“Fak Germani”: Materialities of Nationhood and Transgression in the Greek Crisis

“Fak Germani”: Materialities ofNationhood and Transgression inthe Greek CrisisKONSTANTINOS KALANTZIS

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thales Program

I N T R O D U C T I O N

This essay exploresGreek social practice and imagination in the context ofwhat isglobally defined as the Greek debt crisis. I strategically avoid entering into aformal discussion of the etiology and definition of the crisis,1 which anywayremain contested, particularly among economists. For the purposes of thispaper the crisis is assumed to be a period of wider financial meltdown, which is

Every attempt was made to contact rights holders for the illustrations used in this paper. If permissionfor an image has not been granted, the rights holder should contact Cambridge University Press.Acknowledgments: Various people have contributed to this paper by generously sharing their experi-ences and insights and offering their friendship. Special thanks to Pavlos Vasilopoulos, Stamos Sinio-ris, Kostas Hritis, Martinos Mandalidis, Stefanos and Giannis Vamiedakis, Alexandros Kalantzis,Kostis Kornetis, Iosif Tsiamoglou, Andreas Anastasiou, Pafsanias Karathanasis, and Kostas Strevlosfor help at various levels. I am thankful to Aimee Placas and Othon Alexandrakis for hosting a March2012 workshop on the crisis in Athens, as well as the participants for their many fruitful comments. Iam also grateful to Nicolas Argenti for inviting me to present my work at the Brunel AnthropologyResearch Seminar, where I was exposed to insightful ideas and criticisms offered by facultymembers and students. Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, Sissy Theodosiou, and Elia Vardaki offered manyrich ideas during the 2013 CES conference in Amsterdam. My thanks go also to John Bornemanfor sharing ideas and hosting productive discussions in Princeton. I am extremely grateful for the gen-erous and incisive guidance as well as the energy offered byCSSH Editor Andrew Shryock inworkingon this piece. The essay has also benefitted from the helpful comments provided by anonymousCSSHreviewers and Managing Editor David Akin’s meticulous editing. This project has been financiallysupported by the Princeton Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, of which I was a Mary SeegerO’Boyle fellow in 2011–2012. Many thanks to Dimitri Gondicas and other members of staff fortheir support. My research on Crete has benefited from the economic support of the Arts and Human-ities Research Council (AHRC), the University of London Central Research Fund, and the UniversityCollege LondonResearch Project Fund.Mywork in Thessaly has been supported by the University ofSouthampton and the Greek Archaeological Service (Eforia Spilaiologhias Notiou Elladhos). I amthankful to Yannis Hamilakis for inviting me to the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeo-logical Ethnography project. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Rosa Alchanati for her support.

1 A description of the crisis often uttered by Yanis Varoufakis, Minister of Finance from Januaryto July 2015, which received enormous publicity, emphasizes the mistake of treating Greece’spost-2008 problem of insolvency as a “liquidity problem,” “one to be patched up by means ofthe largest loan in human history” (2014: 13, 14).

Comparative Studies in Society and History 2015;57(4):1037–1069.0010-4175/15 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2015doi:10.1017/S0010417515000432

1037

accompanied by a renewed set of relations between Greece and its lenders andalso by drastic political reforms and austerity policies. I will analyze the crisisfrom a perspective that is rarely considered in dominant depictions of financialcrises. My focus is on the Greek self-image and its multiple corporeal subjectifi-cations (embodied in imagery, sexualized jokes, and other realms) in the face ofwhat is increasingly recognized as national and personal subjugation. I am inter-ested inGreek responses to these conditions, which, even though they differ alongclass and gender lines, generatewidely shared (andwidely contested) understand-ings of what life is like in a contemporary state that is progressively defined assubordinate and in need of tutelage from more powerful regimes to the north.Among my arguments is that the perceived sense of subordination reveals thecommon lure of motifs of transgression for people of different backgrounds.

Given that the crisis conditions under discussion have produced in mestrong feelings of identification and discontent, this essay is also an effort touse my own intimate lifeworld as a means of producing analysis, whichexplains the persistent theorization of anecdotes and other ethnographicmoments involving friends, colleagues, and bystanders.2 My larger goal,however, is to make sense of the anxiety about Greece’s role as a globalentity, how tutelage is conceived in an idiom of surveillance, and how it isnegotiated through fantasies of nativism. I will pursue these questions acrossmultiple social fields, complicating them through an investigation of rupturesand disputes. The role of sexualization and joking in Greek responses to thecrisis will be central to my analysis, as will an examination of how visualand material culture are instrumental to Greek perceptions and practices.

E V E RY D AY I N T E R N AT I O N A L D R AMA S

I will begin with scenes from the winter of 2011–2012 in an eastern U.S. uni-versity town, a place seemingly unrelated to the representational motifs sur-rounding the Greek crisis. One morning I spotted a television news story thatfeatured extensive footage from the “Greek riots” in Athens, taken during aprotest against the austerity measures imposed by the Greek government aspart of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Union (EU) finan-cial bailout and monitoring of the country. I was intrigued by the sudden ap-pearance of Greece on the landscape of U.S. news. The images shownfocused mostly on Molotov cocktails fierily crashing on empty pavement. Iwas taken aback by the story’s switch from the smokiness of the protest land-scape to a didactic placement of Greece in a global map of representable events(figure 1). This rioting iconography, which has come to stand for the Greekcrisis around the globe, plays an instrumental role as a shock tactic that “justi-fies” austerity policies. It helps motivate political shifts in the more powerful

2 I have tried to protect the subjects’ anonymity, in some cases by slightly modifying certaindetails while staying faithful to events.

1038 K O N S T A N T I N O S K A L A N T Z I S

northern European countries (Knight 2013a: 153, 147, 148) and, as it is dis-played here, in the United States. The same iconography can be an object offascination in other spheres, including photojournalistic blogs where photogra-phers claim an aura of self-heroizing empiricism by involving themselves in theclashes, or in those (both Greek and international) domains of leftist aesthetics3

in which the display of rioting scenes is enmeshed in desires for revolutionarywarfare and in the endorsement of the view—increasingly heard outside ofleftist debates—that holds destruction to be the only form of rejecting complic-ity with the current, subjugating state of affairs.

Some hours later, I accidentally met a middle-aged member of the (non-academic) university staff who jokingly commented on a Greek colleague’sbodily injury by saying, “Not only the country is falling apart but you are aswell.” Another kind of placement was at play here. “We,” the injured man andmyself, were ascribed a Greek national identity and, even more, our ownbodies were seen as the metaphor and place where a national injury was sus-tained. The realm of abstract economics was now conceived to be as tangibleas myGreek colleague’s broken limb, and the nation-state itself was condensablein the nationalized subject’s body. I pondered all this as I sat with three Greekcolleagues at the university café a few hours later. One of them recounted a

FIGURE 1. Still Image from Pix11 News, November 2011. Placement of Greece in a global map ofevents. Copyright WPIX-TV. Author’s photo.

3 There are various internal distinctions and differentiations within Greek and global leftist aes-thetics, a matter that I cannot explore here. For instance, rioting and its dissemination as imagerytend to be radically rejected by supporters of the Greek Communist Party, while it fuels debatesamong Greek anarchist groups.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1039

scene in which he tried to chat with a young German woman while waiting forthe night bus in a German city. The woman’s allegedly scornful response wasfixated on the man’s Greek descent, which reminded her of “where our(German) taxes go” (her words). This comment invokes a popular motif incertain public German andGreek discourses according to which German taxpay-ers are called upon to repair themismanagement of Greek finances, which, in thisview, caused the Greek debt crisis. The man’s portrayal of sexuality as a field ofinternational negotiations immediately reminded me of another scene. A youngGreekman, in his early days of “flirting”with a Germanwoman, claimed to havereceived a text message in which she playfully invited him to “fix the corruptGreek tax system,” only later to note that this “of course” was “a joke.”

About a week later, first a medical doctor and then an employee at a super-market remarked emphatically that I must be “happy” to have “escaped” whatwas happening in Greece. These men referred to the allegedly destructive pro-tests that, in the iconography disseminated in U.S. media representations, formthe landscape of the Greek crisis. I originally thought that these remarks reflect-ed a certain triumphant portrayal of America as an entity that rescues peoplefrom supposedly unsafe (non-Western, non-democratic) regimes. In my pastexperience of studying in the UK, where national origin was resonant forsome Greek students due to their expatriate status, I had seen them act out dif-ferent subject positions. These included a self-proclaimed, empowering alli-ance among southern Europeans on the grounds of cultural and sensoryaffinity. As if articulating a kind of European negritude, these Greeks proposedelements such as body posture and open-air socializing as a means of assertingcultural superiority. Of course, despite its glorious tone, one cannot precludethat other groups may use this same essentialization to exclude these “southern-ers” from various social spheres or to attribute potential shortcomings to thisidentity (Carrier 1995: 23; Herzfeld 2005: 52, 62). In any case, the designationof Greece as the place to happily escape from, which I encountered in theUnited States, was rather novel to me.

The scenes I have just described correspond to narratives I began to hearfrom other young, middle-class Greek émigrés during the same period. Theirstories featured motifs of performative ascription of nationality to Greek sub-jects, the (Greek) anxiety about non-participation in a Euro-American Enlight-enment cosmos, a sense of being surveyed and demeaningly gazed at, and thesignification of sexuality as an arena of power struggle. It is the drama of theseeveryday international scenes—Bhabha originally called them “‘everyday’ co-lonial scenes” (2004: 109)—that drew me into this project, tempting me to sub-limate my own ambivalence and even bitterness about the crisis into analysis.This endeavor differs significantly from other ethnographies I have pursued.I ask no questions of my informants, for instance. Instead this project entailsmy constant immersion in scenes, imagery, and other people’s questions thatforcefully demanded my response. A certain personal tone is unavoidable


and necessary, even if its ultimate aim is not a reflexive exposition of ethics andrepresentation (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986). Subjective reflection, with itspotential “lament,” “may in the end fulfill … the law of the word’s course”(Adorno 2005: 16), reproducing the very power relations it sought to scrutinize.Still, an analysis of my own positionality is important in illuminating the ques-tions of pleasure, aversion, and desire that my text addresses.

