CFP: Reframing Europe’s South: Anthropologies across “P.I.G.S.”

This panel ethnographically and theoretically takes Europe’s South as its object. Against the backdrop of centuries of entrenched North/South dynamics and histories of anthropology of and in Europe’s South, we attend to forms of belonging and exclusion and affective alliances that cut across Europe’s Southern periphery in a current moment marked by precarity. Europe’s South has long been writ by stereotypical discourses originating in Europe’s North as Europe’s wayward, sensual, pre-modern, other. Ongoing economic crises since 2008 have both amplified North/South discourses and sharply accentuated center periphery relations within Europe. At the same time, emergent forms of political organizing and solidarity, immigration and migration, and memory and heritage work are re-inflecting the boundaries of belonging across Europe’s South. We place ethnographic case studies in Portugal, Greece, Italy, and Spain (sometimes referred to in economic discourse with the derogatory acronym “P.I.G.S.”) in productive alignment, examining the political and anthropological efficacies of Europe’s South as an analytic category.

Possible paper themes include: precarity, immigration/migration, tourism, North-South and/or South-South dynamics, anthropological labors in Europe’s South (past and present), the senses, “contagion,” heritage, protest, comparative fascisms (in terms of memory/history projects in the present).

For more information, please contact the organizer: Lila Ellen Gray (Columbia University) at leg2114@columbia.edu