Sensing the Everyday: Dialogues from Austerity Greece

265 Pages·2019·13.881 MB·English

by  C. Nadia Seremetakis

SENSING THE EVERYDAY
Sensing the Everyday is a multi-sited ethnographic inquiry based on fieldwork
experiences and sharp everyday observations in the era of crisis. Blending sophisti-
cated theoretical analyses with original ethnographic data, C. Nadia Seremetakis
journeys from Greece to Vienna, Edinburgh, Albania, Ireland, and beyond. Social
crisis is seen through its transnational multiplication of borders, thresholds and
margins, divisions, and localities as linguistic, bodily, sensory, and performative sites
of the quotidian in process. The book proposes everyday life not as a sanctuary or
as a recessed zone distanced from the structural violence of the state and the
market, but as a condition of im/possibility, unable to be lived as such, yet still an
encapsulating habitus. There the impossibility of the quotidian is concretized as
fragmentary and fragmenting material forces. Seremetakis weaves together topics as
diverseasbordersandbodies,historyanddeath,theearthandthesenses,languageand
affect,violenceandpublicculture,thesocialityofdreaming,andthe spatializationof
thetraumatic,inajourneythroughantiphonicwitnessingandmemory.Hermontage
exploresvariouswaysofjuxtaposingrealitywiththeirrealandtheimaginaltoexpose
thefictioningofsocialreality.Thebooklocatesherapproachtoethnographyandthe
‘native ethnographer’ in wider anthropological and philosophical debates, and
proposes a dialogical interfacing of theory and practice, the translation of academic
knowledgetopublicknowledge.
C. Nadia Seremetakis is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of
the Peloponnese, Greece. She has authored several acclaimed books and articles in
English and Greek, including poetry, and has been actively engaged in public
anthropology in both Europe and the USA, where she lived and taught for more
than two decades.
Theorizing Ethnography
Series Editors: Paul Boyce, Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, EJ Gonzales-Polledo, and
Silvia Posocco
The ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ book series seeks to reorient ethnographic engage-
ments across disciplines, methods and ways of knowing. By focusing on ethno-
graphy as a point of tension between abstract thinking and situated life-worlds, the
series promotes ethnographic method and writing as an analytical form that is
always partial, open-ended and epistemologically querying.
Against this background, ‘Theorizing Ethnography’ employs ‘concept’, ‘context’
and ‘critique’ as devices to stimulate creative ethnographic thinking that transects
lines of analysis and location. It publishes work that reaches beyond academic,
political and life-world divisions, and as such the series seeks to foster contributions
from across socially and critically engaged fields of practice.
Recent titles in series:
Sensing the Everyday
Dialogues from Austerity Greece
C. Nadia Seremetakis
On the Emic Gesture
Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner
Iracema Dulley
www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Ethnography/book-series/THEOETH
SENSING THE EVERYDAY
Dialogues from Austerity Greece
C. Nadia Seremetakis
Firstpublished2019
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To those who re-member the present
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xi
PARTI
Interfaces 1
1 On board/on border 3
The ethnographic miniatures 5
Theory in practice 9
2 Dialogue/the dialogical 14
Appendix I: On performance: theater, film versus ritual 23
Appendix II: The public face of anthropology 26
PARTII
Death drives in the city 29
3 Theatrocracy and memory in austerity times 31
Awakening 31
Third stream memory 33
The aperceptual present 34
Theatrokratia and citizenship 36
The cartographic order 38
Silent détournement: from cities of the dead to death in the city 39
viii Contents
Space profaned 41
Gendering the sacred 43
The pre-secular modern 45
Grave selfies 46
The second life 48
4 Modern cities of silence: Disasters, nature and the petrified
bodies of history 52
The city of statues 52
Excavating private memory 55
Bodies in ruins 56
The city without walls 61
The object(s) of memory: managing the uninheritable 64
Re-membering the present 66
Ruins and ashes: re-witnessing the natural 70
Losing place 73
5 Wounded borders: The arrival of the ‘Barbarians’ 78
Europe besieged by the border 81
New space of flows 83
6 Eros and thanatos in transnational Europe 89
Medicine, information and body consumption: Gioconda 90
Fascination beneath the surface 92
The transnationalized body 95
Uncertain bodies 100
Older dramas 102
Postscript: Eros and thanatos re-covered 103
PARTIII
Senses revisited 109
7 Touch and taste 111
Touch/tactility – a backstage 111
Touching taste and memory – the play 118
Aftertastes 130
Contents ix
8 Border echoes 133
The sob 134
From the borders of the inside 136
Tactile sounds 137
PARTIV
Sensing the invisible 141
9 Divination, media and the networked body of modernity 143
Telepresencing theodicy 143
Evil eye and somatic witnessing 148
Shadow modernity 150
Divination and the involuntary body 152
The spell 155
Cup: a cosmological interior 156
The moral economy of reading and witnessing 159
Gendering the invisible 162
The social nervous system via involuntary gestures 162
Remediations 163
10 A last word on dreaming 168
Intangible culture 171
In and out 171
Debts and payments 172
PARTV
Borders of translatability 175
11 On ‘native’ ethnography in modernity 177
Ethnographic translation 184
Import anthropology 185
12 Ethnopoetic dialogues: Performing local history 192
13 Performing intercultural translation 198
Multiculturalism and legislation 202