Memory in Athens

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Memory in Athens
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Acquiescent Spreaders: Occidentalism and peripatetic memory in Athens, Greece

It’s a somewhat commonplace assertion that the COVID19 pandemic involves a heightened sense of globality, given its simultaneous unraveling around the world and people’s renewed dependence on social-media online platforms. It would thus seem appropriate to begin this Greek account of COVID19 by thinking about the impact that a series of global news pieces celebrating the Greek government’s handling of the pandemic had on certain Greek audiences. These news pieces, reposted in the Greek media alleviated the embedded anxiety encapsulated in the question: are we European, modern or Western enough?

Many people reproduced the news pieces, triumphantly stating how the country is now (finally) appreciated for elements long seen as lacking: (Western) efficiency, restraint and maturity. And these traits were now being more-than-ever associated with a particular imaginary dynamic concerning health and illness, which I explore below. It would be convenient to read the adulations from various audiences as mere pro-government rightist expressions, but in fact news pieces approving of Greece’s approach tapped into an uncertainty felt by a wider constituency than the current Greek government’s voters.

Importantly, the complimentary global news pieces provide the sequel to another global-media motif concerning Greece that had become dominant a few years back. I am referring to representations of the post-bailout phase when Greece entered a period of structural adjustment, austerity measures and monitoring by its European creditors. During the first post-2010 years, the Greeks, and especially those reacting to austerity, were represented as immature children (Kalantzis 2015a). This could mean they were the ungrateful “children” rejecting their generous parents’ loans, as in the 2012 comments made by the then director of the IMF Christine Lagarde.

But childishness also informs enthusiastic perceptions of revolting Greeks as resisting youth, perhaps lacking self-control and a solid strategy but venerable nonetheless for challenging the status quo, as in news pieces (and users’ commentary) published by The Guardian (the newspaper would some years later lose some of its appeal among Greek leftists when it publicized a vacation package offering crisis tours in the country). A degree of pathologization (Theodossopoulos 2014; Sontag 2001) is at play in the ascription of childishness and immaturity and this becomes apparent in certain public commentaries drawing on psychoanalysis and carving a certain liberal-centrist position from which commentators rejected protesters as being unable to accept the status quo, which some commentators described as the rule of the Father or reality (evoking Lacanian and Freudian concepts regarding pleasure and its limits [Kalantzis 2015b]).

A key element in both moments, characterized by either approval or castigation, is the sense that one’s self-worth depends on the inspections of European tutelary forces. A sign of the difficulty to fully resolve the anxiety, in fact, emerged with subsequent news pieces coming from German media which questioned Greece’s accurate reporting of infections and thus its handling of the pandemic. These pieces fed into either notions of Germany’s vindictive, callous surveillance (a motif of the post 2010 crisis phase) or into the embittered realization that attaining the modern (efficiently handling the virus) was too good a story to be true. Of course, reliance on audit mechanisms (See for e.g., Strathern 2000) exceeds Greece and may be said to characterize wider neoliberal modes of governance.

But in Greece it specifically replays a very old dynamic pertinent to the 19th-century history of how the nation-state was founded, seeking approval and financial support among its guardian “Great Powers” and constantly struggling to satisfy their concerns and play up to the dominant hierarchies of value, something that various scholars studying Greece have been describing through the scope of colonialism (For e.g., Herzfeld 2002; Argyrou 2002, Gourgouris 1996; Hamilakis 2007; Calotychos 2001; Kalantzis 2019). Michael Herzfeld calls this cryptocolonialism; a condition of indirect colonization that is compensated for through aggressive claims of cultural worth (and antiquity).

A certain East-West, Orient-Occident opposition comes into play in the Greek political imaginary grappling with the dynamic under discussion.  Resistance, for instance, to the lenders’ requests became a key theme in public life in the post 2010 years and this relates to the appeal of the previous government elected in 2015 on the basis of an anti-colonial promise, performed often through nativist (anti-Western) aesthetics. Thus, bearded lyre players and shepherds from Crete were found during different moments at the center of public attention and were venerated either through humor or through straightforward approval of their pugnacious nativist spirit.

