As the first Greek national to be comprehensively trained in American cultural anthropology, Seremetakis challenged entrenched homeostatic binary inversion models of death rituals and gender relations in Anglophone Mediterranean social anthropology.
Based on long-term fieldwork and unprecedented linguistic expertise, Seremetakis rejected assumptions of social totality through intricate performance, divination practices, embodied labour, and a feminised material culture.
Her integration of the senses and material culture has methodologically influenced recent symbolic and cognitive archaeology. Seremetakis’s linkage of material culture and emotions registered methodological advances in the anthropology of the body comparable to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection...
(Excerpt from: Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology)