Dealing with Undeniable Differences in Thessaloniki’s Solidarity Economy of Food (original) (raw)
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The research is aimed at presenting novel evidence on the contemporary dynamics of food sovereignty initiatives and short agri-food chains that were triggered by the crisis. Based on a qualitative approach that combines both a theoretical framework and empirical research, the chapter unfolds the characteristics of two main types of direct food purchasing networks between producers and consumers: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and Markets Without Middlemen (MWM). The research mainly addresses new alliances and complementarities between rural and urban areas and the potential for food system transformation at the local, regional and national scales. The analysis shows that such initiatives can have a transformative effect on rural-urban linkages and patterns of food production, distribution and consumption, by promoting locally defined solutions based on reciprocity and solidarity. Moreover, it sheds light on the interplay between formal and informal public and civic practices and their influence on institutional and political recognition processes. Embedded in a wider discourse on the ethics of food, food system resilience, rural-urban development, urban food strategies, social inclusion, food sovereignty, health and food culture, the chapter discusses diverse perspectives on food system transformation.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2014
Anthropological literature on crises and social and solidarity economies can benefit from integrated approaches that assess grassroots cooperatives formed during critical periods of capitalist recession. This article debates on why it is problematic to conceptualize the Greek crisis as exceptional and then examines the relationship between the solidarity economy and cooperatives and argues that the latter is a development of the former in the future plans of people struggling against the crisis being witnessed in Greece. It moreover makes a case for there being a need to pay more attention to the distribution sector. Its main aim is to point out how participants engaged in initiatives related to the solidarity economy tend to imagine that their activities are inspired by larger aims and claims than the immediate significance of their material actions. This is done by ethnographically analyzing organized social responses against crises through the rise of popular solidarity economies associated with distribution of food without middlemen.
Solidarity bridges: Alternative food economies in urban Greece
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Set in the urban-rural continuum of Thessaloniki, this paper explores the grounded social activities of certain groups, committed to building a social economy of distributing food without intermediaries. In the light of new ethnographic data from grassroots responses to livelihoods’ hardship, I propose to expand reciprocity's conceptual boundaries, extended to include a local concept rampant in crisis-ridden Greece: solidarity. The solidarity economy can be seen as a conceptual and political bridge that symbolically as well as materially brings together communities of food production and consumption. The cosmology of the horio (village) is an unexpected urban activist metonym in the food distribution systems that have emerged amidst austerity measures in Greece
2018. Solidarity bridges: alternative food economies in urban Greece
Set in the urban-rural continuum of Thessaloniki, this paper explores the grounded social activities of certain groups, committed to building a social economy of distributing food without intermediaries. In the light of new ethnographic data from grassroots responses to livelihoods' hardship, I propose to expand reciprocity's conceptual boundaries, extended to include a local concept rampant in crisis-ridden Greece: solidarity. The solidarity economy can be seen as a conceptual and political bridge that symbolically as well as materially brings together communities of food production and consumption. The cosmology of the horio (village) is an unexpected urban activist metonym in the food distribution systems that have emerged amidst austerity measures in Greece.
Anthropological literature on crises and social and solidarity economies can benefit from integrated approaches that assess grassroots cooperatives formed during critical periods of capitalist recession. This article debates on why it is problematic to conceptualize the Greek crisis as exceptional and then examines the relationship between the solidarity economy and cooperatives and argues that the latter is a development of the former in the future plans of people struggling against the crisis being witnessed in Greece. It moreover makes a case for there being a need to pay more attention to the distribution sector. Its main aim is to point out how participants engaged in initiatives related to the solidarity economy tend to imagine that their activities are inspired by larger aims and claims than the immediate significance of their material actions. This is done by ethnographically analyzing organized social responses against crises through the rise of popular solidarity economies associated with distribution of food without middlemen.
Responding to the crisis: food co-operatives and the solidarity economy in Greece
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2013
This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the antimiddleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece. I explore their efforts to turn the food market they have established in Athens into a formal co-operative which links consumers in their neighbourhood directly to selected farmers through bonds of solidarity, and to work with others to create a network of similar co-operatives which will span the whole country. I argue that their endeavours strongly resemble the co-operativism and practical socialism advocated by important social theorists such as Mauss and Polanyi, and suggest that it may be important for the young activists in Athens to learn more about their ideas.
Alternative economies are commonly depicted as a product of the will of individuals or groups, or as a spontaneous and cumulative reaction to an impact, be it crisis or neoliberalism more generally. Their fate is to transform the world, either gradually or through the clash of models. On the other hand, critics usually see them as a product of neoliberalism, or even capitalism. They are condemned thus to co-optation and marginality, or they just embody neoliberal forms, practices, and subjectivities. In this thesis, I chart an alternative explanation for why and how alternative economies emerge and develop, as well as provide a different lens through which to understand their transformative potential. I investigate these questions by looking at alternative food economies in the post-2008 economic crisis. In order to gain a deep comprehension of real-life events embedded in context, I base my research on two case-studies: the case of new agroecological ‘peasants’ in the Basque Country (Spain), and that of ‘no-middlemen’ solidarity food distributions in Greece. Drawing on fieldwork research, on analytical tools derived from political ecology and food sovereignty literatures, and on Bensaïd’s and Gramsci’s insights on radical politics, this thesis deals with important conceptual and practical questions regarding resistance to neoliberalism, emancipatory strategies, and political agency. My main argument is that alternative food economies can be an integral part of activist strategies engaged in struggles over hegemony, which seek to produce critical and active subjects and, ultimately, move the subaltern to a position of leadership. In the Basque Country, denaturalizing hegemonic ideas and practices regarding agribusiness and normalizing peasant alternatives is a key focus of small farmers’ strategy of building alliances and a large social movement fighting for food sovereignty. In Greece, tackling farmers’ difficulties and food insecurity through ‘solidarity’ is a strategic step towards advancing counter-austerity ideas and practices to engage people in ‘practical-critical’ activity. Whereas alternative food economies may provide opportunities to politicize politics, create spaces of politicization and self-organization of the subaltern, and generate learning processes on how society-nature relations can be organized differently, they also face challenges, as they are not outside (because there is no outside to) capitalism. The difficulties faced by agroecological producers call us to pay more attention to the relation between working-time and free-time for politics in alternative models. Efforts to develop alternatives must focus on providing the subaltern with the material and subjective conditions that enable them to become ‘agents of their own history’. A politics that tackles social reproduction needs and builds a ‘politics of hope’ is therefore relevant. Indeed, environmental struggles may involve broader social and political goals, beyond concerns over access to resources and the environment or securing livelihoods; this shows the productive relationship between diverse struggles.
“NEW” GREEK FOOD SOLIDARITIES (ALLILEGGIÍ) Communalism vis-à-vis Food in Crisis Greece
2018 - Special Issue: Practices of Resistance, 2018
When I first began to reflect on the work I had conducted for my Ph.D. dissertation between 2008 and 2010 1 in the southern Peloponnesian prefecture of Laconia (which was primarily about Greek/non-Greek farmer relationships [Verinis 2015]), I sought to account for some statistical evidence that many non-Greeks had left Greece since the onset of the financial crisis. 2 Mainstream media has focused heavily on the rise of support for the Greek far right, particularly the now infamous neofascist party Chryssí Avgí, or Golden Dawn, whose members have been responsible for all sorts of brutal and illegal acts against individuals they deem unworthy of Greek identity. This data and media focus has somewhat overshadowed interest in solidarity movements as well as the seemingly paradoxical evidence I had collected during my dissertation fieldwork-that many bonds between Greeks and non-Greeks in rural areas had strengthened since the early 1990s. 3 What is more, to say that economic migrants are not simply exploited by neoliberalism is generally anathema to anthropology, despite its interest in data niches visà-vis qualitative approaches such as my focus on a certain relatively small group of economic immigrants. Nonetheless, inspired by the unprecedented achievements and future visions of certain Albanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians, Bulgarians as well as farmers of other South-Eastern/Eastern European/Balkan ethno-nationalities whom I have had experiences working with in Greece, I remained convinced that certain forms of co-ethnic In this paper I extend the anthropological analyses of "new" solidarity (allileggií) networks or movements in Greece to rural regions and agricultural life as well as new groups of people. Food networks such as the "potato movement", which facilitates the direct sales of agricultural produce, reveals rural aspects of networks that are thought to be simply urban phenomena. "Social kitchens" are revealed to be humanistic as well as nationalistic, bringing refugees, economic migrants, and Greeks together in arguably unprecedented ways. Through a review of such food solidarity movements-their rural or urban boundaries as well as their egalitarian or multicultural tenets-I consider whether they are thus more than mere extensions of earlier patterns of social solidarity identified in the anthropological record.
Urban Food Activism in Athens: Recovering More Autonomous Forms of Social Reproduction
2019
As the feminist philosopher of the autonomist Marxist tradition Silvia Federici witnessed after visiting various spaces in Athens that emerged between the mobilisations of 2008 and 2015: ‘neither capital nor the state provide any means of reproduction-they exist only as repressive forces, so many have begun to pool their resources and create more collective forms of reproduction as the only guarantee of survival’ (Federici and Sitrin 2016). During the last wave of neoliberalisation, the slashing of social protection, coupled with the destruction of waged labour and insufficient incomes, unfolded a crisis of social reproduction and care with important relevance in the southern European peripheries (Hadjimichalis 2014; Hadjimichalis and Hudson 2014; Lekakis and Kousis 2013; Zechner and Hansen 2015).
Why and how do alternative economies emerge, how do they develop and what is their contribution, if any, to transformative politics? Alternative economies proliferate in the countries worse hit by economic crisis and austerity, such as Spain or Greece. Yet the existing literature is stuck in a counter-productive division between celebration and critique. We move beyond this division applying philosopher Daniel Bensaïd's understanding of politics to two alternative food economies, one in the Basque Country and one in Greece. We illuminate the activist strategies and specific conjunctures within which the two alternatives emerged and explain how they develop in the face of political-economic barriers. Alternative economies, we conclude, can be transformational when they are inserted in activist strategies directed to extend conflict, social struggles and challenge the capital–state nexus. Resumen: ¿Por qué y cómo emergen las economías alternativas, cómo se desarrollan y de que manera contribuyen, si es que lo hacen, a la política transformadora? En los países más afectados por la crisis económica y las políticas de austeridad, como España o Grecia, proliferan experiencias de economías alternativas. Sin embargo, la literatura no ha discutido más allá de las visiones o bien celebradoras o bien críticas de las economías alternativas, generando una división contra-productiva para la análisis. En este artículo vamos más allá de esta división, aplicando la comprensión de política de Bensaïd a dos economías alimentarias alternativas, una en el País Vasco y una en Grecia. Mostramos las estrategias de activismo y coyunturas específicas dentro de la cuales surgieron ambas alternativas y explicamos cómo se desarrollan frente a barreras institucionales y económicas. De esta manera, concluimos que las economías alternativas pueden ser transformadoras cuando se insertan en estrategias activistas dirigidas a ampliar los conflictos y las luchas sociales desafiando el nexo entre capital y estado.