The experience of warfare, state and political violence and terror can impart lasting harmful effects on individuals, familial structures, social networks and communities long after the actual cessation of violence.

The emergence of culturally variable post traumatic stress disorders resulting from direct and indirect experiences of violence and terror, and social and economic dislocation can severely damage the very human resources needed for the social and economic transition to democracy. Recognition and analyses of the long- term costs of human rights violations is essential to the development of a culture of human rights.

While much attention is paid to the demilitarisation issues of adult males, very little is known about the impact of chronic political violence on youth, women, familial, kin and neighbourhood and community structures. The legal orientation of human rights organisations and commissions of truth concentrates on individual experience and legal criteria of evidence, rather than subjective and symbolic experience and collective structures in the family, kin networks, neighbourhood and community. Yet these collective strata are essential cultural conduits for the democratisation of everyday life. The material impact and cultural memory of past political violence will mediate the role kin and community structures, gender relations and youth play in the transition to democracy. Thus, individual and collective posttraumatic stress disorders resulting from recent experiences of political violence can have a decided impact on the formation of a civil society.

Posttraumatic stress syndrome encompasses individual and collective experience, psychic and physical trauma and is intimately entangled with the individual and social organisation of memory. It is a provisional covering concept that requires a high degree of cultural and historical localisation, which is one goal of this project. How do various socio-cultural modes of remembering and forgetting political violence affect the recognition and management of posttraumatic stress? How does this relationship between posttraumatic memory and disorder facilitate or inhibit the transition to democracy? The memory of violence can be located in both public and private spheres:

in juridical inquiry (commissions of truth), and medicalisation-therapeuticisation of trauma stemming from violence, popular culture, life histories and oral history.

The extensive political violence and surveillance exerted against domestic, kinship and wider communal units in contemporary warfare and civil conflict implies that post-war, post liberation or peace situations will be characterised by significant damage to traditional support structures that customarily coped with collective memory, bereavement, long term mental and physical disorders and the mentally and physically disabled. What programmatic responses from the public sphere are needed to address the trauma and wounds of the aftermath of state violence upon women, youth, domestic and familial structures? How is the militarised and traumatised family or community demobilised in the post war situation? What strategies of economic, social and cultural integration will be needed by women, youth and affected families? These question point to the need to develop comparative research agendas and harm reduction interventions.

What are the legitimate and illegitimate modes for constructing the memory of violence: juridical, medical-psychiatric, political, religion, the arts, oral culture, psychic and physical trauma?

• To what extent are the biographies, memories and experiences of families and individuals recognised and provided with an official status in the public culture of their societies? Or is this knowledge privatised and/or stigmatised?
• What various roles do women, youth and families play in creating the cultural memory of violence? How do they historicise the memory of violence? What role do mourning practices, oral culture and material culture play here?
• What is the cultural and social variability in manifestations of posttraumatic stress resulting from political violence: how this correlate with the different forms of state violence, or the political structure and the political culture of the society concerned? What trans-national gendered, age and life-cycle patterns can be discerned?
• What are the various gendered and age manifestations of "posttraumatic" memory and disorder in different cultures and political systems that have undergone violence: psychological/medical manifestations—illness, mental disorders, fatigue syndromes, temporal, spatial, and social disorientation, substance-abuse, inability to manage bereavement, memory lapses? How can it be identified cross-culturally and within cultural divergence and difference?
• What is the current integrity or viability of traditional formal and informal support structures i.e. family community, gender networks, religion, state intervention/ rehabilitation programs (if any) for coping with posttraumatic stress situations?
• What changes have impacted on the domestic unit and familial structures in situations of chronic political violence and terror? How does the arrest, imprisonment, assassination and exile of significant others impact on women and youth within the familial structure?
• How do institutions of chronic violence (such as the state, and resistance movements) depict the family, women and youth in terms of forms, values and functions?
• What are the degrees of social stigmatisation, isolation and fragmentation of families, relations and victims of state violence that inhibit access to traditional formal and informal support structures?
• What continuing situations of formal or informal violence and/or terror are persons undergoing posttraumatic stress syndrome exposed to?
• What new support structures have been developed or need to be developed in the aftermath of political violence that address such issues as multiple bereavement and posttraumatic stress?
• What are the current economic, housing, educational, and job situations of families and individuals who are undergoing posttraumatic stress syndrome? How do economic conditions facilitate or inhibit development of post traumatic stress-disorders?

