DANIEL M.
KNIGHT
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis:
Ironic slogans, food, and antiausterity sentiments
A B S T R A C T
Ironic slogans voice opposition to neoliberal
austerity measures as people in western Thessaly,
Greece, strive to account for dramatically increasing
poverty and cultivate a sense of collective suffering
in an era of economic crisis. The slogans are pinned
to moments of socioeconomic turmoil in recent
Greek history, such as the 1941–43 famine and the
1973 polytechnic uprising against military
dictatorship. Through satire, they capture local and
national attitudes toward the government’s current
austerity policy and neoliberalism more generally.
Drawing on powerful tropes of food, the slogans
critique the experiences of neoliberal reform,
becoming sites of resistance and solidarity that
reframe relations between local people, their
government, and international creditors. [Greek
economic crisis, slogans, irony and satire,
neoliberalism, food, temporality]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 230–246, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12127
Durham University
ogether we ate it” [Mazi ta fagame], then deputy prime
“T
minister Theodoros Pangalos announced to reporters
in 2010. He was speaking in reference to the €310 billion
public debt facing Greece after 30 years of economic
prosperity since accession to the European Economic
Community (EEC) in 1981. With this slogan, Pangalos was trying to sell a
notion of collective responsibility for the debt. He asserted that, since the
1980s, Greeks had “got fat” from government handouts, an almost unregu-
lated banking sector that facilitated handsome personal loans, a stock mar-
ket boom, and lucrative EU–endorsed business schemes. Farmers had sat
back and watched subsidies from the infamous Common Agricultural Pol-
icy roll in, Greece was a prime destination for British and German tourists,
and public-sector bonuses and pretty corporate kickbacks were the norm.
It was common knowledge that people in positions of authority—from
local hospital directors to elected members of national parliament—“ate
money” (fagane lefta), and the culture of the little white envelope (fakelaki)
stuffed with money was part of everyday life. With a slogan suggesting that
everyone had “got fat” together, Pangalos attempted to persuade his au-
dience of collective responsibility for financial crisis and shape public atti-
tudes toward an indefinite period of austerity and economic restructuring
(cf. Holmes 2014:11). Pangalos, however, did not account for the abundant
counternarratives about the causes of economic crisis, such as the lending
practices of international banks and the alleged serious mismanagement
of the European single currency. The perceived lack of accountability for
the malpractice of creditors has caused considerable public anger.
Since Pangalos’s speech in 2010, numerous grassroots slogans di-
rected back at the government and international creditors have voiced
public concerns about the causes and consequences of enforced eco-
nomic austerity, targeting blame for the crisis toward banks, capitalism,
and powerful political figures. Through “linguistic modeling” (Holmes
2014:6), slogans are designed to be easily repeated by diverse publics
wanting to make sense of turbulent socioeconomic situations or rouse
passionate support for social change. Through their inclusivity, slogans
condense the individual and the collective and regularly operate across
boundaries of class, wealth, and political ideology. Expressing political
agency, they are often comical, ironic, or emotive and carry within
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.

them notions of collective responsibility and accountability
and calls for political reform (Haugerud 2013:3).
Slogans that deploy ironic humor, as Angelique
Haugerud (2013:2–3) illustrates, can be used to question
the relationship between wealth and democracy and re-
frame current political debates. Slogans “hold a mirror up
to society” to raise awareness of uncomfortable questions
that some sections of society may wish to ignore (Haugerud
2013:18). The Greek slogans analyzed in the present article
draw on powerful cultural notions of food and eating to
link the current financial crisis with poignant historical
moments of conflict, hunger, and political oppression.
They emphasize a collective struggle and are a means
for people to channel anger, disillusionment, and blame
toward what Andrea Muehlebach (2012:6) terms the “moral
authoritarianism” of northern European neoliberalism.
Not always directed at individuals but, rather, at wider
publics and government institutions, the slogans both
challenge and reinforce neoliberal ideals and identities (cf.
Muehlebach 2009). Antithetically to the argument posed by
Peter Benson and Stuart Kirsch (2010:45) in one of the few
anthropological studies of slogans, the taglines assessed
here all increase the possibility for critical thinking among
diverse publics. They are primarily a form of “communica-
tive action performed socially and enacted prospectively”
(Holmes 2014:10) at a time when people feel that they have
been disenfranchised from the political process and have
little control over the future of their own lives, let alone that
of their nation (Harvey 2005; Narotzky and Smith 2006:170).
As public images, slogans provoke complex emotional
responses, acquiring their own histories of appropriation
and commentary. They bear the aura of history, humanity,
and possibility. Usually offering provocative perspectives
on routine aspects of everyday life, slogans are easily acces-
sible to a mass-mediated sense of collectivity that facilitates
personal affiliation with large-scale events such as national
economic meltdown (Hariman and Lucaites 2007:1–2).
They are therefore an important channel for understanding
how people experience the social history of a “highly
complex, fractured, crisis-ridden world” (Narotzky and
Smith 2006:1). The severe austerity measures imposed on
Greece as the result of a wider project to erase and remake
the world in the mold of neoliberalism (Klein 2008:3; see
also Harvey 2005; Ortner 2011) have provided fertile ground
for the grassroots production and circulation of slogans
reinforcing concepts of collective suffering, victimhood,
and resilience.1
Neoliberalism, the prevailing approach to govern-
ment, supplants regulation by law with market forces
and government functions by private enterprise, closely
interweaving economics with politics (Greenhouse 2010:1;
see also Clarke 2008; Harvey 2005; Ortner 2011; Wacquant
2012). Neoliberal reform reconfigures relationships be-
tween governing and governed, power and knowledge, and
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
sovereignty and territoriality (Ong 2006:3; also Wacquant
2012:69–70), assuming that “market-based popular culture
of differentiated consumerism and individual libertar-
ianism” (Harvey 2005:42; see also Haugerud 2010:127)
eventually yields the best outcome for all.
