Following the lives of men and women in the neighbourhoods of Athens, this study considers how individuals define their identity as Athenians, as members of a family, as subjects of a policy, and in death or mourning.

Clifford Geertz, in his 1973 Interpretation of Cultures, brought about an epistemological revolution unprecedented since Lvi-Strauss's structuralism. In place of Lvi-Strauss's deep structures, Geertz placed deep meaningsand thick descriptions, in a synthesis of the American tradition of cultural anthropology and new qualitative approaches in the humanities. He powerfully synthesized and gave the heart of anthropology's tradition a new and enriched conceptual language that came to be known as interpretive anthropologyand that placed meaning over form in the center of social analysis. This book...

WINNER OF THE 2011 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE, Society for Humanistic Anthropology

WINNER OF THE 2011 EDMUND KEELEY BOOK PRIZE, Modern Greek Studies Association

HONORABLE MENTION IN ARCHEOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY, 2009 Prose Awards

This book simultaneously tells a story-or rather, stories-and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in...

WINNER OF THE 2011 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE, Society for Humanistic Anthropology

WINNER OF THE 2011 EDMUND KEELEY BOOK PRIZE, Modern Greek Studies Association

HONORABLE MENTION IN ARCHEOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY, 2009 Prose Awards

This book simultaneously tells a story-or rather, stories-and a history. The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in...