History Of Greece Research Articles

The disappearing immigrants: hunger strike as invisible struggle

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)This article follows a dialogic approach in an attempt to build bridges between different academic disciplines and actually existing social performances. A social scientist and an applied theatre practitioner adopt a theory of 'performativity' which explores the productive capacities of performances as kinesis, a movement that represents the energies that break political boundaries and trouble social closures. In doing so, we follow Victor Turner's interpretation of cultural performances asnot simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting 'designs for living' (1986: 24).In other words, the term 'performance' refers to actions that incessantly insinuate, interrupt, interrogate and antagonise powerful master narratives. In this line of thought, the social world becomes the theatrical stage of everyday encounters as cultural performances which transcend social, political and, ultimately, academic boundaries. Primarily, we are concerned with how the strategy of engaging with invisible bodies and performative resistances can unpack hierarchies of representation. The article focuses on a specific resistant act which can be read as a performance; dealing with the narratives that provide the act with its socio-political context, as well as the categories of audience witnessing of the act.The article analyses a large-scale hunger strike act, performed by 300 immigrants and staged in the Law School building in Athens. In order to unpack the complexities of such a performance, we critically reflect on our own position as occupying overlapping roles as witnesses, audience, researchers, artists and social scientists. We engage with Turner's 'emphatic view of performance as making not faking', and then we move to 'Bhabha's politically urgent view of performance as breaking and remaking' (Conquergood, 1995: 138).The starting point of our analysis is the socio-political context in Athens which prepares the stage for that performance. We then move to the actual stage of the Law School building in order to critically reflect on the 'academic asylum' state and the multiple meanings of being in a space always already inscribed by powerful social memories. We draw on Henri Lefebvre's work on the social production of space and the power of remapping. To remap means to engage into a compelling negotiation of space, stereotypes, feelings and practices such as inclusion, recognition and openness. Next, we examine hunger strike as a means of practising resistance and as a spectacle. We refer to the importance of the image in our postmodern societies to evoke genuine human reactions, analysing the performance from the audience's perspective (knowingly including several images to underscore this point). Meanwhile we remain critical on issues of participation and representation in grassroots resistance movements. Finally, we discuss what a possible end could be and the wider social, political and cultural implications of such a performance.PREPARING THE STAGE: ALIENATION IN THE ATHENIAN LANDSCAPEThe ethnic self in Athens is perceived through a feeling of superiority, which is the result of ancient Greek heritage. The constitution of solid nationalist identities has involved a procedure of homogenisation, namely, the purging of vibrant Eastern elements that were remnant of Ottoman rule which ended in 1834. Modern Greek identity is based on the assumption that 'the Greeks are the distinctive heirs of the ancient Greek civilisation' (Papataxiarhis, 1998: 3). Considering Greece's history of occupation, it may come as no surprise that the main interpretation of national identity has an obvious xenophobic shade and brings forth a rather defensive definition of Greekness, which seeks to 'establish identity not on the affirmation of us, but on the rejection of the other, leading to an effort to retain its integrity through isolation and ethnocentrism' (Tsaousis 1998: 19). …

Nicholas Doumanis, A History of Greece

Nicholas Doumanis, <i>A History of Greece</i>

Updating the research agenda on business history in Greece: an overview

Updating the research agenda on business history in Greece: an overview

Greece, the hidden centuries: Turkish rule from the fall of Constantinople to Greek independence

For almost four hundred years, between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Greek War of Independence, the history of Greece is shrouded in mystery: distorted by Greek writers and largely neglected by others. What was life really like for the Greeks under Ottoman rule? Was it a period of exploitation and enslavement for the Greeks until they were finally able to rise up against Turkish rule, as is the traditional, Greek nationalistic view? Or did the Greeks derive some benefit from Turkish rule? How did the Greeks and Turks co-exist for so long? And, why are Greek attitudes towards Venice, who also controlled much of Greece for many of these years, so different? In this wide-ranging yet concise history David Brewer explodes many of the myths about Turkish rule of Greece. He places the Greek story in its wider, international context and casts fresh light on the dynamics of power not only between Greeks and Ottomans but also between Muslims and Christians, both Orthodox and Catholic, throughout Europe. This absorbing and riveting account of a crucial period will ensure that the history of Greece under Turkish rule is no longer hidden. It will delight anyone with an interest in Greek and Turkish history and in how the past has shaped the Greece we know today.