In the context of extensive austerity measures aimed
at making Greece “more neoliberal” while championing
an “improvement” on traditional social relationships, a
significant number of my research participants are finding
that neoliberal reform brings permanent impoverishment,
a democracy deficit, social fragmentation, and loss of polit-
ical accountability (cf. Greenhouse 2010:1). In this article,
I discuss how ironic and satirical slogans provide a way for
people to express their political agency in the face of ne-
oliberal austerity measures that have irrevocably reshaped
social relations. Slogans constitute emergent “signs” or
“messages” from a public highly animated by the ongoing
pain of neoliberal reform. Troika—the combined name
given to the IMF, European Commission, and European
Central Bank, which oversee the Greek austerity program—
has administered €240 billion of bailout money to Greece
since 2010 and is the target of numerous ironic slogans.2
Many of my research participants, spanning social and po-
litical strata,3 feel that Troika austerity measures imposed in
the name of neoliberalism are an attack on national history
and culture, belonging, and self-identity. The antiausterity
slogans are reactions to policy dictated by Troika and
sanctioned by the Greek state. While much international
media coverage focuses on incomprehensible numbers,
flowcharts, market “logic,” and the need to tackle the so-
called endemic corruption of southern Europe, the slogans
presented here are representative of the everyday “living” of
“actually existing” neoliberal reform at the grassroots level
(cf. Peck and Theodore 2012). The slogans are a form of re-
sistance, protest, and a search for political accountability.4
On the basis of long-term research conducted in the
towns of Trikala, Karditsa, and Kalampaka in western Thes-
saly, central Greece, I analyze a selection of slogans that
have captured public imagination by referring to poignant
moments of the past that rouse feelings of collective suffer-
ing and the fear of returning to times of conflict and poverty.
The slogans all refer to food (or lack thereof ), edible items,
or the act of eating. Food is “embedded” in all domains of
Greek culture, David Sutton (2013) has recently argued, and
through it, people construct acts of suffering, resilience, and
protest against neoliberal reform.5 Here I explore how slo-
gans, as expressions of political agency, capture local and
national attitudes toward austerity policy and neoliberalism
more generally.
Unpacked one by one in this article, some of the
slogans, like “Bread, Education, Freedom” (Psomi, Paideia,
Eleftheria), have been reborn or recycled, whereas others,
including “Antoni leave the Wi-Fi and give food to the
people” (Antoni ase to Wi-Fi kai dose ston lao na faei), have
231
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
been coined recently. However, all of the slogans empha-
size a collective struggle as people attempt to comprehend
rapidly changing living standards. Through irony and satire,
the slogans locate blame for decreasing living standards
on ruthless political figures in Greece and abroad and
scramble temporal trajectories, reflecting the increasing
fear of returning to times of famine, violent conflict, and
authoritarianism.
Irony: A pause for thought, a moment of
stillness
“Together we ate it” (or “we ate it together”), delivered by
Pangalos as political rhetoric intended to incite solidarity
and a sense of collective responsibility for crisis, has been
turned into a slogan in an act of mocking imitation. The
slogan has gained notoriety and is now ironically quoted
by housewives, television hosts, and members of the main
opposition party, SYRIZA (Vournelis 2013). Troika auster-
ity policy has contributed to unemployment rising above
28 percent (62 percent among people under the age of 25;
see BBC News Business 2014), wages and pensions being
cut, bonuses abolished, protected business sectors opened
up to international competition, the implementation of a
wide-scale privatization initiative, and drastic reforms to
the public sector. People in western Thessaly, where I have
conducted ethnographic research on historical conscious-
ness, socioeconomic relations, and entrepreneurship since
2003, can no longer afford to heat their homes, pay for vi-
tal medication, or, in extreme cases, provide sufficient food
for their families. For them, Pangalos has become a figure of
fun who, with his slogan, seriously misjudged the indigna-
tion of his audience (Theodossopoulos 2013). Redeploying
his words, people recollect how out of touch politicians are
with the suffering of everyday citizens. Popi, a 44-year-old
supermarket employee, explains,
“Together we ate it?” Well, okay, we can argue about
this idea another day. By the size of his belly and that
of [former deputy prime minister] Evangelos Venizelos
the politicians obviously ate a lot more than the peo-
ple (laos) . . . He should start taking some responsibil-
ity and actually think about how his citizens will really
feed themselves now that they cannot afford food. He
should step down from his privileged position and get
in touch with reality because we all know that his family
is still eating well. [conversation in March 2013, Trikala]
Not only do Thessaliots perceive figures like Pangalos to
be the cause of social destitution through decades of ne-
oliberal greed (termed neo-fileleftherismos [neoliberalism]
or kapitalismos [capitalism]), but they also characterize him
as a collaborator with the higher foreign powers enforcing
economic reform while he himself remains in a position of
social privilege. Since the outbreak of crisis, Pangalos, like
232
most Greek politicians, is seen as a puppet of foreign pow-
ers, compared by some of my research participants to the
Nazi collaborators that ran Greece in World War II. In a rep-
resentative statement, in December 2013, Lakis, an elderly
man from Karditsa, told me that “they [politicians] all just
do what they are told to save their own skins. They will never
go hungry.” For Lakis, Pangalos represents the cause of the
initial problem and—much like UK chancellor George Os-
borne, who insists that “we are all in it together”6 —he still
has the audacity to claim collective suffering (cf. Knight
2013:155).
