 Good evening and welcome to this evening's lecture. Great to see so many people here tonight. The event is organized tonight by the SOAS Food Studies Center and is part of the Center's Distinguished Lecture Series. The SOAS Food Studies Center fosters teaching and research on food and agriculture here at SOAS and also serves as a vehicle for connecting SOAS academics and students with those sharing food-related interests beyond SOAS. We are interested in the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food and the dynamic interactions of these dimensions, whether in the past, present, or future, from production through to consumption, not only in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world. More than 40 members of SOAS staff belong to the center, as do more than 20 SOAS research students, and more than 100 students on taught courses at the school and alumni of these courses. We also have nearly 1,000 associate members, including students and academics from other universities, policymakers, activists, journalists, and makers and vendors of food. The center convenes the weekly SOAS food forum, distinguished lectures, such as this evening's, and other events. Should anyone wish to join the center as an associate member, which is free of charge, and to be placed on our email list, please send an email to soasfoodstudies at soas.ac.uk. Our distinguished lectures are co-sponsored by Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. I'd like to thank the journal's editor, Melissa Caldwell, who is here with us this evening, as well as the University of California Press, which publishes the journal for their continuing support for this lecture series. Tonight's lecture will be published in the journal and will also be available on the SOAS Food Studies Center web page. I'd also like to thank the Centers and Programs office here at SOAS, especially Nanachuku, Jane Savery, and Yasmin Jayasimi for all of their work behind the scenes organizing this event. Now I'd like to introduce our speaker. David E. Sutton is professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He holds a BA in general studies in the humanities, an MA in anthropology, and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He took his PhD in 1995, and the work is published as Memories Cast in Stone with Berg in 1998. During a postdoc in Oxford, where after spending time in Greece, where food had figured so prominently in daily life, he found himself in a place where the table settings were of as much importance as the food itself, he started to think about making food more central to his research. Since the 90s, he has conducted research in Greece, much of this on the island of Kalimnos in the Eastern Aegean. His early work explored historical consciousness and the relevance of the past in daily life, ranging from naming practices to the ritual throwing of dynamite at Easter. He subsequently focused on everyday cooking practices in Kalimnos. In this work, he has examined how Kalimnians reproduce and innovate recipes, use tools as extensions of the body, and create their kitchen spaces. More recently, he has studied the so-called Greek financial crisis as seen through the lens of changing food practices, the theme he will address in this evening's lecture. Professor Sutton has been a leading figure in the study not only of food and cooking, but also in relation to this, materiality, tools and technology, and memory and the senses. His work has contributed significantly to the study of gender and, more recently, to the study of political protest. He has also been a pioneer in the use of video in ethnographic research. He is author of Remembrance of Rapasts, An Anthropology of Food and Memory, published by Berg in 2001, Hollywood Blockbusters, The Anthropology of Popular Movies, also published by Berg in 2009, and Secrets from the Greek Kitchen, Cooking Skill and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island, published by the University of California Press in 2014. He is co-editor with David Barris of The Restaurant's Book, Ethnographies of Where We Eat, published by Bloomsbury in 2007. These, as well as a great many journal articles, book chapters, and other writings. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Professor David Sutton, who will be speaking tonight on the theme let them eat stuffed peppers, an argument of images on the role of food in understanding neoliberal austerity in Greece. David. Thanks, Harry, for that really lovely introduction. And I'm really honored to be here tonight to talk to you all and to present what I've been working on and to get your feedback on it. So let me start with a little bit about my title because it's a long one. The argument of images is a phrase I take from my mentor, James Fernandez, who used it to talk about the synesthetic aspects of ritual in particular, which inspired me in some of my synesthetic ethnography. The role of food in understanding neoliberal austerity in Greece. Well, as I'm sure most of you know, Greece has been in a economic crisis. Some call it a financial crisis. Some just call it a crisis since 2009. And unlike other European Union countries, it's been subject to a series of programs, austerity programs known as Memoranda, that have been imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. And