https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:17:52 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/alexanders-great-treasure-wonder-and-mistrust-in-neoliberal-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:46 +0000 http://arc.local/items/alexanders-great-treasure-wonder-and-mistrust-in-neoliberal-greece/ Continued]]> 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.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/ethnographies-of-austerity-temporality-crisis-and-affect-in-southern-europe/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:42 +0000 http://arc.local/items/ethnographies-of-austerity-temporality-crisis-and-affect-in-southern-europe/ https://toarcheio.org/items/the-ambivalence-of-anti-austerity-indignation-in-greece-resistance-hegemony-and-complicity/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:30 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-ambivalence-of-anti-austerity-indignation-in-greece-resistance-hegemony-and-complicity/ Continued]]> This article engages with a contradiction that can help us appreciate the ambiguity and complexity of indirect resistance as this is articulated in informal everyday contexts: many citizens in Greece boldly challenge the antisocial austerity measures that have plagued their lives, highlighting how these represent a hegemonic imposition led by foreign centres of economic power. Their anti-hegemonic critique, however, often recycles a dislike for foreigners and xenophobia, echoing more pervasive hegemonic narratives (for example, a crypto-colonial identification of Greece with the West). To deal with this contradiction, I stress the need to (1) de-pathologize local indignant discourse (avoiding the orientalization of anti-austerity discourse as emotional or inconsequential) and (2) acknowledge that indirect resistance may represent an astute critique of visible inequalities, but is not isolated from overarching hegemonic ideological influences that shape local interpretations of historical/economic causality.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/cultural-proximity-crisis-time-and-social-memory-in-central-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:13 +0000 http://arc.local/items/cultural-proximity-crisis-time-and-social-memory-in-central-greece/ Continued]]> In Trikala, central Greece, specific historical events significantly inform understandings of the present economic crisis through what is termed “cultural proximity”. This is the notion that previous times of social and economic turmoil, apparently distant points in time, are embodied within the context of the present. Some past epochs of prosperity and crisis have proved more significant than others in shaping contemporary crisis experience. As accounts of the Great Famine of 1941–1943 are brought to the fore by the current economic crisis, concepts of lineal time and the nationalization of critical events must be interrogated. Through considering theories of time as proposed by Michel Serres, this paper addresses how specific historical events can become embodied during the current economic crisis.

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