Sarah Green

Perceptual Landscapes in Agrarian Systems: Degradation Processes in North-Western Epirus and the Argolid Valley, Greece

The variation in meanings which are attached to the physical landscape by the people who are active within it is the central theme of this paper. Two Greek case studies have been researched since 1992. These formed part of the Archaeomedes programme which was set up to analyse Mediterranean desertification processes.’ An ethnographic study was undertaken in a number of mountain villages in the Epirus region of north-western Greece, with a brief to investigate local understanding of specific forms of land degradation. The second study, in the Argolid region of the north-

Private equity and the concept of brittle trust

This paper focuses on private equity in the UK and is set in the context of debates about transformations in the City of London. The article focuses on a particular concept of trust as expressed by senior members of the private equity sector. The argument developed is based on interviews with five senior founding partners of private equity firms who talked to us about their background and education, their understanding of how private equity worked and the basis for successful money making and their relationships with those inside and outside the organization. All interviewees strongly asserted the need for absolute trust between senior partners as an essential condition for the successful operation of their business. At the same time, their description of trust in this context was that while it is deep, it is also easily broken, and that once broken, the breach cannot be forgiven. We call this ‘brittle trust’: asserted to be simultaneously strong while extremely fragile. The paper argues, drawing on Diego Gambettas work on the Sicilian Mafia, that this concept of ‘trust’ reflects a particular understanding of the practice of private equity as a high risk, tough and unforgiving business that nevertheless requires high standards of personal integrity. The study allows us to understand something more about the social ideals that were built into this financial sector by its founders, which we argue formed a crucial part of the transformation of the financial sector.

Eating money and clogging things up: paradoxes of elite mediation in Epirus, North-western Greece†

This chapter concerns a few people in a rather remote part of mainland Greece who have, in recent years, become involved with funded European Union (EU) programmes aimed at encouraging the sustainable development of their region, Epirus. Epirus constitutes the north-west corner of mainland Greece, and it shares a substantial border with Albania; having experienced considerable economic and population declines in recent decades, the region has been defined by the EU as a high priority for development assistance, and that has provided access to considerable amounts of funding for the region in the last two decades. In comparison with many of the elites discussed in this volume, it is questionable whether the people I focus upon here could be counted as elites at all: they are small town lawyers, village presidents, civil servants and similar people, who take a leading role in applying for and then managing EU funded development projects. They are not CEOs of major companies, nor the heads of dealing rooms in banks, nor one of the multi-millionaires working in the City of London. One aspect that they share with these others, however, is that their position is based on their role as key mediators, in this case between the European Union and the region of Epirus: for the most part, EU development funds flow from the EU into the region via these people. Moreover, there is a long history of the study of elite groups in southern Europe from the perspective of their position as mediators, including quite intricate studies of the social, political and economic relations involved. That provides an opportunity to compare past accounts of such groups with contemporary experiences and in particular, to look at how the possibilities of mediation are undergoing some changes. Here, I will focus on how all those involved with the EU development programmes struggled with the difficulties caused by a particular form of social relations: one that involved making a strong distinction between peoples with whom you have a close relationship (seen as those who are synonymous with your interests), and those with whom you have no relationship (seen as those who will have interests that are different from your own). This extends an issue I have considered in earlier research in the course of exploring attitudes towards

Reciting the future: Border relocations and everyday speculations in two Greek border regions

Using ethnographic research from two different historical periods and border regions of Greece—the Greek-Albanian border in Epirus in the northwestern mainland during the 1990s, and the Greek-Turkish border in the north Aegean in the 2000s—this article explores how talk about what might happen next contributes toward the continual process of relocating borders. A comparison between them demonstrates that the specific historical moment and the different iconic significance of the two border regions mattered considerably in people’s speculations about what might happen next. As such, the stories form part of the historically contingent process of giving borders certain qualities. This article focuses on the way these accounts combine stereotypical with personal stories about the past, bringing widely known, and often ideologically inflected, commentaries that are recited almost by rote together with more personal stories about people’s experiences. The article suggests that such recitations both perform and reiterate stereotypical and ideological positions, which locate people politically, socially, and in relation to the border—and which also define the qualities of border. The more personal stories act as a contrast, or complement, to these recitations, locating people in their own relations, and highlighting the way borders are multiply qualified places.

Book Review: The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World

The strongest impression left after reading Keith Hart’s The Memory Bank is that it is both hopeful and fearful about the unpredictable global future called forth by the Internet. The last sentence in the book, which is in the final chapter’s ‘Guide to further reading’, is as good as any in representing the form this tension takes: ‘In fact, read anything by Rousseau and ask what it takes to make this stinking world a better place for humanity’ (p. 324). There is a continual balancing act between the simultaneous development of the Internet, ever greater inequalities between rich and poor around the world and the potential, in Hart’s view, for the Internet to return the means of ‘making money’ to ordinary people, rather than leaving that in the hands of an unholy and ambivalent alliance between the state and large commercial interests. By ‘making money’, Hart does not mean going out and earning a living: he means making the stuff itself, gaining control over its form, value and the rules by which it is exchanged. And that is crucial, for Hart argues (heavily drawing on the work of John Locke, and George Caffentzis’s analysis of Locke) that money fundamentally embodies the memory of social interactions (hence Memory Bank), and of movement across space and time. Money traces those things, allows one to keep track of them; and in today’s world of ‘virtual capitalism’, which Hart argues has taken over from ‘state capitalism’ as the dominant (though by no means the only) global economic form, there is much more personal information transmitted during economic transactions than before, due to the data that can be stored about people in credit and debit cards, smart cards and, increasingly, other forms of digital e-payment. In that sense, new kinds of money, no longer endowing its users with the anonymity of coins and banknotes, constitute a potentially global form of sociality and communication: people could move along the lines of the near-instantaneous digital connections provided by the global market, in a manner of their own choosing. So money and the Internet go together exceedingly well, and Hart predicts that the Internet will provide the means for us (the ordinary people) to ‘make money in many different ways as a means of remembering’ (p. 16, original emphasis), and he points to some nascent schemes, such as LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems), which use their own forms of ‘money’ to exchange goods and services amongst one another. He admits these are still rather rare and tend to be both run by idealists and to be unstable, but these are early days. That, in essence, and notwithstanding the occasional elisions made between interaction, transaction and exchange as forms of sociality, is what Hart hopes might happen. His fear is that current trends, showing a domination of the Internet by large corporations, and a studied indifference towards the growing inequalities around the globe by territory-based state systems (which Hart argues are an anachronistic leftover from ‘agrarian civilization’), could continue to drag the world into yet another disaster, and possibly the last one, for humanity at least. And since the individuals who currently have access to the Internet are predominantly the middle classes and those in privileged western nation-states, Hart makes an appeal directly to them to get over their distaste towards money, markets and entrepreneurship, and get stuck in. He spends some time explaining both why intellectuals, especially Book Review