there were three of them, three Memoranda, three programs. And then this summer there was a fourth proposed and Greece had a referendum on it. And the Greek people overwhelmingly rejected the program, 62% to 38%. And on Calumnos, where I work, it was much higher. I think it was like 75%. But the government, the left-wing government known as Syriza, went ahead and signed the new memorandum about a week later. As for let them eat stuffed peppers, well, I'm going to show you a very short video. And this was in September. It was after on the eve of the reelection of the Syriza government. And they were interviewing the Deputy Minister of Social Solidarity. And they were asking her how she planned, how the ministry planned to help the Greek people who have been suffering under these austerity programs. And they have indeed been suffering. Once again, maybe you've heard. But just for example, they've had a youth unemployment rate of 50% to 60% for many years now. And so this is what she responded. We think that there are opportunities to make money and to support the projects that the Greek people are trying to do. The generation, the generations, the people, the people, the people, the people of the Greek people. The next generation. OK, so just a couple of things about that. This statement provoked a lot of reaction. I won't tell you what it was right now. But just to clarify a few things, she's suggesting that her ministry, just like the Greek people, will be able to economize and stretch things by doing things like making what I've translated as stuff peppers. But in fact, the word yamista is more general. It means stuffed vegetables. It can be tomatoes. It can be aubergines. And basically what you do is you fill the vegetable with a combination of rice, meat if you have it, ground beef, and various herbs and spices. And you bake it in the oven, or sometimes in an outdoor oven. And it's very nice. It's very delicious. It is, in some ways, as she's suggesting, kind of a Greek version of that idea of nail broth or stone soup, if you're familiar with it. The idea of making something from nothing. So I'm going to come back to that. During the period as the crisis was unfolding, I had been working on my research on everyday cooking on the island of Kalimnos. And while I felt that my research did have wider implications, I wasn't thinking about politics with a capital P. But I began to hear resonances between food discourses and larger issues, which got my attention at the time. So for me, this actually harkened back to my initial PhD research on Kalimnos, where I was looking at how local practices could inform the understanding of much larger issues, such as, for example, how local Greek naming practices, I believe, illuminated the controversy over the naming of Yugoslav Macedonia. So what's the broader perspective I'm taking here? No reason. Sorry about that. So I felt as I was getting into this, of course, I got into anthropology so that I wouldn't have to understand economics. But I realized at a certain point that I couldn't actually go on with that. And so as I'm motivated by what was going on, I really started trying to get my mind around certain things that were happening. And to get my mind around the concept of neoliberalism. Of course, neoliberalism, big concept, a lot of different perspectives. But the ones that I was drawn to were largely inspired by the work of Carl Polanyi, and he was a mid-century economic anthropologist. And he wrote a book, The Great Transformation, which was looking at the transformations of society around the eve of World War I. And particularly, he was interested in what he called the disinventing of the economy from society, the idea that with free markets, you have a separation of economy from society, perhaps for the first time in history, that was imposed by what was called liberal economics. And so a lot of people have found this concept useful. Can you hear me when I'm out here too? OK, I'll go back and forth. So a lot of people, anthropologists and others, have found this idea useful to understand now neoliberalism, which is in some ways doing some of the same things. He had another really good concept called the double movement. And the double movement was his phrase for the idea that in response to the disinventing of the economy from society, or claims to disinvent the economy from society, society protected itself. Society responded to this through protection of itself. And he noted in his work that this protection could take both right wing and left wing forms. And anyone following the election in the United States can see that he is very prophetic. But coming from my research on cooking, and as Harry described, I was looking at tool use and things like that, one thing that struck me is that very few people who were talking about Karl Polanyi ever mentioned his brother, Michael Polanyi. Michael Polanyi was a mid-century philosopher. And he was best known for talking about the concept of tacit knowledge, or the idea, as he put it, that we know more than we can say. And he explored this concept of tacit knowledge. He said that all knowledge has tacit dimensions, even the knowledge, even the most explicit objective knowledge produced by scientists has tacit dimensions. So it got me thinking, tacit knowledge? It