Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (review)

This is many books in one, different each time it is read; personal, political, and passionate. It challenges the reader in a number of ways, through the way it presents the material and through the often rapid change of tone from personal reminiscence to critical theoretical discussion. The cover provides a resonant image for its contents, based on a series of full-face portraits by Eleni Kalokyri called Ostraka, faded and blurred as if from weathered painted Fayum coffin-lids, and hinting at "the ghostly lives lived by people under persecution for so many decades in Greece" (xx).

What are the consequences for a state or sovereign power of defining some of its citizens as "dangerous and suspicious," as internal "enemies," believed to threaten its stability through their actions, current, past, or future, and even through their thoughts and ideas? The relevance of this theme for any state, in a post-9/11 world, gives the book a particular pertinence.

This theme is worked out through the history of the Left in Greece from the late 1920s onwards, when the state defined a range of political ideas and practices as worthy of the same treatment as that meted out to brigands and other "anti-social elements" of the body politic. This is not simply presented as chronology and analysis, but as experienced by the author herself, and by those whom she interviewed over the course of fifteen months' fieldwork from May 2003, and in interviews during visits in 2005–2007. Family secrets were discovered, contradictions and ambiguities between memories, and recollections laid bare. Photographs and documents (some come upon by the strangest of chances) are subjected to various kinds of reading. The multi-layered nature of the material is reflected in the layout of the text, which employs a range of techniques for capturing these multiplicities—notes in the margins of the pages, set into the text, and at the back of the book, as well as conventional footnotes. Readers familiar with the author's use of "parerga" in her earlier "anthropography" will know that these allow the book to be read, and re-read, in many different ways. What she does with these layers of commentaries, contradictions, refinements, and different voices, including the voices of poets, novelists, and musicians, is also attempted in the electronic version, which allows additional readings as well as new materials and corrections. In some places the reader feels that further notes might be needed (I had to look up Berlinguer and the sense of "parology" in Lyotard's writings); in others (for example, page 6) there are two parerga within two lines—one for the word "we," another for "humans," leading to over two pages of further discussion.

Underlying the book's main theme is the question of defining and practising anthropology itself: of de-exoticizing the strange and of problematizing the familiar, for which the myth of Oedipus provides a metaphorical text and paradigm. Oedipus finds that all the categories he thought unquestionable are illusory (his wife is his mother, his children are his siblings, he himself is a ruler who has broken the most fundamental social rules as a patricide and is the cause of the plague which has broken out in the city he rules). Oedipus poses the questions of how we know who we are, how basic categories are defined for ourselves and for others. As both native and stranger in his own land, he acts as a model for the author herself, who finds out that supposedly well-established and taken-for-granted aspects of her own family history and that of her friends are similarly built on sand. What sort of anthropological knowledge is produced with the intimate knowledge of a "native" ethnographer? How is one to balance the uncomfortable combination of generalization and of understanding from the inside?

The myth also evokes the situation of the "dangerous citizens" whose threat the state attempted to remove...