Some debts are never repaid: Antiquity, archaeology, and the crisis

The current economic and social crisis in Greece has become the subject of intense, local, and international debate, yet the discussion has been dominated by economists, political scientists, and some historians. At the same time, it is evident that in both domestic and foreign invocations and pronouncements, the classical heritage and the material past more broadly loom large. 

I will claim that, far from being simply a colorful backdrop to the political discourse or frivolous distractions from the serious matters at hand, such invocations bring forth crucial issues, hardly touched upon by scholarly research to date: the deeper roots of the dominant perceptions and stereotypes that structure the current political discourses, in Greece, in the rest of Europe, and beyond; the salient continuities between the crypto-colony of the 19th century and the debt colony of the present; and the fundamental role that the classical material heritage, and the materiality of the past in general, have played in the shaping of contemporary perceptions and discursive regimes.

In this talk, I will elaborate on this argument using several examples from the media, but I will also explore how specific archaeological stories that became prominent media phenomena and public obsessions, are intricately linked with the contemporary crisis. I will elaborate in particular on the case of Amphipolis, showing how it became a story of “national treasure-hunting,” or better an example of what anthropologists have described as an “occult economy.”