Local names, foreign claims: family inheritance and national heritage on a Greek island

In this article I analyze the ways in which a national response to an international controversy—the naming of the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”—is mediated by local‐level kinship practices. While the Greek government insists that it has historical claims to this name, much of the press in the United States and Europe depicts Greece as displaying “hysteria over history” with respect to this issue. Both of these discourses mask the significance of the issue of the name “Macedonia” for ordinary Greeks, as interpreted through their ideologies and practices concerned with giving baptismal names and with inheritance and continuity. These provide the unstated assumptions through which a national ideology of historical continuity is filtered and reformulated. This case study suggests how anthropologists can make a unique contribution to current studies of nationalism “from the bottom up.”