Contemporary Greece Research Articles

On 80stalgia: discernments from contemporary Greece

ABSTRACT Nostalgia for the 1980s, or 80stalgia, is a global phenomenon. This article explores the phenomenon in Greece and approaches 80stalgia as a cultural trend that marks media and pop culture. It combines digital ethnography through invisible observation (especially using Facebook, a social medium that favours nostalgic communities) and historicised content analysis to analyse 80stalgia in its interrelation with politics, and approaches it as having been influenced by international nostalgic trends and local politics, especially the political legacy of 1980s governments. Finally, the article discusses why the economic crisis of the 2010s, an experience that triggered self-reflection on the past, strengthened 80stalgia.

Ecofeminism and the Cultural Affinity to Genocidal Capitalism: Theorising Necropolitical Femicide in Contemporary Greece

Resilient necrocapitalism and the zombie genre of representations of current dystopias are persistent in their political purpose in producing changes in the social order to benefit plutocracies around the world. It is through a thanatopolitical lens that we should view the successive losses of life, and this zombie genre has come to represent a dystopia that, for political purposes, is intended to produce changes in societies which have tolerated the violent deaths of women. This article focuses on contemporary Greece and proposes a theoretical framework where femicide is understood as a social phenomenon that reflects a global gendered necropolitical logic which equals genocide. Such theoretical assemblages have to be situated within intersectional imperatives and tacitly as the result of the capitalist terror state performed in an expansive and direct immediate death, exacerbated by the lingering slow social death of the welfare state. The article contends that the scripted hetero-patriarchal social order of the necrocapitalist state poses a unique political threat to societies. With the silence of the complicity of the state, what is necessary is the creation and spread of new political knowledge and new social movements as resilient political tactics of resistance. This article foregrounds an ecofeminist perspective on these issues and considers ways through which new pedagogies of hope can counter the gendered necropolitics of contemporary capitalism in Greece.

Child speech developmental norms in Greek monolinguals: whole word and consonant accuracy

ABSTRACT Child phonological development in standard Greek is aptly represented by both single-case and cross-sectional studies. While some quantitative measures exist, such as the 75% criterion in the acquisition of singletons and clusters, reported norms require replication to fine-tune existing indicators, inform non-existent ones, and better reflect children’s typical developmental speech in contemporary Greece. Our cross-sectional study addresses this gap, in terms of consonant inventory acquisition, and percentage accuracy of words, singletons, clusters, and cluster reductions. Phonological Assessment for Greek (PAel) procedures facilitated data elicitation from 254 Greek-speaking participants, aged 2;0–7;0, equally represented for gender. Our study comprehensively informs quantitative norms on whole word accuracy (WWA), percentage of consonants correct (PCC), PCC variation across the different age groups of children, and the WWA-PCC correlation along the developmental path in this cross-sectional study. A schematic representation models children’s normative PCC-WWA profiles, facilitating the determination of phonological disorder in Greek with direct clinical application on diagnosis and intervention.

Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene acoustemology

Abstract‘Hearing Heat: An Anthropocene acoustemology’ is an intermedia composition that meditates on the climate of history, listening to histories of listening from the Papua New Guinea rainforest to nuclear Japan to ancient and contemporary Greece. It proceeds through continual recombinations of visual and sonic media, with photographs, graphics, animation, and cinema dialoguing with ethnographic field recording of Indigenous song, ambient environmental sound, cinema soundtracks, electroacoustic and radio composition, and vocally performed text.

Рец. на кн.: Eugenia Roussou. Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece. L.: Bloombsbury, 2021. XII+196 с.