was very much similar. I was kind of using a number of different concepts, not systematically, but tacit knowledge, embodied knowledge, situated knowledge, local knowledge. All of these were terms that recognized how knowledge is based in context. And of course I was interested in cooking knowledge and what exactly was transmitted when we talk about cooking knowledge being transmitted. So when I'm talking about neoliberalism now, I'm talking about the belief that markets and privatization provide greater efficiency and superior solutions to economic questions, along with the belief that you can apply market logic to ever-increasing areas of life. And this often involves processes which could be labeled abstraction after James Carrier, like commodity fetishism, like the kind of abstraction of knowledge from social contexts that we see in university assessment schemes and audit cultures. And as Marilyn Sirstern notes, the pressure to make intellectual work visible, measurable, and transferable favors disembed knowledge that attacks the very qualities of complexity and sensitivity that anthropologists are taught to value. So disembed it, just the same term that Polanyi was using, the other Polanyi, car Polanyi, embedded and disembed it. In terms of food, I see a similar tendency that I would call neoliberal in the notion that cooking knowledge and even taste itself can be standardized and abstracted from social settings. As we see in all kinds of projects, contemporary projects, from Cook's Illustrated Magazine and America's Test Kitchen, if you're familiar with those, to many avatars of molecular gastronomy, not all, but many, to the notion circulated last year that the Watson supercomputer is going to provide us with all kinds of previously untried, but delicious ingredient combinations, such as mushrooms with strawberries. Who knew? Let me contrast this briefly to what we know as anthropologists of food. For example, in Anita von Pozer's recent ethnography of food ways of the bosom of Papua New Guinea, she notes of their staple sego pudding, regardless of whether it appeared to her to have the right consistency or preparation, bosom insisted that a sociable person cannot fail to produce tasty sego pudding. Or in my own work on Calumnos, where I showed that techniques, such as what I call cutting in the hand, which is something that I analyze at length in my book, could not be abstracted from a total social material setting in which they make sense as part of the flow of a particular cultural life. So this is my context for beginning to make sense of the role of food and discourse, as discourse and practice in people's experience of the Greek crisis. Now, I first kind of became aware that this might be an interesting issue, when I was listening to various ministers talking about the causes of the crisis. So I remember it was kind of in a documentary and they had back to back, they had, I don't know if it would have been, was it George Osborn back then in 2011? They had the British Chancellor and he basically was saying, you know, we all benefited, so we all have to share the burden. And that was pretty much his expression, it was very unmetaphorical. The Irish minister said, well, you know, we all parted. But the Greek minister, the list-based deputy prime minister, said, mazithafagrame, which I'm translating, it literally means we all, we ate it together, but the gift is the money, we all eat the money. And this is, I mean, the verse, the priest used the word eating to mean a lot of things. And this gives you a sense of kind of the range of the word eating, it wasn't a kind of loud metaphor for him, it's a common expression. But people reacted to it pretty strongly. And I tried to capture their reactions in this, I think it's kind of summed up by this comment. And in this picture you see a group of people known as the Troika, which were the European institutions which were imposing the austerity program. And they're cutting up a cake, a New Year's cake, because in Greece, on New Year's you cut up a cake and whoever gets the piece with the coin in it is lucky for the next year. So they're cutting up a cake, this was on the eve of 2012, it says 2012 Greek, but they're giving out the pieces and it says one piece for the European lenders, one piece for the Greek banks, one piece for Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs actually was pretty instrumental in the Greek crisis in a number of different ways. In fact, I believe that the European director of Goldman Sachs is actually now the head of the European Commission. One piece for Angela Merkel and one piece for Reichenbach, who was the kind of overseer of the Troika. And in the background some very kind of disheveled and skinny Greek people are saying, and now they're gonna tell us that we all ate it together. So this was an initial context, a kind of context of claims of collective responsibility and responses about let's parse out that responsibility a little bit more. Another thing that I noticed early on, oh, actually, I'm sorry, I'm jumping ahead. So this was last year and this is a kind of picking up on this same theme, but in a slightly different way. In this case, a Greek man named Mr. Mitzos, a kind of typical Greek, is talking to Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, and