I am most interested in “life”: bare, naked, clothed, conceptualized, contested, taken, given, suspended, sustained.  And I am interested in what surrounds life: humans who want to give it meaning, take its meaning, make worlds that this life inhabits, keep this life from expiring. And in the politics that surrounds this life and these humans: crude partisan, sophisticated intellectual, engaged, activist, philosophical. Or brutally pragmatic: in the concentration camp, in the prison, in the school (in the camp and the prison as school), in the hospital, in the cemetery. And at what translates meaning: ritual, kin, law, the body (of the patient, of the condemned, of the student, of the desired). Previously I was most interested in “death” and “the dead.” And I am still interested in writing: how to write about life, how to talk and write about death, what happens when one talks and writes about their specters. I look at all this in Greece (and occasionally elsewhere). Originally at the Children’s Hospital in Athens , then at the Cancer Institute, then at the concentration camps of the Greek Civil War. Next at the Intensive Care Unit.

Publications:

1995      Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography. University of Wisconsin Press.

2002a     “Conversations in Hermeneutic Anthropology” Anthropological Theory,   September, 2: 341-354.

2002b     "Interview with Clifford Geertz” Anthropological Theory, December, 2: 421-431.  

2003      "The Stratigraphy of Dislocation: Jerusalem, Cairo, New York . Interview with Edward W. Said" Journal of Social Archaeology, June, 3: 139-150.

2004      "Colonizing the Ideal. Neo-classical Articulations and European Modernities" angelaki , Vol. 9, no 2.

2008      Ethnographica Moralia: Experiments in Interpretive Anthropology Co-edited with George Marcus.

2008      “ Desert Islands. Ransom of Humanity” Public Culture 20:2.