The vegetarian anthropologist

摘要

'Well, if you really insist on being a vegetarian while you're doing fieldwork, you will have to find some other way to prove your manhood. At least you have a son, and can point to him and tell people you produced him without eating meat'. These were the words of advice of a colleague who had conducted fieldwork in Greece, given to me just before I set out on my own fieldwork on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the Eastern Aegean. He was not the only one who questioned the idea that I would carry my dietary preferences with me into the field. There was a lingering implication of self-indulgence, or lack of commitment to one's work in the idea that one wouldn't embrace the maxim 'when in Rome....' But his advice stuck in my mind, posed as it was in such gendered terms. Of course, Greece was a 'Mediterranean' society, and for all the criticism that the concept has undergone in our intellectual discourse, images of Mediterranean masculinity still abound, at least in 'corridor talk'