Liquid Landscapes and Fluid Pasts

Liquid Landscapes and Fluid Pasts

Contingent Countryside: Settlement, Economy, and Land Use in the Southern Argolid since 1700. Edited by Susan Buck Sutton. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xii + 391. 38 illustrations, 6 maps. Cloth $90.00.

The shadow thrown over the popular imagination of modern Greece and its living people by classical Greece—in particular by classical archaeology—has been a perennial irritant to social and cultural anthropology. But Modern Greek scholarship is long past the dead-end of monumentalism, survivalism, and orientalism. In literature (Margaret Alexiou is the core example; 2002a, 2002b) as well as in the social sciences, synchronic studies have integrated regional and diachronic perspectives—and vice versa—to produce a far richer understanding of social reality and expressive culture. In archaeology, a paradigm shift has moved the discipline away from the purely monumental towards processual, multidisciplinary regional scale studies (Kardulias 1994:5) and the material culture of daily life. In social anthropology, Greek ethnography has not abandoned synchronic "village" studies (Just 2000) but builds a sense of the present on history and metahistory (David Sutton 1998; Karakasidou 1997; Papailias 2005) and a critical understanding of tradition (Stewart 1991; Manos 2003) and of place (Green 2005). As Sutton observes in the introduction to her edited volume, Contingent Countryside, ethnography has abandoned its pursuit of "normative rules and enduring cycles" for a conception of "strategy and circumstance" (p. 2). This embrace of Braudelian triple-layered time and refracted world systems theory has been productively pursued by regional interdisciplinary teams of archaeologists, historians and ethnographers in the Peloponnese (Nemea, the Argolid, and Messenia—e.g. Lee 2001), northern Greece (Macedonia, Epirus), and the islands (Kea). The result is a rewarding scholarship of place, grounded in an attention to regional relationships and to the fluidity and flexibility of settlement over time, as Michael Jameson notes in the foreword to the volume (p. xi).

Contingent Countryside is the fourth in a series of publications resulting from the Argolid Exploration Project (AEP). Previous volumes focused on the archaeology, prehistory, and ecology of the Southern Argolid (see Kardulias 1994). The AEP is not alone in its multidisciplinary approach: precursors of the AEP include the Minnesota Messenia Expedition, and the British School Melos project; successors include the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (Wright et al., 1990). The approach is not, strictly speaking, new to Greek studies (see, for example, Sutton's review of the field in Sutton, 1994). The edited volume Regional Variation in Modern Greece (Dimen and Friedl 1976) anticipated, in its careful attention to historical change, population movements, and social agency, later critiques of rural anthropology; and several of the same authors have contributed to Contingent Countryside. Regional Variation was influential—though possibly not influential enough—in the development of rural ethnography in the past decades in Greece.

The broad charter of the AEP was to comprehend 50,000 years of human settlement in the region (Jameson xi). While the present volume focuses on the period from 1700 to the present and foregrounds ethnographic research, it retains the guiding sense of the larger time scale of the AES project. The volume draws a vivid picture of the material culture of rural life and this materiality helps us to grasp what life was, and is, like in the countryside: houses, fields, animals, textiles, pots, as well as social relations, subsistence strategies, inheritance, and systems of exchange are brought into focus as living "arrangements"—contingent, as the title explains, but sensual and embodied. The fifteen chapters by twelve contributors (plus two valuable appendices by Forbes and Sutton on land and population) address a range of diverse but related topics: history and demography (Topping, Sutton), agropastoral economies from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries (Forbes, H. A. Koster, Adams), material culture, settlement and houses (Clarke, Chang, Murray and Kardulias), class and the provincial town (Petronoti) and craft production (Kardulias and J. B. Koster). The authors are all well-established scholars with...