Since the global economic downturn commenced in
2008, the collective inchoate “we” has been incorporated
into political slogans and speeches in an attempt to locate
accountability and call for national solidarity, but it is not
a new phenomenon (cf. Carrithers 2007, 2008). When gov-
ernments face social or economic meltdown, the collective
“we” is employed through slogans to justify questionable
past policy decisions, rouse solidarity for controversial
rescue packages, and “recruit” publics to the neoliberal
cause (Holmes 2014:1). At the World Jobs Summit in Detroit
in 1994, the U.S. president announced that companies
“must cooperate in facing their common problem—
unemployment—in much the way they have cooperated
for fifty years to defeat Communism, to stand up against
Iraqi aggression, and to expand the global trading system”
(Campbell 2003:3). In another case, the Mexican president
placed the “responsibility to reform” on the participation
“of all political parties and of all society” (Campbell 2003:4).
The slogan for Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign,
“Yes we can,” was interpreted by some as a powerful
call for social change directed toward collective action.
Like Osborne’s “We are all in it together,” the aim in the
above cases is to invoke a sense of social responsibility in
the face of prejudice, crisis, and dispossession (as Benson
and Kirsch [2010:45] discuss in a different context). For
Pangalos, this dramatically backfired.
“Together we ate it”7 remains perhaps the most
prominent slogan associated with the Greek economic
crisis and is likely to be ironically quoted long after the
current waves of financial turmoil have passed. It tops
a list of catchy slogans, quips, and puns formed during
the crisis, many of which critique increasing poverty and
social suffering. Spearheaded by the television program
Radio Arvila,8 broadcast on the private channel Antenna,
satirical commentary is directed toward the government
and Troika—especially Germany—and comes in the form
of jokes, songs, voice-overs, and snappy captions. Some
slogans, sketches, and parodies are comical while others are
deadly serious and heart wrenching (cf. Haugerud 2013:5).
The slogans gaining greatest popularity reference symbolic
items of food, the act of eating, and specific events in Greek
history. Bread, cucumbers, famine, money eating, German
occupation, Ottoman landlords, dictatorship, civil war, and

Figure 1. “Vote for Ali Baba, he only has 40 thieves,” graffiti on the main bridge over the River Lithaios, Trikala, Greece, August 2014. Photo by Daniel
Knight.
famous figures in national history provide the plot elements
for a plethora of slogans that are publicly circulated and
occasionally find their way into the halls of parliament.
One slogan that did not directly pertain to food but
that addressed the same concerns, was spray-painted on
the side of a bridge in central Trikala in 2014. Reading
“Vote for Ali Baba, he only has 40 thieves,” the slogan iron-
ically referred to recent corruption scandals implicating
parliamentarians, hospital directors, and pharmaceutical
companies. The slogan mocked not only the “money eat-
ing” elements of the national government, deemed to have
stolen millions of euros from voters, but also the unelected
Troika “thieves” who, in the eyes of Trikalinoi, are system-
atically stealing from every Greek citizen (see Figure 1).
Irony and satire are employed to raise concerns over
drastically changing social circumstances, rising poverty,
and exploitation. Yet the slogans are not ephemeral or flip-
pant. Often, humor is not the ultimate goal of ironic slo-
gans, jokes, and statements, although comedy (as opposed
to satire) does herald “the restoration of harmony and rec-
onciliation of conflict” (Haugerud 2013:10). Instead, irony
helps unpack a whole set of complex circumstances with
deep social and historical roots (Pipyrou 2014a:535). This
irony is not fleeting, not intended to allow the audience a
momentary laugh before continuing with their daily rou-
tine. Ironic slogans are intended to make the audience
pause to critically reflect on issues at the center of social
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
and political debate, to evaluate, on the basis of a collec-
tively recognized set of social and historical criteria, how
and why their lives have changed. Slogans like those adorn-
ing the bridge in Trikala leave the observer in a moment
of stillness, wondering whether to laugh or cry: Is the sen-
timent primarily comical or should it be taken seriously?
Irony thus offers more than a transitory moment of hope or
resistance (see Herzfeld 2001); Haugerud (2013:35–36) sug-
gests that irony allows people to confront the absurd, the
perversely ridiculous, and the politically controversial. As
Stavroula Pipyrou (2014a) has recently argued in this jour-
nal, irony is a redirection of seriousness that helps open
up a central theme to numerous avenues of debate (also
Burke 1945; Carrithers 2012; Fernandez and Huber 2001).
Photographs of the “Ali Baba” slogan (often shared through
social media) never failed to ignite passionate debate con-
cerning a range of issues surrounding the current economic
and political situation, even among otherwise disinterested
publics. Irony thus provokes open discussions about fun-
damental categories of inclusion and exclusion at the very
heart of social life (Fernandez and Huber 2001:9).
Discussing creative verbal attempts to rationalize un-
familiar motives in the context of the NATO intervention
in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1990s, Keith Brown and
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos argue that irony allows people
the rhetorical power to “accommodate the unfamiliar by
re-combining fragments of the familiar” (2000:4; see also
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
2003, 2004), blurring but not erasing the boundary between
jest and political commentary. In the case of the NATO
bombing campaign, irony, sarcasm, and parody were em-
ployed by people in Greece and Macedonia “not merely
[as] a safety valve for unreleased tension” but as a delib-
erately applied form of political commentary that demon-
strated an awareness of contingency and history (Brown
and Theodossopoulos 2000:4–5, 2003). Specific targets for
ironic comments included figures of political power such
as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Madeleine Albright. Ironic
quips also targeted ethnic stereotypes and drew compar-
isons with other periods of foreign intervention in the
Balkans, such as the 1974 Cyprus conflict (Brown and Theo-
dossopoulos 2003:321, 326).
