“Between Good and Evil, Victim and Culprit, Credible and Untrustworthy:” Moralizing as a Means of Narrating the Greek Debt Crisis

This presentation is concerned with dominant or currently emerging rhetorics in the Greek public sphere, and in the realms of private life and everyday sociality, triggered by what has been experienced as the Greek economic crisis.  These rhetorics make available moralizing interpretations of the crisis, for instance by reading the crisis in Manichean terms of good and evil, and are communicated in statements such as, “Greece is envied by…,” “Greece is the victim of…,” “Who owes what to whom,” “Shame on us.”  I intend to discuss a number of issues pertaining to these discursive moments: the sentiment they are invested with and the affect they motivate; the fact that they are widely shared “across the board,” i.e. by subjects from various social categories and class backgrounds in Greece; or, the fact that they reproduce stereotypical polarizations of Greeks and Others, and merge the language of debt with that of morality.  In this process I seek to demonstrate the striking ambivalences of these discursive positions: not only do they rest on a-historical versions of Greek and European realities at the present moment, but also, I contend, they rest on the awareness of the national “self” as flawed.  Drawing on anthropological theories of the economy and its role as a symbolic boundary marker, a technology of citizenship, and a realm where commodity (object) and credit (social relation) are inextricably linked, I will explore the ambivalences these morally charged rhetorics rest on, by tracing their genealogy in Greece’s historically constructed marginality.