The Ambivalence of Anti-Austerity Indignation in Greece: Resistance, Hegemony and Complicity

Abstract

This article engages with a contradiction that can help us appreciate the ambiguity and complexity of indirect resistance as this is articulated in informal everyday contexts: many citizens in Greece boldly challenge the antisocial austerity measures that have plagued their lives, highlighting how these represent a hegemonic imposition led by foreign centres of economic power. Their anti-hegemonic critique, however, often recycles a dislike for foreigners and xenophobia, echoing more pervasive hegemonic narratives (for example, a crypto-colonial identification of Greece with the West). To deal with this contradiction, I stress the need to (1) de-pathologize local indignant discourse (avoiding the orientalization of anti-austerity discourse as emotional or inconsequential) and (2) acknowledge that indirect resistance may represent an astute critique of visible inequalities, but is not isolated from overarching hegemonic ideological influences that shape local interpretations of historical/economic causality.

Keywords:

• Indirect Resistance
• Indignation with Austerity
• Financial Crisis
• Hegemony
• Defensive Nationalism
• Greece

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the seminar “Anthropological Perspectives on the crisis in Southern Europe” organized by Charles Stewart and Daniel Knight in London (28 June 2013). I am grateful to the participants of this seminar, as well as the three anonymous reviewers of History and Anthropology for their enthusiastic comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 My use of the term “indignant” as equivalent of aganaktisménos/i/oi bears tribute to the Spanish indignados, who started the movement that inspired the respective “Greek indignant movement” (Kinima Aganaktismenon Politon). This connection, as well as subsequent use by protestors, protesting authors and journalists has widely established the terms indignation/indignant as the English equivalent of the Greek aganaktisi (noun) and aganaktismenos (adjective), and this translation is favoured by most dictionaries. Anthropologists, in an attempt to capture the polysemy of the term, have used alternative terms to discuss Greek indignation: “exasperation” (Herzfeld 2011; Kalantzis 2012), “infuriation” (Theodossopoulos 2013a) and “rage” (Panourgia 2011). In fact, the terms outraged, exasperated and infuriated translate in Greek as exorgismenos, exagriomenos, ekneyrismenos, a lack of definitional precision, which facilitates the figurative and all-embracing relevance of indignation as trope in everyday conversation.

2 Anthropological accounts based on longitudinal fieldwork trace the transformation in Greek household strategies and economic status throughout the last four decades of the twentieth century; see for example the work of Kenna (1990, 2001).

3 In a recent article, Dalakoglou (2012) discusses the limits of “spontaneity” in anti-systemic resistance and the difficulty with differentiating clearly between spontaneous and non-spontaneous action in the context of the Greek anti-austerity movement.

4 Although aware of similar immigration problems in other EU nations, such Italy or Spain, my respondents in Patras maintain a rather inward-looking view when they discuss the impact of illegal immigration. Their references to other EU countries refer mostly to the responsibility of the industrialized North, with the intention of highlighting how the nations of the European South, and in particular Greece, pay the heaviest cost in dealing with the consequences of immigration.

5 For recent examples of “lessons from history as negotiated by Greek local actors in the context of the current financial crisis”, see Knight (2012a, 2012b).

6 Even supporters of the communist party (which has retained an honest and steady anti-neoliberal orientation for decades) use nationalist arguments to the dismay of a few older fellow-communists who have been indoctrinated to an internationalist (class-based) vision of comradery.

7 Herzfeld has used the notion of “crypto-colonialism” to refer to countries whose national ideologies and “modalities of independence have been defined by outsiders” (Herzfeld in Byrne 2011, 147), often by placing such countries and national cultures “on high cultural pedestals that effectively isolate them from other, more brutally material forms of power” (Herzfeld 2002, 902).