The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani [Paperback]

C. Nadia Seremetakis (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226748766 | ISBN-13: 978-0226748764 | Publication Date: October 8, 1991 | Edition: 1

Based on years of fieldwork in both rural and urban Greece, The Last Word explores women's cultural resistance as they weave together diverse social practices: improvised antiphonic laments, divinatory dreaming, the care and tending of olive trees and the dead, and the inscription of emotions and the senses on a landscape of persons, things, and places. These practices compose the empowering poetics of the cultural periphery. C. Nadia Seremetakis liberates the analysis of gender from reductive binary models and pioneers the alternative perspective of self-reflexive "native anthropology" in European ethnography.

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About the Author

For more information about C. Nadia Seremetakis, visit http://www.seremetakis.com/.

Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 8, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226748766
• ISBN-13: 978-0226748764
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #616,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rich Female culture in a extremely male dominated area, September 10, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Paperback)

While there are a number of books that cover the culture of the men of Mani, from their spartan beginings to the present, generally the culture and beliefs of the Women have been ignored. While the funeral songs of the Mani are often mentioned as a unique trait of the area, few books even touch on the cultural context or that only women sing them. Books on the topic usually give the impression of the women as appendages of the male culture, with a hard life of harder work.

This book covers the (rapidly disappearing) culture of women of the Mani region, and how it contrasts (and conflicts) with the male culture. The book gives a rich view into a unique culture, and the even more unique culture women have carved out of this. The culture being covered has beliefs that predate the christanity of the area (and maybe predate even some classical beliefs), and the truely unique artform of the spontainious poetry of the funeral durges that are only sung by the women.

Even if your interest were the patriarchal traditional culture, the book would be useful in providing the full color of the background that that culture exists in. From the efforts of the priests to put a stop to the remaining old beliefs ("Old women's superstitions") to the role of the womens songs in directing vendetas everything is covered in a richly woven tapestry.

The author has family roots in the area, and has used them to gain access to lore and story that an "outside" anthropologist would have a difficult time getting access to. (And of course, being a women, she had access to much that men are traditionally excluded from.)

My only objection to this book (and some may take this as an advantage) is that when an example of Greek is given (always with English translations) the Greek is transliterated into the roman alphabet, instead of being presented in the Greek alphabet.

5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ!, May 1, 2011

By 

selim (New York City, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani (Paperback)

This humble reviewer cannot say anything but will be happy to bring to your attention the praises Seremetakis' work received (from her website):

"The Last Word is bold, powerful, and moving. It should be our first word in our rehearing of the Mediterranean."
Catharine R. Stimpson
(Dean & Professor, Comparative Literature, New York University)

"A remarkable book. Anyone who thinks they already know how to address the relationship between death and the social order - or relations between men and women for that matter - should read this book. It is a powerful invitation to think again."
Marilyn Strathern
(Professor of Anthropology / Gender Studies, University of Manchester, UK)

"A highly original, sensitive, feisty and exciting anthropological work that will invigorate social theory, ethnographic writing, feminist theory, and of course the anthropology of `modernizing' Europe... A genuine even heroic contribution to the study of mankind."
Michael Taussig
(Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University)

"A fascinating book and model of engaged scholarship... I have been searching in vain for a book that would effect a transitin between the present and the past. The Last Word provides the perfect bridge, an anthropological perspective on otherness as well as a sense of continuity and discontinuity between modern and ancient Greece."
Page duBois
(Professor of Classics, University of California)

"Seremetakis's book which I enjoyed teaching..., is a passionately conceived ethnography of death as social experience.... Imagery, writing style, argument - all are explosive. There will be no dispassionate responses, but few will forget the effect."
Arthur Kleinman
(Professor, Dept. of Social Medicine, Harvard University)

"In the double sense of its title, this ethnography is indeed the last (or latest) word in contemporary efforts in anthropology to mesh the linguistic and the sensorial, the analytic and the aesthetic, the structural and the experiential. The result is a powerful work that should attract attention outside its specific ethnographic genre and location."
George Marcus
(Professor of Anthropology/Cultural Studies, Rice University)

"The Last Word combines... an assiduously scientific anthropology with convolutions of the imagination reminiscent of Baudelaire."
Paul Friedrich
(Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago)

"...An undeniable continuity links the Neolithic goddesses of birth and death excavated in the Balkans by Gimbutas with the oracular exhumation ceremonies performed south of there by present-day Maniat women. A similar continuity links Maniat women's polyphonic laments with the corporeal polyphony celebrated in Kristeva's Greek-borne poetics..."
in American Ethnologist
Margaret Trawick (Massay University, New Zealand)

"The Last Word is a most thorough, emotionally and intellectually inspired and inspiring consideration and interpretation of a people's life, its mind and soul in their unique cultural individuality. ...A highly-gifted offspring of her native soil..., [Seremetakis] instigated by her love for that soil, went back to devote for several years her rich, wide, multifaceted scientific knowledge and epertise, as well as her extraordinary perception, to the ...study...of her native culture in its long history, its mind, beliefs, life and practices... Most expert, skillful and touching is the manner in which the author's word, in informing, conquers and transports her reader."
Andonis Decavalles
(Distinguished Professor, Comparative Literature, Fairleigh Dickinson University)

"A significant contribution to our understanding of performance as social practice,
The Last Word forces a reassessment of conventional views of gender, ritual and the interweaving of aesthetic form and personal experience. And it does so through a prose that engages and challenges a wide range of readers..."
Don Brenneis
(President AAA - American Anthropological Association, 2003)

"...Like Athena, who sprang from the head of Zeus fully grown and ready for battle, Seremetakis has made a dramatic entry into the fields of anthropology and Greek studies with her new book The Last Word, a tour-de-force of ethnography and theory... The depth of Seremetakis's involvement...gives new meaning to the term participant observation... Her analyses illuminate the dynamics of sexual politics in ways not previously explored in Greece, or anywhere else to my knowledge."
In Journal of Modern Hellenism
(Peter Allen, Rhode Island University)

"In this remarkable work Seremetakis comes the closest that a reflexive and refined scholarship can to the resonance of moira, of human fate and affliction, to the timbre of womanhood amid the starkness of the Southern Peloponnese."
Roy Wagner
(Professor of Anthropology / Symbolic Studies, University of Virginia)

"I am quite taken by the breath and depth of Seremetakis's... The Senses Still.
...This volume provides a detailed anthropology of the way that memory has been shaped and shapes us through our technical means of cultural memory... A solid, intellectually daring book!"
Sander Gilman, Professor, Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

"The Senses Still explores areas of cultural life too complex, too experimental to be contained within the bounds of a traditional ethnography... An understanding of culture must include an examination of the role of the senses. Seremetakis...confronts us with this necessity."
Jay Ruby, Professor, Center for Visual Communication, Temple University

"...In most studies the body is examined as text that is "read" and "written." In Seremetakis's works the body is ...also experienced by the senses...
Many are the benefits of social sciences by the adoption of her poetically sensual approach..."
Paul Stoller, Professor of Anthropology, Westchester University

"...An important addition to the recent anthropological literature which is seeking to resist the anesthesia of objectivist method and exclusively formalistic analyses..."
James W. Fernandez, Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago

"A thick satisfying soup of a book, with new flavors and new routes to rewriting a history of the senses. ...A book to prod the anesthetized body of theory on modernity via a tour from early Hollywood camerawork on war to contemporary videowork on Rodney King, from newly opened body of Swedish interwar gymnasiums to the lost tastes of Grecian peaches..."
Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina