Elisabeth Kirtsoglou

‘They are Taking Our Culture Away’: Tourism and Culture Commodification in the Garifuna Community of Roatan

This article is concerned with the efforts of a Garifuna community in Honduras to claim a space in the growing local tourist economy. Its inhabitants maintain that they suffer a form of culture loss because they do not control the commodification of their culture through tourism. By examining the local perspective, we argue that cultural performances could be treated as cultural property and consumed by tourists in a context of mutual exchange as opposed to a hegemonic one. We suggest that every cultural performance entails a statement about collective identity and thus the local battle for cultural ownership relates to the politics of self-representation and the position of the community in the wider world. The members of the community we studied articulate their desire to become an attraction, which can fully satisfy the tourist quest for authenticity and difference. Only this has to take place on their own terms, to serve their interests and to promote the image they have about themselves and their culture.

Dreaming the Self: A Unified Approach towards Dreams, Subjectivity and the Radical Imagination

This paper focuses on dream‐experiences and dream‐narratives as sites of creativity and agency. Through the ethnographic exploration of dreams recounted to me mainly by informants in Thessaloniki, Greece I will argue that dreams are means of making sense of the world in a relational and intersubjective manner, as well as instances of the human capacity to invent new forms and ëoriginal figurationsí.

Phantom menace : What junior Greek army officers have to say about Turks and Turkey

This chapter focuses on the discourse of low-rank Greek army officers about the Turks and the state of Turkey. This is a combination of the hegemonic narratives promoted by the Greek state and other forms of conventional, informal rhetoric. Concentrating on the Greek and Turkish states rather than on the respective populations, the officers reveal a form of nationalism built on seemingly rational arguments as opposed to sentimental reactions. Their struggle to think globally, however, does not necessarily allow them to disengage from a view of the world order that is very much based on local, culturally informed perceptions of micro-level social interaction. Despite their attempt to analyse the current situation in terms of international relations, the subjects of this study do not abstain from recycling hypothetical scenarios and conspiracy theories that ultimately present Greece and Turkey as predictably non-sovereign countries whose policies are dictated by larger and more powerful interests, states and coalitions.

Migration, crisis, liberalism: the cultural and racial politics of Islamophobia and “radical alterity” in modern Greece

ABSTRACT This paper attempts a critical and ethnographically informed reading of the complex assemblage of linkages between migration, racialization and liberal values in modern Greece as a symptomatic case of European attitudes to migration. In line with recent scholarship on racialization and Islamophobia, we discuss novel forms of racism, that support the construction of hierarchies and geographies of entitlement, going beyond notions of biological difference. Processes of inclusion and exclusion, we argue, rest on a meshwork of seemingly disparate identification markers that form the basis of universalist, hegemonic visions of citizenship. Migrants are ultimately expected by considerable sections of the Greek public to demonstrate their acceptance of an array of values regarded as “European”, and to manifest their support to (neo)liberal regimes of subjectification. We conclude by arguing that racialization can be traced back to an imagined “orient”, and just as well, to contemporary cultural and political imperialist projects.