How does the past matter in the present? How is a feeling of ‘ownership' of the past expressed in people's everyday lives? Should continuity with the distant past be seen as simply a nationalist fiction or is it transformed by local historical imagination? While recent anthropological studies have focused on reconstructing disputed histories, this book examines the multiple ways in which the past is used by people as a critical resource for interpreting the meanings of a changing present. ...

What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape ...

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author’s videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks.Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evok...