The widespread notion that Greece is symbolically dominated within thecurrent context of IMF/EU monitoring and sponsorship is not simply an abstractclaim.As Iwill argue, it is deeply embodied; felt at a visceral level. This iswhymyessay privileges material and visual culture, not only from the scope of semiotics,but through a consideration of corporeality, including the embodiment that takesplace in performing and uttering national narratives, or viewing public photo-graphs. My use of the term materiality signals my interest in “the figural”; thatis, the “libidinally charged domain” “where intensities are felt,”which philosopherJean-François Lyotard opposed to discourse, the field associated withwhat can beread and be given meaning within a closed system (Pinney 2002: 85; 2006: 135).My approach complements the emphasis placed on rhetoric and discourse (andconsequently on the semiotic study of meaning and strategies of discursive com-munication) in recent analyses of the Greek crisis (e.g., Theodossopoulos 2013).

The essay traverses different registers and terrains, but it will focus less onmarginal subalterns (e.g., poor farmers, which is the common anthropologicalmotif) and more on young, middle-class Greek men (see also Faubion 1993).Of course, from a certain perspective, all middle-class Greeks constitute a spe-cific form of subalternity in that they were forced to accede to various Eurocen-tric constructs, while reproducing them against weaker internal classes (Herzfeld2002; 2003: 294; Argyrou 2002; but see Kalantzis 2014). Nonetheless, middle-class aesthetics and sensibilities are embodied in ways that affect their position-ing vis-à-vis other groups in Greek society within the crisis.

This essay builds on problematics and approaches developed in recentwork on the geographies, representations, historicities, discourses, and econo-mies of the Greek crisis (Herzfeld 2011; Yiakoumaki 2011; Panourgiá 2011;Papailias 2011; Athanasiou 2012; Dalakoglou 2012; Hirschon 2012; Kalantzis2012; Knight, 2012; 2013a; 2013b; Theodossopoulos 2013; Rakopoulos 2014;see also Cabot 2014). I also turn to questions of desire and pleasure (Kulick2006: 933) that may account for the “affectively ambivalent complexities”(Ortner 1995: 179) of responses to the crisis. I treat the ambivalence ofGreek engagements not as a discursive strategy for acquitting oneself,blaming others, or rhetorically rendering socioeconomic conditions morelegible and “less threatening” (but see Theodossopoulos 2013: 202, 208). Inother words, I am not interested here in evaluating responses to the crisis fortheir capacity to develop “resistance” or to semantically control a felt threat.Instead, I am exploring the kinds of experiences and embodied subjectificationsthat emerge in people’s conflictual reactions to Greece’s putative subjugation,

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1041

by writing in various spheres of disavowal4 including jokes, which tend to beunderrepresented in analyses of the Greek crisis and Greek social practice morebroadly (but see Orso 1979; see also Knight 2015). Such disavowals may beinconsistent with the actors’ self-image, yet they do various things for them.Jokes and ambivalent subjectifications temporarily destabilize the actors’ ex-pressed aspirations of the self, exposing the precarity and even fluidity ofmiddle-class self-images in the face of the crisis. As social performances,they have a contextual character (see also Herzfeld 1985) that escapes thesphere of strategies and semantic tactics, momentarily exceeding the limitsof official political positioning. They operate at the level of pleasure anddesire, producing (even unwanted) commonalities among groups and agentswho might be formally opposed.

Doing research among middle-class subjects whose experiences I relate tothe lives of people in other spheres, including my two earlier rural fieldsites inhighland Crete and Thessaly, involves interesting complications of method. Forinstance, turning my own peers and friends into informants produced height-ened resentment of my decision to entangle them in my analysis. Of course,the dynamic of people “pushing back” as “we push” them “into the molds ofour texts” (Ortner 1995: 189) does not uniquely pertain to fieldwork amongmiddle-class subjects. I am reminded of Petros (a pseudonym), a tricenarianshepherd in the Sphakia region of western highland Crete, who once remarkedthat I would never be able to write about and understand him with “my littlepencil,” derisively pointing at my field notebook. My peers, however,some of them pursuing academic careers in the social sciences, departed slight-ly from Petros’ disdainful remark in that they used a near-to-anthropologyvocabulary that speaks of alienating objectification in describing theirdisapproval of my employing their experiences. Their objections moreclosely mirrored self-reproachful anthropological reflections on ethics (e.g.,Schepher-Hughes 1995).

R E I N F O R C E D A NX I E T I E S

Following the 2010 commencement of the IMF/EU financial sponsorship ofGreece, which is accompanied by the obligation of the Greek government toimplement structural reforms as outlined in a series of memoranda agreedupon by Greece and its lenders, there has been an outburst of public utterancesthat represent Greece as an entity dominated by mechanisms of financial and po-litical control. The term memorandum itself is now synonymous with national

4 This term was originally used by Freud (“Verleugnung”) to describe the male infant’s defenseagainst the putative shock of seeing the absent penis of the female body (2001: 141–48). My use ofthe term obviously deviates from this definition. I am referring to a social reaction that does notpertain to individual psychology, against something perceived as a presence (colonization by theIMF and EU), even though this presence is shocking and of rather elusive corporeality.


subjugation to the interests of foreign agents. In many ways, both the increasedelectoral support to SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) and the public ex-pressions of exhilaration following its victory in the January 2015 Greek elec-tions are related to that party’s anti-memorandum and anti-austerity claims, aswell as its disdain for the lenders’ demands. International monitoring and spon-sorship have heightened and partly shifted preexisting anxieties about Greek be-longing and suspicion of (Western) tutelage. Briefly, what is happening todaybuilds on the widespread Greek sense, present certainly in the second half ofthe twentieth century, that powerful Western nation-states have insidiouslyshaped the history of Greece in ways that have damaged and mocked Greek in-terests (Herzfeld 2003: 293, 298; Sutton 2003). It is this “felt and lived nationalhistory” that triggers empathy for other global populations, even those that areotherwise rejected for their un-European backwardness (Kirtsoglou andTheodossopoulos 2009: 86, 93). Often phrased in anti-colonial language5 (seealso Knight 2013b: 112), and marking the disgorging of terminology frommore marginal discursive spheres (e.g., Papamanousakis 1979) into the main-stream media, this sensibility is nevertheless evocative for people of diversepolitical self-images, even though they may perform/utter it in different ways.

Along these lines, there is currently a re-contextualization of older anxi-eties about Greece’s political and cultural position in the “West,” as an “imag-inary entity” (Chakrabarty 1992: 21). A Greek friend in his early thirties, whoholds a well-paid job as a digital-media analyst in London, pointed out to mehow he was appalled when during a 2011 job interview he was askedwhether he possessed the mandatory work visa. He interpreted the questionas ignoring or even challenging the fact that Greeks, as citizens of an-EUmember state, are not required to hold a special permit in order to work inthe UK. This fear of the non-recognition of Greece as a respectable Westernnation-state is familiar to any anthropologist who has ever worked in Greece,but such worry is now greatly enhanced. My informant understood his inter-viewer’s question as pinpointing how Greece is what Chakrabarty calls, inreference to the always-yet-to-be-modernized Indian peasantry, “a figure oflack” (ibid.: 6, 18).

His story resonates with other narratives I collected from people ofroughly the same age and background working in other Western Europeancountries. Indicatively, one informant claimed to have received jocular notesfrom his academic colleagues warning him that unless he works they “willnotify the troika” (i.e., officials from the European Commission, IMF, andEuropean Central Bank who are monitoring Greece’s progress). We are againin the realm of everyday scenes occurring outside Greece, in which Western

5 For example, Yanis Varoufakis (Greece’s minister of finance from January to July 2015), de-scribed the bailout as a “neo-colonial intervention” in his 2013 keynote speech to the Modern GreekStudies Association Symposium (2014: 17).

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1043

spectators identify Greeks as national representatives and demand responses onthe crisis. My informants often experience such demands as a callous gaze that,as we will see, provokes identifications with the Greek national entity that aremore complex and more intense than expected.

Another story by the informant whose friends threatened to report him to“the troika” illustrates how the European gaze is experienced. He told me thathe once guiltily revealed his Greek identity to a bartender who was askingwhether the money he had placed on the table was enough to cover the bill.He felt he had to disclose his nationality, inviting the bartender to count thebanknotes, as a verification that Greeks are not to be trusted around money. Al-though this man was subjected to unwelcome jokes about the need to surveilGreekness, he was now reproducing the image of Greeks as cheaters to an in-terlocutor who, as a European citizen, was endowed with the capacity tosurvey/evaluate the Greek subject. An interesting complication arises fromthe fact that similar stories of Greeks being ridiculed abroad are often airedin Greek media outlets, making it hard to chart the flow of ideology betweenpersonal experience and public enunciations. This issue demands closer atten-tion, and I will briefly return to it in my discussion of how Greeks envision thepublic sector.

N AT I V I S M A ND S U RV E I L L A N C E

Popular in contemporary media spheres and other social domains is the conceptof a Greek native cosmos resisting past invasion and, by extension, contempo-rary tutelage. I have previously argued that the notion of locality in Greece (parexcellence ascribed to Crete today) brings together diverse political investmentsmade by a wide range of agents. These include anarchists who attribute com-munity egalitarianism and anti-statist revolutionary spirit to gun-bearingCretan shepherds, and nationalists who are lured to Crete as the last enclavethat can protect the nation from its enemies (Kalantzis 2012). Similarly, invo-cations of nineteenth-century Greek brigands as forces that could purify thecorrupt internal bureaucracy and resist external tutelage were recently madeby the young Thessalonikiot artist Christos Stamboulis in his comic-stripMavri Foustanela (“Black kilt”), which casts a poor, nineteenth-centurybrigand and shepherd as the hero who opposes corrupt Greek and Ottomanelites. I recently also witnessed a middle-aged man in an exuberant momentat a restaurant that evokes vernacular aesthetics, calling out Kolokotronis (he-roized figure of the nineteenth-century Greek war of independence) as a histor-ical figure who could purge the nation-state of its traitors. He used the term“Nenekos” to describe this treason, referring to the nineteenth-century Greekchieftain Dimitrios Nenekos, who was reportedly bribed into joiningOttoman forces against his fellow Greeks. In this way, a global problem was“filtered through” a more “local-level understanding” (Sutton 1997: 415), butalso the present moment was understood in light of past events (Knight


2012), as registered in historical figures who are national icons. The man’s per-formative call was related to Greek anger against politicians for leading thecountry to its current debt crisis and further destabilizing the reciprocitiesthat once defined the relationship between voters and the parties.6

Such expressions of wrath against politicians often cast contemporaryCretans in the role of purging force. Take the users’ comments below aYouTube video that features folk singing by members of a Cretan cultural asso-ciation. The performers, who are dressed up in “traditional” attire, are touringMani, another part of Greece that is mythologized for its rugged culture. Apopular comment, which has received many positive votes by other viewers,warns politicians of the devastating wrath of Cretans and Maniates shouldthey decide to act against them. The idea of agnatic feuding is deployed as a pun-ishing counter to the opulent corruption of urbanite politicians.

