Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe

Abstract

This article focuses on how the economic crisis in Southern Europe has stimulated temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, or futural thought, provoking people to rethink their relationship to time. The argument is developed with particular reference to the ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone contained in this special issue. The studies identify the ways the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and re-fashioned under contracting economic horizons. We argue for the empirical study of crisis that captures the decisions or non-decisions that people make, and the actual temporal processes by which they judge responses. We conclude that modern linear historicism is often overridden in such moments by other historicities, showing that in crises, not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Crisis and Austerity
• Historicity
• Temporality
• Southern Europe

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] The majority of articles in this collection are the outcome of a Crisis: Social Suffering and Temporality Research Group we convened in the Department of Anthropology, University College London in 2012–2013 and a corresponding workshop entitled Anthropological Perspectives on the Crisis in Southern Europe held in June 2013 and funded by UCL Anthropology and the Hellenic Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Science. To a lesser extent, themes central to the current collection were also discussed on a panel convened by Knight, Pipyrou and Àngels Trias i Valls at the 2012 EASA meetings in Nanterre and a 2014 AAA conference panel in Washington DC convened by Knight and Alexandrakis, where Pipyrou was a presenter and Stewart a discussant. Nicolas Argenti's ESRC-funded workshop on “Post-Ottoman Topologies” (Athens, 2013) was also a valuable space for us both to think through the temporalities of crisis.

[2] This scene may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaTW7-uOrq4.

[3] de Martino (2012, 2015, 104) saw ritual as a social therapeutic process enabling re-entry into the world. The rites of mourning and even the singing of funeral laments in Greece or Southern Italy, for example, guide people out of the abyss of crisis and back into social relations.

[4] Drawing on Comaroff and Comaroff's (2012) work on shifting international economic and ideological boundaries, both Pipyrou (2014b) and Argenti and Knight (2015) discuss how aspects of the new economic relations within the eurozone's austerity nations resonate with notions of neo-colonialism and the global South.

[5] “Archive”, from the Ancient Greek arkheion, was the place of storage of the arkhai, meaning both the “beginnings, origins” and “rules, principles, authorities” (Derrida 1995).

[6] Zerubavel (2003) prefers the term “periods” to distinguish the highly structured mnemonic distortions of historical distance.

[7] This transmission of intergenerational accounts of the past to act as warning signs or coping strategies for future generations instantiates Benjamin's (1969, 254) famous observation that covert pacts between present and previous generations may be activated in times of need.

[8] The complexity of the term “historical consciousness” is unpacked in the introduction to Stewart's (2012) work on dreaming in island Greece.

[9] On remembering and embodying in the Greek context, see Seremetakis (1994) and Sutton (1998).

[10] Baer (2005, 3–5) offers an alternative to the Heraclitean view of time as a continuous flow by adopting a Democritean perspective that says that the world is occurring in bursts and explosions, privileging the moment rather than the story and the particular over the general. On the related topic of modern timelines, see Rosenberg (2005), Rosenberg and Grafton (2010).

[11] Haugerud (2013, 10) notes that “plotted as satire, an economic meltdown is not a force of nature or freak accident but rather the entirely preventable outcome of politics and policy”. A comparative example of employing irony, parody and satire in affective protest slogans is provided by Knight (2015b) in the context of Greece. Slogans that protest against fiscal austerity measures draw on affective moments of the past—including slogans that are credited with helping to topple the Greek military dictatorship in 1973–74. On irony, satire, and parody as modes of political protest, see also Brown and Theodossopoulos (2000), Boyer (2013), Haugerud (2013), Molé (2013) and Pipyrou (2014b).

[12] See Hamilakis (2007). On objects as creating the boundary between memory and forgetting, see Battaglia (1992).

[13] On local explanations of temporality during the Greek economic crisis as expressed with reference to fossils see Knight (n.d.).

[14] On the differences between sequence and series, see Kubler (1962).

[15] “The future” is a placeholder, a placebo, a no-place, but it is also a commonplace that we need to investigate in all its cultural and historical density (Rosenberg and Harding 2005, 9).

[16] During rallies on the streets of Athens, Madrid, and Lisbon, as well as the “Occupy” movement, protestors have held aloft banners with messages to fellow activists in other nations (Graeber 2011; Theodossopoulos 2013).