THE FALL OF THE 'PURIFIED' COMMUNITY: CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN GREECE

Abstract

The article explores the recent social and political transformations in Greece through events of collective action in the public space of Athens. Drawing on Richard Sennet’s notion of the ‘myth of the purified community’ it is argued that these events demonstrate a gradual disintegration of the social imaginary of the idea of community in various scales (national, local, etc). This argument builds on the indistinction between public and private as reflected in these events in Athens. By providing ethnographic examples from both before and after the economic collapse, the article explains crisis as a long process of contesting the sovereignty of the state and institutions in Greece and how these previously downplayed contestations were rendered visible in the Greek public sphere. This visibility shakes the foundations of the notion of a homogeneous community as it is established by the ‘social contract’.