Children out of Place with Childhood: Pupils’ Assemblies, Direct Action, Serious Play and Public Space in Youth’S Autonomous Horizontal Politics in Cyprus
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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Children out of Place with Childhood: Pupils’ Assemblies, Direct Action, Serious Play and Public Space in Youth’s Autonomous Horizontal Politics in Cyprus. Georgina Christou PhD in Social Anthropology University of Sussex June 2018 2 3 Thesis Abstract Although children as active agents have been extensively studied within anthropology and social sciences in general, children as public actors –or as activists engaged with direct forms of politics and social movements- have been largely neglected. This thesis addresses this research gap by ethnographically exploring the politics of autonomous, self-organized youth and pupils in Nicosia, Cyprus and their processes of radical political subjectivization, as well as the role of public space in such processes of becoming. It further problematizes how national and international configurations of childhood and youth have been enabling or disabling this activism, and how they govern children and ‘minoritized adults’ through educational, gentrifying and other policies of the biopolitical sphere. More specifically, the thesis critically explores how those perceived as minor subjects resist such governing through horizontal collective action and counter-cultural politics. Such politics involve the subversion of enclosed, ‘adult’ –nationalist, militarist, patriarchal, consumerist- establishments and notions of maturity in modernity, enhanced by Cyprus’s recent ethno- national conflict. Their subversion is achieved through playful tactics of street-partying, self- education, community formation and assembly, which are explored in this thesis, and through carving out temporal space for experimentation with alternative self-definitions. By exploring such politics my thesis significantly contributes to the anthropology of Cyprus through the study of politics beyond nationalism and ethnic-conflict frameworks as has overwhelmingly been the case so far. Moreover, in my thesis, I treat youth and children as political categories beyond their socio- cultural framing within youth anthropology and explore the categorical framings youth use to constitute themselves as political actors following larger movements like May 1968, Greek Autonomia and Alterglobalization movement. I further critically re-consider recent theorization on direct action and prefigurative politics from the vastly underrepresented perspective of children and pupils’ activism. I argue that a theoretical over-emphasis on direct action as prefigurative significantly obscures, on an analytical plane, the processes young actors go through in order to become horizontal anti-authoritarian activists. Such processes of becoming, however, form a great part of their activist practice. An 18-month ethnographic fieldwork process further revealed the role of public space and urban commons in the reproduction of autonomous youth initiatives and in processes of re- imagining the political and youth identity in late capitalism. By ethnographically exploring how a public square in Nicosia was produced into an alternative public sphere for youth anti- 4 authoritarian politics, I demonstrate how underage autonomous activists sustain their capacity to act, given their exclusion from dominant public spheres and inability to purchase space. I, thus, contribute to emerging ethnographic literature on squares as key spaces of social movement action and on spatialized public spheres. My findings led me to conceptualize squares as destinations instead of crossing points, as places of stasis, and to argue that stasis in public space manifests multiple radical potentialities and becomes resistance to neoliberal governmentality. 5 Table of Contents Thesis Abstract 3 List of Figures 9 Acknowledgements 10 Chapter 1: Introduction: First encounters .................................................................................. 12 1.1. Methodological Encounters: Ethnography with autonomous horizontal teenage activists .......................................... 13 1.2. Children out of place with childhood ................................................................................ 22 1.3. Thesis overview ................................................................................................................. 29 Chapter 2: Theory ........................................................................................................................ 32 2.1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 32 2.2. Governmentality, the production of subjects and the limits of reaction: Pertinent multiplicities, minoritization and those who refuse to be the population ....... 35 2.3. Youth and children in Anthropology……………………………………………………………………………. 40 2.4. The residual everyday as time-space for subversive political energy…………………………….47 2.5. The spatialization of the public sphere: Stasis against circulation ................................... 57 2.6. The politics of presence..................................................................................................... 61 2.7. Serious play ....................................................................................................................... 65 2.8. Making the case for multiple politics of subversion: Direct action, prefiguration, identity politics and a politics of becoming ................................................ 68 Chapter 3: Situating history, childhood and youth, and activist practice in the Cypriot context and in Nicosia’s old city space .................................................................................. 72 3.1. Initial reflections ............................................................................................................... 72 3.2. History of Nicosia, the old city and Faneromeni area since 1878: The borders, spaces and enclosures, the symbolic space of Faneromeni Square and how it is marked ........... 74 3.3. Perceptions of children and youth in the Cypriot context and beyond: What kind of discourses and regimes of knowledge constitute the Cypriot child? ......... 79 6 3.4. Brief history of the bicommunal movement, the anti-authoritarian community of the old city, and youth politicization at Faneromeni Square ...................................... 85 3.4.1.An upcoming civil society in the 1990s ....................................................................... 85 3.4.2.Claiming the old city and Faneromeni square as a space of non-institutional social action .......................................................................................................................... 86 3.4.3.Underage youth initiatives at Faneromeni square ..................................................... 89 3.4.4.Background on youth members of Skapoula and the community of Faneromeni square ......................................................................................................................... 94 3.5. Concluding remarks ........................................................................................................... 95 Chapter 4: Faneromeni Square .................................................................................................. 97 4.1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 97 4.2. Producing Faneromeni Square as a steki: The emergence of a youth counter-public and an alternative public sphere................. 100 4.2.1.Street parties: Rituals of introduction to the square ................................................ 104 4.2.2.The square as steki, as public sphere ....................................................................... 107 4.3. Sociabilities and practices at the square ......................................................................... 112 4.3.1.Commensality, tzerasma and collective drinking ..................................................... 112 4.3.2.Self-education at the square: ‘We learned in a group, we learned together, we learned in common’ ........................................................................................... 116 4.3.3.Assemblies at the square .......................................................................................... 120 4.4. Youth at the square ......................................................................................................... 122 4.4.1.Maturity at the square and beyond: Youth as metaphor – Minoritizing civil society movements ...................................................................... 123 4.4.2.Faleromeni, vandaloi, anarchidia: Depoliticizing identifications and their appropriation ........................................................................................... 127 4.4.3.Embodying the square: ‘Your first whole day at the square’ ................................... 129 4.5. Concluding