Sarah Green’s field site, an amoeboid blot of land called Pogoni straddling the Greek Albanian border, is the kind of Balkan hot spot that attracts political hyperbole. But Green’s book is refreshingly subtle and even, I am glad to say, funny, with the kind of humor that serves to equalize the power disparities between the observer and the observed. Initially drafted as team ethnographer in a multidisciplinary study on the “Natural and Anthropogenic Causes of Soil Degradation and Desertification in the Mediterranean”— in this case, mountainous Epirus in northwest Greece—Green began by dutifully inquiring into local (she eschews the word) understandings and responses to the question of land degradation. Finding that this was a nonissue in Pogonian interpretations of the landscape (she describes this in passages of dialogue that recall, as she notes, the deadpan hilarity of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer interviews), she applied herself more broadly to the question of what people did make of where they lived (or lived sometimes), and of movement and change. What they saw, chiefly, was the evidence, as she puts it, of marginality, abandonment, and ordinariness: an unremarkable scrubby landscape inhabited by people (mostly pensioners) who are “neither one thing nor another, or alternatively too much both one thing and the other, and somehow still not particularly noted or notable” (p. 7), a place both in the grip of irrevocable change (e.g., p. 53) and also always the same. Her geomorphological–ethnographic perspective allows her to draw imaginatively on different scales of analysis from the tectonic to the political, linking the instability of the soils, the shifting location of villages, and the opening and closing of the border to her larger arguments on what she calls, drawing from Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, and others, “Balkan fractals.”

Green, amazingly, turns the detailed comparison of the quadrants of Lower Pogonian (Kasidiaris) topography into a compelling narrative. She gives the reader a vivid sense of why it matters to live in one place or another, and how diversely differently situated groups exploit and command the region through contrasting subsistence regimes and patterns of short- and long-distance movement. (Here, the book would be enriched by engagement with earlier literature on landscape, ethnicity, and class in Greece: In particular I miss reference to Muriel Dimen’s work on the Greek–Albanian border and the cross-disciplinary work of Susan Buck Sutton in the Argolid.)

Green’s interpretation of the meaning of landscape is a major contribution to the contemporary literature on space and place. She lucidly conveys a contemporary rural reality—unromantic, of “no account”—in which the inhabitants are not only “out-of-the-way,” but are also retracting from the territory they formerly exploited extensively, remaining within their villages and traveling between places on asphalt roads (p. 210). The chapters on “Counting” and “Embodied Counting,” in which Green discusses the production and interpretation of statistics about people, land, animals, and events, stand on their own as object lessons in understanding statistical representation; her ethnographically astute observations on the popular classification of forests (pp. 178–179) are an instructive complement to the broader-brush tableau of James Scott’s Seeing like a State (Yale University Press, 1998).

Green notes that most villages avoid marking (ethnic) difference in public, although the approximate segregation of neighborhoods was obvious to her: Villagers make claims to a generic “just Greek” heritage. This complicates municipal attempts to capture new EU resources organized around regional identities, “tradition,” and “cultural distinctiveness.” Ethnographers such as Jane Cowan and Giorgos Aggelopoulos have noted both avoidance and display in next-door Greek Macedonia: Green’s picture could benefit from more attention to the Slav–Macedonian question and the vexed triple, not double, Albania–Greece–Macedonia international border.

Green observes that Pogonians insist on sustaining a certain incoherence (p. 78) regarding the boundaries between people and places (as other ethnographers have observed, this suspension of definition is in the service of a scarce economy as well as the maintenance of peace); at the same time, they occasionally express nostalgia for the imposed clarity of dictatorship (p. 64). This is a key insight into the dynamics of “Balkan” ethnopolitical relations. . In a pivotal chapter, Green uses the concept of the fractal to describe and analyze contemporary hegemonic understandings of the “Balkans”. Like fractals, the Balkans are conceptualized as a self-replicating, proliferating, hybrid—or better, mixed-up— phenomenon in which the “whole is the same as the parts, and each part is in itself whole.” Yielding wholes at every level, fractal organizations produce “no tops or bottoms, no clear edges, no beginning or end” (p. 135): in short no totalization superior to the sum of the parts. On the one hand Green seems to argue against the Euclidean expectations that cast this fractality as pathological; on the other hand she recognizes it as a “fantasy with teeth” that generates, in the context of contemporary international politics, either murderous attempts at ethnic clarification or a kind of existential suffering connected to the namelessness of generic (and centerless) marginality. Green does not argue for the ontological reality of the Balkans as fractal; she does note the occasional use of “Balkan” as an ironic or disparaging term of self-reference.

Green’s wide-ranging discussion of “Balkan” history, emphasizing circuits of movement, is engaging and enlightening. The book’s theoretical discussions are dense (Green is marvelously well-read) but not turgid; Green has a light, direct, and unpretentious style of writing. Notes from the Balkans gives readers a visceral sense of the “ordinary” and, I think, a better idea about marginality. It is a delightful book to read.