Theodoros Rakopoulos
http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/people/aca/theodoros-rakopoulos/
[email protected]
I'm an economic anthropologist with an interest in politics. I have done fieldwork on agrarian production anti-mafia cooperatives that work on land confiscated from Cosa Nostra in rural Sicily (2008-9) on food co-ops and alternative food distribution movements during the Greek crisis (2013-2016), and on the citizenship by investment project of Cyprus (2019). My research has been funded by Wenner-Gren grants.
My first book, based on a RAI/Sutasoma-awarded thesis (PhD Goldsmiths) is an ethnography of a mafia-influenced village, that examines social relations in and around Sicilian cooperatives, as well as the apparent 'opposites' where members are entangled in (as per mafia/antimafia). I argue that cooperatives are constituted from dynamics taking place outside cooperative systems of work, including kinship practices and ideologies, reputation and informal labour.
My second monograph followed field research in the Republic of Cyprus, on the country's "citizenship by investment" scheme that allows entrepreneurs to acquire the Cypriot citizenship and passport. The book conceptualises a new formation of citizenship, based not on descent or territoriality but on exchange, while being attentive to the merging of state and market in the shape of citizenship-for-sale.
I am particularly interested in the grey zones between nested categories where the political formulates: formal and informal, mafia and antimafia, silence and talk, law and ethics, home and workplace, betrayal and commitment. In recent work, I have explored the liminality of concepts such as neighbourhood, confession and omertà, arguing that they unsettle instituted understandings of separation, while elsewhere I've focused on how concepts reshape in the midst of social change (such as “flexible kinship”, or “hidden welfare”).
Following that line, I've examined “bridging” concepts, that inform activist practices (including solidarity and solidarity economies, on which I've extensively worked on in the context of the so-called Greek crisis). My interest in the contradictions of egalitarianism as practice and ideology has yielded work appraising food activism’s hierarchies, exploring co-op/mafia dangerous liaisons, and critically revisiting the idea of “community participation” in industrial democracy institutions.
I have edited collections exploring: firstly, the global ramifications of austerity, in an attempt to think of this seemingly “European” problem in a non-Eurocentric way; secondly, the intellectual, historical and political genealogies of an Anthropology of wealth.
Phone: 004722855875
Address: Department of Social Anthropology,
Moltke Moes vei 31, Eilert Sundts hus, blokk A, 0851 OSLO
Postboks 1091 Blindern
0317 OSLO
[email protected]
I'm an economic anthropologist with an interest in politics. I have done fieldwork on agrarian production anti-mafia cooperatives that work on land confiscated from Cosa Nostra in rural Sicily (2008-9) on food co-ops and alternative food distribution movements during the Greek crisis (2013-2016), and on the citizenship by investment project of Cyprus (2019). My research has been funded by Wenner-Gren grants.
My first book, based on a RAI/Sutasoma-awarded thesis (PhD Goldsmiths) is an ethnography of a mafia-influenced village, that examines social relations in and around Sicilian cooperatives, as well as the apparent 'opposites' where members are entangled in (as per mafia/antimafia). I argue that cooperatives are constituted from dynamics taking place outside cooperative systems of work, including kinship practices and ideologies, reputation and informal labour.
My second monograph followed field research in the Republic of Cyprus, on the country's "citizenship by investment" scheme that allows entrepreneurs to acquire the Cypriot citizenship and passport. The book conceptualises a new formation of citizenship, based not on descent or territoriality but on exchange, while being attentive to the merging of state and market in the shape of citizenship-for-sale.
I am particularly interested in the grey zones between nested categories where the political formulates: formal and informal, mafia and antimafia, silence and talk, law and ethics, home and workplace, betrayal and commitment. In recent work, I have explored the liminality of concepts such as neighbourhood, confession and omertà, arguing that they unsettle instituted understandings of separation, while elsewhere I've focused on how concepts reshape in the midst of social change (such as “flexible kinship”, or “hidden welfare”).
Following that line, I've examined “bridging” concepts, that inform activist practices (including solidarity and solidarity economies, on which I've extensively worked on in the context of the so-called Greek crisis). My interest in the contradictions of egalitarianism as practice and ideology has yielded work appraising food activism’s hierarchies, exploring co-op/mafia dangerous liaisons, and critically revisiting the idea of “community participation” in industrial democracy institutions.
I have edited collections exploring: firstly, the global ramifications of austerity, in an attempt to think of this seemingly “European” problem in a non-Eurocentric way; secondly, the intellectual, historical and political genealogies of an Anthropology of wealth.
Phone: 004722855875
Address: Department of Social Anthropology,
Moltke Moes vei 31, Eilert Sundts hus, blokk A, 0851 OSLO
Postboks 1091 Blindern
0317 OSLO
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Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters by Theodoros Rakopoulos
but everyday currency in the formation of the citizenry’s relation to the state
in postcolonial communities. A focus on the hyphen (-) in the nation-state
nexus works to unpack how vernacular forms of nationalism take shape in
a post-conflict, postcolonial polity. In Cyprus, two opposed vernaculars are
used by the Greek-speaking population to engage with statehood and thus with
the Cyprus Problem. Certain Greek-Cypriots adhere to a non-nation-bound
loyalty, κυπριωτισμός (cypriotism), that supports the state’s bicommunal
nature. Sociohistorical formations have informed a conceptual distance
between nation and state, a condition nurturing everyday vernaculars of civic
belonging. Among other Greek-Cypriots, ethnonationalist rhetoric operates
in favor of divisionism. The Cyprus case contributes to an understanding of
the political vernacular in postcolonial contexts by highlighting from below
the local “languages” that underpin post-conflict statehood.
glossed as cypriotism, while I illustrate how dividing techniques of conventional nationalist rhetoric operate among other Greek-Cypriots. I also briefly discuss how such vernacular experiences of nationhood and statehood reverberate among Turkish-Cypriots and Turks (the state’s “Others”) and consider the ways this affects the Republic. The article therefore contributes to understanding the political vernacular in the post-colonial and post-conflict context of Cyprus, and highlights from
below the local “languages” pertaining to the Cyprus Problem.
phenomenon, a specific instance situated in recent events
in Europe. On the contrary, the book argues that structural
adjustment policies, an agenda that goes back quite some
time, have served as a backdrop to the currently generalized
austerity configuration. Scrutinizing such policies teaches
us that austerity has a historical depth and geographical
spread that are vaster than what is commonly perceived.
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden
wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different
sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a
strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in
Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s
mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding
of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis
Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and
of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of
(un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and
pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse
trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined
allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory
allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are
shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis.
Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our)
understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions,
according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology
of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the
microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.