he's saying, but why do you want my vine leaf? And she's saying, nomadakya, a stuffed grape leaf, I'm gonna make a menace grape leaf with green, Mr. Mitzos, and in the pot where she's cooking it, it says, lowering of wages and pensions and raising of taxes, which has been a big part of the austerity program. And in fact, I think this cartoon, actually brings up an important concept, which is when you talk to Greeks about the crisis, one of the words that they use a lot is dignity, or axioprapia. And the sense of dignity that they're talking about, well, this cartoon is kind of playing on the idea of personal dignity, right? But axioprapia kind of means dignity in a slightly broader sense, or maybe a lot broader sense. It really suggests the possibility to reproduce habits of life that make you a Greek person. So it kind of resonates with the idea of moral economy from E.P. Thompson. It kind of also suggests the idea that there's a problem with making profits on people's suffering. And in fact, the people I knew on Callum knows, for example, one guy I'm very close friends with, he was the computer administrator for the mayor's office, he is. And he saw his wages cut 48% in one day. In 2012, and over the period of the last six years, his taxes have brought up over 500%. So another food related practice that I was interested in early on, this was really popular back in 2011. And I analyzed it along with my former student and colleague with any of us or Nellies. And we wrote about it a little bit, so I'll just talk about it very briefly. It's called yogurting, and it means throwing yogurt at politicians or people in authority. And one of the things that struck us about it is that it seemed to be accepted for a long time. It was like, it was kind of something that people said, oh yeah, you know, I mean, people weren't, to my knowledge, getting thrown in jail for yogurting. And so of course we asked, why yogurt? Did there just happen to be a lot of yogurt handy? And one of the things we suggested is that yogurt is in fact one of the foods that has an identifiable Greekness to it. In fact, I saw this Greek fans at FIFA 2014 wearing Greek yogurt cups. But I also had the very odd experience last summer traveling through a lot of international airports. And I heard the same, almost the same discussion twice. It was some non-Greek people talking about the Greek crisis because this was right on the eve of the referendum and there was a suggestion that if the Greeks voted against the austerity package, they might be thrown out of Europe. So people had some consciousness of it. And I heard two different conversations where somebody said, oh yeah, the Greeks are doing pretty bad, they just hear about it. And they said, yeah, well, you know, what do they produce? They only produce yogurts. They have a yogurt economy. So this is food scholars. We know that food has that double-edgedness that can be an identifier and also a slur, right? But what we were arguing was that really what people were expressing by throwing yogurt was that the neoliberal austerity package was somehow against Greekness. That it was somehow antithetical to Greekness and that they were going to actually cover the politicians in this substance that represented Greekness to remind them of their Greekness. And I'm going to try and convince you of that in some of the other slides that I'm gonna show. Now these next two slides I wanted to show you together because in some ways they look similar. In one case you have people reaching for a bag of tomatoes. And in the other case you have people reaching for some bags of potatoes. But the context of these two pictures are very different. In this picture, this was during some of the protests in 2011, this was in Thessaloniki, Greece's second city. And farmers from Northern Greece drove their potatoes into Thessaloniki and handed them out to protesters as an act of, they said, solidarity. And this was in fact the beginnings of what later became known as the potato movement or the anti-middleman movement which was the first time in quite a while of trying to really connect producers and consumers more directly in Greece. And it has had some success. It's had different fates, but there are a number of anthropologists who are doing studies of it now or learning about it. Their studies are coming out as we speak. This other picture, people expressed a lot of consternation about this picture because it presented an image of Greeks as desperate. And they said, is this really our Greece? And others said, yes it is our Greece. Let's recognize that. But to me the striking thing is that it reminded me of a quote from Eduardo Galliano when he says I don't believe in charity, I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, it moves from top to bottom. Solidarity is horizontal, it respects the other. I have much to learn from other people. And in fact, a lot of the discussion in Greece about efforts to relieve people's needs and people's hunger is phrased in terms of an opposition between charity and solidarity. And there are big charity organizations in Greece including the Greek Orthodox Church and some very wealthy foundations. And a lot of people, particularly people on the left but more generally say, we're not doing charity, we're doing solidarity. And of course, there