This essay explores Greek responses to the debt crisis, particularly middle-class Greeks and their current experiences of Greece's putative subordination to Germany in particular, and IMF and EU monitoring generally. I focus on the sphere of materiality and embodiment, while also exploring the role of desire and pleasure in Greeks’ responses to their growing sense of subordination. Graffiti, popular protests, hip-hop expressive culture, and sexual joking are lenses through which I examine these themes. I also scrutinize my own positionality as a way of understanding the bitterness and ambiguity entailed in Greek reactions to the crisis. The essay illuminates how Greeks experience subjugation and respond to it through explosive resort to historical comparisons, sexual metaphors, and ill-mannered jokes.
The mountainous region of Sphakia in Crete strongly evokes notions of ruggedness, masculinity, and “tradition,” both in Greece and internationally. Recent anthropological studies of power and imagination (particularly in Greek society) have argued that local claims to tradition as well as stereotypes about the ruggedness of those who dwell in hinterlands necessarily reflect and promote the cultural domination by centers of peripheries. In critically responding to these studies, I offer a comprehensive exploration of the volatile field of subjectifications and cultural dynamics produced by and between Sphakians and spectators of the region. In doing so, I turn to the visual as a particularly rich field of practices that rupture concepts of structural subjugation. In examining such spheres as Sphakians’ photographic reappropriation and indigenous critique, I elucidate the dynamics of dominance but also capture other productive possibilities unleashed in the context of an “exoticized” society.
This article explores Greek social imagination and daily experiences during the debt crisis particularly in relation to Germany, which is increasingly the object of public suspicion with reference to its role in Greece's bailout program. The essay investigates the prevailing Greek fantasy of nativism and the role of the visual in its constitution and conception during a period characterized by anxiety over national sovereignty. Furthermore, the article explores Greek‐German social relations in western highland Crete, which lies at the intersection of cultural investments, as an archetype of the native. The essay especially focuses on photography and other material practices in unraveling the complexities, circularities, and ambivalences in the relationship between Cretans and German tourists and between Greek national imagination and German cultural representations.
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