Description:
1. This book looks to citizens of the Greek island of Chios and how they reshape memories of a traumatic past to form new ways of coping. Author Nicolas Argenti's writing style is incredibly fluid and engaging, and in each chapter he focuses on the stories of particular local people.
2. As Europe struggles with financial and immigration crises which will shape the political future of the EU, memory and trauma studies are becoming an increasingly pertinent way of showing how anthropological work can offer relevant and insightful ways of coping with this change.
3. Argenti is a well-regarded mid-career academic who has spent the past twenty years working on slavery and trauma studies in Cameroon. This shift to Greek studies comes out of earning a prestigious two-year grant to conduct fieldwork in Chios.
Review Quotes:
"A beautifully written ethnography of remembrance of exodus and the tragedies that caused it, this book is an essential reading to scholars of the role of collective memory in trauma, international migration, diaspora, and exile. Argenti conjugates the political with the emotional, the personal with the collective in a groundbreaking ethnography of memory as strategy of resistance to oppression and to the challenges of time in the formation of social identity. "--Joëlle Bahloul, author of The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962
"Like cubist painting, Argenti's multidimensional book offers multiple perspectives on a seminal event that continues to explode in differing modalities of history. Telling the story of one of the first humanitarian crises in Europe, it traces the means by which the memories and historicities of the disparate groups associated with an event come to be embedded in the experience of time itself."--Antonis Liakos, author of Pos to parelthon ginetai istoria? [How does the past turn into history?]