Culture and Customs of Greece (review)

Reviewed by: Culture and Customs of Greece Yiorgos Chouliaras Artemis Leontis . Culture and Customs of Greece. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. 2009. Pp. xxi + 266. 26 illustrations, 1 map. Cloth $49.95. How many Greeks does it take to buy a watermelon? A book that can fruitfully engage this question tells you much about life in Greece and belongs to any modern European culture syllabus. Indexed from Acropolis to Zorba, in eight narrative chapters, following the structure of this Greenwood Press series on the "culture and customs" of Europe, this book contains a discussion of the land, people, and history of Greece; religious practices; social customs, gender roles, and the family; leisure, holidays, and the Greek table; language and literature; music and dance; media, theater, and cinema; and architecture and art. Illustrated with photographs taken by the author and others, this volume also includes a chronology, from the Stone Age through the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and modern periods to 2008; a glossary that explains filoxenia as well as frappé and frontistirio as well as parea; and a selected chapter-by-chapter bibliography that cites many useful websites. In short, this is a volume those of us who used to lecture on modern Greek culture in American universities would have wished to have had not only for our students, but for an educated general audience, including colleagues in other fields. Three major themes that help organize the narrative of the book involve urbanization and the evolution of greater Athens into a dynamic, problematic, and exciting metropolis, where nearly one third of the population of Greece resides; the performative aspect of Greek culture that reflects the way people play their parts for one another, onstage and off; and the living relationship of inhabitants to the distant past. An overarching theme corresponds to the centrality to Greek culture of Greek, a language with more than 3,200 years of documented history. Greek defines the modern nation, argues the author, giving word to song, protest, and debate, relating Greeks to their ancestors, providing oral and visual order to poetry and prose, anchoring religion to its Septuagint and New Testament written sources, and binding diaspora Greeks to their ancestral homeland. Some, like Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis, seem to claim that Greece exists for the purpose of preserving Homer's language. Even if language debates today are not deadly, as they sometimes literally were in the past, they still populate public discourse. Do foreign lexical imports, text messaging, and emails in Greek written with Latin characters threaten communication skills? Will Greece's many recent immigrants ever learn Greek as well as their children do? Also drawing on personal experiences of Greece, going back over 35 years to a first visit to her family's place of origin, Artemis Leontis, who grew up to become a noted Greek teacher and scholar of real and imagined Hellenic topologies, pulls together many threads that can guide those innocent of Greek and Greece through the apparent labyrinths of observed Greek culture, where a crisis may emerge out of nothing, while real threats may be faced as a matter of fact. The country of paradox, politics, and pleasure she describes, which welcomes each year more foreign visitors than the number of its permanent residents, appears [End Page 152] as a very attractive, even if puzzling, destination, the extreme attraction as much a part of the puzzle as the puzzle is of the attraction. If culture can always be conceived as a dance on a tightrope between introspection and exhibitionism, Leontis is singularly perceptive in highlighting such moments in a Greek context for those who wish to get to know the ropes while they enjoy the performance. At the same time, the author manages to pack an unusual volume of information in what is necessarily an introductory account. There are inevitable drawbacks. Given perhaps the constraints of the series, discussion of directly cultural dimensions tends to be more illuminating than discussion of politics and history. Moreover, the need to refer to numerous contemporary Greek contributors in literature, the arts, and culture in general is sometimes reduced to lists of names that could never include everyone who should be...

Interpreting the Athenian empire

The empire that the Athenians established in the years after 478 BC was an entirely new phenomenon in the history of Greece, and the basis of much of the brilliant development of Athenian culture in the fifth century. Its growth and collapse was the key event in the history of the period, after the defeat of the Persian invasion. Yet this important historical phenomenon remains baffling to study. New developments in various fields have made urgent a revision of existing approaches, which largely originated in the first half of the last century. Advances in archaeology have hugely extended the possibilities of writing an archaeology of the empire. The accepted chronology of many key inscriptions has been powerfully challenged, so that new narrative reconstructions become possible. Relevant new documents in languages such as Lycian have become available. Understanding of the Persian empire which was the parallel, and in a sense the model, with which the Athenian empire interacted has been transformed in the last quarter century. Broader developments in historiography (microhistory; history from below; and, post-colonial theory) invite us to pose new questions. The aim of this collection is not to offer a final word on any of the problems, but to give a sense of the possibility of a new generation of studies of the empire.

La evolución del arquero en el contexto bélico griego

La trayectoria del arco en la Historia de Grecia va asociada a la transformación que se originó en el seno del ámbito militar. El escaso protagonismo que durante muchos siglos se concedió a los arqueros en el contexto bélico, dará un giro inesperado conel estallido de las Guerras Médicas. Posteriormente, el dramaturgo Eurípides convertirá a Heracles, uno de los arqueros más célebres del mundo helénico, en el portavoz del cambio que traerá consigo, la aceptación e incorporación definitiva de estos soldados como contingente de considerable valor dentro de los ejércitos griegos.

