Solidarity bridges: alternative food economies in urban Greece

Εστιάζοντας στο αστικό-περιφερειακό συνεχές στο χώρο της Θεσσαλονίκης, αυτή η μελέτη διερευνά τις απτές κοινωνικές δραστηριότητες ορισμένων ομάδων που έχουν αφοσιωθεί στο χτίσιμο μιας «κοινωνικής οικονομίας» διανομής τροφής χωρίς μεσάζοντες. Τα εθνογραφικά δεδομένα (που συνέλεξα μεταξύ 2013-2015), αφορούν τις από-τα-κάτω απαντήσεις προς τις δυσκολίες που ζουν οι άνθρωποι σε ζητήματα των τα προς το ζην τους ζητημάτων. Στο φως αυτών των δεδομένων, προτείνω να ανοίξουμε τα εννοιολογικά όρια της αμοιβαιότητας, έτσι ώστε να συμπεριλάβουμε την αλληλεγγύη, ως ημική έννοια με πολιτισμικές συμπαραδηλώσεις συγκυριακές της κρίσης. Η «οικονομία αλληλεγγύης» μπορεί να ιδωθεί ως μια εννοιακή και πολιτική γέφυρα που συμβολικά, αλλά και υλικά, φέρνει κοντά κοινότητες παραγωγής και κατανάλωσης τροφής. Η έννοια του «χωριού» είναι μια πρωτότυπη μετωνυμία που χρησιμοποιούν οι αστοί ακτιβιστές στα συστήματα διανομής τους, για να δηλώσουν μια συγκεκριμένη κοσμολογία σχέσης με το φαγητό και τα υλικά διατροφής. Η έννοια επικαιροποιείται με σημαίνοντες τρόπους, στην παρούσα συγκυρία λιτότητας στη χώρα.    Set in the urban-rural continuum of Thessaloniki, this paper explores the grounded social activities of certain groups, committed to building a social economy of distributing food without intermediaries. In the light of new ethnographic data from grassroots responses to livelihoods’ hardship, I propose to expand reciprocity's conceptual boundaries, extended to include a local concept rampant in crisis-ridden Greece: solidarity. The solidarity economy can be seen as a conceptual and political bridge that symbolically as well as materially brings together communities of food production and consumption. The cosmology of the horio (village) is an unexpected urban activist metonym in the food distribution systems that have emerged amidst austerity measures in Greece

On divisionism and cypriotism: the civic languages of the Cyprus Problem

This article analyses the two main vernacular poles through which the Greek-Cypriot population engages with statehood, and thus the Cyprus Problem. Using ethnography, I dissect two versions of “nationalist” cultural ethos, which, while pertinent to the post-colonial condition generally, are largely unknown outside Cyprus. These concern on the one hand the idea of divisionism and on the other that of cypriotism. I specifically show how the bicommunal nature of the state in Cyprus finds emic continuity among certain Greek-Cypriots that adhere to a non-nation-bound loyalty glossed as cypriotism, while I illustrate how dividing techniques of conventional nationalist rhetoric operate among other Greek-Cypriots. I also briefly discuss how such vernacular experiences of nationhood and statehood reverberate among Turkish-Cypriots and Turks (the state’s “Others”) and consider the ways this affects the Republic. The article therefore contributes to understanding the political vernacular in the post-colonial and post-conflict context of Cyprus, and highlights from below the local “languages” pertaining to the Cyprus Problem

Alison Sánchez Hall, All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300

Book review of Alison Sánchez Hall, All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300.Recensione di Alison Sánchez Hall, All or none: Cooperation and sustainability in Italy’s red belt, New York-Oxford, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 300

Resonance of solidarity : meanings of a local concept in anti-austerity Greece

Scholarly approaches to the Greek crisis usually centered on its political character, tackle it as “a state of exception” or emphasize its “exceptional” features. Departing from a discussion on the nature of the crisis, in this article I examine social reactions to “it,” focusing on grassroots economic activity. I undertake a case study of a “solidarity economy” movement and from there I explore the wider political repercussions of this activity that has appeared in contemporary Greece where grassroots social welfare projects are organized in order to address hardships in the actors’ livelihoods. In this way, I explore the meaning of solidarity, a term that has become ubiquitous in the public discourse of contemporary Greece. Through an ethnographic study of the activities of a movement that organizes anti-middleman food distributions in Greece, I argue that such activities not only tackle the immediate effects of the crisis but also pose a conscious, wider critique to austerity politics. Activists’ appeal to solidarity economies is informed by their aim to formulate more efficient distribution cooperatives in the future.http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_greek_studies/index.htmlhb201

The crisis seen from below, within, and against : from solidarity economy to food distribution cooperatives in Greece

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.http://link.springer.com/journal/10624hb201

Responding to the crisis : food co-operatives and the solidarity economy in Greece

This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the antimiddleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece. I explore their efforts to turn the food market they have established in Athens into a formal co-operative which links consumers in their neighbourhood directly to selected farmers through bonds of solidarity, and to work with others to create a network of similar co-operatives which will span the whole country. I argue that their endeavours strongly resemble the co-operativism and practical socialism advocated by important social theorists such as Mauss and Polanyi, and suggest that it may be important for the young activists in Athens to learn more about their ideas.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rasa20hb2017Anthropology and Archaeolog

Cooperative modulations : the antimafia movement and struggles over land and cooperativism in eight Sicilian municipalities

Debate on the antimafia movement has placed the phenomenon mainly in the urban civil society tradition of new Italian social movements. While acknowledging the resonance of antimafia mobilization in this context, this article explores a different tradition, wherein struggles against the mafia in Sicily are analysed alongside, and in constant interconnection with, the development of the agrarian cooperative movement of the island. Focusing on the Alto Belice area of western Sicily, the article argues that antimafia politics evolved from an association with agricultural workers’ cooperativism in an anti-middleman direction after the 1950s land reform. Moreover, it assesses ethnographically how this tradition has influenced actors in the contemporary, largely successful, movement of antimafia cooperatives that cultivate land confiscated from the mafia by the Italian state. It examines how these actors link to this genealogy, associating their contemporary activity, in largely imaginary ways, to this history of struggles, and claiming inheritance over it.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmis20hb2017Anthropology and Archaeolog

Show me the money: Conspiracy theories and distant wealth

This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of (un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis. Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our) understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions, according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis

Cooperatives

Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of livelihood. Co-ops have developed as modern institutions aiming to tackle problems created by contemporary capitalism and its associated dependency on wage work. Co-ops operate and interact in context, mobilising ways of human contact that anthropologists usually study (kinship, community, ethnicity, and local belief systems). Anthropologists have expressed interest in co-ops since the origins of their discipline. They tend to investigate the ways that members interact within co-op organizations, as well as the ways co-ops interact with and within broader social frameworks. Key issues arising in understanding cooperatives are how co-ops negotiate industrial democracy, how they respond to market influences, and how they interrelate with broader civil society and social movements. Anthropological critiques of cooperatives distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis, and highlight cases where institutional cooperation does not work in favour of local communities. However, anthropologists have equally celebrated cooperatives as institutional forms that shield communities off from exploitation and promote social solidarity