At the present historical moment, the modernization of the Greek nation is at the forefront of discussion in the Greek public sphere. In the shadow of this discussion, the official public sphere has also been grappling with a very low national birth rate - approximately 100,000 per population of 11 million. This statistical phenomenon is coupled with a high frequency of abortion, between 150,000 and 200,000 in 2001, and is referred to in the media and policy discussions as `the demografiko', (...) Greece's `No. 1 or No. 2 national problem'. This article examines popular Greek perceptions of the problem of the national birth rate and the contestation between meanings of nationhood that the resulting discourses both illuminate and, as the author shows, sometimes incite. The focus is on what women living in Athens say about the demografiko. These are voices not currently being heard in the public sphere. The author argues that the demografiko's articulation of `Greece' is a window through which one witnesses the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, just as they are also being played out at the site of gender and reproduction elsewhere in Europe and Asia. (shrink)

Tax compliance has been extensively researched. Yet, the classic question ‘why do people pay taxes?’ remains unanswered. In Jordan, tax evasion is widespread. The state and citizens have been trapped in a continuous hide-and-seek game, which has taken the form of a virtuous cycle. This paper investigates tax evasion along with the most noticeable features of the Jordanian tax system. It also highlights how the virtuous cycle of tax evasion has been established and what could possibly be a way out (...) of it. We argue that sociocultural values are the most prominent cause for tax evasion. That is, the procedures of state formation and functionality in Jordan have created mutual distrust between the state and its citizens. Having been raised in a community characterized by deep distrust, tax evasion is no longer considered immoral by substantial numbers of the Jordanian population. We argue that successive governments need to create a high-trust-based culture and formulate strategies that serve to acquire normative ethical values in order to enhance voluntary compliance. The way to accomplish this necessity is through enforcing the state’s transparency and accountability. The taxation system needs to concentrate on income tax rather than raise tax rates on essential commodities to collect substantial tax revenues. Thus, further reform of the taxation system along with a reduction in tax incentives need to be considered. Moreover, lowering the exceptionally high personal income tax threshold would bring Jordan in line with its peers, expand the base, and introduce more progressivity. There would also be a scope to introduce a minimum tax based on sales as a tool to address tax evasion. (shrink)

This paper considers the emergence of Mount Athos’ monk elders in Greek society in recent decades until the current economic crisis. Their social influence has grown over these decades, especially after some of them were recognized as charismatic and gerontismos became one of the most important forms of religious discourse in contemporary Greek society. These elders were presented as a kind of cultural resistance in the service of an alternative economy of desire. This analysis suggests that they have ultimately worked (...) in the service of a series of individual or collective fantasies of power and pleasure within Greek society. The theoretical tools informing this analysis are the product of a dialog between symbolic anthropology and Lacanian theory. (shrink)

The article examines the development of anthropological discourse in British travel accounts of modern Greece, and the Greek response. The study has several aims. First, it argues that in British travel accounts ethnographic remarks are encountered which point to a genealogy of the British discipline of anthropology. These remarks on the modern Greek character formulated problÈmatiquesin which history and ethnography, as well as Romanticism and Enlightenment ideas, merged. Second, the article examines Greek peasantreaction to British observation and ‘intrusion’, as a (...) rational product of the Anglo-Greek exchange. Third, it maintains that such peasant responses, which are in accordance with counter-hegemonic, Neohellenic ‘high-brow’ attitudes, were notthe product of the latter, but their genealogical counterpart. From this it follows that in British encounters with Greek peasants, historians can trace the development of Greek folklore as a nationalist product which defied European hegemonic narratives of modern Greek identity. (shrink)

This article examines the bodily donations made by Greeks, Turks and Cypriots to the victims of two devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Greece (1999), as well as to a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot boy, both suffering from leukemia (2000). Considering the age old discourse of amity and enmity shared by the citizens of the three nation states, I ask what made them see these hardly rare events as exceptionally important, and rush to offer each other their blood and body (...) organs. Politicians and journalists of the time presented these corporeal responses as "civil society's demand for brotherly rapprochement," thus underscoring the anthropological insight that contemporary identity politics is increasingly "medicalized". Taking into consideration both the medical regimes of truth that made these donations possible, and the painful political experiences lived and remembered by Greeks, Turks and Cypriots to this day, I argue that the conciliation these donors performed revealed the suspense of their faith in the reconciliatory future rather than their acceptance of restorative notions such as brotherhood and rapprochement. Stated otherwise, these donors, being familiar with the euphemistic and the conditional hence pending nature of such political conciliations, dared the Derridian impossible: without endangering the principle of sharing, they opened their bodies to alterity, to their foe's bodies, and hence entertained the possibility of non-predetermined, thus unexpected even incongruous events of memory. . (shrink)

