History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece by Daniel M. Knight (review)

Analytical narratives of the “Greek crisis” have been appearing across the board. Anthropological work has focused primarily on the political aspect of this holistic phenomenon. A total social fact of historical proportions, this enduring critical condition in a region favored for decades by ample anthropological attention is now calling for urgent ethnographic, yet historicized, approaches. Such approaches have a burden: the ethnography must be situated in a broader context, appreciating two time lapses. First, the rich intellectual inquiry produced by the anthropological concern in the culture and society of a place caught in much debate over nationalism and migration, violence and patronage, kinship and memory, food and politics; and second, the much discussed temporal fusions that Greeks attempt, bridging different historical divides and bringing forward a vivid depiction of current events in the light of worries, woes, and wounds past.

It is in this tradition, and following this need, that Daniel Knight’s interesting book is positioned. It provides an account of lived and living memory, as well as a story of shifts, situated in what the author explains from the start as an inquiry that “straddles a period when nearly three decades of prosperity were quite suddenly replaced by austerity and perpetual crisis” (2). Chapter 1 discusses how Greece passed from what Knight sees as a prosperity period to one of crisis. Chapter 2 explains the methods and provides details on the geography of the site, as well as on how ethnography was conducted, while the chapter after that offers a historical overview of land tenure between 1881–1923. Chapter 4 makes connections between current famine discourses and the 1940s Occupation experience, while the fifth chapter argues that Trikalinoi are much less inclined to remember the Civil War that followed the Occupation. Chapter 6 ponders on forms of protest associated with food claims and discourses, and makes references to suicide. Chapters 7 and 8 are concerned with changes, in the move from prosperity to crisis in both the public sphere and private life in Trikala, especially considering social status. The brief final chapter concludes with thoughts on time and crisis.

In this context of historical change—and of what has elsewhere been addressed as historically condensed time—the author traces what he calls “cultural proximity,” that is, the momentary or persistent conjoining of different points in time in people’s perceptions of crisis. The book suggests that the residents of Trikala, a town in the agricultural region of Thessaly, Central Greece, experience the hardships that austerity measures brought about in their material circumstances by evoking past events, and drawing on comparisons and analogies from a temporal setting of uneasiness. The lived memory of the Great Famine during the Axis Occupation (1941) is here a primary point of reference in local understanding. For most people, this memory is transmogrified through the narratives of those more senior. Indeed, most people seem to refer to the peina (hunger) of that semantic period making comparisons with their current conditions of life. Knight draws on these correspondences to suggest that Trikalinoi are “hungry with the same famine” as their erstwhile selves or older relatives had been in the 1940s (64–84). Importantly, these hunger narratives are forged “in the house—thus creating a genealogy of this crisis connected directly to ‘the moment’” (72).

Memory is selective, however. Knight suggests that the significant decade of the 1940s is not only remembered and relived, but also partly forgotten. The ethnographer claims that the Greek Civil War (1946–1949; or by other accounts, 1944–1949) is a period little pondered by contemporary Trikalinoi, although some of its significant events took place in their town. In comparison with the Famine discourse, the author wonders about the “difference in affective historical moments around notions of unity, solidarity, and landscape” (85), where the Civil War, in Trikalinoi’s imagination, does not fit prominently.

Knight’s analysis is unlike much popular discourse in crisis-ridden Greece, populated by memories, images, and imaginaries of Civil...