Greek crisis – To Archeio

The ‘Greferendum’ and the Eurozone crisis in the Danish daily press

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:44 +0000

This article presents a critical analysis of the Danish press coverage of the referendum called by the Left-led coalition government of Greece in July 2015, concerning the future of austerity policies. It focuses on the conservative daily press of Denmark, one of the ‘core’ EU countries, writing on developments in the periphery. Three main themes emerge in the study’s discourse analysis of Berlingske Tidende’s and Jyllands Posten’s coverage: ‘post-democratic realism’, ‘the upper-class gaze’, and ‘Orientalism and cultural racism’. The authors not only reveal the one-sided, elitist coverage by the rightwing papers at Europe’s centre but also point out how the principles of neoliberalism itself and the acceptance of austerity are being constantly reinforced by the media in a country like Denmark, which had previously been marked out for its more progressive welfare capitalism. Denmark’s turn to the Right (and to racism) alongside its biased coverage of the ‘Greferendum’ are examined here in the context of the way in which neoliberalism and its politico-social effects are now presented as both common sense and the only way forward.

We owe ourselves to debt: Classical Greece, Athens in crisis, and the body as battlefield

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:18 +0000

Since 2009, Greece has been hit by a severe economic recession followed by harsh austerity policies, gradual impoverishment, and ultimately social collapse. This article investigates the cultural landscape of the so-called ‘Greek crisis’, focusing on Athens,the nation’s capital, and the ways the crisis discourse employs biopolitical technologiesof dispossession and displacement in order to generate an intensified breed of body-politics. The article’s main case study is documenta 14, a blockbuster exhibition ofcontemporary art organized in Athens in 2017, seemingly elaborating on the ideasof debt – classical and modern – though in fact promoting neoliberal approaches topublic economy and life. The idea of ‘classical debt’, the article concludes, continuously reiterated by both Greece’s defenders as well as its most unforgiving critics, rather than acting as an emancipatory force, ends up producing a public consisting of silent bodies, trapped in highly romanticized discourses of the past and ultimately unable to defend themselves. This tension, however, also provokes narratives and gestures made of contradictions and ambiguity, difficult to map and monitor according to established research protocols.

Chronotopic dilemmas: Space–time in consumer movements of the Greek crisis

apostolos — Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:03 +0000

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.

From junta to crisis: Modernization, consumerism and cultural dualisms in Greece

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:53 +0000

The Greek economic crisis has triggered a self-reflexive process and prompted a re-examination of political and cultural trends in Greece since 1974 in an attempt to rethink earlier cultural approaches and practices. This article argues that a cultural perspective on the crisis can be productive insofar as it revisits key concepts and dominant models of analysis and charts cultural change in Greece from the fall of the military junta in 1974 to the beginning of the crisis in 2009. Just as the fall of the junta encouraged a re-examination of the post-civil-war period, so the current economic crisis has prompted a rethink of the metapolitefsi era. Exploring the cultural developments that have taken place during this period, this article focuses on competing notions of culture and engages with the two dreams of the post-junta period: modernization and consumerism. The aim is not to reaffirm oppositions or reverse hierarchies but to rethink cultural dualisms and explore hybrid tensions within a broader political and cultural context.

“This is not a political party, this is facebook!”: Political jokes and political (mis)trust in crisis-ridden Greece

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000

The present study attempts to combine Raskin’s (1985) and Davies’ (2011) methodological approaches to political jokes to investigate Greek political jokes targeting politicians and circulated during the first 4 years of the Greek crisis. The proposed analysis identifies, on the one hand, what Greek people perceive as politicians’ main incongruities, namely their flaws that prevent them from fulfilling their roles ‘appropriately’. On the other hand, the particularities of the sociopolitical context in Greece and, most importantly, the pervasive lack of political trust among Greeks allow for an interpretation of the jokes under scrutiny as expressions of disillusionment and disappointment with politicians and the political system in general, and as manifestations of mild, playful aggression towards them. The findings of the study reveal that the accusations raised in the jokes against politicians capture and reproduce quite accurately most of the aspects and causes of political mistrust in Greece.

