Sixteen months on a small Greek island? Not the holiday of a
lifetime, but the start of anthropologist Margaret E. Kenna's
involvement with the residents of Anafi and its migrant community
in Athens. Greek Island Life gives a vivid and engaging account of
research on Anafi in the 1960s, and is based on letters, progress
reports, field-notes and diary entries made at the time. Since then
the author has returned to the island many times and her later
impressions and knowledge are integrated into the earlier texts.
The islanders, who once regarded themselves to be so remote as to
be 'far from God', are now making a living from tourism, marketing
their island as an unspoilt idyll. Anyone interested in Greece and
travel will find this book illuminating and captivating, as will
students and teachers of anthropology, sociology, modern history,
travel writing and Modern Greek studies. 'In the whole of the
Cycladic and Sporadic groups there exists no island so remote in
its solitude as Anafi' wrote the traveller Theodore Bent in the
early 1880s: 'it is a mere speck in the waves in the direction of
Rhodes and Crete, where no one ever goes, and the 1000 inhabitants
of the one village are as isolated as if they dwelt on an
archipelago in the Pacific.' So Anafi remained until the mid 1960s
when Margaret E. Kenna stepped ashore to begin a memorable stay,
and a lifetime's connection, described in this lovely book. Full of
wonderful observation, scrupulously honest, it would be compelling
simply as a travel book, but it is much more: it is a landmark
study of the Greek island world on the eve of the huge changes that
would transform Greece by mass tourism from the early 1970s, and it
is all the more poignant now given the crises currently engulfing
the country. All lovers of Greece will relish and admire this book
for its insight, its realism and its humanity: a portrait of a
world which is almost gone, but as Margaret Kenna shows in her
updates, not quite yet. Michael Wood, Professor of Public History,
Manchester University, and broadcaster This wonderful book counters
the common accusation that anthropologists do such interesting
things and then write boring books about them. This is a unique
document, a narrative of fieldwork, written not retrospectively but
in the actual ethnographic present, in lucid and lyrical prose
worthy of Jane Austen. We the readers are invited to participate in
the unfolding of events from Kenna's arrival to her departure,
sharing in the first puzzles and initial descriptions of strangers
who, by the end, become familiar figures and friends. The narrative
confirms how, contrary to the scientistic tradition of advancing
hypotheses, the role of chance is crucial to anthropological
practice: as in a detective novel, once strange things are
gradually given sense. Professor Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor
of Social Anthropology, Hull University
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