But the new ingredient in the COVID19 moment is acquiescence. What’s celebrated in news pieces concerning Greece’s handling of the virus is Greeks’ obeying the government’s restrictive measures, including the somewhat comically Orwellian rule of having to send an SMS to let the system know where and why you are going out. In a way, this brings us full circle from the Greeks-as-immature-rebels motif. Some Occidentalists would (and in fact have) celebrate this turn-around as maturity, opposed to the supposed immaturity of resisting austerity a few years earlier (Kalantzis 2015b). A crucial component that will help explain the conjuring of acquiescence as maturity is the widespread idea propagated in technocratic centrist circles, but also exceeding them, that Greeks are lacking a certain Enlightenment-style civic culture that would encourage them to impose restrictions on themselves as a means of benefitting the wider social body. It’s a theory kindred to Edward C. Banfield’s notorious amoral familism thesis, applied against southern Italian’s supposed structural backwardness on the grounds of their supposed privileging the family instead of the civic space of openness and reciprocity (Schneider 1998). Pathologization is again key to such formulations as southern populations are ascribed a lack of particular (cultural and psychical) traits that set them apart from the putatively mature, healthy and organized North.

A slight challenge for the Greek Occidentalist crowd came during the pandemic through Orthodox religious ritual. The current government, supported traditionally by the clerical establishment and its following, delayed shutting down churches and banning holy communion (with its sharing of wine and bread via a common spoon). The debate around this delay on social media reiterated again a certain Orient vs Occident imaginary. Many critics disavowed the government on the grounds of Enlightenment notions that mocked the desire for open Churches as signifying backwardness and the “Middle Ages” (On such tensions around spiritual beliefs in Greece, see Stewart 1989). This in fact complicates pathology’s enrollment as a metaphor, in that many commentators were now coming from critical-of-the-government leftist backgrounds but were resorting to the idea that the devout anti-lock-downers were structurally uncouth; lacking the maturity, clarity and self-control afforded by Western Enlightenment. In such commentaries, a seemingly irrational (unhealthy) demand for physical crowding and material sharing was set against a demand for distance on account of cognitively realizing proximity’s perils to one’s bodily health and most importantly to that of the wider social body.

The government in the end embraced the Occidentalist liberal sensibility but without openly clashing with the devout crowd. A high moment of this hybrid solution came when the academic doctor in charge of managing the pandemic, celebrated in centrist-right media for his paternal, restrained manners televised daily at a government briefing, but also a devout Christian himself, chanted the Sunday liturgy, played through loud speakers from inside an evacuated Church (On voices and their trajectories, see Panopoulos and Rikou 2016). The relaying of voices through speakers may strike some readers as relevant to an emerging idiom of daily life during COVID19, given the proliferation of online teaching and meetings, which serve the purpose of maintaining physical distance. And so, we are dealing with a particular imaginary concerning health and pathology here: acquiescence to government regulations concerning so-called social distancing (seen as political and psychological maturity and obedience to Enlightenment principles) guarantees one’s health by virtue of abstaining from what’s now seen as life-endangering physicality of human contact.

As with “the Greek crisis”, representing the COVID19 pandemic confronts us with two persistent problems of method. The first concerns the term crisis itself and its hidden teleologies and blindspots; The term implies a radical break from a before while inviting a “what-went-wrong” quest which makes crisis the Ur-diagnosis that is itself immune to critical investigation (Roitman 2014). Yet, things are significantly different during the pandemic on a tangible level. On the sanguine end, one hears comments about how the horizon in Athens is clearer and birds sing louder due to the abatement of pollution, though such statements will at the same time be critiqued as privileged and unfeeling in relation to people losing their job and/or suddenly sharing their living spaces with others with whom they aren’t on good terms. At the level of ethics, accuracy, representativeness is one mode of description more imperative, right, pressing than the other?

The second problem concerns more specifically the visual. I have long been interested in how the visual shapes our notion of crisis, which can be summarized through questions like: what is the crisis made to look like in various platforms and media? How do we envision it? Does it have to look like something in order for us to apprehend it? Is the visual manifestation a symptom, an after-effect or part of the deep structure of crisis? The latter question needs to be considered in the backdrop of modernist science which would see visuals as an epiphenomenon compared to the real, invisible structures that actually create crisis: biological or economic.  And it would follow: how can one capture crisis photographically or cinematically? And how to do justice to the different voices and subjectivities within it? Thinking again about illness and pathologization, I am reminded of photojournalistic coverage of different political protests during the last decade, which in a particular liberal outlet often portrayed the demonstration as akin to a carnival featuring irrational, ill-mannered and ultimately immature/unhealthy people. 