can be some fuzziness there. It's not always so kind of dry. But I think it's an important distinction that we wanna think about. So we'll see this in a couple of these slides coming up. So this is one of the most successful movements to come out of the crisis. It's called the social kitchen movement. This one is I think the most well-known, Oalos Athropos, the other human. And it started in Athens and it's been expanded all over Greece and they're pretty good about at least once a week getting together and cooking a meal in some public location with the idea that anyone who can should contribute what they can and anyone who can't should just come and they'll cook the meal and they'll sit down and eat it together. And in fact, the founder of this had some phrase. He said, if I just give you food, maybe you just throw it back at my head. But if we sit down together as humans, we can have a dialogue. And I think it's really important as anthropologists to contextualize this within Greek social practices because on Calumnos, people are feeding each other all the time. It's just so common for neighbors to make a little extra and bring it over to their neighbors. And then the other neighbor sometime will bring something over to them. Nobody's keeping track, but it's a constant process and you're doing it for all kinds of reasons, not just out of people's needs, although they do do it in some cases for people who are in need. But more generally, often you're doing it to remember a dead relative when your parent dies, you cook extra for other people to think of them. So there are all kinds of reasons for this, but it's very much embedded in social practice to share food like this. Now this next slide, I don't wanna suggest that food is all about solidarity or that it doesn't include its exclusions. Certainly it does. And this is a food distribution by the notorious Greek neo-Nazi party, Golden Dog. And they have been providing some social services to desperate people in parts of Greece, along with enacting violence on migrants and others. But their food distribution, as you can see here, is a more serious matter. And it's very much pitched in hyper-nationalist terms. This is food buying for Greeks and nobody else. So I just wanted to make that point that the food can have those other uses. Now this is the logo for the suspended coffee movement in Greece. You may have heard of suspended coffee. It started, I believe, in Naples. It's spread throughout the world. And it means buying a coffee for someone who will have it later on, who maybe couldn't afford it. I mean, there are different versions of it, and I think the differences are important. So in Greece, you buy your coffee and then you say, and I'll buy a suspended coffee and you pay 70% and the coffee shop covers the other 30%. And then when somebody comes along and says, are there any suspended coffees, the coffee shop will tell them yes they're on. And as with the social kitchen movement, the idea behind suspended coffee is not so much charity, but neighborhood cohesion by allowing people to participate in daily rituals of life as one of the founders of the movement in Greece says, there's so many people that just sit in their apartment and don't go out because they can't. We want them to go out of the house, socialize and meet their neighbors. In one neighborhood, we even had a group of women baking cakes, which they gave to the cafes to serve with. So it really is a neighborhood initiative. Sorry. And it also has to be put in the context once again of Greek culture in which coffee shop sociability has deep, deep roots. And lots of anthropologists of Greece have written about this. It used to be a male social space, but for the last 30 years, it's definitely become a co-op social space, but it is a primary space for socializing. It's not for going to the coffee shop with your iPad or doing your work or something like that, it's a socializing space. And in fact, especially during the crisis, people have talked about how important it is to be able to still go out to the coffee shop to feel that they are not isolated, that they are still humans, that they are still able to engage in social relationships. And this, in fact, as the anthropologist Daniel Knight has written about, provokes some negative reactions on the part of some Northern Europeans, particularly in the German press, I guess, or maybe the German finance minister, Schoimler, who say, look at those Greeks sitting in coffee shops, if they're sitting in coffee shops buying coffees, clearly they're not suffering enough. But there's a phrase here that's really relevant. It takes us back to what I was talking about about the notion of dignity. It's a phrase. Istochia pedici, and a literal translation of it would be, poverty requires good living. But good living is more expansive term here. They're really, once again, refers to the idea that you can imagine stretching things so that you are able to reproduce your identities and social relations, that you are not going to turn into an isolated individual, which the Greeks imagine that many people in Northern Europe live like that. And I heard a lot of people talking about this on Calumnus, people in coffee shops kind of performed their coffee shop practice. And they said, here we are in the coffee shop. It's