and when “kin” cooperate or fall out. Some of the best material relates to the fissioning of households (the diagram describing one house, on p. 194, is a masterpiece).

Just stays far away from general discussions of “culture.” His prose is not by and large descriptive or evocative – more prosaic than poetic, as befits the spirit of human compromise (oikonomia) that is the book’s subject. And yet the reader is brought close to the local texture of life by means of carefully drawn family histories and Just’s own stories and dialogues from fieldwork. He is a talented observer of social life. His descriptions of the delicate relationship of fathers and sons, of the problems of brothers who are both the epitome and the nemesis of the ideals of kinship, and of courtship, are extremely perceptive. Some of his stories are also very funny. There’s a depth and comprehensiveness to this ethnography that is almost novelistic.

The fieldwork on which the book is based was carried out between 1977 and 1980. This time lapse would appear to pose something of a problem (though it is not so a rare a situation). The first question is what to do about the effects of the passage of time on Spartokhori as an object of description. Anthropologists once freely exploited a rhetorical device called the “ethnographic present,” in which the present tense of the monograph was meant to indicate a kind of structural, rather than chronological, time: an infinite present that constituted the logic of culture. This is no longer intellectually defensible, and anthropologists talk quite specifically about the time, place, and conditions of their research – which is generally a loosely defined “present” (except where the research is explicitly ethnohistorical). But anthropology is not journalism, and the point is not primarily to translate a reality synchronic with the present time of the reader, but rather to translate the synchronicity of a reality – in other words, the actuality of social experience.

At the same time, John Peristiany observed to Just (p. 5) that anthropology is the study of “what is,” and Just’s book is not a history but a picture of the period of his intervention. Although he briefly registers the changes that have occurred between 1980 and 1994 (the year of his last visit to Meganisi) in an epilogue, the book is not a long-range survey. Yet because it is not (and is not meant to be) a picture of a bygone way of life (indeed, it focuses very little on paradigmatically rural aspects of village life) – still less a lament for lost virtues – the book can be “read historically” (as Just suggests on p. 259) without a sense of irrelevance. In other words, it can be understood as part of the flow of time. It may seem paradoxical, but it is precisely the depth of detail that prevents the book from being dated. Just’s subject matter is social interaction, and it remains fresh. The tensions Just describes between the claims of common virtue and the threads of mistrust – between a local life (life being local everywhere) and a cosmopolitan world – are not, as far as I have been able to gauge, datable. Nonetheless, the changes that have occurred on Meganisi since the time of the fieldwork do pose challenges to Just’s central thesis concerning the socially and ideologically constructed community of Spartokhori – for example, a (re-)emerging class stratification may very much strain the family metaphor.

The second question this late publication presents is quite different. Just’s fieldwork took place during – or slightly before – an explosion of (especially Anglophone and French) field research in rural and urban Greece. Much of that research has now been published (Just also takes important unpublished doctoral theses such as that of Mari Clark into account) and the field seems glutted with monographs of Greek village life. Just himself has published well-known articles on various subjects from nationalism to naming to Orthodoxy. How does one place a new monograph on an older period of research within this scenario? Just seems refreshingly without straw horses to beat; he makes no claim that previous ethnographies are generally (or particularly) deficient. (His most serious objection is to Julian Pitt-Rivers’s over-generalizing claims regarding spiritual kinship in the Mediterranean. Pitt-Rivers – in his 1974 “Ritual Kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans,” in J.G. Peristiany, ed., Mediterranean Family Structures – argued that spiritual kinship in this area is basically a contract between individuals and emphasizes individuation; Just sees godparenthood as part of a system of collective reciprocity.) With the array of earlier and later monographs before him, Just engages in a kind of comparative, synthetic, and reflective discussion of the issues raised by his own data by means of a range of other case studies. If a reader wanted to know something about the social anthropology of Greece, Just’s book would be a good place to start. He gives his own data of the late Seventies the advantages of a maturing field, while offering intelligent reconsideration to the wider field.

Of course, not everything is included in Just’s picture. While a focus on kinship and community might sound immensely broad, it is in fact quite specific; Just’s viewpoint was that of a young foreign man to whom certain persons and sites were inevitably more available than others (notably, of course, the domestic life of women was more or less off-limits, and conversely the magazia were especially accessible.) There are some missing bits in the history (very little on the Second World War and Civil War periods). I feel that Just might more creatively have used some resources outside the Greek corpus he knows so well (Charles Lindholm’s 1982 work on male kin and male friendship, for example, Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan). Finally, I would have been interested to hear more from Just about time and ethnography. While his introduction does include reflections on the field – past and recent directions in ethnography, in Greece and elsewhere – he says relatively little about his own experience of researching, writing, and thinking in the temporal context of this book.

If anthropology at some point was – and is popularly still thought to be – in fear of losing its subjects, Just’s book is another proof that we can sleep soundly at night. Researchers continue to write monographs – island studies, city studies, studies of networks and corporations – as the world changes, and, mysteriously, as Just argues, people continue to generate the stuff of social life: its rhetorics of identity, its attempts at collective action and individual distinction. Nothing, in the end, really depended on the illusion of the isolated village. What counts for Just is not the system of kinship, or relative isolation, or integration into world markets, but what ideology makes of these matters: the “way people think” (p. 127). In that sense, “relative isolation” may be, not only the best description of the past, but the stable – if virtual – description of the present and future.