Ethnographies Of Austerity

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.

Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisticated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as diverse as borders and bodies, history and death, the earth and the senses, language and affect, violence and public culture, the sociality of dreaming, and the spatialization of the traumatic, in a journey through antiphonic witnessing and memory. Her montage explores various ways of juxtaposing reality with the irreal and the imaginal to expose the fictioning of social reality. The book locates her approach to ethnography and the ‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic knowledge to public knowledge

Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.

This book is an ethnography of politics of waiting. While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, this book reveals waiting as the shadow temporality of the contemporary logics of governance. The ethnographic site for this analysis is a state-run unemployment office in Latvia, serving as a vantage point from which to observe how welfare programmes use acceleration and waiting as forms of control as well as to compare Western and post-Soviet welfare policy designs. The book is therefore a timely sociological critique of the forms of statecraft that have emerged in the aftermath of neoliberalism. The key audiences for this book are students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social policy, and social and political theory, as well as policymakers and activists with an interest in welfare reforms and comparisons between Western and post-Soviet welfare designs.

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.

A comparative ethnography of the responses on the ground to austerity policies in Southern Europe

Claims around 'who deserves what and why' moralise inequality in the current global context of unprecedented wealth and its ever more selective distribution. Ethnographies of Deservingness explores this seeming paradox and the role of moralized assessments of distribution by reconnecting disparate discussions in the anthropology of migration, economic anthropology and political anthropology. This edited collection provides a novel and systematic conceptualization of Deservingness and shows how it can serve as a prime and integrative conceptual prism to ethnographically explore transforming welfare states, regimes of migration, as well as capitalist social reproduction and relations at large.

This book, based on an empirical form of narration, outlines a short-medium term analysis of the social impact of austerity politics on urban life.. Set in Exarchia, a radical and anti-authoritarian neighbourhood located within the city centre of Athens, Greece, this is an ethnography examining the social struggles and grassroots mobilizations that emerged locally during the crisis. Based on over two years of fieldwork between November 2012 and early 2014, the author brings together participant observation and a period of research-action in one of Exarchia’s stekia. One particular pedestrian street is used as a case study – ‘Odos Tsamadou’ is located near Exarchia Square and here multiple social centres and political activity converge to allow the neighbourhood’s climate of solidarity and reciprocity to fully emerge. This book is specifically targeted at academics specialized in the social sciences, ethnography, cultural anthropology and urban studies and more generally at anyone interested in contemporary urban and social development. To read reviews about this book please visit: · https://www.vice.com/gr/article/mb5n7x/mia-koybenta-me-thn-italida-an8rwpologo-poy-afhse-th-rwmh-gia-na-melethsei-ta-kinhmata-sta-e3arxeia?utm_source=vicefbgrh · https://www.dinamopress.it/news/everything-continues/ · https://ilmanifesto.it/exarchia-uno-spazio-sociale-di-resistenza/ · http://media.planum.bedita.net/cb/42/(ibidem)_Planum_Readings_no.9:2018_De%20Angelis.pdf · https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/resources/resource/book-review-austerity-and-democracy-in-athens-crisis-and-community-in-exarchia/

A comparative ethnography of the responses on the ground to austerity policies in Southern Europe.