the crisis. We may as well be gathering together, having a coffee. And in fact, somebody said that instead of poverty requires good living. The phrase now is ikrisi thalikaliparasi, the crisis requires good living. And this could involve different things from going to the coffee shop. It could involve staying home with your friends and inviting them over for a pizza instead of going out to the taverna. But finding ways to stretch things so that you can still say that you're human beings and have social relations. I'm gonna talk really briefly about this. I think this is an interesting art project that two Greek artists who I think have studied anthropology as well put on. They gathered bitter oranges, which are, for the most part, used for decorative purposes in Greek cities. They gathered them from three different neighborhoods in Athens and in Thessaloniki. This is Syntagma Square. And they made what's called gliko to kutalliu, a spoon sweet out of them. Different one from each neighborhood. And they served them at a food conference in Greece. They served them at the Oxford Food Symposium. They served them at Gathering in Germany. And they wanted to provoke some dialogue with the people they were serving them to. And not surprisingly, they got very different reactions and the people in Germany and England were very interested in the different flavors and how the different flavors came from different locations. The people in Greece thought this was a really interesting strategy. They thought, we need to be doing more of this. We need to, maybe you could market it. Maybe you could make some money off of this. Or maybe this is something we should be doing to help people so that they can be enjoying this resource. And obviously it's not filling nutritional needs. It's just orange peel and sugar water. But it's actually part of coffee practices. That is, you'll serve spoon sweets, especially a little bit in coffee shops, not so much, but mostly when you have people over for coffee. So it's part of this same kind of reproducing sociability. So these are all pictures of what they did. And the one thing that I kind of asked them about and I don't know what they think about it. They haven't kind of totally responded. But I thought it was interesting that this is a bittersweet taste and kind of the symbolism of bittersweetness as a food that's representing the crisis and whether they felt that there was anything kind of connected to the taste of bittersweetness as a way of thinking about history or the past or the present. This takes us up to last summer when the referendum was going on. And once again, a yes vote on the referendum was to accept the new austerity package, a no vote was to reject it. And so this restaurant offered a yes burger, which as you can see was chickpea patties on a dry bun and the no burger, grease style with creamy feta and sun-dried tomatoes. And so, I mean, once again, it's interesting the symbolism of food because there were other protests that I haven't included in this presentation which played on the idea of foreign food in Greece. But this one, they're talking about two fairly Greek things, but chickpeas have an association with poverty or even sometimes some people associate them with World War II. And obviously, creamy feta and sun-dried tomatoes sound a lot nicer. And so I was interested in kind of things going on around the time of the referendum because one of the big issues was that people felt that if they voted against the austerity packages, they might be thrown out of the Eurozone or even thrown out of the European Union. That was kind of what some of the people who said we should vote yes because otherwise this is gonna happen, right? And so there was a kind of question about the Euro itself, that flood and how it felt about the Euro. And this is something that's been, I think, evolved in interesting ways over the, what is it, 12 or 13 years since the Euro was introduced. Because people on calendar still tell me like that the Euro doesn't reflect value in ways that they understand. And I haven't really studied this in depth. My former student actually was there during the time of the transition when the dropment and the Euro were both circulating together. And he'd had people telling him things like, you know, I can see buying clothes with the Euro or other things like that, but how am I going to buy tomatoes with the Euro? Tomatoes are Greek. I can only understand the value of tomatoes in dropments. So, you know, so this got me interested in kind of the relationship of food and money in this discourse. And some of the ways that food and money are like counting symbols to each other. Sometimes they overlap. We all make the money. And sometimes they're an emphasis to each other, right? And so I'm going to explore that a little bit more in these slides. This was a picture that circulated on the internet. This was part of the yes campaign saying, you know, we should stay in Europe. This was a picture from the rally just before the referendum. There were big rallies, both for yes and no. And this was the yes rally. You could say a number of things about this picture, including the fact that the sign the little girl is holding that has misspelled Europe in it. But the interesting thing to me was the Euro, the 10 Euro note plaster