The restaurant patron who summoned Kolokotronis as a comparable cleans-ing force ended his speech by exclaiming, “If only Juncker (then president of theEurogroup) could see us now!” That is, having fun and spending money eventhough we are in a state of austerity. This reference to surveillance has becomea popular trope in Greece. It points to a certain kind of experience emergingwithin tutelage. In other recreational contexts, I have witnessed middle-classfriends pointing at the materiality of recreation (plates of food, drinks, crowdsof bodies dancing) as something that would enrage the European lenders, whoare presented as invisible spectators. A young friend in his thirties, dining outin a restaurant, recently shouted, oscillating between guilt and amusement,“What if Schäuble (then German minister of finance) could see this?” Similarly,a woman standing on the boat escalator dressed in colorful summer attire andholding shopping bags wondered aloud, “What would the Germans and theIMF say if they saw us returning from vacation like this?” (Kalantzis 2013:213). These utterances, often addressed to a wider audience of bystanders inhopes of obtaining their agreement, represent tutelage, not merely as an abstractnotion pertaining to economics but as a deeply embodied, internalized gaze.

I am reminded here of a certain middle-aged Sphakian man who told me in2007 that the image of local bearded men shooting with their guns at a feastwould regrettably remind “those who are watching” of images of warfare inthe third world.Who are “those who are watching”? I take the man to be referringto the sense of constant monitoring and evaluation of local idioms by mecha-nisms that place things in hierarchies of value (see also Herzfeld 2004).Besides, Sphakia has been evaluated by European travelers, photographers, folk-lorists, musicologists, and botanists since at least the eighteenth century (Kalant-zis 2015, 2014). Locals resort to these “external” representations today instatements about the self. I originally interpreted the Sphakian man’s utterance

6 On reciprocity, see Jackson 2005: 39.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1045

as an attempt to distance himself from the alleged excesses of Cretan tradition-alism, which are a theme of constant contestation among Sphakians and areoften presented by people as an embarrassment for the region. I later witnessedhim enthusiastically endorsing the sorts of gun-shooting performances he wascriticizing and, moreover, affectionately calling himself and other shooters“Taliban.” The self-ascription of what is otherwise condemned as warlike back-wardness is comparable to the jocular disavowals of tutelage made by membersof the Greek middle class. In both cases, there is ambivalent pleasure in embody-ing the figure of the transgressive native.

N AT I O N A L I Z AT I O N S

Closely related to the surfacing of common cultural reflexes is the increasinglynationalized perception of things. How events that would normally be classi-fied as personal experience are nationalized is evident in the interactions oftwo close friends from Athens in their early thirties. One had begun a relation-ship with a younger German woman that coincided with the commencement ofthe memorandum. This had already placed him in an ambiguous positionvis-à-vis his friends and peers, who often labeled the woman “Merkel” (afterthe German chancellor) and spoke about his desire as a form of victimizing self-colonization. Following a break-up, one of his peers said, “She colonized us,didn’t she?” Among young Greek men jokes about the potentially castratingpower of women are common, with women portrayed as forces that stealmen away and break the bonds of “homosocial” interaction (Sedgwick in Gian-nakopoulos 2005: 59), finally disempowering and rendering them obedientsubjects who merely fulfill women’s desires. Such jokes are often performedin spheres where men claim exclusionary social space away from the presenceof women, such as the spectatorship of football matches (ibid.).

I want to stress here how this man’s affair was read in a nationalized light.When he spoke of a clash with the German woman in which she maintained anallegedly tough stance, his friend immediately asked, “But will you, in re-sponse, become Aris or Tsolakoglou?” Aris Velouchiotis was the chief of com-munist guerrillas. He was active in mainland Greece from 1942–1945, and hisdeath—possibly a suicide; he was being pursued by Greek rightwing paramil-itaries—was followed by his decapitation. Aris is a heroic figure mostly forleftists, though he stands for combative resistance even among people whodo not identify with the left. His appearance, as captured in archival photo-graphs, invokes the iconography of nineteenth-century brigand warriors, amatter of great interest that exceeds the scope of this essay. Georgios Tsolako-glou, by contrast, was one of the prime ministers of Greece during the Germanoccupation. As with the chieftain Nenekos mentioned earlier, he is often used inGreek public discourse as a synonym for complicity and treason.

The man’s jocular question manifests a complex intertwining of sexualitywith nationhood, staged against a backdrop of comparative historical imagery.


In the dilemma “Aris or Tsolakoglou,” Germany is again portrayed as a scorn-ful female who prompts either resistance or complicity (recall the Greek man inthe U.S. university town narrating his night-bus experience with a Germanwoman). This same envisioning is at play in the jokes another male, middle-class interlocutor directed at his friend with a German partner. He comparedhis friend’s relationship-negotiation skills to the “doomed-to-fail,” “maximal-ist” threats Alexis Tsipras has allegedly made against Angela Merkel’s effica-cious and cold determination. (Tsipras is head of the Coalition of the RadicalLeft and since January 2015 prime minister of Greece, but at the time hewas leader of the opposition party.) In each case, figures from the SecondWorld War and the contemporary political scene are used to classify and meta-phorize daily experience. Furthermore, both men subordinate personal experi-ences to the national realm. Both were self-proclaimed metropolitan leftistswho opposed the national(ist) project, yet they used national(ist) schemata tointerpret events near to them. In some ways, this tendency is the reverse ofwhat Sutton has noted with reference to the employment of Greek local-levelpractices to signify international politics (1997). In what I am describing, thepersonal level is resignified and re-experienced through resort to the nationalideological level. Intriguingly, this is observable among subjects who are oth-erwise disdainful of nationalism and its prescriptions.

The employment of figures from the Second World War through whatKnight calls “cultural proximity” (2012) is further enhanced by the fact thatthe two friends just described had experienced their grandfathers’ embodiednarratives of the German occupation. The man with the German partner re-called his enthusiasm as a child for hearing his grandfathers’ stories aboutthe bodily toil, hunger, and numbing cold in the winter of 1941, and the ruth-lessness of the German forces. The embodied element extends beyond the nar-rative level (i.e., the described bodily sensations of the Occupation itself), sincethese stories were also a means for the grandchild to associate and affectivelyconnect with his grandfathers. The war stories were accompanied by thesensory experience of eating his favorite pasta dish at his grandparents’home (see also Sutton 2001; Panourgiá 2005: 63), remembering the textureof those particular velvety couches, and smelling the attractively obsolete lem-onesque cologne worn by his grandfather. The man’s friend who posed thequestion about Aris and Tsolakoglou recalled his own grandfather’soft-repeated story of a German atrocity involving the killing of a child afterluring it with breadcrumbs. The old man told this tale in protest against hisgrandson’s choice to do German as a third language at school. There is acertain overlap between the school-level teaching of history and these grand-fathers’ narratives, which endow the official ones with feeling. Despite poten-tial divergences between official and personal narratives, the national levelbecomes embodied through its enmeshment in the sensorial sphere ofgrandfather-grandson affection. As with the question of the media, it is difficult

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1047

to assess the exact effect of national history, but the contemporary emergence ofnationalized reflexes does point to the amplification of national history throughits inclusion in affective spheres, and to the fact that the sense of subordinationentailed in the crisis triggers responses at the interface of the national and thefamilial.

R U P T U R E S

I have so far presented a somewhat unitary story that leaps between differentspheres, revealing homogenizations that are emerging in the present context.These homogenizations break down in moments of dissonance, such as that Iobserved during the 2011 Syntagma Square protests, when leftist protestersdancing to a Cretan lyre player’s Cretan tunes booed him for switching tothe national anthem (Kalantzis 2012: 10). Another, more structural dissonanceemerges in reference to the civil sector, and builds on past outcries againstpublic sector employees as lazy, corrupt, and allegedly reliant on political con-tacts to acquire their posts.

In one of many arguments between bystanders I have recently witnessed, awoman criticized civil servants for striking despite their supposedly high sala-ries, and for blocking the train services she needed to commute to her privatesector job, which she described as low-paying. Upon hearing these angry utter-ances, another middle-aged woman in that same train countered that instead ofturning against each other there should be a unanimous Greek response to thedisempowering tutelage imposed by the troika. I have heard similar criticismsof the civil sector in rural Greece, both in Thessaly and Crete. Farmers andshepherds mock co-villagers who work in the public sector as lazy. Theyalso stigmatize EU subsidies as a force that pollutes local cultural and bodilyidioms. Theodossopoulos argues that this anti-civil sector discourse emanatesfrom a Greek agonistic work ethos that is autonomous from ideas aboutcapital and labor produced in Western Europe (2013: 204). Even if such auton-omy exists, we ought to study it in light of the fact that various popular mediasources express views powerfully critical of the public sector. Without assum-ing that the media exercise total control over ideology, the case in contemporaryGreece is clearly one of “articulation between fractured hegemonic discoursesand the situated interpretations of… subjects,” as Gupta put it in his account ofIndian farmers’ perceptions of the state (1995: 391).