Satire, Nicolas Argenti (2007:15–16) highlights in the
context of West African dance, can be used to underscore
the relationship between government politics and ostra-
cized publics. Satire is appropriated by the dominated
to bear witness to the oppression of colonial overlords,
oligarchs, and patrons and bring them together in one
time-space. For Argenti, irony helps unmask social inequal-
ity in moments that entrap, twist, and reconstitute power
relations. Irony plays on the ambiguity between seriousness
and humor to capture often-oppressive political agendas
and provoke passionate responses among an audience
(Argenti 2007:21). Irony, satire, and mockery are acceptable
forms of confronting authority that go against monolithic,
static memorializing of political and historical events.9
Food, temporality, and protest
In drawing on specific historical events that have national
import, slogans become powerful affective tools that bridge
the gap between political policy and the lived tenor of these
decisions (Benson and Kirsch 2010:46).10 Any Greek with a
high school education will be able to relate to the signifi-
cance of slogans referring to the Great Famine of 1941–43.
Speaking to me at a parents’ evening at a local school in
December 2013, a middle-aged teacher from the town of
Trikala said that, “when I read the graffiti lamenting hunger
or see bread being taken into parliament as a symbol of the
current crisis, I am taken back to stories of my grandfather’s
childhood during the famine when he searched the streets
for scraps of bread.”11 Most Greeks over the age of 18 will
be familiar with the slogan “Bread, Education, Freedom”
chanted from the rooftops during antidictatorship demon-
strations at the Athens Polytechnic University in 1973. The
slogan was prominent in antiausterity protests in 2013, as
demonstrators marked the 40-year anniversary of the poly-
technic uprising by directly comparing the 1967–74 military
dictatorship with the current Troika “occupation.”
Moments of the past, like the Great Famine and the
polytechnic demonstration, are collective events etched
into the national psyche through films, theater, and
234
educational textbooks (Knight 2012a:352). Haugerud
(2013:28) has suggested that satirical critiques of inequality
and power relations are only potent if they are based
on shared understandings of history and politics. Thus,
slogans are pinned to affective historical events in a form
of polytemporality (Knight 2012b; Sutton 2011), bringing
collectively recognized moments of the past back to life
in the present. This sewing together of past events with
present circumstances serves numerous purposes, includ-
ing endorsing collective suffering, identifying a common
target of blame, and reminding people that current circum-
stances can be overcome. As will become clear through
the ethnographic vignettes offered in this article, food is
regularly the chosen medium for people in Greece to make
historical reference to hardship and social desperation.
Cucumbers, potatoes, yogurt, and hunger are all
symbols of the current economic crisis that punctuate
daily discourse in public and private spheres. Food in
Greece is a marker of collective social well-being, signifying
either wealth and prosperity or famine and destitution.
Often embedded within evocative narratives of politics and
economy, in the Greek imaginary food is loaded with social
and sensory memory and laced with symbolic historical
moments of personal, local, and national import (Sutton
2001; cf. Toren 2009). In times of economic austerity,
changes in patterns of food consumption are immediately
related to past epochs of hardship and incorporated into
critiques of the crisis situation. Throughout Greece, food
evokes family, history, place, and local knowledge and is
central to a nationalized ideology of cultural belonging,
albeit incorporating local nuances. As I have noted else-
where (Knight 2014b:185), certain items of food hold a
central place in local and national imagery: Olives may be
the idiom that facilitates collectivity in Zakynthos (Theo-
dossopoulos 1999:618); on Kalymnos, it is stuffed grape
leaves (Sutton 2001:90, 2011:468); in Trikala, it is barley with
mutton; and in Greek Macedonia, mushrooms represent a
poignant history of foreign oppression and local resilience.
Meanwhile, for Greek students in British universities, feta is
often the cheese of choice, summoning feelings of national
pride (cf. Herzfeld 1991; Sutton 2001:78).
Food thus provides a cognitive and embodied link to
homeland and history, maintaining an extraordinary place
in the weaving of collective memory and bearing social
and cosmological messages of social well-being (Appadu-
rai 1981:494). Complex “gastro-politics” indicate social
relations characterized by equality, intimacy, solidarity,
and community, Arjun Appadurai (1981:494–496) suggests,
while also seeming, paradoxically, to sustain relations of
social hierarchy, distance, or segmentation. In Greece,
through people’s relations with food, one can estimate the
consequences of political policy, conditions of the market,
and realities of plenty and want. For Greeks, food and
drink are inextricably linked to local and national identity

formation and are essential to the construction of person-
hood in a rapidly changing social world (Bampilis 2013; cf.
Barndt 2002). As food is a marker of social, cultural, and
historical belonging, collective identification with items of
food provides the basis to critique the politics and power
games taking place in crisis-stricken Greece. When used in
slogans, food is a medium to express conflict over specific
cultural and economic resources that reconfigure ideas of
sharing, power, and belonging. How people talk about and
physically interact with food is important for gauging the
mood of a nation.
