Anticipatory Nostalgia and Nomadic Temporality: A Case Study of Chronocracy in the Crypto-colony

Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth

Abstract

This paper expands on the view of Modern Greece as a ‘crypto-colonial’ space (cf. Herzfeld 2002). It offers an alternative reading of the so-called ‘Greek-crisis’, using the lens of chronocracy as developed in the introduction to this volume. An ethnographic engagement with the years of austerity, faced by Greek people since 2010, reveals chronocracy to be a colonial technology with political, moral and epistemic dimensions. Here I argue that chronocracy produces an anticipatory nostalgia: namely, a future-oriented affective state of longing for what has already been accomplished and at once yet to be achieved. I show how anticipatory nostalgia is distributed between relational, material and temporal ecologies. The Greek people, I argue, sustain a nomadic sense of temporality (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 2010), manifested in eclectic connections between time fragments that form provisional temporal assemblages. These are evident in my ethnography in the form of visualities, materialities, discourses and narratives. Nomadic temporality emerges as an expression of temporal agency that both resists and reifies chronocracy and anticipatory nostalgia.

Citation

Kirtsoglou, E. (2021). Anticipatory Nostalgia and Nomadic Temporality: A Case Study of Chronocracy in the Crypto-colony. In E. Kirtsoglou, & B. Simpson (Eds.), The time of anthropology: studies of contemporary chronopolitics (159-186). Routledge

• Online Publication Date: Dec 30, 2020
• Publication Date: Dec 30, 2021
• Deposit Date: Dec 2, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 29, 2021
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 159-186
• Series Title: ASA monographs
• Series Number: 52
• Book Title: The time of anthropology: studies of contemporary chronopolitics.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1649814
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/9781350125827