Foucault (1979), Scarry (1985) and Asad (1983) exclusively emphasised how institutional practices instrumentalise pain to construct political subjects and to dramatise the dominant truth-claims of the institutional order. But can the circulation, expression, symbolisation and sensory memory of pain be used to make counter-institutional truth claims? Pain as truth-claiming through the force of emotions and shared moral inference occurs when the subject is in conflict with the social order. This discontinuity can attain a collective dimension by exploiting the moral capacity of shared emotional inference to generate communities of pain and of healing.

Any discussion of the ideological organisation of pain should take into account those frameworks that deal with the emotions as embodied, conceptual, moral and idealistic constructs that place the self in a dynamic relation to social structure. In the Peloponnesse, the prescribed communicative media or pain encountered in Maniat mourning performances and divination ceremonies in the sensory organisation of the agricultural landscape and in trans-personal concepts of the body was antiphony (Seremetakis, 1991).

In Greek, the concept ofantifonisi (antiphony) possesses a social and juridical sense in addition to its aesthetic, musical and dramaturgical uses. Antiphony can refer to the construction of contractual agreement, or the creation of a symphony by opposing voices. It also implies echo, response and guarantee. In Greek, the prefix anti- does not only refer to opposition and antagonism but also: equivalence, "in place of," reciprocity, "face-to-face." These meanings are embedded in the vocabulary of laments. Mourners in their laments claim to "come out as representative (na vgho antiprosopos) of the dead (prosopo means "face" or "person," and antiprospos means "representative"). A related and emotionally laden phrase is "to witness, suffer for, and reveal the truth about" the dead (na tine martirisoume).

To "witness," "to suffer for," and "to come out as representative for" are narrative devices in laments that fusejural notions of reciprocity and truth claiming with the emotional nuances of pain. A related phrase that is asked of the dead at the beginning of burial procedures and at certain commemoration services is: "Are you coming back? For this is the last trial (dhiki)^ The concept of trial here evokes the "judgement of the dead," the notion of ordeal, and the last opportunity to be witnessed and represented by the living.

The practice of "witnessing" revealed antiphonic relations as contractual relations, and antiphonic discourse as correspondence, concordance and the representation of one social agent by another. Here the correspondence between truth and pain is pivotal. For the Maniats, discoursed pain and discourse in pain constitutes truth. This is an antiphonic relation precisely because it is expressed by contrastive contrapuntal modes of signification: poetic improvisation on the one hand, ritual sobbing and screaming on the other. The relation between truthful discourse and pain, in turn, parallels the antiphonic dynamics between soloist and chorus in lament performance—the former primarily narrates, the latter responds in extralingusitic expressions of pain (including body gestures) punctuated with brief verbal replies. ' The truth claims that arise from the ritual, then, depend on the emotional force of pain and thejural force of antiphonic confirmation by stating that they cannot properly sing.

Maniat Laments are about both the pain of the survivor in the throes of mourning and also about the long-termed experiential pain that the deceased and the mourner bear during the course of their lives. Ponos (pain) is plural. It refers to a multiplicity of pains that at the moment of death cohere into a metaphor for the deceased's life and the mourner's life. Maniats understand pain as "burning" and "fire" (imagery that can be found throughout Greece). Grief, pain, and memory burn, so does anger. "Burning pain" (kaimos) "melts" the subject, "liquefies the self (lioni, revi). Crying and tears as material signs of liquefaction are expressive complements to the inner experience of burning pain.

In several laments, "burning pain" is also metaphorised as a "holocaust"(olokaftoma). This term refers to pain as consuming the self, as a sacrificial expenditure, and as the labour of enduring pain. Labour is understood as the deceased's (and by inference, the mourner's) "fate," "share," or allotment. The endurance of fate is conceptualised as a labour task. To endure or complete an arduous task in the agricultural and domestic spheres is often described as martirisa (past tense); a concept that links labour, suffering, and pain. Just as the mourner -witnesses or "comes out as representative "for others, so women labour, suffer, and endure pain for others. Pain is the concept that determines the social character of women's labour, whether this takes place in the mortuary ceremony or the agricultural and domestic economies. Through pain, Maniat women link kinship, the division of labour, agricultural and domestic economies—all male-dominated institutions—into an experiential continuum.

