Ethnographies of Austerity

Temporality, crisis and affect in southern Europe

Daniel Knight, Charles Stewart, Daniel Knight, Charles Stewart, Daniel M. Knight, Charles Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138204577
• eBook ISBN: 9781315469119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Some of the worst effects of the global economic downturn that commenced in 2008 have been felt in Europe, and specifically in the Eurozone's so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and Cyprus. This edited volume is the first collection to bring together ethnographies of living with austerity inside the Eurozone, and explore how people across Southern Europe have come to understand their experiences of increased social suffering, insecurity, and material poverty. The contributors focus on how crises stimulate temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, futural thought, or some combination of these possibilities.

One of the themes linking diverse crisis experiences across national boundaries is how people contemplate their present conditions and potential futures in terms of the past. The studies in this collection thus supply ethnographies that journey to the source of historical production by identifying the ways in which the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and refashioned under contracting economic horizons. In times of crisis modern linear historicism is often overridden (and overwritten) 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 and can be refashioned according to new rules. This book was originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

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

Daniel M. Knight & Charles Stewart

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.

Some of the worst effects of the global economic downturn that commenced in 2008 with the bursting of the US housing bubble and collapse of companies such as IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs, have been felt in Europe and specifically in the eurozone’s so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and Cyprus. In 2010, Greece received a €110 billion bailout from the European Central Bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the so-called “Troika”), followed by another €130 billion in 2012 and €86 billion in 2015 in return for stringent austerity measures. Later in 2010, Ireland received €67.5 billion, followed in 2011 by Portugal (€78 billion), Spain in 2012 (€100 billion “support package”) and in 2013 by Cyprus (€10 billion). In all cases, the consequences of financial turmoil have been severe for local populations.

This History and Anthropology special issue is, to our knowledge, the first collection to bring together ethnographies of living with austerity inside the eurozone, which explore how people across Southern Europe have come to understand their experiences of increased social suffering, insecurity, and material poverty.¹ An earlier anthropology of the Mediterranean aimed at comparing the values and institutions of circum Mediterranean societies (Peristiany 1965; Davis 1977), but by the 1990s, researchers had largely abandoned area studies approaches. Now, as desperate migrants attempt to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy boats, the matters of rescue and national jurisdiction over the sea itself have brought a new “Mediterranean” into focus (Ben Yehoyada forthcoming). At the same time, the imposition of austerity measures in return for the loans mentioned above has had the effect of converting this Southern part of the European Union into an area unified by shared problems, emergencies, and exigencies. The study of the Mediterranean thus no longer attempts to establish widely shared cultural forms, it analyses, rather, how societies in this region negotiate the structural violence (economic and political) to which they are all now subject.

Austerity differs from endemic underdevelopment and poverty, in that it applies to situations where societies or individuals that formerly enjoyed a higher standard of consumption must now make do with less. It plunges societies into the converse of counterfactual history where one is invited to ask, “what if the past had happened differently?” It is a counterfactual futurity approached with an entirely different level of investment and anxiety: what happens when (not if) the future does not take shape the way we expected and planned? Austerity, then, is not just an economically constrained static circumstance; its particularity for social analysis lies in the dynamics of reversal and the ongoing responses to it. How do individuals, and societies, cope with losing their assumed standard of living, their trappings of social status, and their day-to-day structure of life (especially in circumstances of unemployment)? Austerity throws the issue of human dignity into high relief as people set about deciding on the new minimum requirements for an acceptable life. The ethnographies presented here, the majority by anthropologists from and/or employed in Southern Europe, furnish perspectives from inside the situation. The contributors focus, in particular, on how crises stimulate temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, futural thought, or some combination of these possibilities. The increasing social and economic uncertainty sweeping Southern Europe has resulted in shared quotidian anxieties about such activities as paying the mortgage, providing a warm home, feeding the family, securing medical treatment, and maintaining social status.

One of the themes linking diverse crisis experiences across national boundaries is how people contemplate their present conditions and potential futures in terms of the past. The studies in this collection thus supply ethnographies that journey to the source of historical production by identifying the ways the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and re-fashioned under contracting economic horizons. How do people adjust to and accommodate new realities over their lifetimes? How do critical events shape the societies and individuals who reflect back on them? This is the hermeneutic question at the root of Gadamer’s (1994, 300) notion of historical consciousness. Events shape people, and people through their narrations, reflections, and ethical obligations construe events. In other words, momentous pasts give rise to a present and a future that continually re-interpret that past. Nothing is completely fixed, even though we tend to imagine that critical events are singular and enduring.

In moments of extreme crisis, time becomes elastic—the time waiting for a bomb to explode or a fist to land can seem like an eternity, or a blink of the eye. Events can be indelibly remembered or blanked out; elided in unintelligibility. In the crucible of critical experience, time can swing backward and forward as in Lee Katzin’s 1971 film Le Mans, starring Steve McQueen (Borden 2012, 217). At a certain point in the race, McQueen, playing the role of a racing car driver, realizes that he has to avoid a slow-moving car, and this leads to a lengthy sequence of careening and skidding, ultimately ending in his car crashing into the guardrail.² The ensuing scene is shot in a mixture of slow motion and regular speed, flashing back and forth to close-ups of McQueen’s face. As he is lying dazed after the crash, his mind flits back and forth from the present to the moment he first perceived danger, through all the stages of the event. The crash is captured as a Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness where the past, present, and future are all momentarily swimming together as the present undergoes successive re-evaluations.

