Books by Aris Anagnostopoulos
Aris Anagnostopoulos, Evangelos Kyriakidis, Eleni Stefanou, 2022
Making Heritage Together presents a case study of public archaeology by focusing on the collabora... more Making Heritage Together presents a case study of public archaeology by focusing on the collaborative creation of knowledge about the past with a rural community in central Crete. It is based on a long-term archaeological ethnography project that engaged this village community in collectively researching, preserving and managing their cultural heritage.
This volume presents the theoretical and local contexts for the project, explains the methodology and the project outcomes, and reviews in detail some of the public archaeology actions with the community as examples of collaborative, research-based heritage management. What the authors emphasize in this book is the value of local context in designing and implementing public archaeology projects, and the necessity of establishing methods to understand, collaborate and interact with culturally specific groups and publics. They argue for the implementation of archaeological ethnographic research as a method of creating instances and spaces for collaborative knowledge production. The volume contributes to a greater understanding of how rural communities can be successfully engaged in the management of their own heritage.
It will be relevant to archaeologists and other heritage professionals who aim to maximise the inclusivity and impact of small projects with minimal resources and achieve sustainable processes of collaboration with local stakeholders.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
EuropeNow Journal, 2020
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Field. A journal of socially-engaged art criticism, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A book about memory, history and receptions of antiquity in modern Greece, with essays by A. Liak... more A book about memory, history and receptions of antiquity in modern Greece, with essays by A. Liakos, Chr. Koulouri, N. Belavilas, T. Sakellaropoulos, D. Voudouri, D. Plantzos, E. Yialouri, N. Kaltsas, A. Tourta, A. Delivorrias, L. Stefanou, P. Themelis, Y. Hamilakis, O. Sakali.
Τι είναι μνήμη και τι μνημείο; Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία; Γιατί η κλασική αρχαιότητα θεωρείται σημαντικότερη από τον Μεσαίωνα; Πώς επιλέγουμε τι θα ανασκάψουμε και τι θα εκθέσουμε σε ένα μουσείο; Ποιος είναι ο ρόλος των πολιτών στη διαχείριση της πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς;
Αυτά είναι μερικά από τα ερωτήματα που θίγονται σε αυτό τον συλλογικό τόμο. Ειδικοί από διάφορα επιστημονικά πεδία επιχειρούν να προσεγγίσουν την πολυδιάστατη σχέση της ελληνικής κοινωνίας με το ιστορικό παρελθόν, διερευνώντας θέματα όπως οι μηχανισμοί διαμόρφωσης συλλογικής μνήμης, η προνομιακή μεταχείριση κάποιων ιστορικών περιόδων, η αλληλεπίδραση των πολιτών με τα υλικά κατάλοιπα του παρελθόντος κ.ά. Ο τόμος έχει στόχο να φέρει σε επαφή το ευρύ κοινό με σύγχρονες θεωρητικές εξελίξεις στον τομέα των ανθρωπιστικών επιστημών, να αναδείξει τις ιδεολογικές παραμέτρους της μελέτης του παρελθόντος και να ανασκευάσει ορισμένες στρεβλώσεις που χαρακτηρίζουν τον δημόσιο περί αρχαιολογίας λόγο.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Aris Anagnostopoulos
Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain [En ligne], 2021
Theories of abjection usually approach it as a transhistorical and unchanging characteristic of h... more Theories of abjection usually approach it as a transhistorical and unchanging characteristic of human organization, a natural corollary of bodily and psychological functions. However, historical and post-colonial approaches in particular examine abjection as directly linked to the extension of disciplinary techniques of the Western state to colonized populations. Techniques of control and sanitation have thus become synonymous with the civilizing imperative of imperialist expansion. I hereby examine ambivalences towards abjection in post-Ottoman Iraklion, Crete, to imply that they are directly linked to the memory of such civilizing missions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the implementation of colonial technologies of rule by the British occupying forces happened simultaneously with the state-sanctioned urban reforms. These combined processes created a regime of historicity that appears in facetious stories that question its completeness, its political aims and the very foundations of Western civility. In performative speech acts, bodily functions become contested terrains for a critical recollection of state-sanctioned modernization. The purported passage from barbarism to civilization with the end of Ottoman suzerainty is questioned in a way that proposes that the distinctions it has created, between dirty and clean, Turkish and Greek, old and new, country and city, are only a facade for the collusion of state and privileged classes in their effort to modernize the city.