The concept of "burning pain" reinforces the pain/labour relation by engaging the iconography of the female body. In a lament where the death of a child is described as the mother's holocaust, the separation of son from mother, of child from household, is depicted as the subtraction of a part from a whole—understood here as predestined, sacrificial payment of a share that is consumed. This subtraction, sacrifice, removal of a part from a whole, is experienced as burning pain and as an "incurable wound" that leaves a gap, a rupture in the mother. The use oforificial symbolism encodes a subtle inversion where the experience of birthing (as the painful separation of mother from child) is rendered analogous to the death experience (as the painful separation of mother from child). The open wound is like the open mouth in "screaming" and lament improvisation. Here, the wound stands for both the internal violence of death and the externalisation of pain and witnessing. Mourning discourses bring the pain of life-long labour and the pain of mourning into a semantic equivalence. Death and labour are experiences of embodiment determined by moira (fate). This equivalence is expressed as shared substance between the mourner and the deceased.

The antiphonic display of pain is the cultural construction of truth, and, in turn, truth for the Maniats is the disclosure or revelation of moira (fate). Moira appears in the social order and in individual life as the forced entry of the exterior into the interior. This is apparent in divinatory dreaming where moira. as a future event, first appears in the desocialised state of sleeping. Dreams come from the outside, and the donors of moira in the dream are preeminent representatives of"outsiderhood," of xenitid, the dead. The presence of the dead in the warning dream signifies the advent of a life event tied to moira. The entry of death into the domain of the living, the effectiveness of the dream in the waking world, and the disclosure of moira through divination link the emergence of truth with dangerous entry. The chorus and the soloist deploy antiphonic relations and techniques to dramatise this dangerous entry. In turn, the mourning narratives represent this dangerous entry with the imagery of a disordered body. In both the performative dynamics of the body in the ritual and in the motif of the body in oral poetry, the passage of truth into the social order, the experience of dangerous entry is expressed as "pain," "burning," and "wounding."

Open wounds, the open mouth that screams and improvises moiroloi, and metaphors of birthing (see lament below) from a symbolic continuum, the orificial cartography of the female body. These are thresholds, limens, points of entry and exit where the outside and the inside—fate, truth, and the social order—meet in disordering contact. The presence ofmofra intensifies when the orificial imagery and functions of the female body intensify. In everyday social life, men associate this process with the polluting ambience of the feminine. In the mourning ritual, women convert and invert the orificial symbolism of the polluting (women's speech and embodiment) into media of cultural power that contest the verities of everyday social life. The female body as gesture and as speech, in death and in birth, becomes the preeminent threshold for the disturbing passage ofmofra and truth into the social order.

Pain is materialised by the acoustics of screaming and the poetics of the body. The material character of pain endows it with force. The metaphorical link between the work of mourning and agriculture transforms women's work into a labour relation and thus adds to the material impact to ritual lament practice. The labour of pain, witnessing, representing, burning, wounding, and the endurance of fate organises the relations between self and other, the living and the dead, women and men.

In my last book. The Senses Still (1996 a), I extended the exploration of pain and memory into a deeper examination of the cultural role of the senses in the construction of social meaning. The circuit formed by the material transfer of pain onto persons, objects and landscapes as vehicles of memory can be characterised as commensality. Commensality here is not just the social organisation of food and drink consumption and the rules that enforce social institutions at the level of consumption. Nor can it be reduced to the food-related senses of taste, vision and odour. It can be defined as the exchange of sensory memories and emotions and of the substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling. Historical consciousness and other forms of social knowledge are created and then replicated in time and space through commensal performances, ethics and exchange. Here each sense witnesses and records the commensal history of the others. In this type of exchange, history, knowledge, feeling and the senses become embedded in the material culture and its components: specific artifacts, places and performances. In processes of historical transformation and/or cross-cultural encounter, divergent sensory structures and commensalities can come into conflict with each other and some are socially repressed, erased and exiled into privatised recollection and marginal experience. These dynamics indicate profound transformations in a society's relation to material culture and to systems of knowledge bound up with the material. Commensality is a cultural vehicle for materialising memory, and the memory-metaphorisation of pain appears as the driving force in Greek mnemonic processes as revealed in the semantic depth of the term nostalghia.

