https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:25 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 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/the-golden-salto-mortale-in-the-era-of-crisis-primitive-accumulation-and-local-and-urban-struggle-in-the-case-of-skouries-gold-mining-in-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-golden-salto-mortale-in-the-era-of-crisis-primitive-accumulation-and-local-and-urban-struggle-in-the-case-of-skouries-gold-mining-in-greece/ Continued]]> As formulated by Marx ([1867] 1990. Capital. Vol. I. London: Penguin, 200), ‘the leap taken by value from the body of the commodity into the body of the gold is the commodity’s salto mortale’. Following autonomous Marxist literature (De Angelis 2007. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto Press; Federici 2011. ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.’ The Commoner, other articles. Accessed January 28, 2017, http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=113; Hardt and Negri 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), the circulation of capital could be interrupted by social, class, gender or ecological struggles. In order to unsettle this view, we build on recent critical scholarship on new enclosures, land-grabbing and the permanence of primitive accumulation and we explore the inter-articulation of gold mining projects and neoliberal policies in the era of crisis. In this effort, we examine the case of Greece, a country at the epicenter of the recent financial and social crisis. During the last decade, the Canadian company Eldorado has undertaken a gold mining investment in the environmentally sensitive area of Skouries. A fruitful social struggle has emerged against this project, both in the rural site and in the urban Greek metropolis. Through this examination we investigate how the financial crisis provides an opportunity for multinational mining corporations to expand their zones of exploitation and how social resistance can reclaim common resources.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/illuminating-austerity-lighting-poverty-as-an-agent-and-signifier-of-the-greek-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000 http://arc.local/items/illuminating-austerity-lighting-poverty-as-an-agent-and-signifier-of-the-greek-crisis/ Continued]]> Light – whether natural or artificial – plays multiple roles in the home: both as a material enabler of everyday life and as a device for exercising a variety of social relations. The post-2008 Greek economic crisis has endangered those roles by limiting people’s ability to access or afford adequate energy services. This paper focuses on the enforced lack of illumination in the home, and the strategies and tactics undertaken by households to overcome this challenge. I connect illumination practices and discourses to the implementation of austerity, by arguing that the threat of darkness has become a tool for compelling vulnerable groups to pay their electricity bills. The evidence presented in the paper is based on two sets of interviews with 25 households (including a total of 55 adult members) living in and around Thessaloniki – Greece’s second largest city, and one that has suffered severe economic consequences as a result of the crisis. I have established that the under-consumption of light is one of the most pronounced expressions of energy poverty, and as such endangers the ability to participate in the customs that define membership of society. But the emergence of activist-led amateur electricians and the symbolic and material mobilization of light for political purposes have also created multiple opportunities for resistance.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/infrastructural-disorder-the-politics-of-disruption-contingency-and-normalcy-in-waste-infrastructures-in-athens-environment-and-planning/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:49 +0000 http://arc.local/items/infrastructural-disorder-the-politics-of-disruption-contingency-and-normalcy-in-waste-infrastructures-in-athens-environment-and-planning/ Continued]]> This paper considers infrastructure from the point of view of disorder. During the last few years, waste management controversies have proliferated in Greece, reflecting a generalized feeling of mistrust towards the authorities. In this context, and in relation to the socio-economic crisis that erupted there in 2010, a set of diverse and even antithetic practices, imaginations, and circulations of flows have (re)emerged around waste treatment processes. By looking at the intermingling of formal and informal practices around waste flows and landfill processes in Athens, the paper asks how uncertainty, contingency and instability shape the governance and everyday experience of waste infrastructures. Examining the ways in which the normalization of regular disruption and instability plays out in waste treatment in Athens, it makes the case for understanding disorder as inherent to infrastructure.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/fossilized-futures-topologies-and-topographies-of-crisis-experience-in-central-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:49 +0000 http://arc.local/items/fossilized-futures-topologies-and-topographies-of-crisis-experience-in-central-greece/ Continued]]> Drawing on ethnography from western Thessaly, this article reassesses notions of time and temporality in the Greek economic crisis. People experience the past as a folded assemblage of linearly distant and sometimes contradictory moments that help them make sense of a period of social change. Anthropologists should embrace the paradoxes of (poly)temporality and address the topological/topographical experience of time and history. During an era of severe uncertainty, in Greece temporality is discussed through material objects such as photovoltaic panels and fossils as people articulate their situation vis-à-vis the past, present, and future. Multiple moments of the past are woven together to explain the current crisis experience, provoking fear that times of hardship are returning or instilling hope that the turmoil can be overcome.