https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:52 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/feeling-the-pulse-of-the-greek-debt-crisis-affect-on-the-web-of-blame/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:52 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/feeling-the-pulse-of-the-greek-debt-crisis-affect-on-the-web-of-blame/ Continued]]> This article examines the affective content of Greek media representations of the debt crisis, from 2009 to 2012. We analyze the content of opinion pieces from journalists, experts and public intellectuals published in Greek newspapers, and identify their affective tone towards political actors and institutions. We focus on anger, fear and hope, and identify blame attribution frames, which underpin the public’s trust and confidence in domestic and European Union institutions. This article contributes to the systematic understanding of the impact of the debt crisis as a traumatic event on public opinion, and considers its implications for attitudes towards European integration.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:47 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Continued]]> This article provides an empirical exploration of social change, by assessing subjective experiences and evaluations in relation to social alterations in Modern Greek society. The investigation concerns whether change in everyday life deriving from the Greek crisis also involves an alteration in the ways that Greeks perceive and consider social reality and themselves within it. This article supports the view that social change is related to agency in terms of reflexivity and that Greeks have contributed to social change through the alteration of their ways of thinking and behaving. Participants reported that practices, norms and mentalities inhereted by previous generations are no longer helpful. Customs (such as clientilism) and mentalities (such as prioritizing the personal over collective interest) must now change and be reformed as the new reality demands different ways of thinking and rapid adaptations to a new way of living which has become economically restricted and politically unstable. In this sense, Greeks are becoming reflexive towards the present situation and themselves within it and critical towards the past and future, as they consider what part of the older generation’s established mentalities to retain and what aspects of their way of living will alter.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/surplus-citizens-struggle-and-nationalism-in-the-greek-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:25 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/surplus-citizens-struggle-and-nationalism-in-the-greek-crisis/ Continued]]> The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses – from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza’s electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/punitive-inclusion-the-political-economy-of-irregular-migration-in-the-margins-of-europe/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:21 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/punitive-inclusion-the-political-economy-of-irregular-migration-in-the-margins-of-europe/ Continued]]> Focusing on the treatment irregular migrants have received in Greece since the early 1990s, this article seeks to advance critical scholarship on how European countries have responded to migration from impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged parts of the globe over recent decades. The article first draws attention to ways in which purportedly exclusionary approaches to irregular migration control may be imperfect by design, insofar as restrictions are imposed on outflows to secure an exploitable workforce that serves important labour market needs and, by extension, dominant political interests in the ‘host’ state. Moving on to address the precise ways in which labour exploitation of irregular migrants is brought into effect, the article demonstrates how seemingly unrelated state policies and practices regarding matters of migration, welfare, employment and criminal justice, as well as certain manifestations of anti-migrant violence by non-state actors, may act in combination with one another to this end.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/beyond-hope-prospects-for-the-commons-in-austerity-stricken-greece/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:17 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/beyond-hope-prospects-for-the-commons-in-austerity-stricken-greece/ Continued]]> From 2009 on, Greece has become a laboratory of implementation of neoliberal austerity policies but has also seen fierce resistance and a surge of creative alternatives. In the ensuing years of strife, “hope” has been the notion around which political movements attempted to rally their supporters against the neoliberal restructuring. “Hope” in the blochean sense of evoking the “not-yet” existing through prefigurative politics (apud Dinerstein 2014:59) but also “hope” as an empty signifier (Laclau 2000: 56, 84) a catch-all term to unify all different aspirations for overcoming the crisis under the common hegemonic project of Syriza (Katsambekis 2015:158). This article aims to outline the central political imaginaries of overcoming austerity that arose in this period –Plan A of reform and redistribution, Plan B of national economic reconstruction outside the Eurozone and Plan C of a bottom-up reorganisation of politics and economy around the commons– and the interplay between the three in the context of anti-austerity politics. It especially focuses on the abandonment of Plan A by the political forces that expressed it and the challenges faced by adherents of the third imaginary (“Plan C”) in subverting the capitalist market and in addressing the question of power and the state.