Notes from the Balkans

Reviews / Votes

Notes from the Balkans is a penetrating and richly textured account of marginality in the Epirus area of north-western Greece... Sarah Green's text... provides a subtle and persuasive tool for thinking about the contextual specificity of social identities ... that will be pertinent far beyond the Balkans. -- Madeleine Reeves Cambridge Anthropology Sarah Green's wide-ranging discussion of 'Balkan' history, emphasizing circuits of movement, is engaging and enlightening. The book's theoretical discussions are dense ... but not turgid; Green has a light, direct, and unpretentious style of writing. Notes from the Balkans gives readers a visceral sense of the 'ordinary' and, I think, a better idea about marginality. It is a delightful book to read. -- Laurie Kain Hart American Ethnologist The book's principal contributions are twofold: First, it adds magnificent new ethnographic information about an area that has not been systematically studied by a foreign anthropologist since the pioneering work of John Campbell. Second, it applies a brilliant theoretical discussion of marginality, identity, and ambiguity to a setting in which concepts and categories, or affiliations and labels, have been under constant change. This is a well-researched, masterfully written, and theoretically sophisticated study that is unique in both conception and analysis... This is a quality study that should reach out to a wider audience of area specialists, not only to anthropologists. -- Anastasia Karakasidou American Anthropologist