Abstract
The chapter focuses on ambivalence in market relations and thus on an often-overlooked aspect of the economic crisis in Greece. It challenges the analytical juxtaposition of market and society as dominant forces versus local resistance. It argues that affirmative accounts of the market even under economic crisis and austerity pose pertinent questions about the analytical framing of capitalism. Three ethnographic cases point to the constraints faced as effects of the necessity to earn a living, to the seductive canvas of the market as enabler of meritocracy, and finally to the appeal of anonymous and disembedded market relations to avoid shame. Such entanglements of social relations, cosmologies of capitalism, and constraints in market societies urges a new conception of market and society under crisis and austerity.
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Streinzer, A. (2018). Relations with the Market: On Cosmologies of Capitalism in Greece. In: Spyridakis, M. (eds) Market Versus Society. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74189-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74189-5_6
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