Crisis and democracy – the democracy in crisis: social anthropological perspectives on the fragility of the social contract

A number of authors and commentators on the Greek crisis have pointed out that the Greek financial predicament is a byproduct of a deep and chronic political crisis. I propose that we view this political crisis as a crisis of the Social Contract, which generated multiple spheres of economic, civil and civic exclusion, engendering specific public concerns with sovereignty, democracy and asymmetrical relations of power (cf. Thodossopoulos 2014; Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2010). An anthropological approach to the analysis of crisis and democracy in Greece allows us to document local patterns of accountability, historical and political causality and to analyze them in context. The power of indigenous etiology – how people make sense of political affairs – provides us with unique insights into their preferred avenues of claiming and exercising political agency and participation. The qualitative characteristics of Greek politics and governance – especially after 1974 – have been discussed in the literature under the inclusive terms ‘clientelism’, ‘populism’, ‘corruption’, ‘statism’, and they have been deemed responsible for the inefficiency of the Greek state, the lack of competitiveness of the country as a whole, and ultimately for the lack of fiscal discipline that led to the present financial meltdown

Chapter 8 Anticipatory nostalgia and nomadic temporality

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Anticipatory Nostalgia and Nomadic Temporality: A Case Study of Chronocracy in the Crypto-colony

This paper expands on the view of Modern Greece as a ‘crypto-colonial’ space (cf. Herzfeld 2002). It offers an alternative reading of the so-called ‘Greek-crisis’, using the lens of chronocracy as developed in the introduction to this volume. An ethnographic engagement with the years of austerity, faced by Greek people since 2010, reveals chronocracy to be a colonial technology with political, moral and epistemic dimensions. Here I argue that chronocracy produces an anticipatory nostalgia: namely, a future-oriented affective state of longing for what has already been accomplished and at once yet to be achieved. I show how anticipatory nostalgia is distributed between relational, material and temporal ecologies. The Greek people, I argue, sustain a nomadic sense of temporality (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2010), manifested in eclectic connections between time fragments that form provisional temporal assemblages. These are evident in my ethnography in the form of visualities, materialities, discourses and narratives. Nomadic temporality emerges as an expression of temporal agency that both resists and reifies chronocracy and anticipatory nostalgia

Chapter 8 Anticipatory nostalgia and nomadic temporality

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

Introduction

I do not define time, space, place and motion as being well known to all. But it must be observed that the vulgar conceive those quantities only from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which, it is proper to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and vulgar

Migration, Crisis, Liberalism: the cultural and racial politics of Islamophobia and “radical alterity” in modern Greece

This paper attempts a critical and ethnographically informed reading of the complex assemblage of linkages between migration, racialization and liberal values in modern Greece as a symptomatic case of European attitudes to migration. In line with recent scholarship on racialization and Islamophobia, we discuss novel forms of racism, that support the construction of hierarchies and geographies of entitlement, going beyond notions of biological difference. Processes of inclusion and exclusion, we argue, rest on a meshwork of seemingly disparate identification markers that form the basis of universalist, hegemonic visions of citizenship. Migrants are ultimately expected by considerable sections of the Greek public to demonstrate their acceptance of an array of values regarded as “European”, and to manifest their support to (neo)liberal regimes of subjectification. We conclude by arguing that racialization can be traced back to an imagined “orient”, and just as well, to contemporary cultural and political imperialist projects