In the French Tradition: Review Article

Reviews 127 pp. 263ff. (passim): the discussion of verb mood—admittedly a very messy area for definitive categorizations—is somewhat problematic; labelling the verbal element that occurs with tha to form the future tense as a "subjunctive form" leads to the confusing consequence that a subjunctive form is used in creating indicative mood forms (for Eleftheriades throughout refers—rightly in my opinion—to the future tense as indicative mood) p. 480: the distinction Eleftheriades draws between derived and phrasal conjunctions (e.g., óspu versus^« na) may not be a valid one, since the parts ofya na (if indeed it is synchronically analyzable) are just as inseparable as those of óspu p. 511ff.: all of chapter 14 ("Words with More than One Usage") begs the important question of how one can tell that two functionally distinct forms are in fact the "same" word; I doubt that deictic na and the subordinating conjunction (subjunctive particle) na are the same word in any meaningful sense of "same," and similar considerations hold for the various^a's (preposition, disjunctive conjunction, and emphatic particle) p. 525: the mi that negates individual words (e.g., mi andaláximos) never occurs with a final -n, and thus is probably to be kept distinct from the other negative particle(s) mi(n). Even with the shortcomings noted above, Eleftheriades has created here a useful and useable descriptive grammar of modern Greek. The thoroughness and the wealth of detail, in particular, are the two most significant virtues of this book. Careful cross-referencing of related sections, a detailed table of contents, and an index all enhance the book's utility. Moreover, I myself learned something from it, and trust that most students of the language—at all levels— would be glad for such a work to turn to when necessary. Eleftheriades is to be commended for her efforts in producing this volume. Brian D. Joseph The Ohio State University In the French Tradition: Review Article Maria Couroucli, Les oliviers du lignage. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. 1985. Pp. 169. Marie-Elisabeth Handman, La violence et la ruse: Hommes et femmes dans un village grec, Mondes méditerranéens, La Calade, Aix-en-Provence : Edisud. 1983. Colette Piault, éd., Famille et biens en Grèce et à Chypre, Histoire et Perspectives Méditerranéennes. Paris: L'Harmattan. .1985. Pp. 326. 128 Reviews The sudden spate of publications on Greek ethnography emanating from France is welcome indeed. While it does not appear to represent as radical a departure from British and American models as Francophone anthropology has often achieved elsewhere, it both confirms and amplifies much of what "Anglo-Saxon" anthropology has done and brings some different methods and theories to bear on central issues of Greek social and cultural life. The three volumes reviewed here make an especially strong contribution to three, closely interrelated topical areas: gender roles, the entailment of history in the present, and the relationship between local societies and the culture of the nation-state. Couroucli's study of a Corfiot village embraces all these dimensions in an otherwise somewhat abbreviated, though well documented , ethnographic account. In a society still marked by a long past Venetian policy of enforcing the cultivation of a single crop, here olives, agnatic kinship—reported elsewhere in Greece by other ethnographers (Bialor in the northwestern Péloponnèse, Alexakis, Andrómedas, and Allen in the Mani, and Saulnier-Thiercelin and this writer in west-central Crete)—plays a vital role. Couroucli makes the important point that agnatic kinship, although in conflict with the bilateral kindred favored by church legislation and more recently by the Greek State, was the norm of Venetian legislation. Interestingly , the term ratsa (orfara) appears to denote a more inclusive level thanyenia, whereas in Crete, at least, these terms are more or less interchangeable. Couroucli defines the latter group as a lignage ("lineage"), but this term, although used by Bialor and others, will be contested by those trained in an Africanist tradition to treat lineages as strictly endogamous—and generationally much deeper—social entities. Although the members of a Corfiot lineage do not appear to go to great trouble to preserve property within the lineage, preferential endogamy is only possible when...