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology, Apr 23, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Every summer for the past four years, a small group of Greek and foreign students gather at the m... more Every summer for the past four years, a small group of Greek and foreign students gather at the mountainous village of Gonies Malevyziou in central Crete to participate in the monthly International Field School "Engaging Local Communities in Heritage Management through Archaeological Ethnography". The School is organised by the Heritage Management Organization and the Cultural Association of Gonies. Teaching ethnography to non anthropologists in the field is challenging as it brings multiple and interchanging roles for teachers and students alike. In this process of collective ethnographic learning, where the teaching setting is also our living setting and research setting, we often wonder about the entangled roles in the production of knowledge and interpretations articulated through theoretical readings, daily chores and lived experience. The demands of active research running side by side with methodological instruction and teaching create different expectations that shape the learning experience in unpredictable ways. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in this process: What is the local community members' position as producers, instigators, and transmitters of this knowledge? How are our multiple identities as teachers, researchers, friends, visitors, and locals/non-locals articulated within and outside the field? Finally, how is the knowledge produced managed and controlled by the community and the people responsible for the summer school?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2019
This article presents a fieldwork collaboration between contemporary art, “traditional” craft, an... more This article presents a fieldwork collaboration between contemporary art, “traditional” craft, and ethnographic research in which community engagement plays a key role. Two decades after the abandonment of weaving in a depopulated mountainous village of Crete, Greece, a group of researchers invite an artist to turn the village's old school into a weaving studio. Aiming at the active participation of the local community in weaving heritage interpretation, and the interdisciplinary collaboration of art and anthropology, the weaving studio experience provides a fertile ground for discussing the relationships between disciplines, the difficulties of crossing the boundaries of these disciplines, and the challenges of community participation in managing knowledge production. Here we discuss our experience working with an artist in a project between art and research, including various observations, different approaches, and challenges.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The years after 2008 were marked by a burgeoning of grassroots syndicalism in Greece. Following t... more The years after 2008 were marked by a burgeoning of grassroots syndicalism in Greece. Following the events of December 2008, and their seriously overlooked aspect of worker-oriented action and organizing, a great part of the anarchist and extreme left milieu turned to workplace syndicalism as its principal praxis. Drawing from the experience of previous attempts to organize precarious workers, especially in the courier service, these groups and individuals proposed an aggressive, non-institutional syndicalism, based on collective action for the consolidation of individual workplace victories, with the ultimate aim of gaining workers rights for ‘new’ types of workers, marginalized by state-sanctioned trade unions. In the wake of the austerity measures imposed by the Troika, a series of worker’s rights have been irreversibly revoked, leaving little space for the shop-floor negotiation that these collectives have relied upon until now. At the same time, the importance of fighting over small material victories at the workplace becomes a last bastion of resistance against work restructuring, especially in the private sector. ; This presentation attempts a genealogy of novel forms of syndicalism in Greece, examining them within recent ‘circles of struggle’, as an effect of three not necessarily interrelated processes: the crisis of state-sanctioned trade unions as mediators between workers’ interests and capital, especially as part of the socialist arrangement; the proliferation of low-wage service jobs in the last part of the 90s – as part of the neoliberal regulation of work in late capitalism; and the radicalization of younger generations, especially through the no-global movement of 2003, the student protests of 2006 and its culmination in the events of December 2008.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Contested Antiquity
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology, Apr 23, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies
