Notes on the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border (review)

No one who reads Sarah Green’s book on the Epirus region of Greece will think of the Balkans in the same way again. Green provides the reader with a meticulously crafted study of how villagers—in this case, those of the largely barren landscape of Pogoni on the Greek-Albanian border—construct the places where they live, move and circulate through, and upon which they (barely) subsist. What began as an archaeological project evolved, through several incarnations, into an extensive ethnographic study of the region. Green’s analysis was influenced during her “wanderings around Epirus” by her work with specialists from a variety of disciplines, including agronomy, geology, and geography. What makes this study of these seemingly ordinary people and places compelling is Green’s intricate theoretical argument that combines the principles of Euclidean geometry, geomorphology and tectonics, cartography, and statistics with more familiar anthropological perspectives on belonging and place. In her efforts to navigate a space characterized by its “lack of distinction,” the author succeeds in not only challenging traditional anthropological takes on marginality, ambiguity, and identity, but in providing new insights into hallowed anthropological preoccupations with “the local.” Marginality, in particular, which as Green points out has been the dominant theme of ethnographic work on Greece, receives special attention as a state of “being and not being someone and somewhere in particular” (p. 14).

Green takes the reader on a journey through the scrubby margins of the Balkans and into the lives of what appear to be the unremarkable inhabitants of an ecologically degraded and neglected environment. Despite the relative lack of scholarly interest in the region, its borders have historically been a site of conflict and contestation by numerous political players, including the former USSR, China, Germany and, more recently, the European Union and NATO. Its current inhabitants—among them mostly elderly Turks, Albanians, Greeks, and Vlachs—have subsisted on an increasingly unforgiving landscape and adapted to borders that have, over time, been both opened and closed to their movements. Regardless of their origins, however, they insist that they are “just Greek,” a revelation to those accustomed to interpreting difference in the Balkans through the prism of nationalism and ethnic distinctiveness. The phrase, “This is the Balkans, Sarah; what do you expect?” expressed by one of her informants, initially caught the author off guard and had the effect of challenging her efforts to “figure it out” (p. 13). Green continuously points to the importance of indeterminacy in making sense of how the people of Pogoni reflect on and respond to forces both within and outside of their control. Here is where Green makes one of the most important theoretical contributions, specifically the discussion of “fractals.” Chapter Four, “Balkan Fractals,” stands out as one of the most penetrating analyses and critiques of the Balkans, a region that has been constructed hegemonically as “mixed up,” frustrating efforts to pin it down or, better yet, fix it, through political and other interventions. Pogoni has remained “the same and different” (p. 17), in short fractal, with no edges, beginning, or end (p. 135). One emerges from reading this analysis with an understanding and appreciation more of the relational quality of fractals (earlier theorized by Marilyn Strathern [1991] and Roy Wagner [1991]) than of their endless fragmentation. Chapters Five and Six, on the use and abuse of statistical tabulations in representations of people, places, and things, are an invaluable resource for those interested in the consequences of classification(s) in identity production.

To write a book of this depth and complexity, in a style that is at once witty, clear, honest, and engaging, is a rare skill in ethnographic writing. Snippets of dialogue and conversation are seamlessly woven into the text in a way that enhances the reader’s appreciation of the ordinary, rather than the more usual habit of quoting the extraordinary. Finally, the study is a stellar example of what can be accomplished without the...