Crises can de-realize the present as de Martino (2012) recognized in his concept of the “crisis of presence”. Such moments can produce out-of-body experiences of being on the ceiling or the other side of the room watching oneself suffering. The reality of the present—one’s historicity, in the sense of the historical continuity grounding the present—is momentarily lost.³ In this respect, crises turn ordinary daily routine inside out and expose the seams of temporality to view, a metaphor literalized in the second-hand clothing spread out for sale at street markets in Calabria (Pipyrou, this issue). As the citizens of Reggio Calabria contemplate this tangle of garments, which austerity forces them to consider wearing, they ruminate on their existential bearings—their position in the South of Europe; their past of stylish dressing—opening what Pipyrou terms “history’s can of worms”. Crises rip the seams of existence apart requiring the extemporaneous re-stitching of time as when the dazed race car driver pieces together what just happened, or when the South Italian villager “de-historified” by illness is reintegrated into the present via rituals that bring him or her under the aegis of actions performed in the timeless illo tempore evoked in the ritual spells (de Martino 2015, 94).

Grand definitions of the global economic downturn have focused on macro-scale accounts of dramatic bailouts and incomprehensible numbers that seem to have become commonplace and over-ritualized. Although radical responses to austerity are observable across Europe in the form of mass-protest (Graeber 2011; Dalakoglou 2012; Theodossopoulos 2013, 2014), both Gray and Narotzky (this issue) bring much-needed ethnographic specificity to these debates with local accounts of mobilization in Portugal and Spain, respectively. For the majority of people, the consequences of transnational fiscal turmoil have materialized in critical reflexion on topics including debt, consumerism, Southern Europe’s emergent proximity to the global South,⁴ and past epochs of socio-economic hardship. Activist groups in the South of Europe have linked into international anti-capitalist movements such as Occupy and anti-austerity political parties have supported one another. The leader of Podemos, for example, appeared at SYRIZA rallies in Athens. In parallel with these international political alliances, people in the European South have also burrowed into particular local and national pasts by engaging in historicizing and analogizing practices.

The experience of the current economic crisis has instigated a complex assemblage of past, present and future ambitions, hopes, failures, financial capacities, and political rhetorics (Knight 2012a, 2015a). Engaging in diverse forms of historical consciousness stimulated by socio-economic turmoil, people in Southern Europe regularly telescope specific pasts and futures into the present, temporally condensing moments that shed light on this rupture in everyday routines. The uncertainty caused by austerity requires the critical contemplation of everyday activities, which induce moments of anxiety and stress, moments when the present becomes uncanny (Bryant, this issue), caught in suspended animation. Drawing on past events to contemplate uncertain futures arises as one strategy for resolving the aporia of crisis. As the present collection illustrates, across Southern Europe, people are looking to the past to inform coping strategies or conjure strength, to express fear or to provide glimpses of hope for the future within the murky waters of this critical event (cf. Das 1995).

Event, Archive and Epoch

Crises are a type of “event” and as such, they are the basic units of history—moments in need of explanation (Roitman 2014, 20). They exceed or defeat the expectations of “structure”, or routine—the sphere of what is anticipated under normal circumstances. Events occur when structure cannot replicate itself in the expected way (Sahlins 1985, 153). They take on a particular significance, or semantic density, that separates them from other “outputs” (Ardener 1989, 87, 211). Crises thus stimulate historicization, for example, by prompting actors to assemble information in order not only to comprehend phenomena, but also to establish their reality. Insurance claims exemplify this pattern. Archives come into shape to capture the origin of events and they also institute ordering principles deriving from signal events.⁵ Alexandrakis (this issue) introduces Andreas, whose mother was killed during street fighting in Athens in 1944. His home has become a historicist shrine overflowing with publications and photographs, while at the same time it testifies to the force which that event has held over Andreas’ entire life. Amina, his Nigerian housekeeper, pursues her own archival project of assembling the evidence of her son’s birth so that he may be officially documented by the state.

In situations of crisis, existing archives must sometimes be reopened as when further excavations commenced at Amphipolis in Northern Greece (Vournelis, this issue), with the aim of aggrandizing the patrimonial collection. Or the archive may come into being and expand rapidly, as when versions of a Portuguese fado song decrying the conditions of austerity are circulated digitally and accumulated on the web and on social media (Gray, this issue). Pipyrou’s (this issue) study of Calabrian children affected by floods and landslides in the 1950s discovers archives of the most conventional sort: the governmental and aid agency records kept at the time, and since stored away and ignored. It is a reminder that quintessential historical source materials—archives—were once produced by the effort to govern crisis events rather than intentionally recording them for posterity. Archives are often the index of the event itself, as when Greek citizens pawn their valuables, which then accumulate in the local pawnshop—a his...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe
• 2. On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present
• 3. Transformative Connections: Trauma, Cooperative Horizons, and Emerging Political Topographies in Athens, Greece
• 4. Adrift in Time: Lived and Silenced Pasts in Calabria, South Italy
• 5. Registering Protest: Voice, Precarity, and Return in Crisis Portugal
• 6. Between Inequality and Injustice: Dignity as a Motive for Mobilization During the Crisis
• 7. Debt, Hegemony and Heterochrony in a Sicilian City
• 8. The Spanish Mortgage Crisis and the Re-emergence of Moral Economies in Uncertain Times
• 9. Alexander’s Great Treasure: Wonder and Mistrust in Neoliberal Greece
• Afterword: Economic Temporalities
• Index