The anti-civil sector discourse predates the crisis and may be partly basedon a sense that others have used unofficial relationships with political parties tosecure privileged positions that bypass class criteria and educational qualifica-tions. In fact, spending time in Greek public services in Athens (before andduring the crisis), consistently provides the observer with instances in whichsome customers, embodying an “aesthetics of exasperation” (Kalantzis 2012:7) vocally attribute any inability to successfully complete their transactionsto the services’ structural inefficiency, or even to the laziness and caprice of


employees. These sentiments are currently being reshaped and rearticulated byspecific commentators who represent the civil sector as a morally corrupt, ho-mogeneous entity, prefiguring political measures that include layoffs. On thesame day that I witnessed the heated exchange on the train, I saw a segmentof a popular news show on SKAI (a private television channel) in which thehost insisted that Greek politicians avoid the “necessary regulation” of thepublic sector for fear of losing support from their corrupt voters. Programmingof this kind airs “preexisting grievances,” but it also “creates subjects” by sys-tematically directing the form and etiology of exasperation (Gupta 1995: 388).

Both the critics and the defenders of the civil sector ascribe to their oppo-nents something akin to a Marxist concept of false consciousness. For instance,a fifty-something, upper-middle-class private physician I know often describesnon-civil sector workers who join the public strikes as misguided individualswho fail to see that the interests of civil sector employees do not coincidewith their own. On the other hand, various friends who support the Coalitionof the Radical Left portray those who turn against the civil sector as naivelyinternalizing the agendas of conservative commentators, who have an interestin dividing workers.

The very concept of a common anti-memorandum front is questioned bycommentators who consider themselves representatives of a sober, centrist, andbourgeois aesthetic. Resorting to an occidentalist self-image (Carrier 1995),these interlocutors publicly advocate for accountability, audit culture, and theneed to repay the debt to Greece’s lenders. In media outlets that claim to rep-resent such an aesthetic (e.g., the Kathimerini newspaper), one often encountersthe idea that Greeks today are politically divided into those who (naively)ascribe blame to cryptically external forces and those who (maturely) seekresponsibility among Greeks themselves. In the former category, people ofboth leftwing and rightwing background are bundled together under theanti-memorandum rubric. The other category is supposed to be made up ofpro-memorandum political forces. Forms of Orientalism (Said 1978) and dis-tinction (Bourdieu 1984) play into this binary classification. This is evident,for instance, in the intellectual commentaries offered by the philosopherStelios Ramfos (2012) and the psychoanalyst M. Yosafat, who have argued,from their distinct perspectives, that Greeks are locked in culturally specificpathological structures that hinder their participation in an Enlightenmentcosmos of accountability, responsibility, and maturity. In public disputes,many agents who vocally oppose Greece’s austerity measures increasinglytend to identify this centrist rhetoric with treasonous complicity with thelenders’ interests. Greece is not unique, of course, in exhibiting internal Orien-talisms. The Italian nation-state is also characterized by such dynamics, al-though the Italian variety combines class divisions with regional andracialized claims to superiority (Schneider 1998), factors related to “centrifugalforces” less prevalent in Greece (Herzfeld 2003: 286).

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1049

Consider also the analysis offered by a middle-aged, middle-class Lacanianinterlocutor about an image that circulated in numerous Greek blogs and in inter-national outlets (figure 2). It portrays a mother complicitly handing a shirt to herprotester son, who appears in a tense moment of performative communication,though we cannot tell if he is addressing other protesters or the police. Thesubject position of a son in complicity with a mother who both endorses his trans-gression and subordinates it through her overprotectiveness is certainly familiar toGreeks, from various cultural registers. This familiarity is probably what trig-gered the blog responses that jokingly idolized themother. My Lacanian interloc-utor claimed, nevertheless, that what triumphs in the image is the absence of thefather (and, by extension, the actor’s identification with the father’s domain—thelaw). Supposedly, the father figure would impose a certain order on the patholog-ical synergy between mother and son. I am struck by the similarity between thisanalysis and the approach of the filmmaker Michael Haneke in his 2001 film ThePiano Teacher. During a key scene, the mother places a jacket over the shoulderof her middle-aged daughter, distracting her from her engagements with men andkeeping her confined within the sexualized dynamics of their morbidly dyadic re-lationship. The piece of clothing in both cases is the metaphor and vehicle of themother’s tender domination, an image also evoked in the final scene of AugustStrindberg’s play, The Father, when the old nurse places a straitjacket on themale protagonist following his exhausting defeat by his wife. In my Lacanianinterlocutor’s analysis, the protesting body is represented as an adolescent boy(misguidedly) revolting with the (infantilizing) assistance of the mother. In thisview, the ambiguous love of the mother lies behind Greek protesting practices.

FIGURE 2. Protestor and his mother outside the Greek Parliament in the February 2012 demonstra-tions against the austerity measures. Copyright and photograph by Simela Pantzartzi, Athens NewsAgency (ANA-MPA).


A Saidian reading (1978) of this analysis would certainly point to theattempt to construct a generic category of “protesters” that is immediately re-jected as perverse. From a similar perspective, the views of the allegedlysober center take us back to the theme of Greek reproductions of Eurocentricideas at the expense of other social groups within Greek society (e.g., Herzfeld2003: 294). Class certainly plays a role here. Those who claim to represent thisbourgeois aesthetic may invoke the importance of university studies in theWest, refer to terms (drawn from a neoliberal vocabulary) such as “innovation”or “entrepreneurship,” and express a certain antipathy toward the public sector,sympathizing instead with private sector employers and idealizing Greek indus-trialists of the past. In the face of the crisis, however, this same bourgeois aes-thetic is intriguingly destabilized, particularly in jocular spheres, by the sameactors who would otherwise endorse it.

S E X U A L I Z AT I O N : E C H O E S ( A G A I N ) A C R O S S D I F F E R E N T F I E L D S

A few months before figure 2 was taken, protesters raised a banner in the samesquare that compared Greece to the hotel maid allegedly raped by the then headof the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This imagery stirred a heated debate atthe general assembly that took place in the lower square (mostly frequentedby leftists) in which a young woman critiqued the banner for its aggressive an-drocentric aesthetics. Despite these feminist misgivings, the notion that Greeceis subjected to a castrating form of sexual domination is widely expressed byGreeks, often in the guise of jokes. The identification of Greece as male andGermany as female emerges in a variety of spheres, far exceeding the registersof self-ascribed virility that play out in, say, the relationships between Greekmen and Western female tourists.

This broader casting of gendered roles includes, for instance, the short filmAVery European Breakup (2012) by Bob Denham, which concerns the politicalrelationship between Greece and Germany as metaphorized through the rela-tionship of a Greek-German couple. Following a report about the film on theprivate TV channel Alpha, a Greek journalist asked an instructive question tothe male actor: “So did she succeed in dominating us? Us as Greeks and asmen?” The clash here is conceived as occurring on both a sexual and a nationalplain, with Greece being synonymous to manhood. Similarly, in the context ofthe U.S. university town, my male academic informants actually called theirGerman female friend “Germany.” This nickname cunningly employed theGreek grammar convention whereby Germany and “a German woman” areboth feminine nouns, differentiated only by the consonant delta (Ghermaniavs. Ghermanidha).

My rural Greek informants, in conversations about tourism, also tended toidentify the West as a female entity, contrasting it with Greekness. For them,Greekness ran the risk of becoming passively feminine by catering to tourists

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1051

and abandoning the idealized spheres of shepherding and farming. This view isreflected in ethnographies of tourism in Greece (e.g., Buck-Morss 1987: 216,217; Zinovieff 2006) that explore sexual affairs between Greek men and non-Greek, mostly Western European women. Such affairs are treated as a strategyfor appropriating foreign women, subordinating the symbolic threat they poseas representatives of powerful political forces that clash with the men to whomthese women putatively belong (Buck-Morss 1987: 216, 217; Zinovieff 2006).This is comparable to Bowman’s analysis of Palestinian vendors’ sexualizationof female tourists as compensation for political and economic damages and theprecarities of mercantile exchange in the Old City of Jerusalem (1989).

But what does the sexualization of Germany do for middle-class Greeks?The threat of Western-cum-female power, metaphorized further by the fact thatthe prime minister of Germany is a woman, is currently signified in multiplespheres as threatening the sovereignty of an imagined male national self. Thetendency to express this relationship as a joke rather than as an agonistic nar-rative downplays the certainty and positivity of what is uttered, making it pos-sible for middle-class actors to both affirm its content and deny it on thegrounds that it is simply a joke. “Germany fucked us,” said an academicpeer in the United States, referring to a German woman who recently brokeup with a Greek man. His utterance curiously echoed a Sphakian shepherd’sutterance, “they want to castrate us” (referring to the European lenders), inwhich the man used the local word for removing the testicles of a ram orbilly goat (munuchizo). This echo reverberates further in a pictorial montageportraying a cow labeled IMF humping a horse, labeled Greece, which I re-ceived in a humorous chain email concerning the crisis.

Even more, I was recently sent a picture of what appears to be a sticker (orperhaps stencil-graffiti) inside a public lavatory in Athens, which portraysAngela Merkel in an expression of disgust, indicating with her fingers thesize of the lavatory user’s penis (figure 3). The design can be seen as a wittymeditation on economic measurements and the corporeality of financial poli-cies. This picture, too, has echoes in other domains, as in the circulatedGreek web news about a German research project on European penis sizes,according to which Greeks scored low. A comparable expression of aversionin Merkel’s face is reproduced in the masks I photographed during a protestagainst her visit to Athens in October 2012. It is as if the procession mirrorsthe repugnance people attribute to her political stance, a moral interpretationof German politics (see Herzfeld 2011: 24) that embodies the disavowed oppo-nent as a means of rejecting her.

Dozens of users’ comments on Facebook below the sticker picture (figure 3)attribute the penis’s shrinkage to Merkel’s visual presence and particularly herputative unattractiveness. Here we arrive at current Greek engagements withAngela Merkel as a gendered subject. I recall the indignant question of a middle-class Greek-American businessman in New Jersey: “What is this woman?”