As anthropologists, we are inclined to ground perspectives in their sociological position. And it thus might be worth ending this short piece with material from a walk I took which speaks to what the lockdown looks like for a middle-class 38-year old subject in the northern parts of Athens. Representing life-worlds of relative comfort (especially in a context where suffering is adjacent) presents another challenge for anthropology, particularly in its age of focusing on embattled and disenfranchised subjects (See Robbins 2013). And it becomes even more difficult during a moment when one is bombarded with social media imagery of people demonstrating a repertoire of lockdown domesticities: such as baking and exercising. Is it possible to make such imagery of lockdown speak to wider political imaginaries that are anthropologically relevant?

One thing to note is that walking as both pastime and necessity has been extended during lockdown. The Orient-vs-Occident imaginary again crops up here, for instance around the increase in people training outdoors in Athens (especially runners) whom one interlocutor called America’s mimics.  The comment is disdainful not only because it conjures mimesis as slavish devotion, but also because what’s mimicked is rejected as excessively interested in one’s individual health and well-being (a putative trait of “American” joggers). During a recent walk, I enact that old fantasy of seeking the backdoor alley (what Dean MacCannell would see as a quest for authenticity [See MacCannell 1999]) and by taking unfrequented neighborhood paths I am suddenly confronted with a wall in a small, shady suburban street (figures 1-7). It has a series of tags and inscriptions that recall vividly my own adolescence; some even belong to friends from over 25 years ago. The discovery confronts me with a version of own self as “child” (both versions reviewed earlier would apply: either venerably transgressive or immaturely, unhealthily misguided) when I had one night found myself again in that area, but with the aim of imprinting monikers (the tense, sensory sharing of materials with other fellow taggers are the opposite of social distancing, while the mixture of spring flower scents and spray paint became suddenly sensible while staring at the wall).

Not unlike the lockdown joggers, graffiti and tagging were seen by many in 1990s Athens as Occidentalist (particularly American) mimicries though an ethnographic glance would introduce complications and local trajectories to this scenario. Greek graffiti’s coverage in the global media has more recently exploded and its normative, simplifying representation takes it to be a sign of subaltern creativity stemming from a politicized youth living under austerity measures (On graffiti see Schacter 2014; and on some of its Greek trajectories Alexandrakis 2016; Karathanasis and Theodosis 2019). This normative depiction recalls Carlo Ginzburg’s problem of reading into visuals what one already knows from other means (Pinney 2005: 260), imposing that is, a specific understanding of social structure (crisis as recession) onto graffiti which then becomes a signifier of crisis and what’s normatively seen as its countering mechanism, that is creativity. What strikes me as a relevant irony today is that it was my observing government rules of social distancing and taking walks as pastime that led me to the rediscovery of a supposedly Occidentalist idiom (1990s tagging) from my own past which had a transgressive component. The role of notions of resistance and acquiescence, immaturity and maturity, Orient and Occident that I outlined earlier are tacitly tied together around this set of imagery and can thus find their way into this digital space devoted to COVID19. My photos speak to a transgressive past flashing instantly as an image (to recall Walter Benjamin) and remind us of the problem of representing “crisis”: would my photos from this walk qualify as pandemic visuals or would a more normative perception of crisis (empty streets, people in masks, patients in hospitals or even graffiti at the center of Athens directly critiquing COVID19’s quarantine as authoritarianism) be more pertinent?

Author: Konstantinos Kalantzis
Konstantinos Kalantzis is a social anthropologist (PhD, UCL) specializing in visual culture and political imagination. Since 2006, he has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in rural and urban Greece in which he incorporates visual practices. He is Research Associate in PhotoDemos, Department of Anthropology, University College London. He is author of Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete (IUP, 2019) and director of the ethnographic film “Dowsing the Past: Materialities of Civil War Memories” (2014). www.konstantinoskalantzis.com

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