In the midst of economic crisis, the Greek state has taken the unprecedented step of opening many of the nation's closed business sectors to international investors. Opportunities for multinational investment have been most prolific in the arena of renewable energy, where foreign prospecting in solar and wind energy is soaring. This article discusses two renewable energy initiatives: photovoltaic parks on agricultural land in Thessaly, central mainland Greece, and a planned wind farm development on the Aegean island of Chios. Among the people of Thessaly and Chios, the renewable energy initiatives are widely seen in terms of conquest and occupation akin to the Ottoman era and the Second World War. Harnessing natural resources is perceived to be a colonial programme of economic extraction associated with the global South as much as a sustainable energy initiative, heralding a return to a time of foreign occupation. This article examines the dialectical relationship emerging between narratives of renewable energy extraction and broader, long-standing conceptions of Greek identity.

Oku adults have a straightforward rationalization for the existence of folktales: the frightening cautionary tales of the child-eating monster K∂ηgaaηgu serve to warn children not to go to the fields or to stray too far from the house without their parents. But this rationalization is belied by the fact that adults in this chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields do not tell folktales to children. Rather, folktales are most often told by children amongst each other, with no adult involvement, and they are consequently learned by younger children from older ones. This is an unusual situation in West Africa, where the norm is for adults to tell folktales to children. For all we know, adult-to-child storytelling may have been the normal practice in the Grassfields in the past, but if it ever was, this practice has now passed into desuetude, and today adults look with mild scorn on folktales (f∂ngaanen, ∂mgaanen pl.) and generally remain aloof during storytelling sessions. Storytelling in the Grassfields is therefore a child-structured form of play in Schwartzman's (1978) sense: it is an activity mediated by children without adult input. Prior to the introduction of schooling in the Grassfields, children used to be made to guard the crops against birds and monkeys, an activity that left them to their own devices in the fields for long periods of the day (Argenti 2001; see also Fortes 1938; Raum 1940). In some cases, children actually slept in small shelters that they built in the fields, and they would consequently stay away from their homes and adult supervision for days at a time. It was in this context, away from the censorious gaze of adults, that children's illicit masking activities developed (Argenti 2001). It may also be in this context that children were able to indulge in prolonged bouts of storytelling without fear of reproof by adults, in whose eyes children should be seen but not heard. Today, children no longer guard the fields, and they have therefore taken to telling their folktales at home.

In this article, I explore the ways in which Oku carvers negotiate their relation to the palace hierarchy and to the nation-state by means of the masterapprentice relationship. I describe the palace hierarchy's incorporation of the procreational powers of apprenticed carvers and examine a separate group of nonapprenticed carvers and the alternative network of new-elite patrons for whom they work. This case study leads to a deconstruction of the dichotomies pitting locality against the state, palatine against business elites, and tradition against modernity, suggesting that tradition may conceal social change and that modernist youth movements may conversely provide sources of historical continuity, [apprenticeship, youth, modernity, nationalism, elites, carving, hierarchy]

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As emerging nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa engender warfare and rapid socio-political change that increasingly affect children, this article examines the ways in which child masking may represent a means for children in Oku, a kingdom in the Cameroon Grassfields, to incorporate references to exogenous forms of modernist violence in their fantasy-play. The means by which children overcome their fear of adult masks and the forest spirits they represent by becoming maskers themselves is first examined. Two new children's masquerades, one representing a white man and the other referring to the SDF opposition political party, then serve as a focus to illustrate how children now extend their use of masking to incorporate the exogenous forces of the state, transforming the fragmentation of social ties and local cosmologies these forces threaten into new trans-local models of social cohesion.

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Abstract:With contributions from several of the Balkan countries that once were united under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire, this special issue proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. All of the articles in this issue explore themes to do with the transmission of collective memories of post-Ottoman state formation and the malaise associated with a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term 'late nationalism'. This introductory article examines the several manifestations of this general phenomenon under the rubric of post-Ottoman topologies, suggesting that where history creates a fixed, empiricist record of the past, topologies denote the flux of collective memory in its multiple and mutable incarnations across time.

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