In Maori thought, the possibility exists for a sort of lateral thinking that does not necessarily directly respond to another’s utterance or opinion but that considers some of the creative and arbitrary themes that arise. In this article, I employ this counter-colonial speculation, keeping in mind a Maori worldview whilst thinking in the wake of Elizabeth Rata’s “Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What’s Wrong with Kaupapa Maori?” The speculative powers that Maori have at our disposal here have undoubtedly been (...) employed in a number of ways throughout Maori history; here, I use them in a way that does not directly respond to a prompt. Although Rata’s true aim is to critique kaupapa Maori, she inadvertently brings my attention to a particular characteristic of her writing—the suffix -ism. The fact that it saturates her writing in this article leads me to consider the broader issues associated with instrumentalist language, and the impact of the -ism on a Maori relationship with things in the world. It emerges that, although Rata may be controversial for Maori in her views, her writing is useful for some unintended reasons, as it prompts some thinking around the appropriateness of the -ism for Maori. (shrink)

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the (...) variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine. (shrink)

During the fiscal, political, and social disorder caused by the Greek crisis, Greek cultural production has turned to obscure moments of Greek history, such as the Ottoman period, in an attempt to reframe dominant narratives. For Greek cultural politics, rejecting, or at least questioning the ancient past -- that was until now seen as the only valuable past -- is a way for Greek artists to reject Western perspectives on Greek culture and claim their own set of criteria by which (...) to experience their national past. This aspect of the crisis, which is in some ways a renewed principle of historiographic judgment, inevitably presents itself in comparison to the highly influential Enlightenment philosophy of metakénosis. A term coined by Adamantios Korais, metakénosis referred to the transfer of the ideas of European liberal humanism through translation into Modern Greek, while dismissing Eastern influences in Greek culture. European thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was assumed by Korais to be based on classic Greek ideals, and its re-translation into Greek was undertaken in earnest in order to inspire sentiments of national unity, confidence in Greek letters, and continuity with the classical past. For this proposed article, I examine Korais’s highly consequential principle and its legacy by looking at a recent scandal in the Greek theatre world, that of Jan Fabre’s short-lived appointment as artistic director of the Greek Festival in 2016. A large group of Greek theatre artists circulated a letter of protest in which they asked Fabre to resign. In their responses to Jan Fabre’s perceived appropriation of their festival, these artists seemed to be reversing the metakénosis model as they expressed their opposition to standards of cultural value imposed from abroad. The context of the crisis, as fiscal crisis, but also as a new paradigm of krisis as judgment, was instrumental in voicing this protest. (shrink)

A growing body of knowledge within the social sciences is produced from the perspectives of marginalised groups of people, and often, western science is criticised as an accomplice in a male-dominated and/or Eurocentric hegemony where alternative voices are excluded. This article investigates the terms of debate of this kind of knowledge in the social scientific community: who can partake in this discussion, and with which kind of commitment? The empirical material is the reviews of Linda Tuhiwai Smith?s book Decolonizing methodologies. (...) Research and indigenous peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999). Most of the reviewers welcome Smith's critique of western science and call for a more inclusive alternative. The question of the analysis is how this ambition is put to practice. The analysis demonstrates that even if the reviewers condone Smith's project, many of them hesitate to fully enter the debate. Many reviews oscillate between a classical understanding of culture and a postmodernist approach. The article argues that an unaddressed tension between these patterns of thought leaves the reviewers at an impasse. A crucial point is how we conceptualise the relationship between knowledge and context, and the author suggests that Sandra Harding's version of standpoint theory may help us to reconsider the terms of the debate. (shrink)

In the standard native tradition of Albanian studies, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed their own ultimate goal of constructing national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. In this article, I show how and why an articulate analysis of the main intellectual traditions and their impact can provide fresh insights into grasping the cultural particularism of Albanian studies. Methodologically, a new picture of knowledge production must arise if we consider the historical, cultural, political and ideological terrain (...) on which certain influential ideas and practices in Albanian studies of people’s culture have emerged. The aim, then, is not to provide an exhaustive picture of a positive knowledge of culture and society, but to show the urgent need for avoiding any adoption of concepts that might be pure reconstructions of arbitrary and timeless structures and values, while rejecting any approach in terms of survivals and folklorism. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values critically explores a new stage in which the life sciences and biomedical practices have entered. This new stage is marked by postgenomic developments and an increased interest of life sciences in the everyday lives of people outside laboratories and clinical settings. Furthermore, particular attention is given to many chronic and degenerative disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or developmental disorders. These developments coincide—or have become entangled—with a new set of interests (...) that an anthropologically inclined science and technology studies is bringing to the analyses of biomedical practices. An increased interest is observed in the anthropologically inclined STS in studying phenomena on different scales and in exploring fields that are not readily dominated by technoscientific rationality in practice. The introduction to the special issue examines briefly these developments and situates them in a broader genealogy of different movements that have taken place in the anthropologically inclined subfield of STS since the late 1970s and early 1980s. (shrink)

Anthropologists, through participant observation, play a large role in creating the very locus of their research: socio-cultural context. Challenges to the social-scientific ‘objectivity’ of this process draw strength from historical precedent, and serve a vital role in the larger anthropological project of confronting, as both critic and product of Western thought, its inherent tensions. In this paper, I focus on two types of epistemological bias that construct and reinforce the validity of objective knowledge: objectivism and literalism. An analysis of ethnographic (...) treatments of the philosophical concerns of metaphor theory and phenomenology of the senses illustrates both the difficulty and utility of taking on the epistemological underpinnings of social science. (shrink)