[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Lecture: October 8, 2013

Dimitri H. Gondicas gondicas at Princeton.EDU
Wed Oct 2 09:35:14 PDT 2013




PRINCETON UNIVERSITY



Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies



Lecture



Greeks and Poor Others:

Nationalism and Symbolic Hierarchies at the Turn of the 21st Century



Dimitrios Gkintidis

dg19 at princeton.edu<mailto:antonish at princeton.edu>

Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow, Hellenic Studies





The aim of this talk is to retrace the formulation of the dominant Greek nationalist narrative in the terms of extroverted entrepreneurial success during the 1990s and 2000s. It refers to a specific period of time and attempts to juxtapose these political visions to the immediate previous period of the 1980s, as well as to provide ways to think of Greek nationalism during the economic crisis of the early 2010s. Given the centrality of public events of ostentatious nationalist display in the delineation of statehood and social hierarchy, I will use the example of the World Thracian Congresses (Παγκόσμια Συνέδρια Θρακών) as a locally situated case study of contemporary Greek nationalism. Based on ethnographic and archival research on these Congresses, I will argue that a hierarchy that placed deterritorialized entrepreneurship and capital at the forefront of the Greek nationalist project came to be established from the early 1990s. Far from transcending nationalist classifications, representations of neoliberal and flexible geopolitics built on specific delineations of nationhood; moreover, they communicated with the increasingly Eurocentric and evolutionary worldview of local elites, as evidenced through accounts and experiences of their dominant position in terms of class, knowledge and nationality. This shift in the content and magnitude of Greek nationalism seemed viable, as long as the ideas of Greek dominance fit the overall "objective" configurations of power within Europe and the Balkans. However, the radical devaluation of the Greek state and economy in the light of the economic crisis of 2010 may well have reversed complacent certainties into insecurities, within the same conceptual framework of flexible geopolitics. The impact that the disenchantment of a "Powerful Greece" will have on new formulations of Greek nationalism and new forms of political agency remains an open question.


Dimitrios Gkintidis studied Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki (2003), followed by an M.A. in Sociology at the University of Strasbourg II Marc Bloch (2004). He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies of the University of Macedonia in 2011, with a specialization in Social Anthropology. His dissertation focused on the local public sphere of the Greek border region of Evros and the changing perceptions of politics, economy and culture in the context of national and EU policies. During the academic year 2012-13 he was A.G. Leventis Fellow in Contemporary Greek Studies at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. His current research focuses on the symbolic construction of "European Integration" in Greece over the last thirty years.


Tuesday, October 8, 2013

6:30 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103


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