Between Disavowal and Submission: Experiences and Subjectifications in the Greek Crisis

This paper selectively draws on different fieldwork material collected in highland Crete, the Greek mainland, Athens and the north-eastern US, among Greeks in different social positions. It approaches the crisis as an ‘imaginary entity,’ exploring how it is experienced and particularly how questions of debt and domination are negotiated by various actors. The paper especially examines the question of “colonization” as a (re-)emergent category in Greek popular discourse and imagination. A major parameter that it probes into is the Greeks’ symbolic relationship to Germany within the ‘crisis’ and the emergence of various arguments and performances that attempt to disavow and contest Germany’s role in this. It accounts for the intensely ambivalent responses that Greeks perform as regards their putative domination in the current conjuncture. To this end, it turns to the investigation of diverse realms, ranging from public representations, to visual inscriptions in landscape and protesting practices. It thus investigates particular dynamics that emerged in various protesting moments (through the ethnographic method of participant observation), analyses graffiti documented on walls or circulated as imagery online and examines utterances, bodily performances and discussions occurring between the author and different informants in various contexts. This presentantion privileges the study of materiality and more broadly embodied culture as a means of complicating the ethnographic insights that would be available from more conventional logocentric approaches.