In Greek the verb nostalgho is a composite of nosto and algho. Nosto means "I return," "I travel (back to the homeland)"; the noun nostos means "the return," "the jourpey," while a-nostos means "without taste." The opposite of dnostos is nostimos and characterises someone or something "that has journeyed and arrived," "has matured, ripened and is thus tasty" (useful). Algho means ^tk! feel pain," "I ache for," and the noun alghos characterises "one's pain in soul and body," "burning pain" (kaimos). Thus nostalghia is the desire or longing with burning pain to journey. It also evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement;
it mixes bodily and emotional pain and ties this painful experience of spiritual and somatic exile to the notion of maturation and ripening. In this sense, nostalghia is linked to the personal consequences ofhistoricising sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey.

Nostalghia thus far is far from trivialising romantic sentimentality. This reduction of the term confines the past and removes it from any transactional and material relation to the present; the past becomes an isolatable and consumable unit of time. Nostalgia, in the American sense, freezes the past in such a manner as to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present, preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history, whereas the Greek etymology evokes the transformative impact of the past as irreconciled historical experience.^\ Does the difference between nostalgia and nostalghia speak of different cultural experiences of the senses and memory? Could a dialogical encounter of the terms offer insights for an anthropology of the senses?

Nostalghia speaks to the sensory reception of history. In Greek there is a semantic circuit that weds the sensorial to agency, memory, finitude, and therefore history—all of which are contained within the etymological strata of the senses. The word for senses is aesthisis\ emotion-feeling and aesthetics are respectively aesthima and aesthitiki. They all derive from the verb aesthdnome or aesthisome meaning "I feel or sense," "I understand, grasp, learn or receive news or information," and "I have an accurate sense of good and evil," that is, " I judge correctly." Aesthisis is defined as action or power through the medium of the senses, and the media or the semia (points, tracks, marks) by which one senses. Aesthima, emotion-feeling, is also an ailment of the soul, an event that happens, that impacts on one viscerally through the senses; it also refers to romance, love affair. A strong aeshtima is called pathos (passion). This includes the sense of suffering, illness, but also the English sense of passion, as in "she has a passion for music." The stem verbpatheno means "I provoke passion" in both its meanings;
"I am acting, moving by an internal force of aesthima, passion;" "I get inspired, excited;" "I suffer." Among Greek youth, the word patheno, as in "when I hear this song patheno" is common. The gestures accompanying it, such as hitting and holding the forehead, and the matching sounds, express both (sudden) suffering and extreme enjoyment.

A synonym of patheno, in this case, is petheno (I die). Pathos (passion) is the meeting point of eros and thanatos; where the latter is an internal death—the death of the self because of and for the other; the moment that the self is both the self and a memory in the other. Death is a journey; a sensorial journey into the other. So is eros. The common expression during love-making is me pethanes(you made me die; I died because of you, for you, through you). Eros is desire. It also means appetite. The expression often used in vernacular Greek—i.e. from mother to child—to show extreme desire is 'Til eat you." The same expression is used for someone causing suffering—i.e. child to parent—"you ate me." In the journey of death to the other world, the earth "eats" the body.

In these semantic currents we find no clear cut boundaries between the senses and emotions, the mind and body, pleasure and pain, the voluntary and the involuntary, and between the affective and aesthetic experience. Such culturally specific perspectives on sensory experience are not sheer comparative curiosities. They are crucial passageways for exploring culturally specific memory formations—an inquiry that is essential to a confrontation ofposttraumatic memory stemming from war experiences.

Theorists of cultural memory such as Connerton (1989) and the Popular Memory Group (1988) have identified the conditions under which social memory is culturally reproduced specifying the crucial roles played by legitimised agents of memory, collective recollection practices and formal spaces for the articulation and public depiction of memory.

