Renée Hirschon

Renée Hirschon died on 27 October 2026, at the age of 82. The place and cause of her death have not been made public. Her death was announced by the Department of Social Anthropology and History at the University of the Aegean, which issued a formal resolution mourning its first chair and recording her decisive contribution to the department's academic identity.

Tributes followed in the Greek press and from colleagues abroad. Her former doctoral student and colleague George Tsimouris wrote that it was almost impossible to describe all that he owed her, calling her an enlightened teacher to many contemporary anthropologists. Funeral arrangements have not been made public.

Renée Hirschon was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 13 May 1944, into a family of Jewish heritage with roots in Ukraine. She completed her schooling in South Africa.

In a 2020 conversation recorded for the Human Beast channel, her former student Tamás David-Barrett described how she grew up as a member of a prominent white family expected to conform to the country's systemic racism, and instead rejected it, including by being in an interracial relationship long before the rise of the anti-apartheid struggle. Her early experience of a deeply divided society later informed her lifelong interest in identity, belonging and the people displaced by state policies of ethnic separation.

Hirschon took her BA at the University of Cape Town and then pursued graduate study at the University of Chicago. She came to Oxford for her doctorate in social anthropology and was awarded an MA and DPhil by the University of Oxford.

Between 1968 and 1970 she worked with the Athens Center of Ekistics, the urban research institute founded by Constantinos Doxiadis. That work first drew her to Kokkinia in Piraeus, a district built for refugees from Asia Minor, which became the site of her doctoral fieldwork in the early 1970s.

Hirschon's first publication on Kokkinia, written with the Indian architect S. Thakurdesai, appeared in the journal Ekistics in 1970 under the title "Society, Culture and Spatial Organisation: an Athens Community". She then lived in the district for more than a year and conducted intensive fieldwork, including a 1972 household survey of the Yerania quarter, for her Oxford DPhil.

She taught for many years at Oxford Brookes University (formerly Oxford Polytechnic), specialising in the anthropology of Europe and rising to Senior Lecturer. In 1987 she was elected Professor of Social Anthropology at the newly founded department at the University of the Aegean in Mytilene, Lesbos, becoming the first professor of anthropology at a Greek university. She chaired the department until 1998, took on heavy administrative duties during its early years and introduced courses on minorities, migrants and refugees.

After retiring from the Aegean for health reasons she returned to Oxford, where she was a long-standing Research Associate of the Refugee Studies Centre at Queen Elizabeth House, a Senior Research Fellow and later Emerita Fellow of St Peter's College, a Research Associate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, and a member of the academic advisory and steering committees of SEESOX at St Antony's College. She organised the Oxford conference that produced the edited volume Crossing the Aegean (2003) and took part in SEESOX seminars on the Greek diaspora well into the 2020s.

Her major study, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Clarendon Press, 1989), examined how Orthodox Christian refugees expelled from Anatolia under the 1923 Lausanne Convention, and their children, sustained a separate identity in Kokkinia fifty years after settlement. She documented the paradox of a settlement that was a slum by every objective measure, yet clean, brightly painted and well kept, and explained it through cultural values: reciprocity between households, the role of women, the importance of the home, the neighbourhood and the sacred, and the living memory of lost homelands.

Her wider interests included gender, cosmology and ritual, the organisation of space, the ethnography of speaking, and the relationship between religion and national identity in Greece. She wrote on Greek politeness, verbal play and concepts of time and obligation, on Christian and Muslim relations in the late Ottoman period, on the Jews of Rhodes and their diaspora in Africa, and on the symbolic character of the house in Olymbos, Karpathos. She argued consistently for the relevance of anthropological knowledge to contemporary conditions.

Hirschon was married to Manolis Philippakis, an architect, illustrator and musician born in Olymbos on the island of Karpathos in 1943. Her marriage deepened her ties to Greece, and she published under the name Renée Hirschon Philippakis in later years. The couple had two sons, Niko and Giannis.

She lived for many years in Oxford. A former student recalled that she kept ties with the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox parish in Oxford. Colleagues wrote after her death that she had faced health problems for many years, which made her life difficult but never stopped her research, and that she was deeply proud of her family.

Hirschon believed anthropology should speak to the present. She treated the 1923 population exchange not only as history but as a case study in the human costs of what she called the 'unmixing' of peoples. Her Crossing the Aegean project was designed as a bilateral appraisal, bringing Greek and Turkish scholars together rather than telling the story from one national side.

As a feminist anthropologist she argued that questions of power lie at the heart of gender relations and that property, long central to class analysis, had been neglected in the study of women's position. Her Kokkinia ethnography, as one commentator put it after her death, invited readers to look beyond cultural difference to the ways people build a humane world even in material deprivation.

Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe is regarded as a landmark of displacement scholarship and one of the first systematic anthropological studies of a refugee community. Its concerns with forced migration, memory and long-term resettlement anticipated the growth of refugee studies and critical migration studies in the 1990s and 2000s. Matthew J. Gibney, director of the Refugee Studies Centre, called the 2023 edition a timely new edition of a landmark in the scholarship of displacement.

In Greece her legacy is institutional as well as intellectual. As founding chair of the first department of social anthropology in the country, at the University of the Aegean, she helped establish the discipline in Greek higher education and trained a generation of anthropologists. At Oxford, the political scientist Dimitar Bechev described her as a pillar of the study of Southeast Europe.

In December 2009 Hirschon delivered the William Douglass Distinguished Lecture of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe at the American Anthropological Association conference, under the title "Being at Home in the Global Village: Challenges for Anthropology in the 21st Century". She was elected an Emerita Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford. Her books were translated into Greek and Turkish, and Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe was reissued in a third edition in 2023 to mark the centenary of the Lausanne Convention. No state honours have been reported.

Books: Women and Property, Women as Property (editor, Croom Helm, 1984; reissued by Routledge, 2023); Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Clarendon Press, 1989; second edition Berghahn, 1998, with a foreword by Michael Herzfeld; third edition Berghahn, 2023, with an afterword by Ayhan Aktar; Turkish translation 2000; Greek translation published by the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece); Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (editor, Berghahn, 2003; Turkish translation by Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2005).

Selected essays include "Open Body/Closed Space: the Transformation of Female Sexuality" (1978), "Essential Objects and the Sacred" (1981), "Under One Roof: Marriage, the Dowry and Family Life in Piraeus" (1983), "Greek Adults' Verbal Play, or How to Train for Caution" (1992), "The Creation of Community: Well-being without Wealth in an Urban Greek Refugee Locality" (2000) and "History's Long Shadow: the Lausanne Treaty and contemporary Greco-Turkish relations" (2009).

Recorded talks include her SEESOX seminars at St Antony's College, Oxford, a 2020 conversation on death rituals for the Human Beast channel, a 2022 lecture at the Hellenic Centre in London, and a 2023 conference talk in Greece on daily life among Asia Minor refugees in Kokkinia.