Description
Book SynopsisMaps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps" - places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book explores an example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 2006 William A. Douglass Award, American Anthropological Association Winner of the 2007 Honor Book Award, New Jersey Council for the Humanities "Notes from the Balkans is a penetrating and richly textured account of marginality in the Epirus area of north-western Greece... Sarah Green's text... provides a subtle and persuasive tool for thinking about the contextual specificity of social identities ... that will be pertinent far beyond the Balkans."--Madeleine Reeves, Cambridge Anthropology "Sarah Green's wide-ranging discussion of 'Balkan' history, emphasizing circuits of movement, is engaging and enlightening. The book's theoretical discussions are dense ... but not turgid; Green has a light, direct, and unpretentious style of writing. Notes from the Balkans gives readers a visceral sense of the 'ordinary' and, I think, a better idea about marginality. It is a delightful book to read."--Laurie Kain Hart, American Ethnologist "The book's principal contributions are twofold: First, it adds magnificent new ethnographic information about an area that has not been systematically studied by a foreign anthropologist since the pioneering work of John Campbell. Second, it applies a brilliant theoretical discussion of marginality, identity, and ambiguity to a setting in which concepts and categories, or affiliations and labels, have been under constant change. This is a well-researched, masterfully written, and theoretically sophisticated study that is unique in both conception and analysis... This is a quality study that should reach out to a wider audience of area specialists, not only to anthropologists."--Anastasia Karakasidou, American Anthropologist
Table of ContentsList of Maps and Figures ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Notes on Transliteration, Translation, and Pseudonyms xvii CHAPTER 1: Marginal Margins 1 CHAPTER 2: Travels 40 CHAPTER 3: Moving Mountains 89 CHAPTER 4: The Balkan Fractal 128 CHAPTER 5: Counting 159 CHAPTER 6: Embodied Recounting 176 CHAPTER 7: Developments 218 APPENDIX: Tables 249 Notes 261 Bibliography 279 Index 297
