Authoritative Models and Grassroots Responses to Crisis: Reconfigurations of Everyday Life in Chalkida, a Postindustrial Greek City
[eng] This thesis focuses on grassroots practices, meanings and understandings in the context of the Greek economic crisis and austerity restructurings that were unilaterally imposed by hegemonic institutions and Greek governments between 2010 and 2016. I employ a bottom up approach to identify the...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/178334 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/178334 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/671845 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Antropologia econòmica Crisis econòmiques Solidaritat Economia submergida Grècia Economic anthropology Depressions Solidarity Informal sector (Economics) Greece |
| Sumario: | [eng] This thesis focuses on grassroots practices, meanings and understandings in the context of the Greek economic crisis and austerity restructurings that were unilaterally imposed by hegemonic institutions and Greek governments between 2010 and 2016. I employ a bottom up approach to identify the social, economic, political and cultural shifts and ruptures that the imposition of austerity measures and neoliberal policies provoked in Chalkida, a mid-sized (post) industrial city. I juxtapose mainstream definitions and explanations of crisis with national and place-bound grassroots experiences, practices and understandings in order to establish an inter- scalar interconnection between global processes and local agency. This thesis is based on 18 months of systematic fieldwork that took place between April 2015 and December 2016. Material was collected through participant observation in workplace settings, public spaces and households. Additionally, the research was informed by semi-structured personal and group interviews, as well as many informal conversations in cafes, taverns and open air markets. Building on existing literature on crisis, neoliberalism, scale and power, household transformations, social solidarity and informality, I assess the impact of crisis and austerity on the socio-economic relationships and established livelihood patterns that were severely challenged by it. My research demonstrates that people in a provincial city like Chalkida counterbalanced the austerity crisis’s effects on formal income resources and the restructuring of the state and its welfare provisioning. They did so by reinventing traditional structures and practices that had been predominant in the past when resources had also been scarce. I therefore suggest that crisis was understood as a retrograde movement that questioned linear processes and conceptualizations of modernity and progress. Drawing upon historical continuities and ruptures at the local, national and international scales, this dissertation offers a rich ethnographic account of everyday life under the condition of “being in” and “living with” crisis. |
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