Time, Religion and Social Experience in Rural Greece

This is a study of Orthodox Christian practice in rural Greece with a focus on the interaction between religious imagination and everyday life. Based on extensive fieldwork in rural Greece, Hart offers a cross=disciplinary analysis of the structure and social reproduction of Greek religion, or the Greek religious imagination, through discussion of ritual activity and contemporary village life. Throughout, she emphasizes the long historical view and the heterogeneity of the ideas and practices of complex traditions, drawing on material from various periods of Greek history (pre-Christian, Byzantine, Ottoman, and post-Independence) in order to clarify contemporary practice. Hart links these investigations to reflections on the anthropology of time, "time" being conceived here as a schematization of what each culture proposes as the moral context or purpose of life. She is particularly interested in the frameworks of time and space that hold together the heterogeneous practices and ideas of complex traditions; and in the way certain substances and ritual figures serve as tangible icons of reality.