https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:23:58 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/doing-economic-relations-otherwise/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:23:58 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/doing-economic-relations-otherwise/ Continued]]> Recent scholarship on Southern Europe focuses on economic crisis and contestations of hegemonic economic and political arrangements. Solidarity features prominently in these accounts as a notion of opposition to austerity and recession. This article uses solidarity as an entry point, and then shifts attention to the everyday politics of its enactment in the TEM complementary currency network. The article presents three sets of challenges faced by network members: moral discourses around debt, disregard of communal labour and hierarchies created through economic inequalities among network members. The discussion of these challenges places resistance and solidarity in larger discussions about capitalist economies and hegemonic thought and practice that go beyond the discussion of solidarity in Greece and Southern Europe.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emergent-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emergent-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Continued]]> Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation ‘from below’. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of ‘urban solidarity spaces’, focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making ‘from below’, and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a ‘politics of fear’ and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the ‘Athens of crisis’, between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/volunteering-mothers-engaging-the-crisis-at-a-soup-kitchen-in-northern-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:40 +0000 http://arc.local/items/volunteering-mothers-engaging-the-crisis-at-a-soup-kitchen-in-northern-greece/ Continued]]> The ‘Bank of Love’ is a soup kitchen administered by the Orthodox Church in the town of Xanthi, Northern Greece. Currently operating amidst economic crisis, the Bank of Love occupies approximately fifty volunteering women who cook and distribute 150 meals to the poor daily. Despite the widespread proliferation of the egalitarian and counter-hegemonic notion of ‘solidarity’, these female cooks do not subscribe to its values. Crucially, however, neither do they embrace the hierarchical idioms of ‘philanthropy’, often understood to occupy the other side of the spectrum. In an effort to depart from analytical dichotomies and designatory taxonomies, which might label the cook’s work as acts of either solidarity or philanthropy, this article uses the multivalent and open-ended concept of ‘engagement’. I pay particular attention to two radically different ‘modalities of engagement’. The first modality is contingent on notions of domesticity and occupies these cooks through their identities as women, housemistresses, and mothers. The second modality appropriates the discourses of volunteerism to transform these women into autonomous agents who enter the public sphere in the name of a good cause. I argue that engaging with ‘engagement’ may not only facilitate an understanding of processes of social transformation vis-à-vis articulations of gender, space, and affect, but also offer insights into the construction of the very object(s) of engagement. The Bank of Love bespeaks of a crisis symbolically constructed through the nexus and obligations of kinship, and of a crisis that provides space for the performance of autonomy and empowerment.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:38 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-spatiality-of-counter-austerity-politics-in-athens-greece-emerging-urban-solidarity-spaces/ Continued]]> Grassroots responses and alternatives to austerity that have emerged in Athens and Greece call for a re-thinking of the recent neoliberal crisis through articulations of contestation ‘from below’. This paper addresses this yet nascent theoretical debate through the notion of ‘urban solidarity spaces’, focusing on the spatiality of counter-austerity politics that emerges in and out of places and expands across urban space and beyond. From survival tactics grounded in Athenian neighbourhoods, such as local solidarity initiatives; to solidarity structures and cooperatives; and broader strategies of transformation and alternatives, such as the formation of a solidarity economy. These aim to constitute an empowering process of solidarity-making ‘from below’, and open up spaces for the practice of bottom-up democratic politics vis-à-vis austerity, a ‘politics of fear’ and crisis. The arguments raised here methodologically draw on activist ethnographic research in the ‘Athens of crisis’, between 2012 and 2013.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:30 +0000 http://arc.local/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Continued]]> As the Greek crisis deepens and ‘recovery’ is constantly postponed to an unknown future, a dominant discourse seems to consolidate which focuses almost exclusively on macro-economic arguments and concerns. Other aspects of the crisis, among which are its gendered facets and unequal effects on women and men, rarely permeate the allegedly ‘central’ understandings. With the possible exception of unemployment which fares high among left-wing analysts, gender is thought to pertain to a ‘special’, that is, less important, matter which may detract from the ‘main problem’. The paper draws together a series of stories of ordinary women who have experienced deep changes in their everyday lives as a result of austerity policies (unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, shrinking social rights, mounting everyday violence). It argues that emphasis on this scale ‘closest in’, linked in multiple ways to many other scales (local, national, European, international), reveals areas of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark; and that connecting concrete bodies with global processes enriches our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and informs the ‘big pictures’ (in this case about the Greek crisis)—and not only the reverse.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-seen-from-below-within-and-against-from-solidarity-economy-to-food-distribution-cooperatives-in-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:29 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-crisis-seen-from-below-within-and-against-from-solidarity-economy-to-food-distribution-cooperatives-in-greece/ Continued]]> Anthropological literature on crises and social and solidarity economies can benefit from integrated approaches that assess grassroots cooperatives formed during critical periods of capitalist recession. This article debates on why it is problematic to conceptualize the Greek crisis as exceptional and then examines the relationship between the solidarity economy and cooperatives and argues that the latter is a development of the former in the future plans of people struggling against the crisis being witnessed in Greece. It moreover makes a case for there being a need to pay more attention to the distribution sector. Its main aim is to point out how participants engaged in initiatives related to the solidarity economy tend to imagine that their activities are inspired by larger aims and claims than the immediate significance of their material actions. This is done by ethnographically analyzing organized social responses against crises through the rise of popular solidarity economies associated with distribution of food without middlemen.

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