on the guy's head. Now I could read this in two very different ways. In one way this is kind of actually referencing a Greek practice, which is when a musician is playing for you you might kind of dance over to him and slap a tip on his head or stick it in his pocket or something like that. But this also seems to me to symbolize the idea of identification that we are the money now. So it's standing for some this other idea here I think. And then one of my colleagues sent me this and apparently this is a graffiti that you can find in many places. It says ATM Society. So it has the idea, are we an ATM Society now? But it also is, it has another kind of twist to it, which is that it can be a pun. It can mean ati mekinomia or honorless society. So the ATM Society is an honorless society. And ATMs were actually the focus of a lot of concern last summer because for very complicated reasons Greece had to put capital controls and people could only get out 60 euros at a time. So there were a lot of lines at ATMs and sometimes the media showed to scare people again. They showed people fighting at ATMs. Like once again, if you vote no, we're gonna be fighting for our money. But on Calumnos, in fact, my friends told me that ATMs were actually very sociable places that people gathered together and they were joking and they were saying, yeah, do we really need to take out money today? Maybe not. So once again, this kind of opposition between money and food sociability. Now I wanna talk briefly about what I'm sure is on a lot of your minds, which is the refugee crisis. And this photo got a lot of play in Greece. In fact, it was singled out by the Greek Prime Minister and he said, this is the image that we want to present of Europe, not a Europe of borders and fences. But this Europe. And the woman who's feeding the refugee woman's baby, she is actually one of the people who's been nominated for the Nobel Prize on behalf of all of the volunteers in Greece. And you see lots of things like this. I mean, if you've followed it at all, ordinary Greek people by and large have been tremendously generous. And here you have this Greek baker who's sharing his own product and the word philotimo or honor, love of honor is on top there. And from all that I've read and followed and talked to colleagues about it, there's really been a tremendous effort on part of ordinary people, not only part of the government or the kind of UN or big NGOs, they've been dropping the ball. But ordinary people in solidarity networks have been making a tremendous effort. And it's really important. Once again, context is everything. It's like, why are they making this effort? One narrative says it's because Greeks are generous, Philxonia, hospitality. And this narrative is kind of nationalist. It says, yes, we are the generous ones. Turks aren't generous, nor do Europeans aren't generous. We're generous. And the other thing about Philxonia, though, is as anthropologists have analyzed, it's definitely hierarchical. It's like, once again, it's like that cherry. It's like, I'm in the position of power. But in fact, many people, when you ask them about it and there's actually somebody, I think at LSC who's talked about this, her name is Miria Yorgiu. But other anthropologists, like Renee Hirshan and historians like Nick DiMari, have written about this in the past. It's not about hierarchy, it's about identity. Yorgiu says, when she asked people, why are they doing it, they said, it could be me. It could be me. And this is something that to just quote Nina Glick-Schiller, who's been working on what she calls cosmopolitan solidarity, cosmopolitan sociability, sorry. In Germany and in the north of England, she writes that the welcome that some Europeans gave the refugees in the fall of 2015 was not an expression of tolerance to strangers, but an acknowledgement that we are all facing the consequences of a global warring and the depredations and displacements of capital accumulation. In that sense, we are all refugees. Well, and in an additional sense, many of those older Greeks who are donating so much, they were refugees either during World War II or their parents or grandparents were refugees during the Asia Minor catastrophe. So they are speaking from personal knowledge. How am I doing on time? Okay. So really quick on this one then. So it's not always rosy though. This is a protest, I found this about a week ago, a protest to the Chamber of Commerce of Gios because apparently some merchants are not happy about solidarity actions because they don't want the refugees to be getting free food, they want the refugees to be buying their food. And so this is the social kitchen on Gios, part of the social kitchen movement. They go to the Chamber of Commerce and protest and they say, basically, stop harassing us. But they do it by bringing cups of lentils which they distribute to each member of the Chamber of Commerce. So they actually are using food to shame these people who are once again putting profit and calculation before sociability and solidarity. And very briefly about how are people in Calamno surviving. Well, those who can are sending their children as they have in the past as economic migrants to some of the few places that still take economic migrants like Australia. And one family that I knew, the mother's