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/posterscapes-encountering-solidarityies-in-the-streets-of-exarcheia/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:05 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/posterscapes-encountering-solidarityies-in-the-streets-of-exarcheia/ https://toarcheio.org/items/heterotopian-space-and-the-utopics-of-ethical-and-green-consumption/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:05 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/heterotopian-space-and-the-utopics-of-ethical-and-green-consumption/ Continued]]> In this article, we illustrate how Exarcheia, an Athenian neighbourhood that is renowned for its capacity for revolt and anti-capitalist ethos, provides a rich site for utopian praxis, particularly in relation to a range of green and ethical marketplace behaviours. Arguing that space and place are essential to questions of ethics, ecology, and politics, we explore Exarcheia as a heterotopian space that fosters critique and experimentation, generating new ways of thinking and doing green/ethical behaviours. Drawing on data from a two-year ethnography, our findings not only challenge individualised and de-contextualised notions of the consumer, but also expose moralistic and post-political assumptions that often go unnoticed in ethical and green consumer research. We point to the need for a counter-strand in the literature that reviews instances that we recognise as ethical or green consumerism not in terms of identity projects or given ideas of ethics but rather with reference to the particularity of the spatial contexts in which they occur and their political implications.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/chronotopic-dilemmas-space-time-in-consumer-movements-of-the-greek-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:03 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/chronotopic-dilemmas-space-time-in-consumer-movements-of-the-greek-crisis/ Continued]]> This paper explores the spatio-temporal dimensions of consumer activism during the Greek crisis. Existing work has provided valuable insights into the figure of the political consumer and the socio-spatial contexts in which consumer activism is enacted. The paper presents original six-year ethnographic work that extends current knowledge through exploring how the spatial and temporal dimensions of consumer activism are unsettled and reconfigured during an acute economic crisis. It builds on the concept of chronotopic dilemmas to illustrate the ideological tensions and contradictions between old and new spatio-temporal logics and practices. In doing so, the current study complements prior research focused on how distinct cultural and institutional settings mediate discourses and actions of consumer activism, by highlighting their inherently spatio-temporal (chronotopic) nature.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/stretching-money-to-pay-the-bills-temporal-modalities-and-relational-practices-of-getting-by-in-the-greek-economic-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:01 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/stretching-money-to-pay-the-bills-temporal-modalities-and-relational-practices-of-getting-by-in-the-greek-economic-crisis/ Continued]]> This article investigates the temporalities of ‘getting by’ amidst the ripple effects of economic deterioration in Volos, Greece. Through the case of Kalypso and her family, I argue for a relational framework in the study of temporal practices, and then discuss the significant material relations of the family. Faced with less than half of their previous income, Kalypso runs a general budget pool via e-banking that allows her to coordinate the temporal constraints of periodic and everyday bills. The effect is a drifting apart of temporal experiences in the family as well as tensions about the future. Temporal agency is shown to reside in the modalities of social relations and in corresponding practices.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/let-them-be-screwed-by-the-troika-blame-shame-and-ambivalent-pro-troika-social-critique-in-greece/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:00 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/let-them-be-screwed-by-the-troika-blame-shame-and-ambivalent-pro-troika-social-critique-in-greece/ Continued]]> This working paper discusses pro-Troika social critiques in everyday life in Greece. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2014-2017) conducted in the town of Volos, on the eastern shore of mainland Greece, this paper traces largely unanalysed forms of widespread critique. As literature has more extensively covered opposition and resistance to the restructuring of the Greek state and economy under the austerity regime, this focus allows for a nuanced analysis of social reactions to current processes of neoliberal restructuring. I argue that the perspective adopted must not only take into account power relations and overlapping moral frameworks but also refrain from strategic essentialisations of power and resistance. My analytical focus in this paper is on ‘ambivalence’, as a way to understand the complexity of moral orders and to capture the contradictions and dilemmas my interlocutors routinely accommodate, as they navigate economic hardship. This perspective on social critique and ambivalence is important in two ways – 1) theoretically – as it refuses power binaries and instead refocuses on hegemony and ambivalence in the analysis of moral orders in capitalism; 2) ethnographically – to complement and contrast the current emphasis on resistance and solidarity in the anthropological literature on the Greek crisis.

]]>