Dimitris Dalakoglou

This book is an ethnographic and historical study of the main Albania-Greece highway. But more than an ethnography on the road, it is an anthropology of the road. Highways are part of an explicit cultural-material nexus that includes houses, urban architecture and vehicles. Complex socio-political phenomena such as EU border security, nationalist politics, post-Cold War capitalism and financial crises all leave their mark in the concrete. This book explores anew classical anthropological and sociological categories of analysis in direct reference to infrastructure, providing unique insights into the political and cultural processes that took place across Europe after the Cold War. More specifically, it sheds light on political and economic relationships in the Balkans during the socialist post-Cold War period, focusing especially on Albania, one of the most under-researched countries in the region.

An ethnography of (im)mobility, space, and cross-border infrastructures in the Balkans

The road

Georgios Agelopoulos

This volume brings together new anthropological research on the Greek crisis. With a number of contributions from academics based in Greece, the book addresses a number of key issues such as the refugee crisis, far-right extremism and the psychological impact of increased poverty and unemployment. It provides much needed ethnographic contributions and critical anthropological perspectives at a key moment in Greece’s history, and will be of great interest to researchers interested in the social, political and economic developments in southern Europe. It is the first collection to explore the impact of this period of radical social change on anthropological understandings of Greece.

Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis

Critical Times in Greece

Antonis Vradis

Jaya Brekke 

Christos Filippidis

Four years and four days. The exact amount of time, that is, that has lapsed since the day the greek state would sign its ‘memorandum of agreement’ with its lenders (the IMF, the EU and the ECB), on May 5, 2010—officially making its own way into the era of global austerity and crisis. An entering that would come with a bang, and very much stay so: from that moment on, the social tension playing out at the greek territory would feature—constantly, it seems—in discussions, analyses and reports the world over. But what is life like in a city that finds itself in the eye of the crisisstorm, how does the everyday reality here compare to Athens’ global media portrait? What kind of lessons might our city be able to learn from the outbreaks of capitalism’s crises elsewhere, and what lessons might the Athenian example be able to offer, in return? The volume that you hold in your hands acts as an accompaniment to a conference that tried to answer some of these questions. ‘Crisis-scapes: Athens and beyond’ took place in the city of Athens on May 9&10, 2014. Over the two days, the conference tried to explore an array of the facets of the crisis in the city, divided between five axes/panels, which are in turn mirrored in the structure of this book: 1. Flows, infrastructures and networks, 2. Mapping spaces of racist violence, 3. Between invisibility and precarity, 4. The right to the city in crisis and 5. Devaluing labour, depreciating land. Five broad axes comprising the vehicles we used to perambulate through the dark landscapes of the crisis. A crisis neither commencing nor ending here, today. Through these conceptual vehicles taking us through Athens, through her spaces and her times, we focused on the particularities of the greek crisis; a crisis first of all concerning the structures, meanings and processes weaving together what we could broadly label as the greek everyday reality. Yet we also believe these particularities ought to be understood within the global financial crisis framework: hence this centrifugal “beyond”. Athens may now be in a position to offer explanations about phenomena taking place much beyond the city’s strict geographical limits. What renders the city a field of experimentation are trials and productions of new means of governance. And they acquire a new meaning when seen as wider tendencies in crisis management. Yet these Athenian testing grounds must at the same time be studied as traces and as future projections of structural readjustments taking place in seemingly disparate locations, but often-times ever so close in their causes and consequences alike. The interventions put together in the present volume try to take another composite look at Athens and its crisis. They try to comprehend the city through crossings and transitions in space and in time.

Athens and Beyond

Crisis-scapes

How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe? Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece's long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world--including those on the ground in Greece--analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund. In the twenty essays collected here, the Occupied London Collective offers a historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome.

Dimitris Dalakoglou

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