In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine / Edition 1

by Jill Dubisch

Overview

In a Different Place offers a richly textured account of a modern pilgrimage, combining ethnographic detail, theory, and personal reflection. Visited by thousands of pilgrims yearly, the Church of the Madonna of the Annunciation on the Aegean island of Tinos is a site where different interests—sacred and secular, local and national, personal and official—all come together. Exploring the shrine and its surrounding town, Jill Dubisch shares her insights into the intersection of social, religious, and political life in Greece. Along the way she develops the idea of pilgrimage-journeying away from home in search of the miraculous—as a metaphor for anthropological fieldwork. This highly readable work offers us the opportunity to share one anthropologist's personal and professional journey and to see in a "different place" the inadequacy of such conventional anthropological categories as theory versus data, rationality versus emotion, and the observer versus the observed.


Dubisch examines in detail the process of pilgrimage itself, its relationship to Orthodox belief and practice, the motivations and behavior of pilgrims, the relationship between religion and Greek national identity, and the gendered nature of religious roles. Seeking to evoke rather than simply describe, her book presents readers with a sense of the emotion, color, and power of pilgrimage at this Greek island shrine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691029672
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/21/1995
Series:	Princeton Modern Greek Studies , #11
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jill Dubisch is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona State University. She is the editor of Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton).

Table of Contents

	List of Plates	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	A Note on Transliteration	xv
Chapter 1	Introduction	3
Chapter 2	The Pilgrim and the Anthropologist	20
Chapter 3	The Anthropological Study of Pilgrimage	34
Chapter 4	Observing Pilgrimage: Churches, Icons, and the Devil	49
Chapter 5	Pilgrimage Observed: The Journey and the Vow	76
Chapter 6	The Observer Observed	101
Chapter 7	An Island in Space, an Island In Time	120
Chapter 8	Writing the Story/History of the Church: The Panayia and the Nun	134
Chapter 9	Of Nations and Foreigners, Miracles and Texts	156
Chapter 10	Women, Performance, and Pilgrimage: Beyond Honor and Shame	193
Chapter 11	The Virgin Mary and the Body Politic	229
Chapter 12	Epilogue: In a Different Place	250
	Notes	259
	References Cited	287
	Index	309

What People are Saying About This

James Faubion

In this book we get not one pilgrimage but three: that of the believer seeking to be granted or to commemorate a miracle, that of the anthropologist departing from the more straightforward channels of structure-functionalism to follow the windings and rewindings of postmodernist reflexivity, and that of a sufferer, a woman, and a scholar arriving at the synthesis of her suffering, her sex, and her scholarship. In A Different Place is built upon a metaphorical foundation of exceptional power and vividness and of exceptional heuristic value.
— James Faubion, Rice University

From the Publisher

"In this book we get not one pilgrimage but three: that of the believer seeking to be granted or to commemorate a miracle, that of the anthropologist departing from the more straightforward channels of structure-functionalism to follow the windings and rewindings of postmodernist reflexivity, and that of a sufferer, a woman, and a scholar arriving at the synthesis of her suffering, her sex, and her scholarship. In A Different Place is built upon a metaphorical foundation of exceptional power and vividness and of exceptional heuristic value."—James Faubion, Rice University

Editorial Reviews

"Dubisch covers a great amount of material in a scholarly and emotionally powerful fashion. Her book is an important addition to the works of earlier female anthropologists.... I only hope anthropologists do not overlook the heuristic importance of Dubisch's book, a book that will be instructive for years to come."

American Anthropologist

"In this book we get not one pilgrimage but three: that of the believer seeking to be granted or to commemorate a miracle, that of the anthropologist departing from the more straightforward channels of structure-functionalism to follow the windings and rewindings of postmodernist reflexivity, and that of a sufferer, a woman, and a scholar arriving at the synthesis of her suffering, her sex, and her scholarship. In A Different Place is built upon a metaphorical foundation of exceptional power and vividness and of exceptional heuristic value."—James Faubion, Rice University

From the Publisher