The Greek Revolt, the World Crisis and Freedom of Expression

The December 2008 Greek popular revolt1 , with mass youth participation, was misrepresented by the mainstream media, in Greece, as a ‘nihilistic’ manifestation of ‘blind violence’ of ‘marginalized elements’ against police brutality without any political agenda. In reality, judged by its width, depth and duration, it was the biggest rebellion from the time of the 1973 revolt in the Polytechnic University of Athens, which was brutally repressed by the tanks of the military dictatorship and possibly even from the time of the civil war in Greece in the 1940s. Paper presented at the Critique Conference 2009 on Capitalism and Repressive Tolerance, London School of Economics, 27 March 2009. The battle for freedom of expression, information and counter-information, the use of the Internet, etc. became a crucial element in the confrontation. The December events were not a repetition of past conflicts in the turbulent history of Greece but its first metropolitan revolt, as the social economic structure, class composition and power relations in the country had been profoundly transformed under the impact of capitalist globalization and its crisis. The Greek revolt combines features from May 1968, and from the French suburbs rebellion in 2005, but it presents also new features, ‘ coming from the future’, as the rebels were saying. It is the first political explosion of the current world economic crisis, and thus it has world significance.

A Trunk Load of Books

THIS LONG political process that has brought out the uniqueness of almost every state and given unprecedented status to the voter largely came about because of a trunk full of books. I learned this while searching for books to recommend to readers of this column for their annual summer reading. In the past, I've recommended items ranging from children's books for policy makers to resources intended to make people want to embrace their activism. In this momentous political year, it seemed that a list that reminded everyone of the tie between education and democracy would be a good choice. During my research, however, an equally interesting theme began to appear. It is about what the Founders themselves read that prepared them to write the U.S. Constitution. Did you know, for example, that the College of New Jersey was the Berkeley of the mid-1700s? It prepared a generation of young men to lead a revolution based on the ideas of John Locke and the Enlightenment. Today, that college is known as Princeton University and not generally considered a hotbed of rabble-rousers. But back then it nurtured the minds of James Madison and others with Locke's philosophy of government by consent of the governed and attention to the common good. One of Madison's favorite books was the 1723 Memoirs of the French Cardinal de Retz, who attached a value system to the actions of politicians, suggesting that they should be prudent, calculate the consequences, admit to mistakes, and use power effectively. Unhappy with the imperfections of the Articles of Confederation, Madison carefully studied dozens of books that Thomas Jefferson sent him in trunks from France. These books told how other societies, such as Greece, Switzerland, and the Germanic states, organized their governments, listing their features and analyzing the ways they used central authority. These analyses formed the basis of his arguments that produced, finally, the government we have today. Jefferson, Madison, and others who crafted the framework for the United States were steeped in the classics. By age 11, for example, Madison was studying Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, math, science, and the history of Greece and Rome. Jefferson received a similar classical education, and at the College of William and Mary he thoroughly explored the work of Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. He carried around with him his Greek grammar notebook and spent his spare time reading Tacitus and Homer. Just as Madison developed our concept of federalism, Jefferson laid the foundation for our public education system. It did not take shape as the common school supported by all citizens until after his death, but in his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge for the State of Virginia (his proposal for three levels of education) and in his establishment of the University of Virginia, Jefferson linked the future of the new nation to the education of its citizens. Jefferson believed that literacy was essential for self-government. He was a voracious reader (his collection of more than 6,000 books became the basis of the Library of Congress), and he insisted that only through literacy could citizens carry out their responsibilities to the new republic. …

Social History in Greece: New Perspectives

This article focuses on the evolution of Greek historiography since the 1970s, with an emphasis on issues of class and gender. It is argued that, in the last decades, Greek historiography has been liberated from traditional nationalistic narratives in favor of new intellectual perspectives dealing with social history and the history of “society.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of class—a fundamental concern of social history in European historiography—did not find much room in Greek historiography. Debates about the socioeconomic and political system in modern Greece focused on the importance of immobile political and economic structures as main barriers to modernization and Europeanization. The 1990s were marked by the renewal of the study of the “social,” articulated around two main methodological and theoretical axes, signaling the shift from structures to agency. The first was the conceptualization of class as both a cultural and economic phenomenon. The second was the introduction of gender. The recent period is characterized by the proliferation of studies that conceptualize the “social” through the notion of culture, evoking the historical construction of human experience and talking about the unstable, malleable, and ever changing content of human identities. Cultural historians examine class, gender, ethnicity, and race in their interrelation and treat these layers of identity as processes in the making and not as coherent and consolidated systems of reference.

