Galani-Moutafi Vasiliki

Vasiliki Galani-Moutafi studied social and cultural anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She did her postgraduate studies at the Graduate School of the same university, from where she obtained her Doctorate degree in 1990. From 1989 till today she has been teaching at the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean a range of courses covering the history of social anthropology, economic anthropology and anthropology of tourism. She is the Academic Director of the Postgraduate Program “Women and Genders: Anthropological and Historical Approaches” while in the same program she has also taught for several consecutive years the course “Gender, Work and Consumption”. Furthermore, she has served as Academic Director of the Postdoctoral Research program “Women’s Work in Family, Cooperative and Individual Enterprises in Tourism: the Cases of Mykonos and Lesvos”. From 2010 until today she serves as Dean of the School of Social Sciences, at the University of the Aegean.
Her research on the subject“Chios Mastiha, practices of heritage and representations of local identity” (2003-2005) was funded in part by the European Union program «Mediterranean Voices», whose basic aim was the development of approaches related to heritage management in urban areas of the Mediterranean. In addition, her research on the subject of “Chios Mastiha and Consumers: Multiple and Contested Meanings, Practices and Identities” (2006-2009) was funded by the Research Committee of the University of the Aegean. She is a reviewer, as well as resource editor, for the journal of Annals of Tourism Research.
Her research interests include: processes of socio-economic transformation in local Aegean island societies (Chios and Samos), cultural changes and the renegotiation of local identities, work, gender and consumption, anthropology of tourism, tourist discourse and tourism representations (with an emphasis on the tourist identities of Chios and Samos), alternative forms of tourism –eco- and cultural tourism-, conceptualizations of cultural identity in relation to indigenous and locally distinct products (such as Chios mastiha and Samos wine), village cooperatives, Unions of cooperatives and new forms of entrepreneurship in rural areas.