Although kinship has been a privileged field of anthropological study and research for about a century, its significance has come in for a lot of controversy during the last decades of the 20th century. Recently there is a renewed and growing interest in its study due to the influence of the Schneiderian symbolic approach, feminist analysis of gender, reproduction and sexuality and ethnographic accounts of relatedness in difference contexts.

This course attempts to present and analyze the main anthropological approaches concerning the study of kinship and gender.

Τhis course provides an opportunity for students to come into contact with cutting edge topics in ethnographic fieldwork, while at the same time giving them a chance to apply some basic research skills. This course is not a historical overview of the methodology of ethnography. To the contrary, we begin with the contemporary concerns and ideas of working anthropologists. Our main question is: what is—and what could be—the “field” of ethnographic study in the contemporary situation. In our examination of this subject we will extend our conversation beyond conventional borders to speak about subjects, such as the non-academic uses of ethnography (i.e., in marketing, by the army), the use of ethnography in other disciplines (i.e., education), the relation of ethnography to political activism and, finally, the future possibilities for qualitative methodologies in the contemporary technocratic university. This course, which is co-taught by the faculty members of the Social Anthropology section, is part of the “Open Access Digital Courses” of the University of Thessaly. Most of the meetings of the course will be videotaped. While this course is primarily intended for undergraduate social anthropology majors, students from other majors, who have a demonstrated interest in the subject and taken previous courses in anthropology, can be admitted after consultation with the instructors.

Jewish identity has not yet been the subject of systematic study in Greek anthropology. This seminar is concerned with issues pertaining to the management of Jewish culture and history in contemporary Europe, with Greece as its main focus. This is pursued through an anthropological perspective which favors the ethnographic approach. Some main topics to be discussed are: Jewish communities in Greece and Europe, the politicization of Jewishness, Jewish identity as memory of “pain,” the “absence” in public sphere and the emerging “visibility,” multiculturalist politics in the “new Europe,” contemporary consumerism and commercialization of Jewish culture, and existing filmography.