Marilena Papachristoforou was born in Thessaloniki. She traces her origins to the Greeks of Egypt. He teaches social anthropology and folklore at the University of Ioannina. Her latest book is Self as a Research Tool – Ethnography and Performance (published by Papazisi).

Mostly books I don’t have time to read in a day…

I once identified with Lalla, the heroine of Le Clézio in The Desert, a Tuareg teenager with no family, just a person of essentially nomadic origin who breaks away from her destiny and comes of age.

This is a time-varying response. At twenty-three, it would have been Le Clecio without a second thought – I identified with his writing in general. In my thirties, I would probably be Wim Wenders, that’s what the filmmakers say. I’ll call Mimika Kranakis again today and tell her to bring her friends from Mataroa, Castoriadis and maybe Xenakis (although he seems unrelated) – I’d love to hear them chat with each other.

Laugh at shocking historical facts, such as those that frame the light plot of “The 100-year old man who jumped out of the window and disappeared.”

I read authors, not books. Moreover, a “classic” may be completely out of our view one moment and not the next, or we may recognize it as such a dynamic, depending on our relative position. It is therefore a matter of definition: each epoch finds its own timeless meaning in the work of the previous one…

I return to many texts to return to my traditions – in terms of entertainment, only poetry: I love Cavafy, Ritsos in his monologues, Seferis, George Gotis.

This is the moment when you put yourself in the place of the “other” in order to understand him – and, together with his world, discover aspects of yourself. Ethnographic fieldwork can be a convergence area for many different and often apparently incompatible epistemological points of view and practices: it benefits from observation and improvisation in practice, from distance and reflection when analyzing events.

Not now. I am constantly interested in possible answers to my many questions, and not so much the expression of my feelings or imagination in writing. In addition, like writing, ethnography for many of us is already a field of self-expression.