Contested Identities : Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece

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. Contents: Part One : Gender and kinship in marries life Part Two ; Gender, Kinship and Religion: 'Reconstructing' the Anthropology of Greece by Jill Dubisch; Cosmos and Gender in Village Greece by Juliet du Boulay; Silence, Submission and subversion: Towards a Poetics of Womenhood by Michael Herzfeld; The Resolution of a Conflict through song in Greek Ritual Therapy by Loring Danforth; The Limits of K inship by Roger Just. PART TWO GENDER AND KINSHIP OUTSIDE MARRIAGE: Sisters in Christ: Metaphors of kinship among Greek nuns by A Marina Iossafides; Friends of the Heart: Male Commensal Solidarity, Ge nder and kinship in Aegean Greece by Evthymios Papataxiarchis: Going out for Coffee? Contesting the Grounds of Gendered Pleasures in evryday Sociability by Jane Cowan; Hunters and Hunted: Kamaki and t he ambiguities of sexual Predation in a Grek Town by Sofka Zinovieff; Gender, Sexuality and the Person in Greek Culture by Peter Loizos and Evthymios Papataxiarchis.259p. plates. bibliography.index.…