Eugenia Roussou studies the phenomenon of the evil eye in Greece. Based on long-term fieldwork in Thessaloniki and Rethymno, her main claims are that religious attitudes in contemporary Greece are a result of significant shift. In her opinion, Orthodoxy and New Age spirituality are not now “at cultural war”, and attitudes to the evil eye are the finest example of this reconciliation. Unfortunately, the entire text is nothing more than an illustration. The ethnographic descriptions are rich, but rather one-sided. Almost all of author’s interlocutors were neutral or positive towards New Age and new religious movements. Also, Roussou did not include interviews with priests in her research, which significantly distorted the picture. The theoretical framework of this monograph goes against the described material, because of the author’s desire to avoid all sorts of contradictions. She claims to adopt the framework of vernacular religiosity in her monograph, but does not follow this line either in terms or in material.

War, Postmemory, and Exhibition Design in Greece. The “Asia Minor Hellenism: Heyday-Catastrophe-Displacement-Rebirth” Exhibition at the Benaki Museum (2022–2023)

In the paper, I critically discuss the commemorative exhibition “Asia Minor Hellenism: Heyday-Catastrophe-Displacement-Rebirth” (Athens, Benaki Museum, 2022–2023), examining the role of postmemory in the shaping of national identity in contemporary Greece. Building my analysis on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, I draw attention to commemorative exhibition practices and the intergenerational transmission of collective traumatic experiences related to dark events of national significance. Touching upon issues concerning the civilianization of war, I interrogate commemorative exhibitions as prefabricated events, bringing to the fore the selective management of collective memory through exhibition design.

From the margins of law to the margins of the city; a legal-geographical analysis of sex work regulationism in Greece

PurposeThis paper aims to shed light on the spatial constraints of sex work in Greece. The objective is twofold: to illustrate the intertemporal stance of the Greek state to push sex work at the edge of both the city and the law produces sex workers as always already marginal subjects and to identify how a spatial-based understanding of sex work could help in acknowledging sex workers’ full community citizenship.Design/methodology/approachThis article examines the legal geographies of sex work in modern and contemporary Greece. The author is a doctoral student in critical jurisprudence with a professional background in urban planning law, who also works voluntarily with Athens-based sex worker’s organizations. Law’s materialization within space (Bennet and Layard, 2015, p. 406), namely, the implication of law in the discursive and material production of place, is examined through archival research with primary and secondary sources, including legislations and LGBT publications such as Amfi and Kráximo from the 1980s and 1990s found in the Archives of Contemporary Social History (ASKI) in Athens. Additionally, as the author is currently conducting fieldwork with people who are working or have worked in the past in sex in Greece as a part of her PhD dissertation, the paper contains data provided by ten interlocutors to highlight their own personal experience. The researcher has used the critical oral history method, as it is committed to recording first-hand knowledge of experiences of marginalized community members who are often unheard or untold, with the additional goals of contextualizing these stories to reveal power differences and inequities (Lemley, 2017, Rickard, 2003).FindingsThe paper provides insight into how regulationism establishes the brothel – a metonymy of prostitution – as a heterotopia within the urban space. Contemporary approaches, such as LULUs and broken window policies, are used to indicate the historically marginal placement of sex work.Research limitations/implicationsThe interviews presented here were conducted in the summer of 2022, in the context of the author’s PhD research. Despite her six years of activist-level involvement with sex workers’ rights organizations, due to ethical constraints, only the findings of interviews conducted up to the writing of this paper are presented here, while details of private discussions with members of these organizations are omitted.Originality/valueThe paper examines a significant and timely matter of place making and spatial justice. Unlike earlier research on prostitution in Greece that focused on the brothel either as a heterotopia or as an undesirable land use, the novelty of this paper is that it highlights the intersections between policing, planning, public hygiene, anti-immigration policies around the regulation of the sex market. By critically discussing the implications of the de facto illegality of sex work in Greece, the study highlights the importance of including the voices of sex workers in decision-making and contributes to the debate around the decriminalization of sex work in Greece.