This article presents a community project developed through the Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central... more This article presents a community project developed through the Three Peak Sanctuaries of Central Crete archaeological project in the village of Gonies in Crete, Greece. We propose that archaeological research should include community projects and involve locals in decision-making. We examine the limitations put on such community programs by state institutions and networks of power. We argue that archaeologists should be involved as experts through engaged long-term ethnographic research that precedes any archaeological or heritage investigation and enables them to understand the position of their research within instituted networks of power and knowledge. We make a case for local engagement that can alter the course of research towards more ethical and sustainable forms. And finally, we discuss the development of public outreach programs in collaboration with the communities themselves.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal
This article presents a fieldwork collaboration between contemporary art, “traditional” craft, an... more This article presents a fieldwork collaboration between contemporary art, “traditional” craft, and ethnographic research in which community engagement plays a key role. Two decades after the abandonment of weaving in a depopulated mountainous village of Crete, Greece, a group of researchers invite an artist to turn the village’s old school into a weaving studio. Aiming at the active participation of the local community in weaving heritage interpretation, and the interdisciplinary collaboration of art and anthropology, the weaving studio experience provides a fertile ground for discussing the relationships between disciplines, the difficulties of crossing the boundaries of these disciplines and the challenges of community participation in managing knowledge production. Here we discuss our experience working with an artist in a project between art and research, including various observations, different approaches, and challenges.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
History and Anthropology
ABSTRACT The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemorati... more ABSTRACT The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemoration of a massacre of the Christians of the city by Muslim irregulars in 1898 demonstrate an ambivalence towards the transition to the post-ottoman nation-state, one aspect of which is the dialectic that develops between absence and presence of material traces of the Ottoman past. A second aspect is the non-linear temporality within which historical events are remembered. Official commemoration practices have shaped plural memories and often conflicting accounts of the events into a single narrative of modernization, to justify the rebuilding of the city according to western precepts. Reactions to this process did not take the shape of political resistance, but emerged as acts of refusal that create telling absences in the archive and ironic statements that form a genealogy of the ambivalence contemporary Irakliots feel towards the official state and its account of progress to modernity.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
This article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the A... more This article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the Autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898, to interrogate current categories of ethnic boundaries used in historical and social research. It proposes an ‘archaeological’ method of investigating such boundaries in space. It conceives of the city as a field of interaction between the predominant religious groups of Muslim and Christian, and the way these groups have been represented in historical research and public memory. It also shows how understandings of ethnic boundaries were fashioned by colonial, especially British, sanitary and civic planning projects. Finally, it demonstrates how subaltern Muslim spaces, gendered places and ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods were transformed into paradigmatic cases for understanding spatial segregation in cultural terms.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Public Archaeology, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by Aris Anagnostopoulos
This volume presents the theoretical and local contexts for the project, explains the methodology and the project outcomes, and reviews in detail some of the public archaeology actions with the community as examples of collaborative, research-based heritage management. What the authors emphasize in this book is the value of local context in designing and implementing public archaeology projects, and the necessity of establishing methods to understand, collaborate and interact with culturally specific groups and publics. They argue for the implementation of archaeological ethnographic research as a method of creating instances and spaces for collaborative knowledge production. The volume contributes to a greater understanding of how rural communities can be successfully engaged in the management of their own heritage.
It will be relevant to archaeologists and other heritage professionals who aim to maximise the inclusivity and impact of small projects with minimal resources and achieve sustainable processes of collaboration with local stakeholders.
