 | Notes from the Balkans Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof. Sarah F. Green is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and has spent over ten years researching the Greek-Albanian border area in Epirus, northwestern Greece. She is the author of Urban Amazons (Macmillan). |