The Poetics of Pain

Abstract Modern Greek poetry has been influenced by a tradition of lament that is still practiced in rural Greece, and by the tragic events of modern Greek history. In contrast to the elegiac tradition, laments and their women practitioners ascribe a positive value to pain. Male poets of the generation of 1930 made use of the imagery of folk lament in their poetry, and women poets of the second half of the 20th century addressed the dead directly as their village counterparts still do. The Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922 dominated 20th-century modern Greek literature and drew on another traditional poetic form, the “lament for lost cities.” More recently, songwriters have mourned the political and economic tragedies of contemporary Greece in lyrics that seem much closer, in their expression of pain, to the tradition of lament than to elegy.

Divergent democracy: Notes on a mediatised affective activism renewal of feminist and anti-fascist struggle in contemporary Greece

While the shackles of austerity continue to shatter the remnants of once dignified, and now, mostly dehumanising lives, for most Greeks who have suffered decades long of economic and social crises, the rapid rise of the far right and its incipient racist and xenophobic discourse has had a profound impact on the country. This paper attempts a twofold objective: on the one hand to contribute to the global feminist dialogue by making visible and vocal the case of Greece, and, on the other to advance a plea for a current consciousness raising era in Greece as regards particularly contemporary youth who can transform instances of despair into action and social change by adopting feminist principles in their everyday lives. I draw on the representational politics of far-right fascist discourse and individual behaviour articulated and depicted in contemporary Greek films, and its gendered and xenophobic normalisers, to contextualise an interdisciplinary feminist analysis of such phenomena in contemporary Greece.

“Out in the Streets”

Abstract This article provides a socio-anthropological portrayal of the hip-hop narrational mosaics in Greece through the intertemporal exploration of two hip-hop scenes: the rap scene and the hip-hop dance scene. It explores the gray and contested zones of a local hip-hop culture—which reflect on global hip-hop imageries, norms, and antinomies–through permutations and manifestations of difference, hybridization and subcultural capital, and their subversive intersections with race, class, gender, and affective states in contemporary Greece in landscapes of crisis. Drawing on content analysis of rap lyrics and ethnographic fieldwork on rap and hip-hop dance performativities, resonating contemporary Greek society’s precarities, traumas, and ethics, this article explains why hip-hop and street cultures are so popular today in Greece. Furthermore, it highlights their global dynamics and their present and future potential as an empowering and emancipatory space for young generations.

‘Signs of the times’: Prophecy belief in contemporary Greek Orthodox contexts

This article examines the structure, content, and function of widely circulating prophetic narratives in contemporary Greece and Cyprus. Prophetologists play a key role in recycling and disseminating prophecies through traditional and modern means of communication in an attempt to explain conditions of crisis and to promote conservative moral values and nationalistic aspirations as salvific remedies in the public sphere. Their highly politicized prophetic discourse blurs the differentiation between religion and politics that characterizes secular modernity. But at the same time, the use of modern media and secular strategies for sacred purposes have unintended secularizing effects on the religious field. Finally, the article explores the reasons why prophecy belief finds fertile soil for proliferation in these countries.

“Your Shadow Blocks My Sun”: Reading Alternative Narratives in The New Parthenon and Other Films by Penny Siopis

In The New Parthenon, as with her other films, Penny Siopis pieces together fragments of found footage of anonymous home videos, shot handheld on 8 or 16 mm film. The films are digitised first for sampling, but not digitally remastered, and are then combined with music and subtitles from various sources. These films narrate the stories of individuals, set against significant historical and political events. Evocativeness and anxiety are induced by the un-specificity of the connections between images and subtitles, heightened by the materiality of the amateur home video footage, often centred on quotidian family life and holidays, that has been reframed to narrate events that continue to reshape nations. I introduce the construction of a nation as a political community and examine how Siopis subverts narratives that connect ancient and contemporary Greece and its own internal antisemitic and nationalist conflicts to those of apartheid South Africa and imperialist Britain. I propose that the numerous representations of souvenir replicas and icons in The New Parthenon appear to perform a witnessing role to public and personal histories, while symbolically holding historical traumas in frozen form. I focus on Siopis’s mediated views of the Acropolis structures in the film, considering the symbolic bleaching of the Parthenon Marbles in the nineteenth-century British imaginary to track whiteness as a signifier of power. Siopis migrates this to signifiers of apartheid South Africa in order, I argue, to critique the narratives that maintain national imaginaries and to propose instead an aesthetics of reattachment.

