ABSTRACT
An ethnographer of Greece faces liabilities that provide a perspective, at once personal and political, on defining “culture” at the close of the twentieth century. These liabilities are an outcome of the history that the independent Greek nation-state shares with the discipline of anthropology—a history of Eurocentrism that today torments the nation and embarrasses the discipline. For a nation intent on realizing its geopolitical autonomy, the sorry tale of its subordination to Western European criteria of cultural hierarchy is a lasting reminder of its humiliation. For an anthropology grown critical of its colonial origins, years of complicity in the project of European domination have left a dismal legacy of preconceptions that undercut each new theoretical development. Yet nothing is to be gained by hoping that these meanspirited ghosts will simply fade away. On the contrary, as a constant reminder of the civil disabilities under which, as the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico insisted, 1 nations and scholarly traditions both labor, such complications are a necessary irritant. They are the source of a productive discomfort.