Through physical and particularly powerful semiotic
protest, food is used to oppose the hegemonic rule of the
political elites that enforce austerity. Sutton has noted how
food has become the center of creative protest against ne-
oliberal governance during social unrest in Greece, Egypt,
and the United States. He argues that food contextualizes
and moralizes troublesome social situations, challenging
the “supposedly neutral non-cultural language of neolib-
eral economics” (2013:346).12 The undermining of neolib-
eral markets has become particularly prominent in Greece
through a series of social movements advocating alternate
forms of trade. Current initiatives operating outside con-
ventional forms of market exchange include the “potato
movement” that distributes potatoes free or “at cost” from
cooperatives, the rise of food markets accepting alterna-
tive currencies such as that of the Topiki Enallaktiki Mon-
ada (TEM) system in the town of Volos (Kanters 2013), and
the increase in the cultivation of small private vegetable
plots facilitating resource sharing among villagers. Soup
kitchens run by NGOs are now a common sight in Athens,
Thessaloniki, and some Aegean Islands, and the neo-Nazi
Golden Dawn party has organized the free distribution of
food parcels on condition of proof of Greek nationality.
People use food to challenge neoliberalism in other
contexts. In a now infamous event, Communist Party (KKE)
member Liana Kanelli attempted to enter a loaf of bread
and a liter of milk into the parliamentary record to remind
her colleagues debating new austerity measures of the suf-
fering their policies create (Sutton 2013:346). Television ad-
vertisements use restaurant scenes to debase government
authority as actors parody a potential government refusal to
pay outstanding bills (on political parody, see Boyer 2013).
Items of food such as yogurt, tomatoes, eggs, and flour are
thrown at politicians, foreign bureaucrats, and corrupt for-
mer ministers (Vournelis 2011, 2013:356–357).
Food is also present in the ultimate form of protest in
crisis-stricken Greece, with suicide notes regularly citing
severe hunger and the inability to provide food for the
family as the primary reasons for ending one’s own life
(Knight 2012b:59–62). The provision of food is entangled
with powerful cultural notions of honor, and these notes
indicate that the only solution to unbearable public shame
is to kill oneself (Pipyrou 2014b:191–192). It is apparent
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
that food is central to protest and notions of solidarity and
belonging. Slogans harness the cultural importance of food
to challenge existing power relations and demand political
and socioeconomic change.
Capitalist cucumbers
“For five days you eat the cucumber, but on Saturday you
are someone” [Pente meres tros aggouri, ma to savvato eisai
mouri] reads the graffiti adorning the side of a multina-
tional beauty outlet in the town of Trikala. Graffiti, Bruce
Campbell (2003:3) suggests, plays a key role in the “politics
of visibility” during times of socioeconomic upheaval; a
graffiti artist from Trikala refers to his spray-painted slogans
as “the philosophy of the walls.” The tone of graffiti slogans
has changed in the past five years. The artist tells me
something that is clearly evident during a leisurely morning
stroll through any Greek urban center: Graffiti no longer
reflects support for mainstream political parties—the green
sun of PASOK and the bright red hammer and sickle of the
communist KKE are conspicuously absent. Even hard-core
party political supporters now rarely “tag their territory.”
Nowadays, graffiti is generally very emotional, “physically
seeping with desperation and anguish” to use Michel
Serres’s (1995:4) evocative language (see Figure 2).
Cucumbers regularly crop up, so to speak, in everyday
conversation in Greece, symbolizing deeply historical hard-
ship, and can also be found throughout popular culture.
In his majestic four-volume novel Ta paidia tis Niovis (The
children of Niobe, 1995), Tasos Athanasiadis narrates—
often through irony and caricature—the relocation of
Greek populations during the Asia Minor catastrophe of the
1920s: “In front of Lito’s pharmacy a bear-tamer was pulling
a bear munching on a huge cardboard cucumber with
the inscription ‘THE BUDGET’” (1995:226–227). With this
image, Athanasiadis is saying that, once again, the people
(laos) will have to endure (or “eat”) the hardship brought
about by the new budget. The cucumber represents the
abject poverty of the common citizen.
Additionally, sayings such as “Life is like a cucumber;
either you eat it and it refreshes you or you eat it and cry
in pain” [I zoi einai san aggouri; eite tros kai drosizesai, eite
tros kai zorizesai],13 “This work is a big cucumber (lit. pain)”
[Afti i douleia einai megalo aggouri], and “He/She found
it to be a cucumber (lit. very difficult)” [To vrike aggouri]
are enduring adages highlighting the cucumber as a sym-
bol of the pain and suffering incurred during a lifetime. It
was perhaps inevitable that the cucumber would become
a key symbol of the hardship brought about by the eco-
nomic crisis. The cucumber slogan was a graffiti tag before
the crisis, but since 2009 it has appeared on the walls of
shops, railway stations, and apartment blocks from Athens
to Lamia, Trikala to Thessaloniki. It even has its own Face-
book page. The cucumber—in this instance, representing
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American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
Figure 2. “For five days you eat the cucumber, but on Saturday you are someone,” graffiti in central Trikala, Greece, June 2012. Photo by Daniel Knight.
hardship—features prominently in conversations about the
economic crisis. Kostas, a 44-year-old mechanic with a pri-
vate garage in Trikala, says that the slogan painted on the
beauty outlet has become a popular way to voice protest
against austerity measures while emphasizing the collective
struggle of “people against the politicians and economists.”
