In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain: The Genesis of a Rural Greek Community and Its Refugee Heritage (review)

314 Reviews juxtaposition and repetition than by close argumentation, this is perhaps the consequence of seeking to make an argument of great generality through the particular vehicle of the ethnography of Greece. A more generic phrasing of the question might have been, How has the dominance of West Europeans and their construction of their own genealogy (which includes Greece) also been refracted in the development of anthropology? To have pursued this question, however, would have required Herzfeld to sacrifice his synthesis of Greek ethnography and his semiotic models. Thus, his ambitions for the book may have weakened his argument for Europeanist anthropology. But at the same time, these ambitions enabled him to make a valuable contribution on several fronts—to a historical reflexive anthropology, to a more comprehensive theorization of Greek ethnography , and to a treatment of the formation of Greek national identity. In each of these he has moved scholarship decisively forward and set new standards for Europeanist anthropology. Katherine Verdery Johns Hopkins University Stephen D. Salamone, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain: The Genesis of a Rural Greek Community and Its Refugee Heritage. East European Monographs. New York: Columbia University Press. 1987. Pp. 245. This little book portrays a Greek fishing village, Amuliani from its establishment in the 1920s on a previously uninhabited island near Mt. Õthos until the mid-1970s. Salmone relies on oral reports for his reconstruction of what life had been like for the villagers in their Asia Minor home, on the Marinarás islands in the Sea of Marmora. He follows the community through its flight from the Turks in 1922 to reestablishment of a part of the group on an island that had previously been part of a monastic estate but had no permanent inhabitants. The story is interesting in itself, and told with sensivitity to the role of key individual leaders and their interaction with traditional patterns of behavior. Salamone is also sensitive to technical aspects of fishing as practiced in the Sea of Marmora and subsequently in the Aegean, and shows how a labor system that required collaboration Reviews 315 across familial lines interacted with the marketing system and with the dictates of technique to sustain a specific local social structure in the village. While studies of Greek farming villages and of communities dependent principally on sheep and goats are familiar from the work of the last generation of anthropologists, this is the first study of a fishing community (so far as I know) and it is interesting to see how the dictates of fishermen's work patterns affect filótimo and other aspects of Greek cultural behavior. Salamone puts great emphasis on the autonomy of village life under Ottoman rule; and on the leadership role of nikokiraii— independent householders, but more specifically of men who hired others to work on their boats or with farming. Depending on how skillfully a nikokiris caught and marketed fish, and engaged in other economically remunerative enterprise, he either flourished or retreated from the leadership role into the lesser class of men dependent on others for their daily sustenance. His other emphasis is on the way this fluid social structure fitted into a market context. Fishing was not a simple subsistence for the villagers either in Turkey or in Greece. Instead all sorts of equipment, boats, nets, and in time also engines and fuel oil had to be purchased and paid for by selling fish in urban markets. To begin with, an effective marketing system was lacking in Amuliani and fishing took second place to hired labor on Mt. Õthos and elsewhere in the villagers' livelihood. The horizon point for an effective marketing system was, strangely enough, World War II and the occupation, when unlike most Greek communities, Amuliani flourished due to black market operations of a fairly diverse character. Its island position and remoteness from police headquarters assisted in achieving this result; the presence of a seafaring population accustomed to perils of the sea added the other critical ingredient. After the war, commercial fishing with a changing technology came on strong. But with participation in a wider commercial network, the old autonomous structure of Amuliani, grouped around the nikokiraii and their crews, began...