Social anthropology: openings and expansions in the age of exclusion

Abstract

A sign of anthropology's Greek coming-of-age is the inevitability of omitting significant contributions from this account. In the 1970s, omission would have been perceived as an insult. Today it is the happy effect of a proliferation that makes it impossible to represent the entire spectrum in one short overview. Anthropology's most substantive contributions to Greek studies, then as now, were detailed ethnographies, providing a counterweight to the generalizations of more top-down, model-building social sciences while constituting an important bridge between social-science and humanities disciplines. There has been less interest in meeting the challenge of the discipline's own commitment to cross-cultural comparison, although Danforth's comparison of firewalking rituals in Greece and the United States1was an early exception – subverted, as Bakalaki points out, by his Greek publisher's omission of the American material.2Internal comparison was present as soon as anthropologists themselves began to proliferate,3but few initially questioned the presupposition of a reified common national culture.