Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on the role of family transfers during two different periods of social and economic crisis in Greece. It will try to examine the interaction between family strategies and wider process of social reproduction aiming to show the complexity of economic exchanges within market societies.

Paper long abstract:

While family exchanges and transfers play a capital role within pre-capitalist societies, their role in "modern" market societies is often underestimated. As market processes are supposed to constitute the organizational principle of economic activities, outside market exchanges are regarded as marginal or vestigial. However, the persistence of different types of exchanges, especially in periods of economic crisis, imposes the reexamination of the dynamic character of family transfers within the construction and the transformation of market societies. In this framework I will examine the role of family exchanges in post-war and contemporary Greece.

Taking two different periods of economic and social crisis in Greece, this paper aims to discuss the role of family exchanges and transfers not only as a factor of family reproduction but as a component of social transformation and wider social reproduction processes. Thus, I will examine, firstly, the period during the '50s and the '60s where rapid urbanization and a shift from rural to industrial and services economy took place and, secondly, the current period of economic crisis. On the one hand, extended family transfers have been the base for aggressive housing strategies marking a period of immigration and urbanization. On the other hand, intergenerational exchanges and transfers contribute to the reproduction of households that face serious economic problems due to unemployment and low revenues within the current economic crisis. In both cases, exchanges and transfers within family networks are part of households' important reproductive strategies aiming to cope with instable conditions and at the same time imply a complex interaction between market and non-market processes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the complexities of transnational families' ability to safeguard its members against the risk in different historical and spatial contexts of economic uncertainty. The paper draws upon my ethnography of transnational families across Poland and Finland since the Cold War to date.

Paper long abstract:

This paper indicates the successes, tensions and pitfalls of transnational families' attempts at helping their members deal with various forms of economic uncertainty experienced in different economic and cultural contexts, from the Cold War past to the post-Cold War present. The paper argues that thanks to the historical perspective the particularities of the recent economic turmoil and its effect on transnational family members' ability and willingness to help can be seen in a better light. The paper is based on the multi-sited ethnography of transnational families conducted across Poland and Finland, encompassing their life since the Cold War to date.

During the Cold War transnational family transfers constituted a buffer against uncertainties of socialist shortage economy for those in Poland. The capitalist 1989-shift introduced in Poland new uncertainties related to shortage of income and employment rather than problems with supply, but also increased various groups' material welfare. Simultaneously, I noted an intensification of cultural uncertainties related to principles of transnational exchange. The transnational wealth transfer became a contested terrain. It reminded that risk and economic uncertainty are subjective categories susceptible to different reading, especially if people speak from different national locations within a common transnational space. In a situation of recent crisis important was also how both states were imagined to help their residents deal with the risk. It seemed that social welfare system in Finland ensured its residence with a buffer against uncertain times, whereas those in Poland were left relaying on their families for support.

Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic examples, this work illustrates the significance of a house in the process of identity formation of "Aussiedler" - ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union - questions of self-perception and the perception of others.

Paper long abstract:

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain many Russian-Germans - returned to their ancestors' homeland, hoping for a better life, leaving their houses and homes behind them. Supported by the German government the first "homecomers" transported their property in containers. Later, bringing possessions was limited to one suitcase. The objects associated with the former life were carefully selected by the families in order to include them in the forthcoming life in Germany.

Arriving in Germany the Aussiedler faced an unexpected foreign culture and situation: The Germans in Russia became the Russians in Germany - a paradox of identity?

Today, in a large number of German cities these Russian-Germans make up a significant percentage of the population, living in so called "Little Russia - districts". For many Aussiedler building a house is not only a symbol of growing wealth but it is also linked to the final decision of spending one´s life in the homeland of one´s own ancestors. The construction of the house, a collective work, develops into (re-)creating a home in respect of practices, material objects or traditional dishes. A home that is seen as a family capital investment should ensure all the stability and safety that migrants need to become active participants of the German society.

This work that is based on a qualitative research carried out between 2009 and 2011 in Wertheim/Main, Germany explores the exterior and the interior décor of Aussiedlers' houses as well as its symbolic value, helping migrants to create a new home and to (re)define their identity.

Paper short abstract:

Cooperatives cultivating land confiscated from the mafia are a joint venture of the antimafia movement and the state in Sicily. The people involved experience the uncertainties of change, claiming a different engagement with the state's 'domesticating' processes and contesting their consequences.

Paper long abstract:

Antimafia cooperatives are hailed as thriving work-units that allow people to make a living while contesting the mafia in contemporary Western Sicily. The uneasiness of a labour market controlled by mafia patronage has been alleviated through the proliferation of employment opportunities in these cooperatives. The cooperatives utilise land that the state confiscated from local Mafiosi while a public consortium regulates their activity.

However, a series of issues have shaped the experience of 'doing antimafia' as an uncertain one. These include disquiet accommodations of the confiscated land that the cooperatives work on, the fact that mafia is by no means obsolete and the social arrangements of recruitment and work practices of many people involved in the cooperatives. State agents promote 'meritocratic' ideas premised on 'anti-kinship' rhetoric, as kinship links are seen as 'primordial' and 'prone to mafia influence'. Local peasants developed resistance practices to this scheme; indigenous engagements with the project entailed the impossibility of detachment from village nexuses of relationships, including kinship-bound ones.

I analyse this significant instance of social change for Sicily, as a dialectics of continuity and transformation. While legalistic jargon and jural reification of the confiscated plots' statuses push to undermining kinship bonds, local everyday practices trace continuities with an uncomfortable recent past, in constituting the cooperatives. I explore the uncertainties these processes entail for locals and question the 'anti-kinship' rhetoric of the state, showing that the state-building project of the confiscated land's use is itself premised on specific state categorisations of kinship which produce unintended consequences.

Paper short abstract:

In Dakar's monetarized and pervasive sociality, agency is based on the conversion of liquidity in relations. But only life-cycle rituals, where women honor kinship relations through prestations, manage successfully to synchronize financial relations.

Paper long abstract:

À Dakar, où la vie sociale se caractérise par la monétarisation généralisée des relations, tout détenteur de liquidités est soumis à des demandes permanentes de son entourage, en particulier de ses parents. La stratégie adoptée pour conserver de l'argent consiste à le mettre en circulation : la liquidité est convertie en relations financières, notamment au sein de tontines. Lorsque l'argent circule, il est inaccessible pour un temps. Dans cette socialité marquée par la monétarisation et le caractère envahissant des relations, la préférence pour l'illiquidité n'est pas une simple stratégie d'épargne, mais une condition pour agir.

Cette capacité d'agir repose en outre sur la capacité à synchroniser ses relations sociales (et donc financières), aux temporalités hétérogènes, pour obtenir son argent le moment voulu. Le commerce fonctionne selon une logique de cloisonnement des relations marchandes du reste des relations sociales et pâtit de la difficulté à synchroniser les relations financières. De même, il est souvent difficile d'obtenir de l'argent pour la santé. En revanche, les cérémonies d'échanges entre femmes à l'occasion des mariages et des naissances mobilisent l'ensemble des circuits financiers et permettent de rassembler des sommes impossibles à obtenir autrement. Le système financier est ainsi hiérarchisé du point de vue de la capacité des agents à mobiliser et synchroniser les relations financières.

Les relations sociales n'apparaissent donc pas comme un capital réticulaire mobilisé dans le cadre de stratégies financières d'assurance face à l'incertitude. A l'inverse, les réseaux financiers sont mobilisés pour honorer les relations de parenté.