Crisis Brain drain: short-term pain/long term gain?

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:50 +0000

The emigration of professionals from Greece is a phenomenon that predates the current crisis. It is historically attributed to the low demand for highly skilled work in the Greek labour market and to related structural malfunctions of the Greek productive model of the past decades. Yet it is during the past few years that it has acquired alarming dimensions. In this chapter we explore the magnitude, dynamics and impacts of the phenomenon at times of crisis, recession and austerity. We further provide evidence on the aspirations and experiences of the emigrants themselves based on which we propose policies that could be implemented to alleviate its negative consequences.

Alexander’s Great Treasure: Wonder and Mistrust in Neoliberal Greece

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000

This paper explores how the past is used to interrogate the present under conditions of social and economic crisis. It focuses on the ways national history and personal historicity blended in the media frenzy and public reactions generated in the summer of 2014 by archaeological discoveries in a burial mound in Northern Greece that captured the attention of the nation for many months. During a time of intense debate over the privatization of national resources, growing demands for Nazi war-crime reparations, and increasing pauperization, popular speculation over the mound as a hiding place for priceless treasures was very often informed by mistrust towards the state, its representatives, and its experts. I look into history and culture to investigate how the past in conditions of crisis and uncertainty can weigh heavy in peoples’ identity claims, social demands, and moral economies.

Tracing aspects of the Greek crisis in Athens: Putting women in the picture

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:45 +0000

In the political fluidity of our times, the dismal economic situation in Greece is perhaps extreme but indicative of a deepening crisis in Europe, which is expanding, both geographically and socially. Contrary to the dominant rhetoric, austerity measures and pacts imposed on Greece, Portugal, Spain – and later Cyprus – do not seem to provide effective remedies. On the contrary, they seem to plunge entire areas and groups of people into a vicious cycle of rising unemployment, shrinking incomes and deep impoverishment. In the context of this rhetoric, an almost exclusive emphasis on the macro-economic aspects of the crisis, seems to “expel” from public debate the fact that there are effects of austerity policies that are unevenly distributed, inscribed as they are on existing inequalities: inequalities among places, between women and men, locals and migrants, big and small employers, secure and precarious workers and, most importantly, intersections of these. This paper engages with some of the less debated aspects of the crisis in Athens, with a focus on the complex and usually invisible ways in which it impacts on women. It draws upon research in a low-income neighbourhood of Athens and focuses on changes in women’s everyday lives, which have to do with job precarity and job loss, destruction of social services and the re-shaping of care, as well as practices of coping with/resisting the crisis.

Proxy Brigands and Tourists: Visualizing the Greek-German Front in the Debt Crisis

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:41 +0000

This article explores Greek social imagination and daily experiences during the debt crisis particularly in relation to Germany, which is increasingly the object of public suspicion with reference to its role in Greece’s bailout program. The essay investigates the prevailing Greek fantasy of nativism and the role of the visual in its constitution and conception during a period characterized by anxiety over national sovereignty. Furthermore, the article explores Greek‐German social relations in western highland Crete, which lies at the intersection of cultural investments, as an archetype of the native. The essay especially focuses on photography and other material practices in unraveling the complexities, circularities, and ambivalences in the relationship between Cretans and German tourists and between Greek national imagination and German cultural representations.

Solidarity’s tensions: Informality, sociality, and the greek crisis

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:36 +0000

During times of crisis, economic practices organized on principles of reciprocity often arise. Greece, with the vibrant sociality pertaining to its ‘solidarity economy’, is a case in point. This article is premised on the idea that crises make contradictions in societies more visible. I suggest that a central contradiction is at play in Greece between informal and formalized economic activity, as demonstrated in the tension between the fluid features of ‘solidarity’ networks and the formalization proposed or imposed on them by state institutions. In Thessaloniki, the informal solidarity economy proves to be more efficient than the work of NGOs. Arguing that such economic activities are built around the rise of new forms of sociality rather than a tendency toward bureaucratization, the article contributes to anthropological understandings of solidarity and welfare, as well as their relation.