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-green-economy-as-a-sustainable-alternative/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:49 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-green-economy-as-a-sustainable-alternative/ Continued]]> This article explores the green economy as a sustainable alternative to austerity in Greece. The author argues that the movement towards the green economy has been hijacked by multinational corporations taking advantage of an austerity‐era policy that encourages a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short‐term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast ‘crisis’ as an incubator of economic strategies that may feed green ecological transformations of the economy leading, ultimately, to sustainable growth. Current configurations of advanced capitalist power enable and promote injurious ‘green grabbing’, in part by leveraging the fantasy of a green economy as a solution to the fiscal crisis. As an alternative to austerity, the green economy requires further uncoupling from neoliberal business opportunism to allow natural capital to be harnessed as an economic asset for a sustainable long‐term public good.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-political-ecology-of-austerity-an-analysis-of-socio-environmental-conflict-under-crisis-in-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:47 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-political-ecology-of-austerity-an-analysis-of-socio-environmental-conflict-under-crisis-in-greece/ Continued]]> The paper focuses on two largely understudied and interrelated aspects of the post-2008 economic crisis: how the politics of austerity influences the dynamics of environmental conflict and how the environment is mobilized in subaltern struggles against the normalization of austerity as the hegemonic response to crisis. We ground our analysis on two grassroots conflicts in Greece: the “no-middlemen” solidarity food distribution networks (across Greece) and the movement against gold mining in Halkidiki (northern Greece). Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, our analysis shows that by reciprocally combining anti-austerity politics and alternative ways of understanding and using “nature,” both projects challenge the reproduction of uneven society–environment relations exacerbated by the neoliberal austerity agenda.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/economic-sustainability-of-organic-aloe-vera-farming-in-greece-under-risk-and-uncertainty/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:42 +0000 http://arc.local/items/economic-sustainability-of-organic-aloe-vera-farming-in-greece-under-risk-and-uncertainty/ Continued]]> During the last decade, an encouraging environment for the restructuring and modernization of the agricultural sector has formed in Greece. The diversification into higher-value crops can be a promising option for small and average-sized farms, particularly during the current economic crisis. One of the most promising alternative crops that have been recently established in Greece is the organic Aloe vera crop. The main advantage of this crop is that it can utilize poor farmlands and, therefore, can facilitate rural development in marginal areas. This study explores the economic sustainability of the Aloe vera crop, considering the embedded risk and uncertainty. The results indicate that organic aloe farming is a promising alternative to “traditional” crops in Greece, particularly for family farms in rural areas. In contrast, this activity is not advisable to the most entrepreneurial type of farmers, unless their crop size allows economies of scales. Finally, the Stochastic Efficiency with Respect to a Function (SERF) analysis associates farmers’ risk attitude with their willingness to be involved in organic Aloe vera farming. SERF analysis highlights the crucial role of farmers’ risk aversion and concludes that, above a certain level of risk aversion, farmers have no incentive to adopt this economic activity. View Full-Text

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/land-of-fires-urban-growth-economic-crisis-and-forest-fires-in-attica-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:36 +0000 http://arc.local/items/land-of-fires-urban-growth-economic-crisis-and-forest-fires-in-attica-greece/ Continued]]> This study investigates the spatial distribution and basic characteristics of 2692 forest fires between 2000 and 2011 in Attica, Greece, a rapidly expanding urban region. Fire variables were assessed, together with variables describing the socio-economic local context in three distinct periods of Athens’ expansion (2000–2003: semi-compact expansion and economic growth before the 2004 Olympic Games; 2004–2007: infrastructure development and discontinuous expansion following the Olympic Games; 2008–2011: crisis-driven decline of the construction industry). Fire characteristics changed over the three periods following the negative trends in the construction industry. Burnt areas decreased in the rural area around Athens and the opposite pattern was observed in the peri-urban belt. Our findings suggest that the temporal and spatial distribution of forest fires in Attica reflects the construction boom stimulated by the 2004 Olympic Games and the subsequent economic crisis.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/opportunism-and-diversification-entrepreneurship-and-livelihood-strategies-in-uncertain-times/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:34 +0000 http://arc.local/items/opportunism-and-diversification-entrepreneurship-and-livelihood-strategies-in-uncertain-times/ Continued]]> As economic crisis deepens across Europe people are forced to find innovative strategies to accommodate circumstances of chronic uncertainty. Even with a second multi-billion euro bailout package secured for Greece, the prospects of a sustainable recovery in the near future look bleak. However, crisis has also created dynamic spaces for entrepreneurial opportunism and diversification resulting in social mobility, relocation, shifts in livelihood strategy and a burgeoning informal economy. Although economic systems are currently undergoing radical reassessment, social demands such as competitive consumption remain. Opportunities for investment in renewable energy programmes, especially photovoltaics, are also pervasive. By considering cases of business opportunism and livelihood diversification in relation to Max Weber’s concept of wertrational and notions of uncertainty, this article brings new perspectives to strategies of negotiating the worst economic crisis in living memory.

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