Assessing quality of care and observance of human rights in residential mental health facilities in Greece through the WHO QualityRights tool kit.

In this paper, we present and reflect upon the process of evaluating two residential mental health facilities in Thessaloniki, Greece, through the WHO QualityRights tool kit. The QualityRights tool kit is a structured process for assessing quality of care and human rights in mental health and social care facilities, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), introduced by the World Health Organization in 2012. We have piloted the use of the Toolkit in two supported accommodation facilities, a hostel and a service supervising independent living in apartments, for individuals with long-term severe mental health problems in the region of Thessaloniki. In this paper, we present the methodology and process of evaluating the facilities, including the challenges posed to the evaluation process by restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We showcase the outcome of this evaluation through presenting a summary of the results and the ensuing recommendations for improvement. Finally, we reflect on the usefulness, appropriateness and relevance of the Toolkit for evaluating mental health care facilities in the particular context of contemporary Greece.

“Affluent and Tender Online”: Instagramming Celebrity, Masculinity, and Fatherhood in Contemporary Greece

This article explores the online construction of masculinity and fatherhood in contemporary Greece. Through a digital observation of five celebrities’ Instagram activities that identified with the image of family man and affectionate father, the article argues that self-representations of affluent and involved masculinity and fatherhood represent a popular media trend. The article analyzes such self-representations as the outcome of historical transformations in gender and family politics, economy, and media that go back to the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. It also argues that the acceptance of such imagery by wide audiences demonstrates the persistence of the male archetype of breadwinner, the value of the family, and the nostalgic survival of elements of earlier prosperous consumer aesthetics throughout the Greek economic crisis of the 2010s.

الروحانية : تحوّلات الممارسات الدينية العامية في اليونان، النوع والسلطة

In contemporary Greece, Orthodox Christianity remains the predominant institutionalized religion, being directly connected to Greek religious and ethnic identity. However, more recently, the so-called ‘New Age spirituality’ has begun to claim an active position within contemporary Greek religiosity. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper offers an anthropological account of how a new religious pluralism is formed at the level of vernacular religious practice in Greece, through negotiations of gender and power. The main objective is to show how religiosity is lived and transformed, through the amalgamation of religion and spirituality, in a Mediterranean country where, according to the stereotype that follows most countries of the northern shore of the Mediterranean region, Christianity supposedly prevails.

“As a Trans Person You Don’t Live. You Merely Try to Survive and Apologize Every Day for Who You Are” – Discrimination Experiences Among Trans Individuals in Greece”

ABSTRACT This qualitative study sheds light on an issue very little research has been conducted on so far, the discrimination trans people in Greece are subjected to every day. The findings presented in this paper are part of a larger study focusing on trans persons’ life experiences in contemporary Greece. Eleven participants identified various discrimination areas, employment, education, family, romantic relationships and daily life; participants also pointed out specific measures that would contribute to the improvement of their life. Findings are discussed in relation to measures toward eliminating discrimination against trans persons such as the improvement of gender recognition legislation, an increase in general education regarding gender identity issues and the need for transgender-focused research.

