Description
Book SynopsisSince 2008, Greece has been at the centre of European current affairs due to the financial and economic crisis. However, it should not be forgotten that before the current crisis the political upheavals of the early 1990s and the collapse of Marxist-inspired regimes had already radically transformed the face of the country. These transformations have been seen as a return of the Balkans’ question, raising issues of border disputes and migration, minorities and national inclusion. They have had far-reaching consequences on the relations between Greek society and its peripheries, and what some have deemed to be its destabilising diversity. In this context, the material presented in this book examines the strengthening of discourses of belonging which draw legitimacy from a glorification of the past and tradition. The fieldwork carried out over the past 15 years on the fringes of Greece has focused on groups who were stigmatised and distanced from standard definitions of Greekness. It provides an original perspective on the changes that the country has undergone in recent decades. The question of the nation-state’s future is raised through close observation on the local scale, leading to a debate about the relationship between areal and reticular territory within the framework of globalisation. This book also aims to provide non-Francophone readers with access to research carried out on these issues in France, shifting the focus of Balkan Anglophone specialists for whom French publications remain a distant province.
Trade Review‘Indeed, the time-space variations in the mobilities described in the empirical chapters of the book offer important lessons for the broader study of migration as a complex socio-spatial phenomenon.’
Russell King,
Balkanologie Table of ContentsIntroduction
Shadows and light
Memory – identity –territory as a trinity for observation
Chapter 1: Understanding Greece in the world
The geo-political upheavals of the 1990s
A new intensity in international migrations and domestic mobility
Migration Studies in the Balkans: a multiplicity of perspectives
Towards new fields of research
Locality as an indicator of globalisation
Chapter 2: Conflictual memories and migration between Greece and Albania
Migration seen from above
Discovering relational space
(Re)discovering the link beyond otherness
Migration, transnational relationships and minority issues in Greece
A new survey deep within the margins
Landscape and places: relating the conflict or ‘silencing the past’?
A never-ending fragmentation?
Chapter 3: The Jewish community of Rhodes: a revitalised fragment of the Greek mosaic
Historic fragments of Aegean Andalusia
A community of memory
Juderia rediscovered
The Jewish past in action
The grindings of memory
Towards a successful heritage status: tourism as an ally?
Counter-memory and local feeling
Chapter 4: Mobilities, heritage and the construction of border territories
Return to Thesprotia
Reminiscences of ‘home’… elsewhere
‘New rural communities’ and changing lifestyles
‘Good patrimonial practices’ in Macedonia
Nymfaio: tourism as a sole perspective?
Creating order, starting projects
The border as a new locus for resources?
Geopolitics and cross-border cooperation
Chapter 5: Rescaling power in an era of globalisation
From roots to pastures new
Losing the border and regaining memory(ies)
From transformation in the ways of inhabiting place to the mobilisation of memory: territorial impact
Using locality to gain ‘roots and wings’
Effects of globalisation?
Institutional back-up for an alternative recourse to the past
‘Glocalised’ processes?
Scales of globalisation in the Balkans
Conclusion