A comparable puzzlement over Merkel’s gendered identity is expressed byanotherGreek émigré, the hip-hop artist Alitiz, who fashions himself as a gangsterfrom the lower class of urban Germany. The artist’s own career, starting suppos-edly as a joke and acquiring enthused veneration by people who enjoy but alsomock his excess, illustrates the character of the jocular trope I am analyzing.His moniker is a slightly modified transliteration of the noun alitis, which couldbe roughly translated as “rogue” or “bum,” with connotations of transgressionand misconduct. In his song about Angela Merkel, which is replete with sexistand sexualized insults, Alitiz emphatically asks, “What are you exactly, a manor a woman?”

Another overlap between the hip-hop artist and the businessman is theway they conceive of kinship, which reflects an émigré preoccupation withblood and national belonging that has been cultivated by the Greek stateitself (Stewart 2006: 66, 68, 82). The Greek-American entrepreneur told methat he had heard that Merkel is related to Hitler, while Alitiz sings about hersupposed use of a Hitler poster as home decoration. For both men, Merkel,as a contemporary German national leader, belongs to an aesthetic and bloodlineage of German-ness that includes Nazism as an inherent trait and depictsHitler as an archetypical agnate. A striking parallel to this politics of kinship

FIGURE 3. Picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a public lavatory. Unknown artist.Taken from “Η χολή.”

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1053

was provided four decades ago in Peter Loizos’s ethnography of Greek Cypriotvillagers before the island’s division. In the heated 1970 elections, supporters ofthe Progressive Front (a populist, nationalist party that appealed especially toyoung rural men) questioned the legitimacy of the United Party, which waslead by an English-trained barrister and seen as a party of the privilegedurban bourgeoisie. Backers of the Progressive Front accused this leader ofhaving a picture of the Queen of England in his study; they also claimed hewas not a proper Christian Greek and associated his wife with the Turksbecause of her non-Greek descent (Loizos 1975: 237, 238, 254, 259). Theseaccusations linked the United Party to Cyprus’s recently overthrown British co-lonial regime and thus with treason, a linkage that, as we have seen, is central incontemporary Greek criticisms of the politicians who agreed to the memoran-dum and to austerity policies more broadly. In both Alitiz’s song and the Pro-gressive Front’s claims, the ownership and display of an image is seen as anabsolute sign of allegiance to the depicted figure, a pattern that highlights theprimacy of the visual in establishing and proving social bonds. The ProgressiveFront’s claims were particularly resonant because both Cypriot parties compet-ed to control the same national space, but the Progressive Front emphasized itsleader’s role in the anti-colonial struggle against the British. The ProgressiveFront also professed an uncompromising desire for union with Greece,which was fashioned as antithetical to the supposedly corrupt, middle-classposition on that issue (ibid.: 279). Again, in contemporary Greece it isexactly the notion of an uncompromising, pure stance that the fantasy of nativ-ism entertains. This pure stance is juxtaposed to the alleged duplicity of thegoverning political system.7

The idea that Merkel is not a proper female subject, that she steps overdesired gender boundaries, is poignantly expressed in prosthetic visual montagesthat circulate on the web in the guise of the joke. The picture editors add pre-dictable traits (e.g., oversized breasts), re-sexualizing Merkel in order to makeher the object of aggressive masculine sexuality. Elsewhere, she is shown as afemale tourist, which places her in the role of the foreign visitor who issubjugate-able through sexual affairs established with local men. In a picturethat circulated following the 2012 defeat of the Greek national football teamby “Germany,” Chancellor Merkel was portrayed as naked, in a bent overpose, being penetrated by the black Italian football player Mario Balotelli, anallusion to Italy’s victory over “Germany” in the same cup. The jocular com-ments below this image (some mocked the ridiculousness of the montageitself, but also celebrated the chancellor’s submission) could be read as signs

7 In the Greek popular imagination the “governing political system” mostly refers to the twoparties (PASOK and New Democracy) that have dominated the political scene over the past fourdecades. Syriza’s election in January 2015 is in fact related to the promise of breaking with thisgoverning system.


of a complex identification. The racist stereotype of black men as “licen-tious”—which itself enacts an ambivalent oscillation between veneration andrepugnance (Bhabha 2004: 108)—is used to equate Greekness with potent sex-uality. This “black Greek” is a fantasy of revenge allowed within the photo-graphic frame. Such cultural investments do not contradict the Orientaliststance the same Greek commentators might otherwise take towards blacks, es-pecially black migrants in Greece. Two things are happening politically in thedeployment of Balotelli’s image. First, the black male is seen as representativeof a subaltern class with whom the commentators establish empathetic affinitiesin contrast to Western political powers (see Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos2009: 98). Second, the same stereotype that stigmatizes black men for theirsupposed underdevelopment, their animality, leaves space for the venerationof potent sexuality (Bhabha 2004), a quality that is attractive for its avengingcapacity against the (feminine) West.

Pictures like these realize certain possibilities of photography that preex-isted digital technology, such as the representation of sitters in multiple rolesand postures through collage, as well as the use of props and backdrops inIndian studio photography (Pinney 1997), or the reassembly in a singleframe of deceased kin in photo-montages, which are often used in the mortuarypractices I recorded in western highland Crete. These doctored images encap-sulate a certain cultural investment in photography; they call upon photogra-phy’s capacity to induce effects beyond the realm of physical actuality. Inother words, they approach photography as being akin to magic (see Pinney2011: 12, 76–78). The web images I discuss here ought, therefore, to be ap-proached through questions of efficacy rather than meaning alone. Whatkind of “work is expected of them?” (Edwards 2012: 222).

The hint at how this question should be answered comes from a popularcomment on YouTube under a picture of Alitiz giving the Greek version ofthe middle finger to Angela Merkel (figure 4). YouTube user “Andreas19ist”invites other viewers to admire how Angela “the whore” is standing to attentionin front of Alitiz and “does not talk back.” The photographic frame is the spacewherein a power reversal is possible. Here, Angela Merkel is subjugated to thepotency of the male national subject (note the flag in the background). Giventhe intensity of people’s engagements with this iconography, the power reversalis arguably effective at a visceral level, where it is “animated” in one’s ownbody (Belting 2009: 307). I borrow the term “animation” from Hans Belting,who makes the body central in assessing how images “work on us” (ibid.:319). Viewing imagery is, in this sense, more than a passive reception ofsigns, and entails reviving an image in one’s own body, summoning and pro-ducing the image and filling it with personal experience (ibid.: 305–7, 315).Viewers temporarily become the black penetrators or the mischievous“rogues” who control Merkel’s movements; their gestures are enacted andenjoyed (or rejected and found repulsive) at the bodily level.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1055

Not surprisingly, approaches to Merkel, and to Germany as a whole, arefar from stable. Merkel’s androgynous image, for instance, can also produceawe. “Merkel has balls,” noted a retired civil servant in Thessaly, celebratingher prosecution of tax evaders in Germany, against the interests of Swissbanks. Another informant in the same village, a middle-aged farmer, recalledhow his migration to Germany “made him a human being,” meaning a law-abiding, hard-working citizen. His claim was identical to that of my London-residing friend (of quite different background, given his urbanite middle-classdescent), who said he knew a Greek man who “became a human being” as aresult of dating a German woman for five years. Germany is the ambivalentobject par excellence, venerated by Greeks of different background for itspolitical efficacy, technology, socialist policies, or even its gender politics.Germany can also inspire aversion among these same venerators for whatthey see as its dehumanizing instrumentality and intrusive spirit. In ways com-parable to colonial stereotyping, Greeks attempt to box Germany into fixed cat-egories yet end up in a vacillating dynamic in which veneration and aversionconstantly shift (Bhabha 2004).8

The Twitter and Facebook pages of members of the “Independent Greeks”party, known in Greece for its aesthetics of patriotic carnivalesque, often endow

FIGURE 4. Hip-hop artist Alitiz’s YouTube image.

8 The aversion aspect of the dynamic is increasingly attached to the figure of GermanMinister ofFinance W. Schäuble, who in Greek popular anti-austerity representations tends to be framed as thearchetype of an almost robotic, villainous instrumentality. There is interesting overlap between theway these Greek evocations operate and the semantic framing described by David MacDougall inhis discussion of how ethnographic filmmakers Frederic Wiseman and John Marshall used a par-ticular psychiatrist character in their film Titicut Follies as a means of producing the familiar arche-type of the “mad doctor” who is “often Germanic” and “a close cousin of a string of other maddoctors, stretching from Frankenstein and Jekyll to Caligari, Moreau, Mabuse and Strangelove”(1998: 42).


the motif of aggressive male sexuality that subordinates Western tutelage with acertain official status. The head of the party, Panos Kammenos (appointed Min-ister of Defense in January 2015), who inaugurated his campaign in Crete andmarked the island as an inspiration for themes of resistance, tweeted, in re-sponse to a Swedish minister’s allegedly demeaning 2013 statements, thatSwedish women spend the summer as tourists with Cypriot lovers onCypriot beaches. The tourist sphere emerges once again as a space of potentialrevenge, reversal, and transgression. As if to prove this point, before AngelaMerkel’s visit to Athens in October 2012 the actor and politician Pavlos Hai-kalis (appointed Deputy Minister of Social Security in July 2015) posted animage of a tied-up statue with an immense erection, captioned “Is shecoming on Tuesday?? Untie me!!!!!!!!!”

This nationalized portrayal of tourist encounters as a field of power andsensuality corresponds to the jokes made by my colleague’s German girlfriend.She often affectionately labeled her partner a Greek fisherman or shepherd, hu-morously comparing their relationship to that between an awkward femaleGerman tourist (with references to the supposedly revolting aesthetics ofwhite socks and sandals) and a sensually sunburned southern manual laborer.The girlfriend thus participated in the casting of Greece as male, Germany asfemale, within a paradigm of reverse negritude. Her investment in alterity—Said would have called it “latent Orientalism”—entails fantasy, enthusiasm,dreams, and desire for a world that is attractively different (Bhabha 2004: 102).

