This study describes the ancient Athenians' conception of women during the Classical period, and shows the connections between women's place as defined by law and the gender ideology of masculinity and femininity.

Meganisi is one of the smallest and most remote of the Greek Ionian islands. From another point of view, it is the centre of the world, and its sailors travel literally from China to Peru while its migrants maintain familial connections from Johannesburg to Montreal. The villages of Meganisi are tightly-knit communities and this detailed ethnographic study explores the basis on which the islanders' solidarity and sense of identity are constructed and reconstructed despite population mobility and economic change: the values, sentiments and structures of kinship and family. Series Editors:...

Realism has become a dirty word in some social sciences, yet, despite fashionable new approaches involving multiple ontologies and the like, when anthropologists actually produce ethnographic accounts they are, still, indulging in realism in some form. Perhaps this is why ethnography, too, is unfashionable. Given the authors' background as anthropologists committed to fieldwork, this book provides a theoretical grounding to justify and explain the sorts of accounts that anthropologists produce as the result of ethnographic research. The book's approach starts from an acceptance that...

This book provides a comprehensive account of the Athenians' conception of women during the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Though nothing remains that represents the authentic voice of the women themselves, there is a wealth of evidence showing how men sought to define women. By working through a range of material, from the provisions of Athenian law through to the representations of tragedy and comedy, the author builds up, in the manner of an anthropological ethnography, a coherent and integrated picture of the Athenians' notion of woman'.