Maria COUROUCLI, Research officer, CNRS maria.couroucli@mae.u-paris10.fr Regional domains Greece, Balkan Peninsula Thematic fields of interest History and anthropology, kinship, gender, nationalism, identity, popular religion, memory. Keywords Kinship, popular religion, ethnicity, nationalism, identity, memory

Maria Couroucli's research concerns the anthropology of modern Greece. She received her B.A. Hon. and M.A. from the University of Cambridge (UK), and her PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her first fieldwork was conducted in Epikepsi, an olive-growing village in Corfu. Her early work concentrated on issues of kinship organisation, property relations and marriage exchange in Corfu (monograph published in 1986), followed by some comparative work on social organization in different regions of contemporary Greece drawing on ethnographic and some literary material. She then turned to the study of identity and nationalism, examining modern representations of self and nation ; her work on the cultural construction of ethnic and national identity in a historical and anthropological perspective dealt more specifically with the ethno-religious dimension of identity in Balkan societies.

Her more recent work bears on mixed shrines and shared religious practices between Christians and Muslims in the post-ottoman world, namely in Greece and in Turkey. This research is being conducted in a comparative perspective within the Euro-Mediterranean programme RAMSES2 funded by the EU (6th PCRD). Her current research focuses on issues of memory, through an ethnographic analysis of a personal narrative on the Greek Civil war (1946-1949).

Maria Couroucli joined the Laboratoire d'Ethnologie in 1985 where she coordinated for many years the research group "Anthropology of the Mediterranean and Southern European societies". She is currently co-organizing the research seminar Memory and displacement and has also been teaching since the early 1990s a Master's class in the Department of Ethnologie et Sociologie Comparative in Paris X University in Nanterre on the Anthropology of Balkan Societies.

Dr. Couroucli was a visiting scholar in the department of Anthropology at Harvard University from 1998 to 1999 and served as Deputy Director of the Maison de l’Archéologie et de l’Ethnologie René Ginouvés from January 2000 to October 2003.

Published works