Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani
Based on years of fieldwork in both rural and urban Greece, The Last Word explores women's cultural resistance as they weave together diverse social practices: improvised antiphonic laments, divinatory dreaming, the care and tending of olive trees and the dead, and the inscription of emotions and the senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the cultural periphery: C. Nadia Seremetakis liberates the analysis of gender from...
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Based on years of fieldwork in both rural and urban Greece, The Last Word explores women's cultural resistance as they weave together diverse social practices: improvised antiphonic laments, divinatory dreaming, the care and tending of olive trees and the dead, and the inscription of emotions and the senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the cultural periphery. C. Nadia Seremetakis liberates the analysis of gender from reductive binary models and pioneers the alternative perspective of self-reflexive "native anthropology" in European ethnography.
Dedication Acknowledgment On Laments and Transliteration Maps 1. Contexts Fragments and Margins The Politics of Pain Departures Dutiful Ethnographer Diachronic Death 2. Social History and Social Organization Ecology and Topography Settlement Pattern The Village Social Organization Alliance The War Tower Social Stratification The Economy and Division of Labor 3. The Warnings Multiple Entries The Bird of the Dead Apparition Dreams Low Voicing Dream Codes The Economy of Dreams 4. The Screaming Death, Birth, and the Outside High Voicing The Silent and Naked Death The Good Death 5. The Appearance On the Road From Segmentary Kinship to Shared Substance Center and Peripheries 6. The Ethics of Antiphony Categories of Performance and Pain Customary Law: The Women's Jury Memorization Polyphony and the Orders of Discourse Incorporations or the Double Ceremony The Counterpoint The Breath Sound and Violence Truth and Pain Truth, Pain, and Ethnography Historical Context 7. Weaving Conflict Men's Council / Women's Mourning Ritual Kalliopi's Story Tracking Vangelio 8. Women and Priests, Voice and Text Mourning Ritual versus Funeral Historical Context Procession and Burial 9. The Second Body and the Poetics of Labor Hertz and the New Body The Maniat Double Burial The First Facing or The Meeting of the Eyes The Second Body and Its Reading The Otherworld Death, Exhumation, and Women's Labor 10. The Visible Invisible: Divination, History, and the Self The Archaeology of Feeling Shadows Cynics and Others Cosmological Construction Dream Time, Labor Time, and Power Dreaming in the Field 11. Eschatology Shadows: A Photographic Essay Notes Bibliography Index
