Transformative Connections: Trauma, Cooperative Horizons, and Emerging Political Topographies in Athens, Greece

Alexandrakis, Othon

doi:10.1080/02757206.2015.1111211

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The renewed interest in Southern Europe and austerity made temporality a fruitful entry point of analysis. For example, in relation to memory and resistance (Narotzky 2016), forgetting and suppressed memories (Pipyrou 2016) and trauma and affect (Alexandrakis 2016;Apostolidou 2018). These works complemented anthropological discussions of historicity (Stewart 2016), the near future (Guyer 2007), debt and fiscal disobedience (Graeber 2011;Han 2004;Roitman 2005), hope (Miyazaki 2004(Miyazaki , 2006, speed cultures of modernity (Virilio 2005), the study of time through labour (Bear 2014) and the concept of time as a technique (Bear 2016).…”

Section: Chronocracy Nostalgia and Nomadic Temporality In The Crypto-...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipatory nostalgia and nomadic temporality

Kirtsoglou¹

2020

The Time of Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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

show abstract