ABSTRACT
Greece offers a pertinent case-study for reflection on current conditions of European intellectual production. This may sound ironic, in that Greece does not really have a centuries old academic tradition like the rest of Western Europe. As it is, social anthropology and other social science departments were established in Greek universities only in the early 1980s. That period was characterized by two main features: first, a democratization process following the end of a seven-year dictatorship in 1974; second, the country’s increasingly prevailing European orientation. The introduction of the Reformative Law for Higher Education Institutions in 1982 sought to update and modernize the statecontrolled system of higher education in line with the best intellectual traditions of the West.1 Young foreign-trained academics, among others, now saw their political activities against the junta-often conducted from host countries in the Westbearing fruit. With the European civil social structures and their universities as prototypes, the prevailing intellectual, political climate in Greece was one of critical thinking and reflection.
