Professor Evthymios Papataxiarchis has studied Social Anthropology in the London School of Economics. He received a BSc (Econ.) in Social Anthropology with First Class Honours in 1978 and a PhD on the basis of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Aegean Greece in 1988. He is also a graduate of the School of Law of the University of Athens. Since 1987 he is teaching Social Anthropology in the University of the Aegean where he has been advisor to the Governing Body of the University for the establishment of the first Department of Social Anthropology in Greece. He has been President of this Department and member of the Senate from 2002 to 2005 and served in various committees including the Research Council of the University of Aegean. From 2000 till 2019 Evthymios Papataxiarchis has been director of the Postgraduate Program ‘Social and Historical Anthropology’. He is currently directing the International Postgraduate Summer School ‘Cultures, Migrations, Borders’ and the Laboratory of Ethnography and has the scientific responsibility of the Observatory of the Refugee and Migration in the Aegean. He has taught as visiting professor in the Universities of Athens and Crete, in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Bogadici University (Istanbul). He has directed EU funded research projects (Horizon, ELIDEK, ESPA, Pythagoras) and has recently been a Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and a Senior Research Fellow to the Institute of Advanced Studies of the same university. He has been a founding member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the American Anthropological Association and is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of Greek Review of Political Science and the Greek Review of Social Research and a member of the Editorial Board of Synchrona Themata. He is also directing the series ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Ethnographies’ in Alexandria Publications.
Evthymios Papataxiarchis has published extensively in Greek, English and French on gender, kinship and power, on extra-domestic sociality, on the anthropology of emotions and the politics of locality. He has combined historical anthropology and microhistory in the study of mid 19th c. traformations in Ottoman Western Anatolia during the Tanzimat and is engaged in a long term project on the history of anthropological ideas in 20th c. Greece.
His recent work, inspired by long term fieldwork in a border village community on the island of Lesbos, is on migration and the management of cultural difference. His is currently working on the structures of ‘humanitarian governance’ and the socio-spatial restructuring effected at the local and regional level by the recent refugee crisis.