Έργα και Ημέρες στην Κέρκυρα. Ιστορική Ανθρωπολογία μιας Τοπικής Κοινωνίας (review)

Greek scholars now have the translation of a classic ethnography on Greece, Maria Couroucli's Έργα και Ημέρες στην Κέρκυρα (Work and Days in Kerkyra), a study of the rural community of Επίσκεψη that focuses on the interrelationship between kinship and economy in historical perspective. First published in French in 1985 as Les Oliviers du Lignage: une Grèce de Tradition Vénitienne (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose), the book is the product of the first ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the mid-1970s by a Greek anthropologist in her native country. In this study, the author introduces Jack Goody's and Peter Laslett's work on family in Europe and on the systems of devolution of family goods as well as the French schools of Marxism-structuralism and historical anthropology to the Greek field. She is not interested in a "typical" Greek community in order to draw general conclusions about (rural) Greece as a unified whole. Rather, she emphasizes the longue durée study of this particular village in order to contribute to a comparative exploration of "structural" phenomena, such as kinship, and to illustrate the mechanisms of change and continuity at both the local and national levels.

The volume has five major and related strengths: 1) Couroucli arrived in Greece at a time when numerous Anglo-Saxon and French anthropologists were making the Aegean islands the locus of their ethnographic investigations. Following this trend, but also distancing herself from it, she chose an original field site, the Ionian island of Kerkyra (Corfu), which is characterized by a specific Venetian and British (as opposed to Ottoman) history. In this way, Couroucli emphasizes how different historical heritages have shaped the local identities that constitute the heterogeneity of Greek society today. 2) Due to its Venetian past, Kerkyra possesses more archival sources than do other sites that had been under Ottoman rule. This is of great importance to the author who, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon functionalist-structuralists who tended to overlook written sources, combines extensive participatory observation with systematic archival work. 3) As was the case with many ethnographers of that time, Couroucli studied a rural community. However, in an attempt not to "exoticize" her subject, she looked for a "normal" village. Επίσκεψη is a geographically isolated, yet not a marginal, mountain village. It is a demographically growing and prosperous community where, due to intensive olive cultivation, villagers have never had to migrate on a large scale. 4) By examining kinship in relation to land and property questions, she combines economic anthropology with the kinship approaches that characterized most earlier studies of Greece. Her hypothesis is that kinship structures are not static, but change in conjunction with property rules and the adaptation of the local community to the institutions of the larger society. 5) Couroucli basically examines how local structures are formed and how they change as a result of an ongoing dialogue between the state and the local community.

In the first chapter, the author provides some historical background concerning Venetian rule and its unique system of πρόνοιαι (large land holdings) as well as the systematization of olive production which distinguishes Kerkyra from other Greek regions. The second chapter is an introduction to the village and its numerous transformations-ones attributed to "modernization" that were taking place at the time of her research. Chapter Three provides a detailed analysis of the kinship system. Three institutions are the key elements of local social organization: family (mainly couples with children), γενιά (all the patrilineal descendants of an ancestor who is well-known and eponymous and who have the same family name and παρατσούκλι [diminutive or nickname]), and συγγενείς (kin, or a group of people that is formed as result of each marriage and is thus not a fixed social group). Kin are not a symmetrical whole; bilaterality is valid only for first cousins. Beyond first cousins, kin are considered only from the agnatic line. As far as the structure and composition of the family is concerned, by the time of Couroucli's research, extended modes of household (with one grandparent living with the family of his/her son) were prevalent. The ideal, however, was still the nuclear family...