The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani

by C. Nadia Seremetakis

Based on years of fieldwork in both rural and urban Greece, The Last Word explores women's cultural resistance as they weave together diverse social improvised antiphonic laments, divinatory dreaming, the care and tending of olive trees and the dead, and the inscription of emotions and the senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the cultural periphery. C. Nadia Seremetakis liberates the analysis of gender from reductive binary models and pioneers the alternative perspective of self-reflexive "native anthropology" in European ethnography.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, History

290 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 1991

Reviews

[Emma Colón · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 (read for religion in society course)

WOW. what a GREAT book about women's marginality and power through the event and poetics of death! it was a little difficult to get used to the dense language at first, but once i got into the flow of the writing, i found this ethnography to be just stunning. seremetakis weaves together all the elements of maniat women's mortuary rituals in a way that causes everything to fall into place in the end with a really powerful precision that sort of blew my mind. it reminded me why i fell in love with academia in the first place. this isn't your average ethnographic account; it connects visible social and historical reality of the inner mani region to an invisible plane of acoustics, embodiment, divination, and fate only able to be reached by the maniat women. it is rich with integrity and gives voice to a culture that has been largely diminished by notions of modernity and rationality. i certainly didn't expect to enjoy this as much as i did, and i'm super excited to write my final essay about it! :)

[Dennis - Διονύσης · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academically dense but the only work of its kind. An authoritative ethnography and documentation of Mani culture, its historical relationship with death and the important role that women play(ed) in keeping it all together!