Guest post by Konstantinos Kalantzis, Visiting Scholar in Comparative Cultural Studies 2022-23

Research topic during fellowship: Picturing the Political: Photography, Crisis, and Imagination in Contemporary Greece

The project I am pursuing during my CHS Fellowship in Comparative Culture Studies explores contemporary Greek political imagination through the scope of visual culture. By visual culture, I refer to how people experience vision and visibility, their uses of imagery, cameras, and social media, but also, I refer to how I use visual media ethnographically in order to understand social experience. The project builds on research I conducted from 2016 to 2020 as a member of the Citizens of Photography project (European Research Council grant agreement no. 695283, PhotoDemos based at University College London Anthropology). My fieldwork took place in three sites in rural Greece: Sfakia in southwestern Crete, Distomo in central Greece, and Kalavryta in the Peloponnese.

What is it that makes these sites valuable to think with so as to understand contemporary Greek and European politics?

The two subject positions they evoke, that of an avenging native warrior (Sfakia) and that of a bereaved victim (Distomo and Kalavryta) have become collectively relevant in post-2010 Greece, a period commonly described as “the crisis”. This is a historical phase that followed Greece’s 2010 bailout deal with the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), marked by Greeks’ renewed anxiety regarding their position in Europe and their monitoring by EU-IMF mechanisms. The period unleashed ambivalent experiences of power along with many northern Europeans’ conflictual cultural investments in Greece that rework older themes of Romanticism and hierarchy in the relationship between centers and peripheries. The latter tensions become particularly perceptible around the art show Documenta14 which I heuristically compare to German tourists’ experiences of the Sfakia region in the early tourist decades of the 20th century.

We may think about the resonance of these regions in the political imaginary by thinking through the ways in which these areas have been represented by state-commissioned photographers, such as Voula Papaioannou in the 1940s and 1950s. If Papaioannou’s Distomo is visualized as black-clad bereaved widows and their deprived children, her depictions of Sfakia, a decade later, supply another key subject of this gendered “national family album”: men as embodiments of rugged tradition, pictured in front of a mountainous backdrop.

But as an anthropologist, I am interested in how these imageries are animated in social life and not merely in their original encoding. Both the figure of the Cretan and the representation of victimhood through Distomo and Kalavryta do work for Greeks today as symbolic figures that enable them to reconfigure politics and power within Europe as well as signify the relationship to Germany and the European north.

As other ethnographers of Greece and southern Europe note, the past is utilized often as a way of making sense of present-day events. In the Greek post-2010 period, the 1940s specifically are reworked in various political gestures. In this framework, Germans often become perceptible as executors of austerity descending from historical executioners. Relevant engagements about the past and Germany’s role in it revisit key national imaginaries concerning gender, victimhood, sexuality, hierarchy, and resistance.

My exploration of these regions, organized as two case studies (the Sfakian avenger and the Distomο/Kalavrytan victim), illuminates two political possibilities of coexistence alongside powerful Others. Here, anthropological attention to local particularities is vital. In Sfakia, I explore the paradox of a society that is expected to avenge the nation’s harm but seems nevertheless capable of infinitely accommodating Germans and other outsiders in the complex field of hospitality. I specifically explore the role of photography in this sphere, where, I argue, an extensive photo exchange between photographers and locals facilitates the creation of a community. In Distomo and Kalavryta, I think about experiences of victimhood while people negotiate the fear that the memories of the slaughter are thinning out and are being replaced by gentrified mnemonics. People there also negotiate tensions that occur along the left-right axis concerning the narration of the past.

A most vital aspect of my fellowship concerned my weekly stay at Olympia along with colleagues (faculty, staff, and students). It was particularly fortuitous that the classes taught by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and George Syrimis at Olympia as well as seminars with Gregory Nagy covered issues that concern me in my own work and I was able to particularly expand on themes such as: *nationhood, Mediterranean political systems and metaphors of sex and kinship, *“crisis” and representation (from crisis porn to the suffering subject); *folklore studies and the representation of the rural; *visual theory and photography; * political imaginaries about the “Great Powers”; * war reparations in international politics; *classicism and Romanticism today; *tourism and metaphors of invasion; *rootedness and the displacement of refugees; *Orientalism and the problem of fascination; *hierarchies between the north and the south;*modernity and fantasies of tradition; *nativism; *cosmopolitanism and the search for roots.

About Konstantinos Kalantzis

Konstantinos Kalantzis is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries, University of Thessaly, and an Honorary Research Fellow at PhotoDemos, Anthropology, University College London (UCL). He has conducted a number of fieldwork projects in rural and urban Greece since 2006. He has taught as a lecturer at San Francisco State University, at UCL, and at the University of Bern. He has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, at UCL, and at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Therasia project). He is the author of Tradition in the Frame: Photography, Power, and Imagination in Sfakia, Crete (Indiana 2019) and director of the ethnographic films Dowsing the Past (2014) and The Impossible Narration (2021). He is the 2019 recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute's JB Donne essay prize on the Anthropology of Art. His most recent work on Distomo, Kalavryta, and Sfakia is forthcoming in the edited volume: Citizens of Photography (Duke University Press, coming out Fall 2023). Videos and other materials from his recent fieldwork can be found in the Citizens of Photography project and on the Anthro Scope YouTube channel.

Fellowships in Comparative Cultural Studies

The Fellowships in Comparative Cultural Studies program was established in 2008 and has welcomed dozens of educators from Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences from Greek Universities. Find out more about this research opportunity on the Fellowships in Comparative Cultural Studies webpage.