Connerton and the Popular Memory Group see cultural memory as intentionally mediated by social actors and as embodied in performance practices that can intervene in the meaning systems of the present (see also Bauman, 1975). Complementing this model of memory as performance is the work of philosophers of historiography such as Hayden White (1978), Paul Riceour(1988), Paul Veyne (1976) and Reinhart Koselleck (1985) who concur that the historical event is not that which happens but that which is narrated.

The narratological model does not simplistically assert that history is reduced to texts, but alerts us that formulaic and ideological depiction can leave vast realms of experience unnarrated and dehistoricised, and thus inaccessible to a society as a cultural resource. The act of historical narration in a variety of written, oral, aural, artifactual and visual media, is dependent on the social and political conditions of its own action and knowledge; and to the attention or inattention paid to these contingencies. Representations of the past are only realised through social and personal perspectives, standpoints and positions that both contain and create meaning—"the ancient trinity of place, time and person" (Koselleck, 1985) gives birth to shifting and multiple historical perspectives. Both theorists of cultural memory and philosophers of historiography view the social capacity to narrate the past, to objectify and to collectivise historical experience as a cultural process that is subjected to uneven social and political conditions of constraint and possibility.

The emergence of culturally variable memory disorders and posttraumatic conditions resulting from direct and indirect experiences of violence and terror and attendant social dislocation can severely damage the very human resources required for the transition to democracy and civil society. Taussig (1988), Feldman (1991) and Seremetakis (1996a, 1996b) have pointed out that cultural memory is contingent on material conditions of embodiment and the senses, conditions that are radically altered if not interdicted by exposure to chronic political violence, domination, and their traumatic after-effects. Political violence as a lived ecology or as traumatic memory can disable the very sensory, conceptual and linguistic resources that reproduce and externalise memory in time and space. Psychic survival may demand the cultivation of stoicism, puritanical relations with violated embodiment, and the silencing of pain in order to continue political struggle. In turn, the future emergence, healing or resolution of posttraumatic social and personal scars, are irrevocably tied to the social legitimacy or illegitimacy of diverse memories of the violent past in the present. In societies once, or presently, gripped by political warfare, racial or ethnic animosity, and subjected to institutionalised secret knowledge as well as lacking stable civil institutions and a stable open public sphere, experiences of violence, terror and pain can be erased by "cultural anaesthesia" (Feldman, 1996):

Cultural anaesthesia is my gloss of Adornos (1973) insight that in a post-Holocaust and the late capitalist modernity the quantitative and qualitative increase of objectification increases the social capacity to inflict pain upon the Other and I would add—to render the Other's pain inadmissible to public discourse and culture. It is upon this insight that a political anthropology of the senses in modernity can be elaborated. This formula implies that the communicative and semantic legitimacy of sensory capacities, and their ability to achieve collective representation in public culture, is unevenly distributed within systems of economic, racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and cultural domination...State, legal and media rationality, separately or combined, can erect a cordon sanitaire around... social perception to neuter collective trauma, to subtract victims and to install public zones of perceptual amnesia which privatise and thus incarcerate historical memory. In this atomised context, "the memory of the senses" (Seremetakis 1996) becomes a vital repository of historical consciousness, and once shared and exchanged, the basis for illicit cultural identities... Contrapuntal sensory histories can be located in the scattered wreckage of the inadmissible: lost biographies, memories, words, pains and faces which cohere into a vast secret museum of historical and sensory absence. (Feldman, 1996)

Notes

To conduct an etymological analysis of a term or concept is not to assume that all the sediments of meaning are operant at all times and with a uniform prevalence. However, etymological analysis is complementary to the uneven historical development of European peripheries which is characterised by the incomplete and disjunctive articulation of the premodem. different phases within modernity, and the post-modern. Etymology captures the uneven shifts of semantic history that may be present at any given moment in a society. Thus the American sense of term of nostalgia can be discerned in Greek state discourses and in the popular press. Both institutions tend to deliver discourses on identity and value loss and consequent societal crises. Yet, in its various etymological senses discussed here. nostalghia is widely heard in the language of everyday life, as well as in Greek popular music and poetry.

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