The death of her grandfather sets Neni Panourgi and her readers on a path through the rituals of mourning and memory in modern urban Greece. Blending emotional richness and intellectual rigor, the anthropologist returns home in this exploration of kinship and identity within her own family and native city of Athens. What emerges is not only a new anthropological view of contemporary Greek culture, but also a reflective consideration of the self and subject. Following men and women grappling with questions of mortality, Panourgi moves through the streets and neighborhoods of Athens, seaside resorts and pistachio groves, the corridors and rooms of the Cancer Institute, wakes in apartments and observances in cemeteries. She mingles popular culture, venerable traditions, and contemporary theory as she considers how individuals define their identity as Athenians, as members of a family, as subjects of a polity, in sickness and in health, in death or in mourning. Memory is their guide as it negotiates their relationships with a personal, collective, and cultural pastand the memory of many deaths challenges and reaffirms, deconstructs and reconstructs who they are. As intellectually ambitious as it is moving, Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity reconfigures the subject and object of anthropological study and recasts the line where experience ends and analysis begins.
A rich and beautifully written ethnographic evocation of Athens and its multiple identities. Panourgi makes a highly original contribution to anthropology in general, and to the study of modern Greek culture specifically.Eugenia Georges, Rice University
