A member of the Chiot diaspora, Argenti makes use of unpublished correspondence from survivors of the Massacres of 1822 and their descendants and reflects on oral family histories and silences in which the island represents an enigmatic but palpable absence. As he explores the ways in which a body of memory and a cultural experience of temporality came to be dislocated and shared between two populations, his return to Chios marks an encounter in which the traditional roles of ethnographer and participant come to be dispersed and intertwined.
Nicolas Argenti is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University. He is author of The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields, and editor (with Katharina Schramm) of Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission.