ABSTRACT
Hastily reading my mail in a taxi cab one morning, my eye stopped at an invitation by the University of Athens and the then Municipality of Areopolis (Mani) to address an international paleo-anthropological and historical-folkloric conference. It was to be organized on the occasion of the discovery of Paleolithic skulls in Mani (Apidhima) and the subsequent opening of a museum in Areopolis (locally known as Tzimova), in 1997. The program and abstracts revealed that the speakers, all male and most of them academics, were apparently ignorant of the local history and everyday cultural practices of the people. Trapped by disciplinary and areal boundaries, they had missed both the local ongoing tradition of exhumations historically practiced by women, and all related ethnographic evidence in the area – including my own ethnography on the subject published in both English and Greek at the time. I got angry.
