Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece

by Peter Loizos, Evthmios Papataxiarchis

Overview

In this collection leading anthropologists provide a comprehensive yet highly nuanced view of what it means to be a Greek man or woman, married or unmarried, functioning within a complex society based on kinship ties. Exploring the ways in which sexual identity is constructed, these authors discuss, for example, how going out for coffee embodies dominant ideas about female sexuality, moral virtue, and autonomy; why men in a Lesbos village maintain elaborate friendships with nonfamily members while the women do not; why young housewives often participate in conflict-resolution rituals; and how the dominant role of mature married householders is challenged by unmarried persons who emphasize spontaneity and personal autonomy. This collection demonstrates that kinship and gender identities in Greece are not unitary and fixed: kinship is organized in several highly specific forms, and gender identities are plural, competing, antagonistic, and are continually being redefined by contexts and social change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691028590
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/21/1991
Series:	Princeton Modern Greek Studies , #5
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter 1. Gender, Kinship, and Religion: "Reconstructing" the Anthropology of Greece, pg. 29
• Chapter 2. Cosmos and Gender in Village Greece, pg. 47
• Chapter 3. Silence, Submission, and Subversion: Toward a Poetics of Womanhood, pg. 79
• Chapter 4. The Resolution of Conflict through Song in Greek Ritual Therapy, pg. 98
• Chapter 5. The Limits of Kinship, pg. 114
• Chapter 6. Sisters in Christ: Metaphors of Kinship among Greek Nuns, pg. 135
• Chapter 7. Friends of the Heart: Male Commensal Solidarity, Gender, and Kinship in Aegean Greece, pg. 156
• Chapter 8. Going Out for Coffee? Contesting the Grounds of Gendered Pleasures in Everyday Sociability, pg. 180
• Chapter 9. Hunters and Hunted: Kamaki and the Ambiguities of Sexual Predation in a Greek Town, pg. 203
• Chapter 10. Gender, Sexuality, and the Person in Greek Culture, pg. 221
• Contributors, pg. 235
• Literature Cited, pg. 237
• Index, pg. 255

Editorial Reviews

[This] outstanding collection ... will without doubt be essential reading for anyone concerned with Greece, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans, especially in respect of the nexus between kinship, marriage, gender, friendship, religion and symbolism.

Social Anthropology

"[This] outstanding collection ... will without doubt be essential reading for anyone concerned with Greece, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans, especially in respect of the nexus between kinship, marriage, gender, friendship, religion and symbolism."—Social Anthropology

From the Publisher