T H E J O C U L A R MODA L I T Y

Disavowals of the lenders’ power through the idiom of aggressive masculinityare judged at both the national and international levels as signs of ridiculous,intransigent nationalism. This assessment, made by advocates of a “sober”and “serious” politics, reflects only one side of things, and the mechanismsof “sober” political engagement often themselves reproduce, as a joke,sexist, aggressive responses to tutelage, giving them another life. For instance,Lifo, a free, image-heavy periodical and online platform that cultivates the self-image of a bourgeois aesthetic opposed to nationalism, occasionally reproduceshostile, sexualized reactions to the West for the purpose of mocking them.Despite the reality of critique at the discursive level, the visual representationof criticized arguments and performative images allows for their reappearance,revival, and reproduction. I draw here on Bernadette Bucher’s analysis of earlyEuropean representations of the Americas (1981). She argues that there can beno negation in the visual, since anything represented occupies the positivityof appearance, including what is being otherwise (verbally) diminished ordespised (Pinney 2006: 136). W.J.T. Mitchell similarly argues, in relation toMalek Alloula’s (1987) reproduction of colonial postcards depicting Algerianwomen as a means of “exorcising” their “ideological spell,” that such

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1057

reappearance hardly eschews the original, objectifying dynamic involved in theviewing of this material (1994: 310, 309).

Questions of visual ontology aside, I have repeatedly observed friends andinformants verbally criticizing a long list of what they consider stereotypicallyGreek responses to the crisis, such as the frenzy against Merkel, the conspira-torial analyses of the “crisis” and its causes, and the ridiculousness of carnival-esque protests against Merkel’s visit. The same people, however, engage in theexchange of messages, mostly through the Internet, in which they enthusiasti-cally reproduce and transmit imagery taken from the discourses they otherwisemock and critique.

When discussing, for example, the Greek football fans who supposedlywrote in 2012, “We don’t pay, you cunts!” on the German parliament building,my friends and interlocutors often call them “gods,” while simultaneously rid-iculing them for a series of deficiencies such as their incorrect English. Theother side of the cult of these “gods” is their placement in the cosmos of illit-eracy, even lunacy, a common designation for one’s political opponents inWestern contexts (Sontag 1991: 37, 77).

An image circulated recently on the web in which a semi-naked man dis-played aggressively sexual, but also incoherent banners during the 2012 pro-tests against Merkel’s visit. Partly due to his appearance, this man wasdescribed as “crazy” by one of my interlocutors, a diagnosis that denied theman’s critical credibility. Yet insanity, in the Greek context, also evokes desir-able attributes. It stands for a kind of bestial deliverance that carries “the threatof absolute freedom” (Foucault 2002: 78). The Greek terms for “madness”(trela) and “illness” (arrostia) are typically used in the context of sports spec-tatorship to designate embodied frenzy and satisfaction. This frenzy is espe-cially associated with combative male sociality played out through sexualtropes of domination (see also Giannakopoulos 2005). It is hardly accidentalthat one of my émigré friends, in discussing the embarrassing effects theGreek protests against Merkel produce when screened globally, jokingly admit-ted his desire to light up a flare and sing protest rhymes at his university so as toshock “the Harvard professor.” “The Harvard professor,” a visiting (non-Greek)scholar at his institute, was, in my friend’s eyes, a personification of high au-thority. Flares, commonly used in football matches, mostly among youngmale fans, were a means by which my friend could transgress against an author-ity he strongly respected. His expressed desire was funny exactly because it re-worked his vehement admiration for the professor and was in flagrant contrastto the daily etiquette of civility at the institution, which excludes the possibilityof entering the office with a flare.

At one level, the circulation of material that glorifies the aggressive re-sponses to tutelage is indicative of a cultural dynamic enabled through the In-ternet. Here, one may send material to others, justified by the sheer abundanceof available information, while oscillating between endorsement and derision.


Such information forwarding can employ the alibi that the sent material isbased on a collecting habit and focused on bizarre and amusing curios, evenif these are simultaneously reanimated and reengaged in the act of resending.Such reproductions are not confined to the web-world, however. My interloc-utors often jokingly stated their pleasure in seeing Western spectators shockedby aggressive Greek reactions to tutelage, especially when these spectatorshave offered critiques of Greece for its laziness or corruption. The same infor-mant who ridiculed the rhymes sung by football fans against a German team in2012—a close translation, appropriately ungrammatical in English, would be:“This is how those who owe to you, fuck you”—enthusiastically narrated theembodied shock produced in a café in a Northern European capital when heperformatively broke a glass during the Germany-Greece football game. Iwas struck by how similar this story was to another friend’s account of produc-ing surprise in a café in an East Asian capital during the same football matchbecause of his sustained screams, which obviously contrasted with localsocial etiquette.

There is, at present, a certain idiom of joking in which pleasure at and re-jection of aggressive national performances coexist. This idiom is expressed bymale, middle-class subjects who would reject such performances in formal con-texts of self-representation. Greeks who are seen as the authentic originators ofsuch performances (e.g., football fans) are not unproblematically accepted; theyare subject to rejection on the basis of things such as linguistic ability. They arecomparable to the social groups who, according to Kathleen Stewart, becomeobjects of nostalgia. These groups are glorified for their ability to speak authen-tically, yet they are dismissed as speaking “incorrectly” (1988: 228). Jokesabout “incorrect” linguistic utterances (e.g., those of Alitiz) are prefigured inGreek television shows and book editions, mostly addressed to middle-classaudiences, that feature malapropisms and blunders (especially those utteredin rural and poor urban settings) (e.g., Markopoulos 1995).

Mixed feelings of derision and desire are particularly intense amongmiddle-class informants who face criticisms of Greek laziness and corruptionwhile living abroad. Often, these informants privately celebrate the idiom ofviolent counter-response (e.g., of bringing up the Nazi past to a German),but they rarely enact it. In the form of social fantasy, they momentarily allywith actors they would normally reject for their lack of seriousness. I vividlyrecall a friend, who criticized my decision to do fieldwork in highland Crete,“Orientalizing” Cretan shepherds as macho bullies who mismanage EUfunds. He recently described in guilt-cum-delight how he wanted to embarrassa German acquaintance by insinuating the latter’s connection with Nazism fol-lowing an uncomfortable conversation about Greek tax corruption. His storyreminded me of a shepherd friend in highland Crete who told me that whenhe is faced with demeaning expectations from German tourists he respondsby saying the word “Nazi,” which allegedly embarrasses the Germans and

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1059

stops the conversation abruptly. It is as if the Cretan shepherd (who is otherwiserejected) fulfills my friend’s fantasy, which is hindered by certain conventions(politeness, sophistication, reserve).

The performed transgressions of “incorrect” subjects offer a liberating re-sponse to Orientalist assumptions about Greek backwardness, which reinforceEuropean public opinion about the precarious position of Greece withinWestern hierarchies of value. This Orientalism is particularly damaging tomiddle-class Greeks who identify with a bourgeois European style, but nowmore than ever find themselves in the position of the (globally) mockedsubject. The embodied satisfaction that comes with aggressive disavowals ofGerman tutelage is due partly to their sharp contrast with the public self-imagethat middle-class Greeks aspire to. This same satisfaction produces temporaryalliances and feelings of commonality with subjects (e.g., rural Greeks) who areexcluded from the bourgeois aesthetic, yet who become viscerally compellingin the face of imposed austerity and financial monitoring.

I was especially troubled, for instance, by my own and a friend’s suddenlaughter upon seeing a self-consciously preposterous “Nazi” vehicle in the pro-tests against Merkel’s visit (figure 5). This vehicle totally opposed our aestheticand ideological understanding of politics, yet it seemed to produce a certain ill-mannered enjoyment. I was reminded of Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea that to“be entertained means to give one’s consent” (Claussen 2008: 161). What en-tertainment was offered by such a performance, and what kind of consent werewe giving? The reflections of Stallybrass and White on the European carnival

FIGURE 5. The “Nazi vehicle” during the protests against Angela Merkel’s 2012 visit. October2012. Author’s photo.


and “the dialectics of social classification” (1986: 26) are relevant here. I inter-pret our laughter as a temporary embodiment of that which is excluded at theofficial level yet is immensely alluring precisely for its vulgar lowness (ibid.:4, 5, 191). Officially expelled from the middle-class self-image but providingfuel for fascination and longing, Greek aggressive performances createsubject positions that are nearly impossible to inhabit (ibid.). Relevant here isthe question of “desire in negativity,” apparent in other historical contexts, asin the nineteenth-century destruction of police stations by Indian peasants inAndhra Pradesh described by David Arnold (in O’Hanlon 1988: 206). Indianprotestors’ actions were incapable of offering structural change, manifestingthe partial failure contained in any form of dissent (see also Prakash 1994:1480). Though we are far from the world of nineteenth-century Indian peasants,it is important to remember that not all political practices in the Greek crisis areto be understood as consistent forms of critique and interpretation. Carnival-esque destruction and self-Orientalist explosions may in fact inform the re-sponses of people who usually affect stable political positions (like my friendwho laughed at the vehicle, a consistent critic of austerity from a communistperspective). This pattern might even account for the behavior of protestorswho embrace appeals “to go bankrupt,” appeals that Theodossopoulos readsmostly as discursive tactics and interpretative strategies (2013: 206). In otherwords, the negotiation of the crisis entails not just calculated tactics and“discursive weapons” of “empowerment” that subsume threats, pursue account-ability, or rationalize events through interpretation and blame-negotiation (peribid.: 202, 208, 209; 2014: 500). It also involves visceral eruptions and unpre-dictable performances that are deeply conflictual and ambivalent, offeringmostly (non-strategic) temporary pleasure at a level that engages the body.

Another picture that recently circulated on the web, both widely ridiculedand widely reproduced, shows a poster ad for a private language school inAthens on which someone has written with a marker, “Germany is beingfucked” (ghamietai i Ghermania), and crossed out “German” from the list ofcourse offerings (figure 6). The man who sent me the image was the onewhose grandfather had deterred him from studying German in school by refer-ring to the atrocities he had witnessed during the occupation of Athens (1941–1944). As if realizing his grandfather’s aversion, my friend claims that he hasnever been able to learn German, and he told me about the aggression he andhis classmates exhibited against the German language teachers in school.

