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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 338

Part of Session 141: Taking over the squares (Other abstracts in this session)

Identity as space: Localism in the Greek protests

Authors: Goutsos, Dionysis; Polymeneas, George
Submitted by: Goutsos, Dionysis (University of Athens, Greece)

The public gathering of tens of thousands of Greek indignados or ‘aganaktismeni’ in Syntagma square outside the Greek parliament for about three months (May to August 2011) has been one of the most important events in the recent cataclysmic developments following the economy ‘crisis’ in Greece. As has already been suggested (Sotiris 2011), these protests took place in an altogether different context from that of other countries, shaped by previous struggles against austerity measures taken by the Greek government and the EU-IMF-ECB ‘Troika’. They were also influenced by the widespread social and political tension regarding the updated version of the Memorandum of Understanding, the Medium Term Economic Program, which was to be discussed and approved in the parliament before the end of June 2011. Thus, although public assemblies in Syntagma brought to the fore demands for political change, authentic democracy and popular sovereignty in ways similar to other movements, especially Sol square in Madrid and Al-Tahrir in Cairo, they focussed on organizing a concrete anti-Memorandum movement, hugely critical towards government’s fiscal and financial policies. This local perspective seems to favour an ethnocentric view of struggle, co-existing with its international dimensions (e.g. as a threat to European economy).

          Taking this context into account, in this paper we combine corpus-based methods with CDA’s analytical tools in order to investigate how social subjects and social situation are discursively constructed in the Greek movement, as well as how social/political identities and social/public space are co-articulated. Our hypothesis is that processes of self- and other-definition in the Greek data mainly implicate space deixis (‘here’ vs. ‘there’), construing identity in terms of space.

            In particular, we study the proceedings of 48 public assemblies (220.000 words) and the 36 announcements voted by the public assemblies (15.000 words), along with supplementary material, including slogans, posters etc. This data were retrieved from two official sites and relevant literature, but we also rely on our personal observations, since we attended most of the assemblies and casted our votes for the issues discussed. We thus analyze a multiplicity of resources through which protesters define themselves and their actions in relation to other social agents in Greece and the rest of the world, with the aim of exploring both global and local dimensions in the movement of Greek aganaktismeni and their articulations. Our focus is on personal and relational identity (Joseph 2004: 81), as it appears in ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ contrasts (van Dijk 2000, Chilton 2004, Hart 2010). In the Greek case the ‘us’ comprises the Greek aganaktismeni, other anti-government and anti-Memorandum groups, as well as international movements, whereas the ‘them’ involves agents such as the Greek government, the banks, Troika and occasionally all parliamentary parties, even if some supported the movement’s goals. Finally, we touch upon the identification of participants as global citizens and local actors and the formation of collectivities through monolingual and multilingual practices, as well as the role of affect and evaluation in this process.