Identity, Nationalism and Anthropologists

This paper is about the ambiguous relationships between Europe and the Mediterranean as they are revealed in the anthropological studies on modern Greece. Although anthropological understanding is now considered richer when historical knowledge complements fieldwork, this was not the case in the pre-1990s studies, when anthropology stayed away both from social time and from historical and political science research within the country. This paper examines the difference between the native and the non-native points of view in anthropology and claims that this difference is best studied in the context of the post WWII world order, where the 'western' model dominated unhindered in the 'free world', creating inequalities between center and periphery. The ethnography of Greece brings out problems of method related to cultural distance between observer and observed in a European context, where this distance is less explicit. While many studies have focused on the paradox of Greece's incomplete inclusion in the West, the opposite question has now to be dealt with: is the ‘western' ethnographer ‘at home' in Greece? How is one to define what distinguishes the ethnographer's world from the world where the observed belong