Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on time tricking strategies of "everyday financial brokering" during the economic crisis in Greece. Based on ethnographic data of an extended household on the slopes of Mt. Pilion in Thessaly, the role of money and related strategies of tricking time will be discussed.

Paper long abstract:

The economic-temporal diet of austerity in Greece has led among others to the collapse of labour markets, the decrease of wages, pensions and unemployment benefits.

Kalypso, a woman in Thessaly is struggling to make ends meet for her extended family in a situation that is stuck between an enforced presentism and fantasy futurism (cf. Guyer 2007).

Kalypso engages in what I call "everyday financial brokering", a practice that sheds light on the role of money, the value of labour, and time-tricking strategies in the Greece of today.

Confronted with the increasing gap between revenues and necessary expenses in her extended family, Kalypso struggles to ensure a smooth flow of values for

ensuring the necessary liquidity for paying bills on time. Kalypso juggles with deadlines for payments and the dates wages and pensions are paid. She uses money as an economic device that does not require that any one person in the family is able to settle her own bills in time.

This paper discusses various strategies of tricking or silencing time in the face of economic hardship, by combining ethnographic data and anthropological concepts. The role of money as a device to bend time will be investigated as an echo of an era, in which the social role of the financial broker is no more restricted to high finance, but becomes as well necessary in times of socio-economic uncertainty in Thessaly.