This example reminded me of graffiti I encountered in 2007 on the asphaltroad of an abandoned village in western Crete, where German visitors hadbought extensive property (figure 7). Despite the shock they are likely toproduce, both inscriptions are conditioned by a set of limitations. The Cretanone, with its bad English (“Fak Germani” instead of “Fuck Germany”), willpossibly cause the spectators’ amusement. Written in an oily substance thatwill be quickly eroded by rain, it reflects the inability of its maker to reverse

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1061

FIGURE 6. Image of a language school poster with graffiti. Unknown photographer. Currentlyfound online at: http://athensville.blogspot.gr/2011_11_01_archive.html. The caption in the blogreads: “That’s a form of resistance too….”

FIGURE 7. Oily inscription on tarmac in western rural Crete. Photo by Giorgos Patroudakis and theauthor, October 2007.


http://athensville.blogspot.gr/2011_11_01_archive.html

the resented phenomenon (the passing of local property into “foreign” hands)because they do not possess the cultural and financial capital necessary for ef-ficacious resistance (see Kalantzis 2014: 67). The Cretan inscription is part ofwider negotiations over the power dynamics inherent to tourism. Negativity isonly one aspect of this process, since Germans are frequently included and ac-cepted in areas of local social life (see also Papataxiarchis 2006: 455). The fearof losing property to Germans and other outsiders is played out today on thenational level through media stories about the potential purchase of islandsand archaeological monuments, particularly the Acropolis, by the lenders(see also Yalouri 2001).

The “Fak” element resonates with the jocular salute that was dominantduring the October 2012 protests against the German chancellor’s visit toAthens: “[I] fuck Merkel” (Ghamo ti Merkel). There was a unifying power tothis salute, apparent in two scenes that I witnessed. In the first, a middle-agedleftist with a history of antipathy toward the police amicably called out “fuckMerkel” to a patrol officer, who responded with a slight smile. Second, a middle-aged woman whose bag was snatched by a motorcyclist broke the silence thatensued by shouting, “[I] fuck Merkel,” which produced intense laughteramong the café patrons and bystanders in that corner of Athens. Her statementwas funny for several reasons. It was incongruous, given that one might haveexpected her to accuse the thieves rather than Angela Merkel (although thereis an element of indirect blame in the innuendo claim that Merkel’s imposed aus-terity makes people steal for survival). Her statement allowed for a release of theaudience’s tension, given the intensity and danger of the moment. Her reactionalso brings to mind the old Hobbesian idea that laughter arises “from a suddenconception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity ofothers” (in Oring 1982: 63), an observation that is applicable here to the extentthat the audience potentially mocked the woman, while enjoying its exemptionfrom her plight. Finally, a dynamic of powerful veneration is possibly at play inthe laughter, idealizing the woman’s ability to adhere defiantly to her critique ofwider political forces despite a damaging attack by individuals. In any case, herutterance acted as a punchline, which drew the spectators’ attention back to theday’s main event, from which the theft digressed, and further condensed theday’s message to one of sexualized domination over the German chancellor.It was a woman assuming the role of sexual domination over another woman(perhaps another reason for the spectators’ laughter), a move enabled by heridentification with the nation, which is envisioned in such contexts as a maleaggressor.9

I finish with the “Fak Germani” inscription because it condenses many ofthis essay’s points. The graffiti was located on the Greek periphery, in a region

9 For the comparable role of Greek women football spectators, see Giannakopoulos 2005: 64.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1063

associated with notions of resistance. It manifests a reaction that tends to stig-matize the graffiti authors themselves, yet offers pleasure to middle-class spec-tators within a jocular idiom (two friends enthusiastically pointed to this signwhile walking with me in the village). It thus echoes in realms far beyondthe rural Cretan context. The inscription is currently in dialogue with the na-tional media and nationalized anxieties as it encapsulates fears regardingforeign house buying. It envisions tutelage not as an abstract notion but asthe visceral penetration of the (national) body itself.

C O N C L U S I O N

This essay has traversed various cultural fields in exploring Greek responses tothe financial crisis. These entail anxiety about the position of the nation-stateglobally, fantasies of nativism, resort to historical figures in classifying thepresent, the dynamics of internal Orientalism, the perception of Germany asa threatening female force, and the practice of sexualized joking. I have empha-sized embodiment and materiality, the perspective of ambivalence, and ques-tions of desire and pleasure. By comparing different registers and spheres, Ihave revealed strong convergences between people of different social back-grounds. Greeks become imaginarily black, urbanite Athenians endorseCretan shepherds’ anti-German utterances, and metropolitan leftists employcategories fundamental to national identification. All of this is part of theemerging “erotics of nationhood,” to redeploy terminology Appadurai inventedto describe Indian cricket spectatorship (1996: 111).

My point about these convergences is not that Sphakian shepherds andLondon-residing Athenians belong structurally to the same cultural universe,even though the Greek class system is arguably not as consolidated in culturalterms as in other European cases, such as France as described by Bourdieu(1984). My argument is that the financial crisis, and the sense of dominationit creates, disgorges certain cultural materials, particularly among middle-classGreeks. These materials exceed the self-image of middle-class individuals,dragging them closer, in terms of identification and desire, to positions occu-pied by or ascribed to other groups, such as rural Greeks. The context of thecrisis, therefore, produces shifts in the experience of nationhood, revealingthe irresistible lure, for different Greeks, of unruly (yet fundamental) “stuff”that inhabits the national imaginary. The latter include motifs of an avengingmale sexuality directed against the (feminine) West, ideas of transgressivenatives fighting against treason, and playful rogues undermining Westernizedcivility. Of course, these shifts in patterns of national identification do not elim-inate ruptures and class-cultural cleavages, which reemerge in other momentsand contexts. It is useful to remember that middle-class anti-tutelage perfor-mances resort to the modality of joking in order to justify the transcendingof boundaries that are in fact integral to middle-class self-images. The jokeas a form is what allows this (temporary) recasting of boundaries, while the


endorsement of elements classified as “low” triggers guilt and derision as wellas delight and pleasure, especially when Western observers are imagined as theaudience for these performative transgressions.

This ill-mannered delight, which includes elements of segmentary organi-zation whereby clashing social groups harmonize in the face of an externalthreat (see Herzfeld 2003), is in my account a question neither of “resistance”nor of the reproduction of power relations. Jokes and humor are often seen inanthropology as either a sign of subaltern subversive resourcefulness (e.g.,Jackson 2005: 189) or complicit reproduction “that leaves power relationsintact” (Faris 1997: 211). I have moved away from this dilemma, focusinginstead on the embodied experiences, the explosive conflictual reflexes andpleasures, which make middle-class actors uneasy even as, at the viscerallevel, they do things for them.

Across the Greek public sphere different constituencies and interestgroups promote fixed political positions, for and against the memorandum.Yet a part of the middle-class, composed largely of young adults, is caughtbetween Orientalisms and disappointment about Greece’s problems of govern-ability, between bitterness about the nation-state’s subjection to surveillanceand difficulty in trusting specific models of escaping the crisis. As with mostGreeks, these subjects are experiencing an “evaporation of the near future”that is perhaps an inherent result of IMF structural adjustment policies(Guyer 2007: 410). Furthermore, they face the threat of (re)encountering mo-dernity as loss of property and the means of production (Buck-Morss 1987:227), as pervasive changes in taxation, labor laws, and income that are affectingpatterns of inheritance, social care, and employment. For these embattled sub-jects, the jocular embodiment of a debased form of anti-colonial aggression iswhat allows the suturing of sober self-images to a dreadfully delightful sense ofincorrect disavowal.10

R E F E R E N C E S

Adorno, Theodor W. 2005 [1951]. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.E.F.N Jephcott, trans. London: Verso.

Alloula, Malek. 1987. The Colonial Harem. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

10 This paper focuses on the period 2011–2013, during which the Greek government expressedformal agreement with the lenders’ proposed austerity measures (this agreement phase roughlycovers the years 2010–2014). Since January 2015, the newly appointed government, an alliancebetween leftwing SYRIZA and rightwing ANEL, is explicitly opposed to European tutelage.That anti-austerity is now official rhetoric could affect the collective sense of transgression. Oppo-sition to the policies and practices of the present government enables new alliances mostly acrossthe center and right of the political spectrum, while new versions and nuances of anti-tutelage arebeing formulated by different members of the government, especially following the July 2015agreement between Greece and the lenders that is officially set to extend austerity. I have addedsome observations on recent developments to the paper. In any case, the anti-tutelage idiom de-scribed in this essay still had anti-government connotations.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1065

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Argyrou, Vassos. 2002. Tradition, Modernity and European Hegemony in the Mediter-ranean. Journal of Mediterranean Studies 12, 1: 23–42.

Athanasiou, Athena. 2012. I Krisi os Katastasi Ektaktis Anagis. Athens: Savvalas.Belting, Hans. 2009. Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology. CriticalInquiry 31, 2: 302–19.

Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and theDiscourse of Colonialism. In Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London:Routledge, 94–120.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bowman, Glenn. 1989. Fucking Tourists: Sexual Relations and Tourism in Jerusalem’sOld City. Critique of Anthropology 9: 77–93.

Bucher, Bernadette. 1981. Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrationsof De Bry’s Great Voyages. Basia Miller Gulati, trans. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1987. Semiotic Boundaries and the Politics of Meaning: Modernityon Tour—AVillage in Transition. In Marcus G. Raskin and Herbert J. Bernstein, eds.,New Ways of Knowing: The Sciences, Society and Reconstructive Knowledge.Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 200–36.

Cabot, Heath. 2014. On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Carrier, James G. 1995. Introduction. In James G. Carrier, ed.,Occidentalism: Images ofthe West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–32.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for“Indian” Pasts? Representations 37: 1–26.

Claussen, Detlev. 2008. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Rodney Livingstone,trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Clifford, James and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics andPolitics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dalakoglou, Dimitris. 2012. Beyond Spontaneity: Crisis, Violence and CollectiveAction in Athens. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action16, 5: 535–45.

