Anticipatory nostalgia and nomadic temporality

Abstract

This paper expands on the view of Modern Greece as a 'crypto-colonial' space (cf. Herzfeld 2002). It offers an alternative reading of the so-called 'Greek-crisis', using the lens of chronocracy as developed in the introduction to this volume. An ethnographic engagement with the years of austerity, faced by Greek people since 2010, reveals chronocracy to be a colonial technology with political, moral and epistemic dimensions. Here I argue that chronocracy produces an anticipatory nostalgia: namely, a future-oriented affective state of longing for what has already been accomplished and at once yet to be achieved. I show how anticipatory nostalgia is distributed between relational, material and temporal ecologies. The Greek people, I argue, sustain a nomadic sense of temporality (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2010), manifested in eclectic connections between time fragments that form provisional temporal assemblages. These are evident in my ethnography in the form of visualities, materialities, discourses and narratives. Nomadic temporality emerges as an expression of temporal agency that both resists and reifies chronocracy and anticipatory nostalgia.My present analysis is intellectually indebted to several strands of scholarship. The writings of Michael Herzfeld (especially 2002, 2005, 2015, 2016a, 2016b) on crypto-colonialism, structural nostalgia and European moralism are central. However, I also draw on his earlier works on the making of the Modern Greek state and the marginalization of the anthropology of Greece (1986, 1987), as the impetus for this paper. I build on these works not only to support my claim that Greece ought to be analysed as a colonial space but also in my attempt to formulate the concept of anticipatory nostalgia and to connect it to chronocracy as colonial durability. Post-colonial studies' literature and an enormous body of Greek-studies' scholarship have provided substantial analytical and historical evidence on the colonization of the

Reconsidering the vignette as method

“…Today, one cannot easily replicate Malkki's (1996) paradigm‐setting ethnography or Schuster's (2003, 2011) decades‐long sociological‐ethnographic documentation of Afghan displacements through Asia and Europe and back to Afghanistan (see also Schuster & Majidi, 2013, 2015). Pathbreaking ethnographies have shown us how to trace trajectories (Andersson, 2014), interpret materialities and their assemblages (De León, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017; Kirtsoglou, 2018, 2021, forthcoming), approach populations involved in refugee reception (Cabot, 2014; Papataxiarchis, 2016; Rozakou, 2017), and think about the entanglements of people and space (Avramopoulou, 2020; Navaro, 2017; Panourgia, 2019). These are, through their thematic foci, exemplars of ethnography as vignetting and the ethical commitments this entails.…”

Borders, Belonging, and Refugee Memory since the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

“…The role that cultural memory plays in society goes beyond helping us learn some "lessons from the past" (and if there is one thing history has taught us, it is that such lessons are hardly ever learned as they are intended: see Salvanou 2021). Memories equip us with a set of tools that can be used to craft a wide array of identifications and associations-nomadic temporalities (Kirtsoglou 2020), contingently brought together to address the present moment.…”