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Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border
Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof.
Notes from the Balkan s represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.
Notes from the Balkan s represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.
- GenresAnthropology
336 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2005
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November 3, 2017
skillful study of ambiguity and marginality
Anthropology split long ago with its practitioners heading off on many diverse tracks. Gender, health, law, image and identity, family, religion....the possibilities became legion. And if you wanted to "keep up" in your field, you had to read the books which dealt with that particular track while hoping to be able to follow---in a more general way---some others. So, I must confess that this volume is the first I have read which deals with ambiguity and marginality. While finding a study of a small area of Greece near the Albanian border interesting---it is a part of that region called Epirus, which has been contested for some considerable time---I realized as I read that "ambiguity" plays a far more important role in life and society than I previously considered. (I had not considered it, to be frank.) Anthropology, the author points out, has always emphasized "belonging" to a place and what separates the people found there from others, rather than the connections, the possibility of marginality, and the constant change which makes certain things invisible, then visible again. But instability, contested-ness, and fluidity have been part of Epirus for a long time and if you think, part of so much of the world, now more than ever. The Balkans, she argues (riffing on the English word "Balkanization") don't suffer from too much fragmentation if you look under the (Western-imposed) surface, but from too much connection. "Everything about the Balkans," she says (p.140) "is contested, including explanations for that state of affairs." I may add that on thinking, I surmised that love is ambiguous, especially bisexual love or love of more than one partner; immigrants live in marginal, ambiguous circumstances, what to say of refugees? And in many parts of the world, religion has ambiguous qualities. The work of Rosaldo (on history in Philippine anthropology or vice-versa) and Leach on the ambiguous identity of hilltribes in Burma don't feature in Green's gaze, but I suspect they and far more could be included in an imaginary "Ambiguity in Anthropology" series.
As a book, NOTES FROM THE BALKANS ranks as highly-academic, lots of footnotes, lots of jargon and lots of the use of "ironic" or "questioning" quotation marks (which certainly add to the general atmosphere of ambiguity, by the way!) I found it rather tough going, but full of interesting ideas, full of all sorts of side topics which, when considered, add a lot to the overall impact of the book, topics like fractals, soil erosion, contrast of modernity and modernization, statistics and their usage, and geomorphology. The author's experiences in Greece over some years in the 1990s play a role, but overall, this is more a book of "thinking about a topic" than "in depth ethnographic description". The papering over of differences to seem more modern, to get more funding from the EU, to make Greece into a more mono-ethnic state, or just to avoid conflict means that ambiguity exists under the surface in many ways. Epirus as a region was marginal to the Ottoman Empire, to the Greek state, and is still to Europe. The region she focused on is marginal even in Epirus. Green has elucidated all this very well and finally, may I say, unambiguously.
Anthropology split long ago with its practitioners heading off on many diverse tracks. Gender, health, law, image and identity, family, religion....the possibilities became legion. And if you wanted to "keep up" in your field, you had to read the books which dealt with that particular track while hoping to be able to follow---in a more general way---some others. So, I must confess that this volume is the first I have read which deals with ambiguity and marginality. While finding a study of a small area of Greece near the Albanian border interesting---it is a part of that region called Epirus, which has been contested for some considerable time---I realized as I read that "ambiguity" plays a far more important role in life and society than I previously considered. (I had not considered it, to be frank.) Anthropology, the author points out, has always emphasized "belonging" to a place and what separates the people found there from others, rather than the connections, the possibility of marginality, and the constant change which makes certain things invisible, then visible again. But instability, contested-ness, and fluidity have been part of Epirus for a long time and if you think, part of so much of the world, now more than ever. The Balkans, she argues (riffing on the English word "Balkanization") don't suffer from too much fragmentation if you look under the (Western-imposed) surface, but from too much connection. "Everything about the Balkans," she says (p.140) "is contested, including explanations for that state of affairs." I may add that on thinking, I surmised that love is ambiguous, especially bisexual love or love of more than one partner; immigrants live in marginal, ambiguous circumstances, what to say of refugees? And in many parts of the world, religion has ambiguous qualities. The work of Rosaldo (on history in Philippine anthropology or vice-versa) and Leach on the ambiguous identity of hilltribes in Burma don't feature in Green's gaze, but I suspect they and far more could be included in an imaginary "Ambiguity in Anthropology" series.
As a book, NOTES FROM THE BALKANS ranks as highly-academic, lots of footnotes, lots of jargon and lots of the use of "ironic" or "questioning" quotation marks (which certainly add to the general atmosphere of ambiguity, by the way!) I found it rather tough going, but full of interesting ideas, full of all sorts of side topics which, when considered, add a lot to the overall impact of the book, topics like fractals, soil erosion, contrast of modernity and modernization, statistics and their usage, and geomorphology. The author's experiences in Greece over some years in the 1990s play a role, but overall, this is more a book of "thinking about a topic" than "in depth ethnographic description". The papering over of differences to seem more modern, to get more funding from the EU, to make Greece into a more mono-ethnic state, or just to avoid conflict means that ambiguity exists under the surface in many ways. Epirus as a region was marginal to the Ottoman Empire, to the Greek state, and is still to Europe. The region she focused on is marginal even in Epirus. Green has elucidated all this very well and finally, may I say, unambiguously.
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