pictured here, sorry, her son has been in Australia for something over a year. In the course of a year he sent them roughly 12,000 euro. So quite a substantial amount that he's basically dedicating himself to keeping his parents and his sister afloat. And the mother here is cleaning oregano, which used to be one of the many things you might do to provision yourself. But now things like this are being used to make a little bit of money. So she's gonna bag it up and sell it to tourists as she might do with wild capers or other things. Sometimes they collect snails, which used to be just a delicacy that you would eat and maybe share with friends while they collected extra snails and sold them to neighbors. And it called on a lot of local knowledge, a lot of knowledge that could be forgotten, like how do you keep the snails? How do you cook the snails? Only the grandmother remembered that or knew that. These aren't recipes written down. So this is one of the ways that people are surviving through local knowledge. I'll give you one more brief example. I've got plenty. There's a dish called Kavarmas that I had never in my 30 years had anybody had made on Calamness because it's basically pork that you preserve by cooking it in fat and it preserved for a long time. And the sponge divers would take it on the sponge boats because it would last for them. But nobody had made it, but people were making it. At least a few people were making it. I said, why are you making Kavarmas? They said, well, you never know. Who knows? We might not have electricity in the future. We might not have refrigerators. We may as well still know how to make those things that can keep us going. So this is very much kind of related to some of the things that that minister was saying about stretching things and using Tassan knowledge or local knowledge. So to come back to that minister's statement, and here's another quick video of a protest outside of that minister's office. Oops. Okay, so they're saying, basically show us the money so that we can eat stuffed specials. Because these are municipal workers who haven't been paid in months. And basically they're saying, we don't even have enough money to make the ME stuff. So why were people so upset with this minister? Basically, it's not that what she was saying was wrong. It was that this is not something you bring out in the open. And she certainly didn't have the right to say it because once again, she, like other ministers, but not like the Greek people, she wasn't suffering. She didn't, she wasn't having to make any stuff. So to say that the Greek people should be doing this was very upsetting to people. So to kind of bring, start to bring things to a close, here's a quote from Annalise Riles. She says, the compulsion toward reciprocity and exchange relations, the compulsion to create and continually rejuvenate relations based on debt and mutual obligation is in fact the basis of all ethics and sociality, the source of our humanity, and what we can return to at points at which grand ideologies such as neoliberalism fail us. And so this is what I've been talking about. The way that, the way that neoliberalism is not Greek is that it doesn't recognize that sociability is the basis of society. And that sociability calls on all kinds of local knowledge and tacit knowledge for its reproduction. All right. So while food can be used, certainly it can be used for neoliberal or exclusionary purposes and money can be culturally redeemed. In broad terms, money stands for a spirit of calculation and anti-social profiteering, which is something I've developed in some of my other work on Calimnian shopping. And food stands for sociability and the embeddedness of knowledge. And I would propose that there is something of comparative value in this ethnography and that we will find similar meanings anywhere in which a robust food culture, a cuisine in Sidney Mince's use of the term still exists and thrives and is faced with the threat of neoliberal ideologies and practices. But that's for all of you to tell me. And lastly, the more I study food, the more convinced I become that food studies needs to be at the very center of anthropology. And, you know, my mother was an anthropologist and she was, I think in many ways ahead of her times, she was studying social movements back in the 1950s. She was studying transnational migration in the 1980s. But she wondered why I was writing a whole book about food back in 2001. And when I finished that book and told her what my next project was, she said, you're gonna write another book about food? But I think my point is that food is not only a window onto other domains of life, is not only deeply woven into practices of kinship, exchange, and ritual, those domains that we have traditionally considered central to our anthropological project. But food itself is one such domain, absolutely critical to people's daily reproduction of what matters to them about their lives. And as food scholars, I think it's time that we own up to this. So I'll leave you with this, one of my favorite comic strips. This was on New Year's this year. And it's not talking about Greece, but somehow appropriate, I think. And thank you. Thanks to Harry, Jacob, Nenichuku, Leo Vornellis, Nenipanaya, Samatis Amarai, Rianakis, and Navsika Papacharo-Lambos.