Theodoros Rakopoulos

Resonance of Solidarity: Meanings of a Local Concept in Anti-austerity Greece

Scholarly approaches to the Greek crisis usually centered on its political character, tackle it as “a state of exception” or emphasize its “exceptional” features. Departing from a discussion on the nature of the crisis, in this article I examine social reactions to “it,” focusing on grassroots economic activity. I undertake a case study of a “solidarity economy” movement and from there I explore the wider political repercussions of this activity that has appeared in contemporary Greece where grassroots social welfare projects are organized in order to address hardships in the actors’ livelihoods. In this way, I explore the meaning of solidarity, a term that has become ubiquitous in the public discourse of contemporary Greece. Through an ethnographic study of the activities of a movement that organizes anti-middleman food distributions in Greece, I argue that such activities not only tackle the immediate effects of the crisis but also pose a conscious, wider critique to austerity politics. Activists’ appeal to solidarity economies is informed by their aim to formulate more efficient distribution cooperatives in the future.

Introduction to an anthropology of wealth

ABSTRACT In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to ‘accumulated assets’. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we begin to understand the processes wherein it is constantly being pulled at from forces that demand appropriation, be that finance, community or state. We therefore outline wealth as a triangular phenomenon between capital, the commons, and power. Careful at the dynamics between such forces, we structure our analysis around the paradoxical social processes where wealth, originating in every day relationships and human reproduction, is continually exposed to claims – such as market alienation, but also ‘commoning’, or governmental state control.

Responding to the crisis : food co-operatives and the solidarity economy in Greece

This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the antimiddleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece. I explore their efforts to turn the food market they have established in Athens into a formal co-operative which links consumers in their neighbourhood directly to selected farmers through bonds of solidarity, and to work with others to create a network of similar co-operatives which will span the whole country. I argue that their endeavours strongly resemble the co-operativism and practical socialism advocated by important social theorists such as Mauss and Polanyi, and suggest that it may be important for the young activists in Athens to learn more about their i...

Antimafia families: Cooperative work and flexible kinship in Sicily

This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separated, on paper, for fear of mafia corruption. In actual fact, members of Sicilian antimafia cooperatives experience their merging of family life and antimafia cooperativism as a belonging to ‘antimafia families’. This article explicates the tension between this ethnographic finding and antimafia ideology and policy. Antimafia families provide a backdrop for a cooperativism inclusive of kinship. The analysis shows both how antimafia families are mutually constituted with cooperatives and how cooperatives are embedded in the domestic lives of their members. This cooperative-family interplay can help us bridge conceptual separations between workplace and family life.

Show me the money: Conspiracy theories and distant wealth

ABSTRACT This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of (un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis. Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our) understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions, according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.

The Social Life of Mafia Confession: Between Talk and Silence in Sicily

Exploring Sicilian secular confessions, this essay discusses anthropological impasses on talk and silence. Such dilemmas reveal ethnographic frailties in engaging with concealment and revealing. The delicacy of negotiating between those demanding silence (the mafia) and those demanding self-revelation (the antimafia activists) unsettles the fieldwork ethics of our own anthropological entanglement in the gray areas of fieldwork between silence and talk. I show that pentiti (mafia confessants) blur the area between mafia and antimafia, allowing people to navigate across institutional categories. What is more, the essay embeds Sicilian confession in an intellectual genealogy, comparing mafia confession with its Christian counterpart and with bureaucratic theodicy. The move of confessional material of mafiosi and ordinary Sicilians from a private exchange to the public sphere recalls comparisons with religious ritual. While acknowledging the effects of confession on the mafia person, akin to the religious experience as a path to change and a new self, the essay suggests that secular confession should be approached through the lens of its effects on the lives of others. Its secularism is not imbued in an institution as much as it is invested in the life trajectories it inspires, often in the face of punishment.