Edwards, Elizabeth. 2012. Objects of Affect: Photography beyond the Image. AnnualReview of Anthropology 41: 221–34.

Faris, James. 1997. Comment on James Weiner, Televisualist Anthropology: Represen-tation, Aesthetics, Politics. Current Anthropology 38, 2: 211–13.

Faubion, James. 1993. Modern Greek Lessons: A Primer in Historical Constructivism.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 2002 [1961]. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in theAge of Reason. Richard Howard, trans. London: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund. 2001. The Infantile Genital Organization. In James Strachey ed. andtrans., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of SigmundFreud, Volume 19. London: Vintage, 141–48.

Giannakopoulos, Kostas. 2005. Polemoi metaksy Andhron: Podhosfairo, AndhrikesSexualikotites kai Ethnikismoi. Syghrona Themata 88: 58–67.

Gupta, Akhil. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture ofPolitics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22, 2: 375–402.

Guyer, Jane. 2007. Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evan-gelical and Punctuated Time. American Ethnologist 34, 3: 409–21.


Herzfeld, Michael 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a CretanMountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2002. The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism.South Atlantic Quarterly 101, 4: 899–926.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2003. Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: CretanReflections. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 2: 281–310.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the GlobalHierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, fromEpistemology to Eating. In William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 45–63.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2011. Crisis Attack: Impromptu Ethnography in the Greek Mael-strom. Anthropology Today 27, 5: 22–26.

Hirschon, Renée. 2012. Cultural Mismatches: Greek Conduct in the Current Euro Sit-uation. At: http://blog.oxfordcollegeofmarketing.com/2012/02/06/cultural-mismatches-greek-conduct-in-the-current-euro-situation/ (accessed 4 July 2015).

Jackson, Michael. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, Effects.New York: Berghahn Books.

Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2012. Crete as Warriorhood: Visual Explorations of SocialImaginaries in “Crisis.” Anthropology Today 28, 3: 7–11.

Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2013. Comment on Dimitris Theodossopoulos, Infuriated withthe Infuriated? Blaming Tactics and Discontent about the Greek Financial Crisis.Current Anthropology 54, 2: 212–13.

Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2014. On Ambivalent Nativism: Hegemony, Photography and“Recalcitrant Alterity” in Sphakia, Crete. American Ethnologist 41, 1: 56–75.

Kalantzis, Konstantinos. 2015. Shepherds as Images, Shepherds with Images: Photo-graphic (Re)engagements in Sphakia, Crete. In Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis,and Eleni Papargyriou, eds., Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materiali-ties. Farnham: Ashgate, 313–35.

Kirtsoglou, Elizabeth and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. 2009. Intimacies of Anti-Globalization: Imagining Unhappy Others as Oneself in Greece. In Dimitrios Theo-dossopoulos and Elizabeth Kirtsoglou, eds.,United in Discontent: Local Responses toCosmopolitanism and Globalization. Oxford: Berghahn, 83–102.

Knight, Daniel M. 2012. Cultural Proximity: Crisis, Time and Social Memory in CentralGreece. History and Anthropology 23, 3: 349–74.

Knight, Daniel M. 2013a. The Greek Economic Crisis as Trope. Focaal—Journal ofGlobal and Historical Anthropology 65: 147–59.

Knight, Daniel M. 2013b. Localising National Protest: The Nuances of Greek PoliticalAllegiance. Suomen Anthropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society38, 1: 111–15.

Knight, Daniel M. 2015. Wit and Greece’s Economic Crisis: Ironic Slogans, Food, andAntiausterity Sentiments. American Ethnologist 42, 2: 230–46.

Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology 47,6: 933–52.

Loizos, Peter. 1975. The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village. Oxford: BasilBlackwell.

MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Markopoulos, Dimitris. N. 1995. Eite Paidhes Ellinon, Eite Paidhes Varvaron: Kai taDhyo dhen Ghinetai. Athens: Gnosi.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1067

http://blog.oxfordcollegeofmarketing.com/2012/02/06/cultural-mismatches-greek-conduct-in-the-current-euro-situation/









Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.Chicago: Chicago University Press.

O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 1988. Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories ofResistance in Colonial South Asia. Modern Asian Studies 22, 1: 189–224.

Oring, Elliott. 1982. Review of Charles R. Gruner’s Understanding Laughter: TheWorkings of Wit and Humor and Ethelyn G. Orso’s Greek Humor: A Collection ofJokes and Ribald Tales. Western Folklore 41, 1: 62–66.

Orso, Ethelyn G. 1979. Greek Humor: A Collection of Jokes and Ribald Tales. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1995. Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal. Compar-ative Studies in Society and History 37, 1: 173–93.

Panourgiá, Neni. 2005. Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State.New York: Fordham University Press.

Panourgiá, Neni. 2011. The Squared Constitution of Dissent. In “Hot Spots: Beyond the‘Greek Crisis’: Histories, Rhetorics, Politics.” Special issue of Cultural Anthropology,at: http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/252-the-squared-constitution-of-dissent (ac-cessed 3 June 2015).

Papailias, Penelope. 2011. Witnessing the Crisis. In “Hot Spots: Beyond the ‘GreekCrisis’: Histories, Rhetorics, Politics.” Special issue of Cultural Anthropology, at:http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/246-witnessing-the-crisis (accessed 3 June 2015).

Papamanousakis, Stratis. 1979. I Ksenokratia stin Kriti. Athens: Kalvos.Papataxiarchis, Εvthymios. 2006. To Kathestos tis Diaforetikotitas stin Elliniki Koino-nia: Ypotheseis Ergasias. In Evthymios Papataxiarchis, ed., Peripeteies tis Eterotitas:I Paraghoghi tis Politismikis Dhiaforas stin Simerini Elladha. Αthens: Alexandreia,407–69.

Pinney, Christopher. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs.London: Reaktion.

Pinney, Christopher. 2002. Visual Culture. In Victor Buchli, ed., The Material CultureReader. Oxford: Berg, 81–86.

Pinney, Christopher. 2006. Four Types of Visual Culture. In Christopher Tilley, WebbKeane, Susan Kuechler, and Michael Rowlands, eds., Handbook of MaterialCulture. London: Sage, 131–44.

Pinney, Christopher. 2011. Photography and Anthropology. London: Reaktion.Prakash, Gyan. 1994. Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism. American HistoricalReview 99: 1475–90.

Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2014. The Crisis Seen from Below, Within, and Against:From Solidarity Economy to Food Distribution Cooperatives in Greece. DialecticalAnthropology 38: 189–207.

Ramfos, Stelios. 2012. Time Out. Athens: Armos.Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Schepher-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. The Primacy of the Ethical: Proposition for a MilitantAnthropology. Current Anthropology 36, 3: 409–40.

Schneider, Jane, ed. 1998. Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country.Oxford: Berg.

Sontag, Susan. 1991. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London:Penguin.

Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Stewart, Charles. 2006. Creolization, Omogéneia and the Greek Diaspora. Diaspora 15,1: 61–88.

Stewart, Kathleen. 1988. Nostalgia—A Polemic. Cultural Anthropology 3, 3: 227–41.


http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/252-the-squared-constitution-of-dissent






http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/246-witnessing-the-crisis




Sutton, David. 1997. Local Names, Foreign Claims: Family Inheritance and NationalHeritage on a Greek Island. American Ethnologist 24, 2: 415–37.

Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory.Oxford: Berg.

Sutton, David. 2003. Poked by the “Foreign Finger” in Greece: Conspiracy Theory orthe Hermeneutics of Suspicion? In Keith S. Brown and Yannis Hamilakis, eds.,The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 191–210.

Theodossopoulos, Dimitris. 2013. Infuriated with the Infuriated? Blaming Tactics andDiscontent about the Greek Financial Crisis. Current Anthropology 54, 2: 200–21.

Theodossopoulos, Dimitris. 2014. The Ambivalence of Anti-Austerity: Indignation inGreece: Resistance, Hegemony and Complicity. History and Anthropology 25, 4:488–506.

Varoufakis, Yannis. 2014. Being Greek and an Economist while Greece Is Burning!An Intimate Account of a Peculiar Tragedy. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32,1: 1–23.

Yalouri, Eleana. 2001. The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford. Berg.Yiakoumaki, Vassiliki. 2011. Contesting Histories of Greek Student Protest, or theDebate on “Open” and “Closed” Universities. In “Hot Spots: Beyond the ‘GreekCrisis’: Histories, Rhetorics, Politics.” Special issue of Cultural Anthropology, at:http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/248-contesting-histories-of-greek-student-protest-or-the-debate-on-open-and-closed-universities (accessed 3 June 2015).

Zinovieff, Sofka. 2006 [1992]. Ellines Antres ke Ksenes Ghinekes: To “Kamaki” se miaEparhiaki Poli. In Evthymios Papataxhiarchis and Theodoros Paradellis, eds., Taftotiteske Fillo stin Sighhroni Elladha: Anthropologhikes Proseggiseis. Athens: Alexandreia.

Abstract: This essay explores Greek responses to the debt crisis, particularlymiddle-class Greeks and their current experiences of Greece’s putative subordi-nation to Germany in particular, and IMF and EU monitoring generally. I focuson the sphere of materiality and embodiment, while also exploring the role ofdesire and pleasure in Greeks’ responses to their growing sense of subordination.Graffiti, popular protests, hip-hop expressive culture, and sexual joking are lensesthrough which I examine these themes. I also scrutinize my own positionality as away of understanding the bitterness and ambiguity entailed in Greek reactions tothe crisis. The essay illuminates how Greeks experience subjugation and respondto it through explosive resort to historical comparisons, sexual metaphors, and ill-mannered jokes.

“ F A K G E R M A N I ” 1069

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/248-contesting-histories-of-greek-student-protest-or-the-debate-on-open-and-closed-universities

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/248-contesting-histories-of-greek-student-protest-or-the-debate-on-open-and-closed-universities

“Fak Germani”: Materialities of Nationhood and Transgression in the Greek Crisis

Documents

Transcript of “Fak Germani”: Materialities of Nationhood and Transgression in the Greek Crisis