BOOK REVIEWS

Notes From the Balkans: Locating Marginality andAmbiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Sarah F.Green. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2005. xviii 1 313 pp. (ClothUS$65.00; Paper US$22.95)

KEITH BROWNBrown University, Watson Institute for InternationalStudies

Drawing on over twenty years of encounters withEpirus in northwestern Greece, Sarah Green haswritten a demanding, rewarding book that tests theboundaries of the ethnographic enterprise. Whilethere is undoubtedly a ‘‘there’’ here, Green has es-chewed a narrow focus on the lives and voices of aspatially defined communityFstill, arguably, adominant paradigm in Greek anthropology. Insteadof focusing on ‘‘roots,’’ this is a book that owesmuch to the paradigm-shifting work of scholars likeJames Clifford, and emphasizes ‘‘routes.’’ Whatmakes this particular iteration compelling is its ac-tual application of the kind of multiperspectivismthat social scientists have more extensively preachedthan practiced in recent years.

Green’s account swoops between different scalesof analysis including, for example, discussions of thetectonics of the Kasidiaris area, the enduring impactof Ottoman-era land ownership patterns on thecontemporary sociopolitical landscape, and theinter-relation of population statistics and govern-mental funding priorities. The traces of Green’s inter-actions with archeologists, geographers, and culturalheritage professionals, as well as with an eclectic mixof ‘‘local’’ people living in and passing through thearea, are all in evidence as the book’s argumentsunfold.

I say ‘‘arguments’’ in acknowledgment and rec-ognition of the book’s Whitmanesque qualities.Green writes with an eye to style, unafraid of literaryflourishes. Particularly noticeable is her comfortwith repetition of key words and iconic phrases.Along with the marginality and ambiguity indexedin the title, and the oft-invoked ‘‘What do youexpect Sarah? This is the Balkans!’’ reported as anironic rejoinder to her inquiries about apparentcontradictions, Green explores dominant tropesof dishevelment, disorder, erosion, and leakiness.Differentially self-evident to various participants

and observers in the process that is Epirus, the con-tradictions are conjoined in what I take as a centralthread in Green’s enterprise: to question all forms ofauthoritative knowledge, but especially those thaterect arbitrary limits to their purview.

In this regard, the book’s genre-bending is clear.Neither ‘‘classically’’ ethnographic nor strictly theo-retical, it combines the literatures of physical andsocial sciences as well as literary criticism in an ex-tended meditation on the ways in which borders(between states, academic disciplines, and scales ofanalysis) create relations between bodies even asthey purportedly dichotomize them. If the book hasa master-trope, it is drawn from late twentieth-century work in mathematical modeling on fractals.In Chapter FourFwhere data from Epirus areleast presentFGreen draws a connection betweenrepresentations of the Balkans and what Paul Fried-rich (1988) has called the ‘‘eerie chaos and eerierorder’’ of fractal mathematics, arguing for a re-theo-rization of the region’s complex issues of identity anddifference.

An ill-disposed or unimaginative reader mightnot find much new in this book. Green sometimesoveruses the trope of the naı̈ve fieldworker, ‘‘sur-prised’’ that census figures are social constructionsor that ‘‘others’’ may be simultaneously recognizedas bearing attributes of the ‘‘self.’’ Inevitably in suchan ambitious undertaking, there are some oddomissions. Paul Friedrich’s work on the applicationsof fractality passes uncited, as does Alfred Gell’splayful and seriously helpful re-reading of fractalityin Marilyn Strathern’s work (Gell 1999). Given thefocus on the Greek-Albanian border, and issues of hy-bridity and purity, it is also surprising not to find areference to discussions of the term Arvanites appliedto Greek citizens ‘‘of Albanian descent.’’ SeasonedBalkan hands may see in ‘‘fractality’’ nothing morethan a new buzzword to supplement the language ofmosaics, fruit salads, and (crazy) patchwork quilts. Butsuch responses miss, I think, the larger point. Fract-ality, ambiguity, and marginality are not confined tothe Balkans. By putting these concepts at the center ofthe book, Green infuses Balkan anthropology withtheoretical insights currently gaining wider acceptancethrough the innovative work of leading figures in U.S.anthropology, including Anna Tsing and AnneliseRiles. Green also invites readersFin a less-explicitregister than the disarming self-deprecation evident in

Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 16, Number 1, pp. 79–80, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. & 2008 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2008.00012.x. 79

her descriptions of fieldworkFto reflect on the re-cursivity embedded in her own project, and oftenunexamined in ethnography as knowledge-productionmore generally. We are accustomed to the idea thatour discipline makes small facts speak to large issues.Notes From the Balkans offers a serious, extended at-tempt to put the epistemology of that self-image underclose scrutiny.

REFERENCES CITED

Friedrich, Paul1988 Eerie Chaos and Eerier Order. Journal of

Anthropological Research 44(4):435–444.Gell, Alfred1999 Strathernograms. In The Art of Anthro-

pology: Essays and Diagrams. Oxford:Berg.

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