In this book, Penelope Papailias infuses the term history from below with a new meaning. Although it usually means an approach to history from the perspective of “ordinary” people in contrast to history from the perspective of rulers and elites, Papailias takes a further crucial step—and then another. For “history from below” is still mostly authored in established academic contexts. But how about considering a range of marginalized social actors who themselves “do history”? I use this phrase instead of “write history” because Papailias also nudges readers to expand the field by considering a range of unexamined historical practices such as the creation of archives, memoirs, witness accounts, and historical novels. If any anthropological examination of the margin is intellectually productive by forcing encounters with the unspoken presuppositions of the commonsensical, Papailias forces reexamination of the presuppositions of historical production itself by ethnographically considering a range of marginalized historical practices.

Greece provides the social context for the examination of various such historical practices, as a society in which the word archive carries fearful connotations: “Perhaps the only truly ‘successful’ archiving project in Greek history was that undertaken by the security police” (p. 27). It is worth noting that all the key terms Papailias employs have more open meanings in Greek, which reinforce the conceptual openings she strives for. Archive, from the Greek archeio, whose older literal meaning was “residence of the powerful,” etymologically links to arche, which means both “power” and “beginning.” Istoria can mean both “history” and “story.” Mythistorema (the literary novel) is a telling combination of the concepts of “myth” and “history,” and martyras can mean either “witness” or “martyr.”

Yet the four case studies Papailias examines do not just explore the idiosyncrasies of a Greek “experience” (in the process making valuable contributions to the cultural history of modern Greece), but all speak of wider themes. Her discussion of the practices of local historians in a provincial Greek city (Volos) who are interested in their city’s story reveals the tensions between professional academic historians and local amateur ones, as well as those between national and local stories, while pointing to modernity’s shifting narratives of urbanization and westernization. In her second case study, she focuses on the formidable effort to document the experiences of refugees from Asia Minor resulting from the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the first compulsory population exchange in modern history, a tragic policy subsequently replicated in many other frantic efforts to achieve national homogenization. This project “introduced the problematic of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in modern Greek historical studies” (p. 98). In her third case study, Papailias takes the opposite direction by focusing on a controversial novel from a left-wing writer about the Greek civil war, a novel that problematized the nature of testimony and of historical discourse itself. In her last study, she focuses on the memoirs of a Greek migrant to the United States who subsequently returned to Greece. This moving story of hardship and story about movement casts a dark critical shadow on liberal narratives, whether of progress or globalization, and on territorialized stories of belonging.

As Papailias moves from one study to the next, her analysis deepens as she is then able to reconsider each practice from the perspective of the previous ones, in the process refining her arguments and producing a tightly integrated discussion. This is a thoughtful book whose author pushes the boundaries of anthropology and history further as she demonstrates the gains of examining their overlaps.