Category Archives: Anarchism

Anarchism,Anthropology,geopolitics

Parkhàr studies – Or, Towards an Anarchic History of South-western Asia

by Akis Gavriilidis

Published in International Journal of Science Culture and Sport (IntJSCS),  December 2015 : 3(4)

 

ABSTRACT

From the late 80s – early 90s on, a new genocide was invented and started being talked about in Greece (and among the Greek diaspora): the «genocide of the Greeks of Pontus». This was accompanied by a more general revival of a particular ethnic Pontic identity.

This revival is often seen by many, including its protagonists, as one more variation of Greek nationalism and irredentism. However, in this paper I propose instead that we read these public identity performances as expressions of “anti-state nationalism”.

The Pontians manifest a particularity which, although presented as quintessentially and primordially Greek, in practice differentiates them from standard Modern Greekness. In my paper, I examine some examples of such manifestations in the field of legislative lobbying, establishment of public rituals, selecting names and nicknames for persons, places, institutions or football teams, translation activities, and political propaganda through typography and the cyberspace. I analyze these expressions of ponticity through the lens of political anthropology and philosophy and try to see to what extent these can be considered as an effort by the respective populations to escape the state, to become at least partly invisible to it and its bureaucracy.

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Κλασσικό
Anarchism,Art,Performativity,Politics

The Hegelian pitfalls of the Documenta14 criticisms

by Akis Gavriilidis

 

Recently, while in Cyprus, I spoke to a doctoral student who had just returned from Athens, where, as he informed us, he had visited several events taking place there in the framework of the Documenta14 exhibition. Among these, as he said, a performance “in a building close to Omonia square”. After one or two questions, it came out that this performance was actually not part of Documenta, but a sort of a “counter-event” staged as a satire, under the title dokoùmena (ancient Greek for “things believed/ seen as”, a title which obviously parodies the name of the institution)[1]. Our friend apparently mistook it as being part of the official program.

But was this really a mistake? If so, in what sense?

Documenta consists in a series of artistic works shown during a certain period of time Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό
Anarchism,national identity,Refusal,State

Macedonicity as an art of not being governed

by Akis Gavriilidis

Having lived in Thessaloniki around 1990, I personally witnessed the «our-name-is-our-soul» frenzy that emerged out of the blue in that city and its surroundings and became the starting point for the series of tragicomic events we all know. As most people, I was surprised by this eruption of heated interest for history, geopolitics, ethnology, and a number of other disciplines, for which I was totally unprepared. Listening to all these people who, with the nerve and the conviction of a specialist, repeated incessantly a set of newly discovered «scientific truths», I felt uneasy, but also puzzled, because these «truths» concerned a period and a topic I had no deep knowledge about. Instinctively, I felt there was something wrong with these discourses, but was not quite sure what a valid counter-argument would be.

At that time of confusion, when Greek newspapers were sweepingly stormed by a repetitive wave of “experts” providing “evidence” that “the name Macedonia was never used to describe a language and a people before 1944, this use is arbitrary and artificial,” one day, in a small leftist newspaper, Epokhì, an article appeared which contained some Συνέχεια →

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