The cucumber is a phallic symbol that represents economic
austerity being forcefully administered by Troika and the
Greek government. The slogan implies that the cucumber
(austerity) is being forced inside the anus of local inhab-
itants. They are being sodomized by what Kostas terms
“capitalist austerity . . . by Merkel, Obama, Samaras.” In
summer 2013, Kostas says the cucumber is representative
“of the pain we are all enduring as austerity is forced upon
us . . . hitting not only our pockets [implying money], not
only our minds, but also our bodies . . . nothing is sacred
and they [politicians and Troika] have no morals.”
Since austerity hit, businesses in Trikala have struggled
with the decrease in expendable income, increasing taxes,
and a dramatic rise in unemployment, leading to the clo-
sure of dozens of shops in the town center. People are fed
up with declining living standards that have led to many
Trikalinoi resorting to burning old furniture, clothes, and
unsuitable, illegally sourced firewood to heat their homes
(Knight 2014a). Stella, a 35-year-old shop owner tells me
that “every day employers and employees gather outside
their shops in the road to talk and exchange depressing
stories of their financial woes,” as there are no customers
236
frequenting their businesses. Another local shop owner,
Anita, 55, notes that the cucumber is a reminder that peo-
ple or governments that one may never see face-to-face
can creep up behind you without warning. She passion-
ately narrates, “We [Greeks] were enjoying our lives, our
money, not thinking that anything bad could happen. We
had bought into the idea that we all had money to spend.
We had 30 years of money, money, money. Our government
and ‘Europe’ were our friends. But we got complacent and
they crept up on us brandishing a gigantic cucumber” (con-
versation in December 2013, Trikala). Anita, who is married
to a secondary school teacher, goes on to say that people
should have been more prepared, as history should have
taught them that the next “cucumber” is always just around
the corner. “The crisis is history repeating itself. We have a
few years when everything goes well, life is good, and then
the next crisis. The next cucumber if you like.” She notes
that the region of Thessaly gained independence from the
Ottoman Empire in 1881 only to be troubled by the Balkan
wars and then reoccupied by Axis forces in 1940. Then fol-
lowed famine (1941–43), a gruesome civil war (1946–49),
and dictatorship (1967–74), interspersed with periods of
economic prosperity. “The cucumber is the crisis, it is the
depression and anxiety we have suffered in the past at dif-
ferent moments and we are experiencing now. You have to
‘eat’ it, what else can you do?”
As they were in wartime Athens (see Psathas 1944), veg-
etables are now at the fore of movements that invert what

had become conventional market-based power relations.
Launched in 2012 as a symbolic gesture against heavy tax-
ation of small-scale farmers, the “potato movement” has
become a national phenomenon. Large-scale agribusiness
and the use of numerous middlemen had forced farmers
to sell their produce below cost price. However, by the time
the produce reached supermarket shelves in urban areas, it
had become unaffordable for the average consumer (Vour-
nelis 2013:358). After free handouts in Thessaloniki, an NGO
from the town of Katerini bought potatoes in bulk from a co-
operative to sell at cost to local consumers. The selling price
thus doubled for the farmers and the purchase price halved
for the consumers. The movement immediately caught on,
went national, and inspired similar schemes for the sale of
other fruit and vegetables (Vournelis 2013).
In 2011, mass media brought attention to the fact
that cucumbers were greatly in demand in other Balkan
states, leading to the “€1 per kilogram” cucumber produc-
tion initiative. Although it is not as popular as the potato
movement, small-scale farmers have begun to export
cucumbers to retailers in Bulgaria and Romania for a fixed
price of €1 per kilogram, providing a valuable source of extra
income at a time of fiscal strain. Cucumbers have also been
at the center of local programs advocating the exchange of
fruit and vegetables among villagers in rural Greece. Fani, a
67-year-old retired pharmacist from Trikala, grows cucum-
bers, pumpkins, and cabbages in her small back garden.
Like many people since the outbreak of crisis, Fani replaced
her flowerbeds with a vegetable patch. She says that “it is
important to provide yourself with as much food as possible
without relying on supermarkets. I have to feed myself as
well as my son and his family and you can survive on fruit
and vegetables for a long time” (conversation in August
2013, Trikala). Fani exchanges some vegetables for other
items of food provided by other villagers, remarking that
this practice has not taken place in her neighborhood since
the 1980s. “Katerina brings me eggs and I give her some
olives. Dimitris grows oranges and tomatoes but needs my
cucumbers and pumpkins. I also send some vegetables to
family members that live in the town center and do not have
a garden . . . this practice had been lost over the past 20 to 30
years.” Similar to what Christina Toren (2009:132) has noted
in Fiji, the sharing of food has given new form to kinship
and neighborly relations as people reconceptualize notions
of “common good” (Muehlebach 2012:18). The importance
of being self-sufficient in staple foods is emphasized during
regular petrol and haulage strikes, when supermarket
shelves in peripheral areas remain bare for up to two weeks.
Andreas, 60, explains that the fear of returning to times
of hunger akin to the Great Famine has persuaded people
to grow their own vegetables: “we have now got a small veg-
etable patch and have planted some fruit trees . . . noth-
ing is guaranteed anymore . . . we all know the stories of
the Great Famine when people couldn’t even buy vegetables
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
and can’t risk returning to those times. Here in Thessaly we
have gardens and fields to grow the essential food to avoid
starvation” (conversation in August 2013, Trikala).
On a recent visit to Athens, a shopkeeper bemoaned the
fact that in 2002 he had sold his house in his rural ancestral
village to fund his son’s university expenses and a new car
and holiday for the family. He asked, “What will I do now if
I can’t afford food? At least that house (in the village) had a
garden to grow fruit and vegetables. Here in Athens I have a
rented flat and my business is failing . . . but ten years ago I
was not expecting the crisis.”
It is not difficult to understand why items of food—in
this case, the cucumber—become poignant mediums for
expressing disillusion with the current socioeconomic
situation. Changes in food production and consumption
represent the literal embodiment of shifting economic
circumstances. Cucumbers envelop multiple meanings
as symbolic of hardship; they relate to past eras of social
turmoil and current social movements against the market
economy and are representative of the everyday anxiety
surrounding staple food provision. Cucumbers are also
central to local satirical humor and ironic jest. Apostolis,
28, says that people are now resigned to the fact that their
future may be out of their own hands: “Troika are fucking
you with the cucumber, but what can you do? You just
have to get on with life, otherwise you will die worrying”
(conversation in August 2013, Trikala). Giannis, 60 and a
builder, also suggests that the cucumber is symbolic of how
foreigners are opportunistically profiting from the sorry
socioeconomic situation in Greece:
Germany and our own government are raping Greece,
raping our banks by giving us unpayable loans, raping
our land and natural resources by selling islands and
putting solar panels where we once grew crops, raping
our children’s future . . . we are being violated and the
idea of the fat cucumber is something everyone can re-
late to, whatever way they are being violated. [conver-
sation in December 2013, Trikala]
Giannis notes that the cucumber is also a reminder that “we
will get up and carry on. We can take it.” Referring to a cu-
cumber’s phallic resemblance, he says that even some of the
Ancient Greek heroes had to sometimes “take it up the ass”
when they were away at war, and he jokingly adds, “Ancient
Greeks had huge cucumbers. Imagine that. We only have to
deal with Germans!” Resilience in the face of violation is an
important aspect to the second part of the slogan.
Saturday you are someone
Situated in the ideals of northern European neoliberalism
(see Muehlebach 2012:6), my Scandinavian friend is per-
plexed by Greek attitudes toward austerity: “They all sit
around drinking their coffees and lying on the beach . . .
237
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015

they are not even trying to change their lifestyles but con- son cannot get a job despite a university education. I
tinue to complain.” His voice is echoed by many diasporic have 1,000 new taxes to pay. Every day is a war. But I
Greeks living in the United Kingdom and the United States cannot just stop living. This crisis isn’t going away any-
who, upon returning to Trikala for the Christmas festivities, time soon. What do the Germans expect us to do—all
remark that “people endlessly complain and whinge but stay at home and abandon our culture? That is impos-
sible. Every week there is a new government austerity
they still have great lives. They don’t want to work and have
policy, a different foreign economic bureaucrat visiting
had it too easy for too long.” They claim that “evidence” of
Athens to tell us how to live our life. But I cannot die of
this headstrong attitude can be found by simply “watch- stress; I have to continue as normally as possible. And
ing people in cafeterias, bars or at the beach.” Surely, the drinking a coffee with friends allows me to share my
onlookers declare, Greeks who continue to spend so much pain if I so choose, but also to escape from the stress of
money on coffee, nice clothes, and holidays cannot truly life. I cannot lose all self-worth or I will end up commit-
pretend to be victims of austerity. The reasons for the re- ting suicide . . . the slogan tells Troika and politicians
fusal of some Greeks to sacrifice some basic pleasures of life that they will not break us. It also shows them that we,
as they adapt to the new economic landscape (cf. Procoli the Greeks, are together in our defiance of their laws.
2004:8) are summed up in the second part of the cucumber [conversation in December 2013, Kalampaka]
slogan: “On Saturday you are someone.”
The decision to continue dining out, clubbing, and
The day is irrelevant. It could be replaced by any other
going on holiday may seem “illogical” economic behavior
day of the week. The message is simple. Apostolis believes
to the bodies charged with reforming not only national
that the slogan is a glorious celebration of Greek resilience
budgets and macroeconomic flowcharts but also the way
against “people who want to destroy us in the name of
Greeks are perceived to think about personal finance.
capitalism”:14 “No matter how much we are punished,
However, most of my informants believe that such activities
demoralized and beaten into the dirt, we will rise above
constitute a form of solidarity and collective resistance to
adversity and enjoy life. The slogan is a triumphant call
impositions by European neoliberal economists that, they
for solidarity and stubbornness in the face of external
believe, are aimed at “destroying Greek identity.” Solidarity,
attempts—by Troika, puppet politicians, the capitalists—to
Muehlebach (2012:227) argues, constitutes a community
obliterate the very fabric of life. Remember, ‘You are some-
of interest with the oppressed and exploited (also Arendt
one’” (conversation in August 2013, Trikala).15 Moreover,
1963:79). In the present case, the people gathering in bars
Apostolis says, in championing a sense of collective victim-
and cafeterias perceive themselves as the oppressed and
hood, the slogan attempts to remind the individual that, al-
exploited, and communal gatherings represent a humanis-
though faced with unemployment, poverty, and 24–7 media
tic outlet for sometimes overwhelming stress and emotions.
coverage of imminent doom, there is a life beyond austerity.
Public displays of consumerism are a demonstration of
The slogan also promotes the idea of “maintaining
resilience to both foreign bureaucrats and fellow citizens,
face” amidst economic turmoil. A persistent demand to
showing that the crisis has not destroyed sociality or social
preserve social status through consumption practices
status. Christina, 29, sits in a bar in Trikala, facing a wall
has a long social history throughout the Mediterranean
with the slogan “For five days you eat the cucumber, but on
(see Argyrou 1996:74, 97; Hirschon 1989:226; Knight
Saturday you are someone.”
