Remembering Absence : The Sense of Life in Island Greece

• Format Paperback | 352 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229mm
• Publication date 01 Apr 2019

Resulting from research conducted on Chios in the midst of the sovereign debt crisis that struck Greece in 2010, this monograph follows the lives of a series of individuals representative of the transformations currently affecting this Aegean island. As witnesses to the crisis speak of their current lives, however, their contemporary anxieties and frustrations are expressed in terms of past crises that have affected the dramatic history of Chios, including the German occupation and ensuing famine of the Second World War, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey of 1922-23, and the Massacres of 1822 that decimated the island at the outset of the Greek War of Independence. The complex temporality that emerges in these accounts is ensconced in a cultural context of commemorative ritual, ecstatic visions, an annual rocket war and other forms of embodied practice that all contribute to forms of memory production that question the assumptions of the trauma discourse, revealing the islanders of Chios to be actively engaged in forging their place in time in a manner that blurs the boundaries between historiography, memory, religion, and myth.

A member of the Chiot diaspora, Nicolas Argenti makes use of unpublished correspondence from survivors of the Massacres of 1822 and their descendants and reflects upon oral family histories and silences in which the island represents an enigmatic but palpable absence. As he explores the ways in which a body of memory and a cultural experience of temporality came to be dislocated and shared between two populations, his return to Chios marks an encounter in which the traditional roles of ethnographer and participant come to be dispersed and intertwined.