Τι είναι μνήμη και τι μνημείο; Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία; Γιατί η κλασική αρχαιότητα θεωρείται σημαντικότερη από τον Μεσαίωνα; Πώς επιλέγουμε τι θα ανασκάψουμε και τι θα εκθέσουμε σε ένα μουσείο; Ποιος είναι ο ρόλος των πολιτών στη διαχείριση της πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς;
Αυτά είναι μερικά από τα ερωτήματα που θίγονται σε αυτό τον συλλογικό τόμο. Ειδικοί από διάφορα επιστημονικά πεδία επιχειρούν να προσεγγίσουν την πολυδιάστατη σχέση της ελληνικής κοινωνίας με το ιστορικό παρελθόν, διερευνώντας θέματα όπως οι μηχανισμοί διαμόρφωσης συλλογικής μνήμης, η προνομιακή μεταχείριση κάποιων ιστορικών περιόδων, η αλληλεπίδραση των πολιτών με τα υλικά κατάλοιπα του παρελθόντος κ.ά. Ο τόμος έχει στόχο να φέρει σε επαφή το ευρύ κοινό με σύγχρονες θεωρητικές εξελίξεις στον τομέα των ανθρωπιστικών επιστημών, να αναδείξει τις ιδεολογικές παραμέτρους της μελέτης του παρελθόντος και να ανασκευάσει ορισμένες στρεβλώσεις που χαρακτηρίζουν τον δημόσιο περί αρχαιολογίας λόγο.
Papers by Aris Anagnostopoulos
This volume presents the theoretical and local contexts for the project, explains the methodology and the project outcomes, and reviews in detail some of the public archaeology actions with the community as examples of collaborative, research-based heritage management. What the authors emphasize in this book is the value of local context in designing and implementing public archaeology projects, and the necessity of establishing methods to understand, collaborate and interact with culturally specific groups and publics. They argue for the implementation of archaeological ethnographic research as a method of creating instances and spaces for collaborative knowledge production. The volume contributes to a greater understanding of how rural communities can be successfully engaged in the management of their own heritage.
It will be relevant to archaeologists and other heritage professionals who aim to maximise the inclusivity and impact of small projects with minimal resources and achieve sustainable processes of collaboration with local stakeholders.
Τι είναι μνήμη και τι μνημείο; Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία; Γιατί η κλασική αρχαιότητα θεωρείται σημαντικότερη από τον Μεσαίωνα; Πώς επιλέγουμε τι θα ανασκάψουμε και τι θα εκθέσουμε σε ένα μουσείο; Ποιος είναι ο ρόλος των πολιτών στη διαχείριση της πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς;
Αυτά είναι μερικά από τα ερωτήματα που θίγονται σε αυτό τον συλλογικό τόμο. Ειδικοί από διάφορα επιστημονικά πεδία επιχειρούν να προσεγγίσουν την πολυδιάστατη σχέση της ελληνικής κοινωνίας με το ιστορικό παρελθόν, διερευνώντας θέματα όπως οι μηχανισμοί διαμόρφωσης συλλογικής μνήμης, η προνομιακή μεταχείριση κάποιων ιστορικών περιόδων, η αλληλεπίδραση των πολιτών με τα υλικά κατάλοιπα του παρελθόντος κ.ά. Ο τόμος έχει στόχο να φέρει σε επαφή το ευρύ κοινό με σύγχρονες θεωρητικές εξελίξεις στον τομέα των ανθρωπιστικών επιστημών, να αναδείξει τις ιδεολογικές παραμέτρους της μελέτης του παρελθόντος και να ανασκευάσει ορισμένες στρεβλώσεις που χαρακτηρίζουν τον δημόσιο περί αρχαιολογίας λόγο.
attempts have been made over the years to accentuate the meaning of this event and forge a collective memory of it locally, by tying it to narratives of national liberation. While they have succeeded in marking the date as a generic landmark
in national history that proves the barbarous nature of Ottoman rule and therefore justifies the efforts of Cretans (as in fact all Greeks) to liberate themselves, the very space where this massacre – a holy sacrifice, according to these discourses –
took place has remained a largely secular place that stubbornly rejects all efforts of ascription.
The street where the massacre happened, extensively looted and burned almost to the ground, became a contested space already in the aftermath of the events. Official efforts were divided between monumentalization and economic development, since this was at the time the main street leading from the city port to the centre of the city and the hinterland. Responses ‘from below’ were conversely prompted by dire need and the lack of resources, as well as marked indifference towards official commemoration, which is indicative of deep-seated trauma.
