THE INTERPRETATION OF MY material which has resulted from this experience can be compared with the purely anthropological interpretations, freshly made on my fieldwork alone, which I published in the 1980s through to the early 1990s. These are listed in the bibliography. A few small differences are marked in the notes; but otherwise the interpretation of the village material is substantially the same. Differences arise only from the much broader perspective taken here, which requires additional distinctions to be made about the Christian or other origins of village material, but chiefly imparts to it a heightened sense of the spiritual and symbolic heritage from which it springs.

A deep participation in the life of the Orthodox Church is something which few academics in the West, even those closely involved in observing and studying Greek culture, feel called to engage in; indeed, many would shy away from it, feeling perhaps that it might compromise their academic objectivity. But anyone who observes life by participating in it, as social anthropologists have always done, must feel that such an avoidance is a little paradoxical, and that many connecting links in Greek culture might well be more easily seen with a mind sensitive to the formative ideas of the Greek Orthodox Church. For those who do not themselves, for whatever reason, participate in the life of the Orthodox Church, therefore, I offer here what is at once a view from an insider’s experience, and a view from the discipline of social anthropology; and as chance and the circumstances of biography would have it, this combination of experience has become apposite to our sharpened contemporary awareness that broad cultural regions of the world have different ways of seeing things, and can contribute to the question of how far the forms taken by Orthodox cultures are shaped by their religious origins.

For all that Greece is so much seen as the mother of the western world, modern studies of the Greek world are not always well understood in the West. Among other problems, there is a potential among readers from western confessions for misunderstanding the Christian history of Greece, though I believe that, when it is rightly read, there is also a potential for their recapturing their own history within it. It became apparent, for example, as I wrote this book, that in the various streams of tradition that had fed into what the villagers of Ambeli called ‘the old mind’ (τὸ παλιὸ μυαλό), there were differing world views available, running alongside one another and intersecting and clashing at various points. This was a culture with very ancient roots which necessarily included choices other than Christian ones, even if the main frame was by that time drawn from Christianity. The drama of village life lies in the vividness with which people perceive these different traditions of thought, how they choose between them, and how the choices work out for good or for ill; and this is why it is so easy to see a variety of different influences in the villages—the classical past, the Orthodox inheritance, the distrust of public institutions which goes back to the Ottomans, and the competitive juggling with all these ways of seeing which is a part of village repartee.