The Concept of the History of Greece

The Concept of the History of Greece

HARRIET I. FLOWER. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 400. $59.95

HARRIET I. FLOWER. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 400. $59.95

Conflicts to Face When Values Conflict

Values in an age of globalization are sure to come into conflict. This cannot but be the case, since values come into conflict in all ages. But for sheer extent of conflict among values, an age of globalization can be expected to usher in a brave new world. Meetings, expansions, and interminglings of cultures have always added to current stocks of conflicting values. Histories of Greece and Rome from Herodotus to Gibbon provide showcases for such conflicts. But histories of anywhere, at any time, whether of Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, or the Americas can be counted on to do the same. Globalization just ups the ante, as it were, though the up is so great that it does not take an unhappy philosopher to fear a crash. Philosophers, in a broad range of moods, may do much to address conflicts to face when values conflict. We need to keep clear two contexts of moral deliberation. 1 As philosophers of science used to draw a distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification in science, so moral philosophers should draw a distinction between a context of moral decision-making and a context of moral justification. In an epsitemically transparent world without barriers or impediments to complete considerations of moral matters, the two contexts might come together. For what used to be called ideal observers, the context of moral decision-making might just merge into the context of moral justification. For the rest of us in the world as we find it, the contexts are commonly not the same. The point can be broadened to take in evaluative deliberation in general. For epistemic reasons, we need to take care to distinguish the context of evaluative decision-making from the context of evaluative justification. The case that can be made for what may be called precepts and exemplars in the context of moral decision-making holds as well for the context of evaluative decision-making in general. Investigations of the context of evaluative decision-making and the sorts of precepts and exemplars that might be promoted are likely to be highly

Beyond and Below the Polis: Networks, Associations, and the Writing of Greek History

This article looks at the ways we can use networks in the study of the history of Greece. At the level below the polis, networks take the form of associations (koinoniai) that bring together people of various statuses and backgrounds. Studying these koinoniai allows us to move beyond structuralist approaches into the study of real social interactions. When looking at the level below the polis, we have to adopt a world-system perspective, and study the networks that move people, goods and ideas/technologies, and the world centres that organize these networks. This approach allows us to move beyond Hellenocentric and Athenocentric approaches, and insert the Greek world into the wider Mediterranean and Near Eastern world-system.

R. MALCOLM ERRINGTON. Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 336. $45.00

R. MALCOLM ERRINGTON. Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 336. $45.00

CELIA E. SCHULTZ. Women's Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 234. $39.95

CELIA E. SCHULTZ. Women's Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 234. $39.95

‘Few Women Have a History’: Callirhoe Parren and the Beginnings of Women's History in Greece

Gender & HistoryVolume 18, Issue 2 p. 400-411 ‘Few Women Have a History’: Callirhoe Parren and the Beginnings of Women's History in Greece Angelika Psarra, Angelika Psarra Historian and JournalistSearch for more papers by this authorMartha Michailidou, Martha Michailidou Historian and JournalistSearch for more papers by this author Angelika Psarra, Angelika Psarra Historian and JournalistSearch for more papers by this authorMartha Michailidou, Martha Michailidou Historian and JournalistSearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 December 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2006.00435.xCitations: 4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume18, Issue2August 2006Pages 400-411 RelatedInformation

Liberty and obligations in George Grote’s Athens

In this article it is suggested that George Grote’s History of Greece (1846–56) employed a narrative history of Greece in an attempt to resolve the philosophical problem of the compatibility of individual liberty with considerable obligations to society. His philosophical achievement has been largely ignored by modern classical scholarship, even those who follow his lead in treating fifth-century Athens as the epitome of Greek civilization. The present reading of Grote’s History is informed by John Stuart Mill’s use of Athenian examples. Outlining the evidential, moral and spatial parameters of Grote’s fifth-century Athens, it is argued that Grote understood fifth-century Athens to be amodel intellectual and liberal society, in which the performance of obligations by citizens coexisted with individual and political liberty. Grote explained the decline of Athenian power in the fourth century BC by reference to the neglect of obligations, and in doing so, married historical explanation to political theory.

:Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic.(Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.)

:Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic.<i>(Studies in the History of Greece and Rome.)</i>

Greek, Latin and the Indian Civil Service

The whole question of the future of the East is full of interest, and is, perhaps, the greatest political question in the world.(Benjamin Jowett)… a corps of men specially selected, brought up in a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modern people have subjected their ruling class, trained by cold baths, cricket, and the history of Greece and Rome …(Philip Mason)In his essay ‘Comparativism and references to Rome in British imperial attitudes to India’, Javed Majeed shows how Greek and Latin figured prominently in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the prestigious administrative body that David Lloyd George called ‘the steel frame’. Greek and Latin were not just used to attract and shape a class of ruling ‘gentlemen’, but were also part of a complex structure of attitude and practice designed ‘to preserve the ICS as a monopoly of European officers’. Majeed's insightful essay sheds light on the role of ICS examinations and on the function of Classics in colonial contexts, although it is mainly about comparative approaches to the British and Roman empires.