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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the transformative potentialities of a cultural practice centered around mutualities. It asks how Ikarian paniyiria have changed during periods of crisis, and what has persisted through them, and proposes a way to think about commons and their capacity to re-orientate change.

Paper Abstract:

In the Greek island of Ikaria, the village festivals, known as 'paniyiria', have been diachronically the locus of a gift economy centered around care for the saints, the deceased and the living community members. This paper focuses on a change that occurred during a period of crisis and social transformation to explore how paniyiria have shaped and have been shaped by social transformations. In the 1870s-1890s, what was previously given as a gift to the saints and in memory of ancestors, and was redistributed among the participants, was now sold and the earnings were directed towards 'common-good projects'. Since then, the semantic content of the 'common-good project' did not stop changing and, besides churches, it included schools, roads, water systems, and community centers. That is, projects that evince care for the commons (e.g. education, water), and occupy or create new spaces of the commons. Drawing from long-term ethnographic and historical research, this paper argues that such projects bespeak of their era, while also participating in the historical transformations of each era. The turn of paniyiria towards common-good projects was the local response to wider processes of enclosure of the ecological and civic commons. At the same time, it ensured the continuity of the interpersonal, intergenerational and intercommunity exchanges centered around care and grounded on a long tradition of commoning. Within this foundational relationship between the gift economy and commoning lies the key for understanding the transformative potentiality of care, which radiates in the common-good projects financed by Ikarian paniyiria.