Report 5. Case Studies in Greece

ERC-COG-2016-724692 HETEROPOLITICS Refiguring the Common and the Political D3.5 Author: Dr. Aimilia Voulvouli Host Institution: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Principal Investigator: Dr. A. Kioupkiolis ERC COG 2016 (implementation 2017-2020) July 2020 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................ ………4 Entering the field: Relevance of the Greek case-studies to the objectives of Heteropolitics….. ............................................................................................................... 4 Heteropolitical ethnography ............................................................................................... 5 Social Innovation and Collective Knowledge production: ‘Society in Control’................... 7 Technology and Economy as total social phenomenon ....................................................... 8 Communities of Values and Care ....................................................................................... 9 Commoning as heteropolitics ........................................................................................... 10 5. Case Studies in Greece ..................................................................................................... 11 5.1. Sarantaporo.gr ............................................................................................................. 11 5.1.1. Introduction: Hacking the ‘Gods’ ........................................................................... 11 5.1.2. ‘The Network’ ........................................................................................................ 14 5.1.3. Ethnographing the commons: The narratives on the ground .................................... 19 5.1.4. ‘Commoning the political:’ Alter-politics or ‘politics as it should be’ ..................... 22 5.1.5. Commoning Sarantaporo.gr: A prefigurative counter-hegemonic commons in progress ........................................................................................................................... 28 5.1.6. Tying the node: The marriage of community and politics and their wedding gifts ................................................................................................................................. 34 5.1.7. ‘Did technology come to the village?’: Sarantaporo.gr as a total social phenomenon .................................................................................................................... 39 5.1.8. Sarantaporo.gr as a new commons sociotechnical experiment ................................ 43 5.1.9. Contradictions and weaknesses: Enclosures and gendered technology .................... 45 5.1.10. Conclusions: The Commons of the (Un)common people ...................................... 48 5.2. The Cooperative Ecosystem of Karditsa ...................................................................... 51 5.2.1. Introduction: First encounters ................................................................................. 51 5.2.2. The place ............................................................................................................... 55 5.2.3. Cooperativism as Social Innovation: The social origins of the Collaborative Ecosystem of Karditsa ..................................................................................................... 57 ANKA today……………………………………………………………………………57 5.2.4. The social origins of Cooperativism as Social Innovation ....................................... 63 2 5.2.5. The Collaborative Ecosystem of Karditsa (CEK) .................................................... 69 5.2.6. The Collaborative Ecosystem of Karditsa as a case of Commons............................ 71 5.2.7. The Social Ecosystem of Karditsa as a hybrid Commons Based Peer Production ....................................................................................................................... 72 5.2.8. The Cooperative Bank of Karditsa: The ‘moral rationalism’ of a ‘moral economy’ ......................................................................................................................... 77 5.2.9. CEK as a community: ‘The politics of value’ ......................................................... 80 5.2.10. The alter-politics of CEK ..................................................................................... 83 5.2.11. The Women’s Center of Karditsa (WCK): The affective micropolitics of the ethics of care .................................................................................................................... 84 Affective micropolitics………………………………………………………………….87 Carving out an ethics and politics of care……………………………………………...89 5.2.12. The Stevia Agricultural Cooperative of Karditsa .................................................. 92 5.2.13. Conclusions: Reframing the economy and the political ......................................... 96 References ........................................................................................................................... 99 3 REPORT 5 CASE STUDIES IN GREECE Sarantaporo.gr and the Cooperative Ecosystem of Karditsa Introduction Entering the field: Relevance of the Greek case studies to the objectives of Heteropolitics Embarking on our journey in the field, our aim was the critical anthropological elaboration of the radical political imaginary discovered in our field. Our intention was to trace the local responses to global predicaments that belong to ‘the larger universe of social movements’ (Schönwälder 2002: 11), they propose alternative ways of doing politics in Greece, Italy and Spain and they are potential agents of social change. The Greek case studies, namely the wireless community network Sarantaporo.gr and the Cooperative Ecosystem of Karditsa (CEK) afford us the possibility to challenge our own subjectivity in regard to our conceptions of the political, a criterion that was taken seriously into consideration when choosing to locate our fieldwork. The nature of each case is closely intertwined with recent developments in global political economy and the growing need for digital literacy and communication. Hence, the ethnographic case studies were selected a) as responses to wider political developments; b) as part of a larger universe of similar responses and not just as isolated case studies; c) as successful attempts at overcoming structural hindrances and even at benefiting from the ‘queereness’ of the capitalist state; and d) as cases of commoning outside of the mainstream political apparatus, which construct alternatives to bureaucratic structures of state administration and to profit-driven market forces, contributing to social innovation, openness, social justice, collective political empowerment. In this vein, I have tried to situate my study in the framework of the Greek anthropological literature that examines the field between the state and the household as a locus where the political is being produced (Rozakou, Gkara & Yiannitsiotis 2013) away from and in relation to the state (Campbell 1964, Papataxiarchis 1990, Allen 1993, Astrinaki 2002, Tsantiropoulos 2004, Rozakou 2007, Herzfeld 2012). At the same time, I have tried to expand the notion of the political as a field of antagonism and a field of patronage (Campbell 1964, Sotiropoulos 2013, Papataxiarchis & Lyrintzis 2013; see also Dertilis 1977, Mouzelis 1978, Mavrogordatos 1978, Komninou 1981, Nikolakopoulos 1985) by including the agonistic features of the groups I have studied which are inherent in their structures and by excluding the patronage relations, which in my case-studies are replaced by public deliberation, ‘humble leadership’ and transparency. 4 Heteropolitical ethnography When studying radical political alterity, in the contemporary West, there is but one way to treat it methodologically in order to gain an insight inτο the ‘indigenous cosmologies’ of such collective endeavours, and this is to treat it as early anthropologists treated non-Western, exotic societies. The collective action that we studied in the framework of Heteropolitics is not simply challenging mainstream economy and politics but it reframes these notions. It carries thus a degree of exoticism in the midst of the conventional, the mainstream, the orthodox. We went in the field to study alterity, but we ended up studying much more than that; we studied prefigurative action in the midst of a devastating financial breakdown, we explored actual ‘real utopias.’ In such a radical alterity, an ethnographer is just one participant in a system of knowledge production, and s/he participates in a system of collective knowledge production that forms the basis of political action (Casas - Cortés et al. 2013). Hence, our work was not just to interpret the field but also to produce knowledge with the actors of our field and to conceptualize alternative schemes of community, the commons and social self-organization. In light of these, the methodological routes I have chosen to travel during my fieldwork in the two Greek case-studies were both mapped and unmapped. The familiar route was of course the conventional ethnographic fieldwork, which is paired with participant observation in which the ethnographer, in this case myself, was initially an external observer who attempts to immerse herself in the field in order to attend to the specific ‘lived realities’ of her interlocutors and establish meaningful relationships with them. Following this path, I was able to ‘convince’

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