Temporal Vertigo and Time Vortices on Greece’s Central Plain

in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Author:
Daniel M. Knight Durham University dmk3@st-andrews.ac.uk

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2016.340105
Keywords:
assemblage; crisis; future; Greece; temporality; time
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The consequences of prolonged fiscal austerity have left people in Trikala, central Greece, with feelings of intense temporal vertigo: confusion and anxiety about where and when they belong in overarching timelines of pasts and futures. Some people report feeling ‘thrown back in time’ to past eras of poverty and suffering, while others discuss their experiences of the current crisis situation as reliving multiple moments of the past assembled in the present. This article analyses how locals understand their complex experiences of time and temporality, and promotes the accommodation of messy narratives of time that can otherwise leave the researcher feeling sea-sick.

Contributor Notes

Daniel M. Knight is Addison Wheeler Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University and Visiting Fellow at the Hellenic Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has written numerous articles on fiscal austerity in Greece. He is currently associate editor of the journal History and Anthropology and in 2016 he will take up a post as a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of St Andrews.

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Cover The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
13
Keywords:
assemblage; crisis; future; Greece; temporality; time
Print Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Online Publication Date:
01 Mar 2016
Copyright:
© The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 2016
Editorial
General Article
Special Section - Time-Tricking: Reconsidering Temporal Agency in Troubled Times
Part I. Time-Tricking in Moments of Crisis: Political and Economic Manipulations of Time
Part II. Maintaining Other Times: Technologies for Being Out-of-Time
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