Confl icting Threads. Technological Innovation and the Socio-technical Ensemble of Weaving

This paper refers to two new approaches to conceive the relationship between technological innovation and society as one of anchoring: The TASC concept (Technologies as Anchors for Societal Conflicts) aims to show how societal conflicts are anchored in technologies that, as such, are not responsible for the conflict. The ‘Anchoring Innovation’ research program of the Dutch Research School in Classical Studies (OIKOS) aims to explain how technological in- novations were anchored in ancient society. Our paper trials these concepts along the threads that connect the social and the technical in the weaving of contemporary India and archaic Greece. The first part of the paper examines the Indian government’s efforts to provide technological upgradation to a community of weavers who insist on their loin loom that is embedded in their local ecology, making them appear backward and ignorant of innovation. In the second part, we examine how innovation in ancient Greece was anchored in the socially ubiquitous technology of weaving. In both cases, the social turns out to be an essential part of (the technology of) weaving. Conflicts arise where technology claims to be ahead of a society that must constantly adapt to it.

Liberal Democracy in a Less-than-Liberal Context? The Case of Contemporary Greece

The persistence of democracy in today’s Greece may be surprising for two reasons. First, liberal democracy survived an economic crisis in the 2010s that was more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Second, liberal democracy has remained stable despite the fact that the period since the 1974 transition from the Colonels’ Regime has witnessed the diffusion of illiberal ideas and an emergence of relatively small yet very active antiliberal parties. Liberal democracy has been resilient in the face of nationalism and populism, even though accountable liberal institutions enjoy limited political trust. The resilience of contemporary Greek democracy can be explained through two sets of factors: a political set and a social set. Political factors include a long history of political liberalism and the robustness of contemporary political-party competition. Social factors include Greece’s relatively large middle class and the absence of overlapping social cleavages that could otherwise have led to destructive socio-political polarization and then a slide toward illiberalism. The Greek case shows under what conditions a liberal democracy can flourish in a less-than-liberal context.

The humorous rewriting of Orwell’s '1984'

This commentary piece offers some preliminary thoughts concerning the Greek memes produced since COVID-19 disease arrived at Greece at the end of February 2020, through identifying an analogy between the sociopolitical conditions in Greece-under-lockdown and Orwell’s Oceania in his 1984 novel. It is specifically argued that such texts constitute political humour commenting on the abrupt, yet pervasive changes attested due to state measures against the spread of COVID-19 disease. To this end, memes collected from the social media are discussed and interpreted in comparison with extracts from Orwell’s novel to point to striking similarities between the 1984 sociopolitical context and the Greek one. It is, however, suggested that there is a significant difference between the two contexts: in Orwell’s dystopia, humour seems to have no place at all; on the contrary, humour thrived in Greece-under-lockdown, especially among participants in the social media, in the form of rapidly created and disseminated memes. Memory (a central notion in Orwell’s novel) emerges as a crucial factor for the production of such humour in contemporary Greece and for its absence from Orwell’s Oceania.

Ο μύθος της «μυθικής μεθόδου»: Μια φιλολογική ανασκαφή

The myth of the "mythical method": A philological excavationThis paper seeks to illuminate the meaning and purpose of T. S. Eliot’s “mythical method”, both in its original context (Eliot’s 1923 review of Joyce’s Ulysses) and in Greek critical practice, from the mid-20th century to the present. Beginning with a review of the “mythical method’s” strong impact and widespread use as a critical term in contemporary Greece, it proceeds to present this term’s main interpretations, following its initial formulation by George Seferis: as a general organizing principle or tone of voice (by E. Keeley), as a “myth-historical objective correlative” (by N. Vayenas) and as an allegorical device (by various recent critics), and to discuss their respective shortcomings. Turning to Eliot’s text, the paper shows that the “mythical method” was never meant to be used as a critical term, while Eliot’s definition of it fails to correspond to his prime textual examples. The term’s original formulation was mainly intended to protect The Waste Land, in the context of local literary politics, and so it was effectively repudiated by its author shortly after its introduction. Although the term has been practically abandoned in international critical practice, its proliferation in Greek criticism is remarkable. The paper concludes that, despite the confusion caused by their conceptual failures and wild improvisations, Greek designations of the “mythical method” can be enlightening, as illustrations of the contradictory canonizing strategies operating in the field of Greek criticism during the second half of the 20th century.