Creation from Krisis: Regenerative Design and (Re)Making the Oikos in Austerity Greece

This dissertation is about creation in Greece—creation that is emerging from krisi, in Greek meaning crisis or critique, or the ruins left in the wake of the persistent booms and busts of capitalism. It tracks the growing network of ecologically-inspired groups in Greece—ranging from community initiatives, businesses, and NGOs—seeking to repair the habitability of their worlds through regenerative design. My primary site of study was ReGreen, an Ecoculture Center, “permaculture sanctuary,” and residential community situated atop a mountain in Achaia, Greece. The research also included time in central Athens, as well as visits and varying degrees of engagement with similar projects in the Peloponnese, on the outskirts of Athens, and in Evia. Participants in these ecological projects draw on alternative farming approaches, such as permaculture and biodynamic agriculture, to navigate their relationships with land Similar initiatives around the world today draw on these approaches to respond critically to industrial modes of material and social reproduction beyond agriculture. Rather than locate crisis exclusively within the trope of the economic, my interlocutors couch issues of scarcity within a broader ecology where the social, political, and economic are entangled in the experiences of everyday making and relationship building. For them, regeneration occurs through experiments of more balanced exchange practices—between one another (e.g., time banks, labor share) and with “natural” environments (e.g., natural and bioclimactic building, locally grown, pesticide-free produce, and energy harnessing). By tracking redesign of housing, production, and exchange practices, this study illuminates the politics and ethics of daily life that reside alongside market-oriented values and citizenship, revealing a diversity of practices and relationships that deconstruct rigid notions of the economic in popular parlance and academic literature. I explore how collaborative relationships are made and negotiated through these community interventions in everyday material practices. Practitioners of permaculture and biodynamics, in different ways, strive to understand and provide for the needs of the interconnected lives in the gardens they tend and homes they share. They do so through a critical rewiring of the senses—and through close observation and an opening to the multisensorial inputs and multispecies life in these spaces. The photographs used in this dissertation point to the multisensorial dimensions in my fieldsites that I consider productive dimensions of ethnographic data and knowledge production. They emphasize the co-articulation of bodies and worlds, ones that cultivate aesthetic and ethical proficiencies for eco-project participants. This ethnographic work on how regeneration is enacted and recognized in ecological projects in Greece illuminates new possibilities for abundance and making lives worth living in contexts otherwise defined by scarcity.

Author

• Vourlides, Evy

Language

• en

Keyword

• Greece
• Making
• Regeneration
• Design
• Ecology
• Permaculture

Date created

• 2022

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Anthropology

Degree

• Ph.D.

Advisor

• Wagner, Sarah E.

Committee Member(s)

• Bell, Joshua A.
• Feldman, Ilana
• Dent, Alexander S.

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/2f75r878q