The built fabric of the place evokes nowadays not only memories of the massacre, but also later memories of reconstruction and class-skewed urban development
that suffused official nationalist sacralisation efforts. The place memory of this street is a palimpsest which changes according to the position of the speaker or the hearer. It has been named locally ‘delusion street’. This, in order to indicate both
the difference between this wide thoroughfare of European proportions, lined with luxurious mansions, and the haphazard, cramped and miserable abodes of the rest of the city; and the history of its construction, where a major class offensive
turned this from a commercial street of small properties into an elite district of mansions and hotels.
I show here how the built form of the street is an unintentional monument to the aesthetic class politics of an urban sanitation initiative, led by the city’s Christian bourgeois, and the efforts of the lower strata of the city to resume their daily life both in this particular street and the city as a whole. I move in a critical direction against the straightforwardness of ideological uses of space: i.e. that monumental space can be manipulated to fix the ideological creations of structural power, such as the national community or the power of the state. I am arguing instead that the presence of material remains of the past may problematize such creations and imbue them with several unpredicted layers of meaning. I examine how the
material form of this street, as it developed through time, shaped the particular dialectic of commemoration and forgetting inherent in this incomplete project of
Cretan modernity.
Αυτή η δημιουργία καταστάσεων και η σχέση της με τη γλώσσα και τη γραφή είναι κάποια από τα σημεία που θα θίξω και θα ήθελα να αποτελέσουν μέρος του διαλόγου
Ασίνης να εξάγουν κάποια ευρήματα στη χώρα τους για μελέτη και συντήρηση. Πρόκειται για έναν ιδιότυπο
δανεισμό, ο οποίος συνάπτεται κατά τα φαινόμενα πάνω στις προσωπικές σχέσεις του Σουηδού πρίγκιπα
Γουσταύου με την ελληνική βασιλική οικογένεια. Η εξαγωγή αρχαιοτήτων προς τη Σουηδία λειτούργησε σε ένα
ιδιότυπο καθεστώς εξαίρεσης μέχρι και τη δεκαετία του 1930, παρά την ουσιαστική απαγόρευση εξαγωγής
αρχαιολογικών ευρημάτων που επέβαλε το διάταγμα του 1926. Το 1997, η Berit Wells, τότε
διευθύντρια του Σουηδικού Ινστιτούτου, αγόρασε από κάποιον μη κατονομαζόμενο συλλέκτη ένα φάκελο με
έγγραφα, τα οποία ο ίδιος ισχυρίστηκε πως ανήκαν στο μουσείο Ναυπλίου. Προσεκτικότερη μελέτη του φακέλου
όμως, δείχνει ότι τα έγγραφα αυτά είναι οι φάκελοι των σουηδικών ανασκαφών στην Αργολίδα, που προέρχονται
από το αρχείο της διεύθυνσης αρχαιολογίας του υπουργείου θρησκευτικών και εθνικής παιδείας. Τα έγγραφα που
περιέχονται στο φάκελο φωτίζουν τις λεπτομέρειες της εξαγωγής των ευρημάτων στην πράξη, και αναδεικνύουν
τις συγκρούσεις που η διαδικασία αυτή προκάλεσε με τις τοπικές κοινότητες αλλά και σε κεντρικό επίπεδο.
Our contention is that at the core of the uses of photographs made by both disciplines is the assumption that photographs are faithful, disembodied representations of reality. We instead discuss photographs, including digital photographs, as material artefacts that work by evocation rather than representation, and as material memories of the things they have witnessed; as such they are multi-sensorially experienced. While in archaeology photographs are seen as either official records or informal snapshots, we offer instead a third kind of photographic production, which occupies the space between artwork and ethnographic commentary or intervention. It is our contention that it is within the emerging field of archaeological ethnography that such interventions acquire their full poignancy and potential, and are protected from the risk of colonial objectification