Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses on Skyrians’ recourses to the local past through the Apokries ritual, which emerge in response to a threatening local future. In doing so, it explores how the depiction of the Mediterranean as ‘frozen in time’ can affect communities’ historicity and thus their collective agency.

Paper Abstract:

In the island of Skyros, Greece, the Apokries festivity is the most beloved. It takes the form of a ritual whose participants are collectively known as the ‘ginomenoi’: ‘those who become’, and which was perceived as an unchanged remnant of ancient Greek life by the foreign ethnographers who first studied it. Consequently, the island has been portrayed as offering an authentically Greek experience, ‘uncontaminated' by modernity, particularly during the Apokries. Skyrians exploited this characterization by further inscribing links to the national past in local histories and landscapes.

However, recently, the threat posed to Skyros’ natural landscape and indigenous community’s way of living by tourist overflow and state-backed wind-farm projects, has propelled a recourse to local pasts. In this recourse, the Apokries play central part as an embodied process awakening within participants the counter-memory of the historical experience that gave birth to the ritual – an experience that is discounted by the official national narrative and anthropological/folkloric studies.

This presentation reveals how this threatening future, as well as the nationalist appropriation of the local past and epistemic construction of Skyros as a Mediterranean site ‘frozen in time’, have confronted Skyrians with the problem of their collective agency. It focuses on how Skyrians’ recourses to the local past emerge as part of their wider efforts to regain their collective agency towards both their appropriated past and future of dispossession. It thus explores how collective agency emerges as a property fundamentally linked to a community’s historicity, meaning its sense of historical embeddedness.