2015b; Lison-Tolosana 1966:96; Pipyrou 2014a).16 Al-
though perhaps not consistent with the expectations of
We all know the stories of and feel on our skin (nio-
northern European economists, Troika representatives, thoume sto petsi mas) the famine during World War II
or my Scandinavian friends, the social value placed on and the times when we had no private businesses or
public appearance and commensality does not disappear even our own land. There is a sense that these times are
overnight and does not necessarily imply either prosperity very close, but you can also see that people are still try-
or laziness. Well-documented notions of honor and status ing to live a normal life. On the streets of the towns the
form the basis for continued conspicuous consumption small takeaway restaurants are packed from morning
enabling people to maintain personal and familial prestige. until night as they advertise “special offers.” Greeks will
Despite a radical decrease in expendable income, in central always want to drink their coffee and socialize in cafe-
Greece people continue to participate in status compe- terias . . . Some hairdressers are thriving, as the women
must still look their best and show in public that they
tition through conspicuous consumption and to pursue
are not affected by the crisis . . . People are still going
culturally significant activities such as the so-called café
on holiday, perhaps the destination has changed, but
culture (Cowan 1991; Knight 2015b; Papataxiarchis 1991). they must go on holiday to keep up their status . . . The
Haris, a private business owner, 44, explains, businesses in the center of town and even the agricul-
turalists are finding ways of serving existing demands
The crisis is all around us. There is coverage 24 hours a that will not disappear just because we no longer have
day on television. I have no customers in my shop. My so much money. These practices have social value, not

238

just monetary. Like the slogan says, you must show
you are strong. You are still someone. [conversation in
March 2013, Trikala]
By gathering in a public place, well dressed and with
glass in hand, people demonstrate to themselves, each
other, and the invisible enforcer of financial austerity that
they are not culturally extinct. They project a powerful pub-
lic rhetoric that they, personally, are not affected in any pro-
found way by crisis. The faceless administrator of painful
economic measures has not won; the opaque neoliberal
system that dictates wage cuts, tax hikes, and job losses has
not conquered the will of resilient citizens. Or, as Christina
puts it, “Merkel and Troika have not destroyed the Greek
people . . . there is not a cucumber big enough to keep us
down.”
The slight paradox of participating in neoliberal con-
sumption patterns despite open protest against the sys-
tem is part of the “complex of opposites” entailed in
capitalism (Muehlebach 2009, 2012:25; see also Gledhill
2004:339; Haugerud 2010:127). But importantly, as the slo-
gan poignantly emphasizes, “you are someone” regardless
of the crippling consequences of global political and eco-
nomic power games. Attempts to incite resignation through
systems of governance by what Benson and Kirsch term
“structures of feeling that promote cynicism about the abil-
ity to alter social structures” make resignation “a dominant
mode of political action” (2010:474). By continuing to fre-
quent cafeterias and adorn the body in fashionable cloth-
ing, people show that they are not resigned to surrendering
their lives to increasing social suffering and poverty. The cu-
cumber slogan is a tenacious call to arms to rouse resistance
against those who want to destroy activities at the center of
Greek social and material life. As Apostolis sums it up, “Peo-
ple will have to eat the cucumber, but they will stay strong
and rebel.”
Preexisting sociality is not destroyed overnight by new
economic reform packages. As Sandhya Shukla has argued
regarding the social complexity of neoliberalism, “To sug-
gest that new forms of organization wipe the slate clean
of long-standing investment is . . . untenable” (2010:177).
The “existing cultural materials” (Muehlebach 2012:9) that
are consumer demands for clothes, coffees, and holidays
are historically constituted in long-established regional
concepts of honor and social capital (Narotzky 2006, 2007;
Pipyrou 2014a). These activities also offer opportunities for
socialization and relaxation, chances for people to escape
the all-encompassing stress of the pummeling crisis. Local
businesses have tried to accommodate the need to “be
someone” by introducing special offers, happy hours, and
loyalty cards, which in turn attract more customers (Knight
2015b). Locals have also cut back on the number of drinks,
holidays, and clothes they purchase. For instance, Vassilis,
35, an unemployed former civil servant speaking in August
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
2013, is coping with the conflicting demands of status
maintenance and fiscal restraints by “making one drink last
all night, taking a trip to a Greek Island and not Mauritius,
and recycling clothes among family members.”
The maintenance of social persona in times of finan-
cial squalor is not unique to Greece. In the context of South
Italy, Pipyrou (2014a) has shown that people still strive
to maintain their “beautiful appearance” (bella figura) in
times of economic austerity, as the social demand to wear
expensive-looking clothes is deeply embedded in the his-
tory and micropolitics of the Mediterranean region. Since
the onset of fiscal crisis, open-air secondhand clothes mar-
kets have emerged in Calabrian towns, where, for as little
as €1, one can purchase (often, designer) clothes that have
been donated from northern Europe. The new markets are
problematic, as, on the one hand, people do not want to be
seen buying used clothes, as this would harm their social
status, but, on the other hand, they need to maintain bella
figura. The clothes markets are discussed by locals in terms
of colonialism, secondhand citizenship, and aid. They also
voice suspicion of mafia business interest in the import,
sorting, and sale of the clothes.
The decision by people in central Greece and South
Italy to invest their limited funds in public displays of
resilience and status maintenance highlighted in the
cucumber slogan emphasizes the necessity to view ne-
oliberalization as a culturally nuanced historical process
(Peck and Theodore 2012:177). Economic rescue pack-
ages orchestrated from the major epicenters of neoliberal
power attempt to fashion opinion at the grassroots level
and promote models of ideal economic practice (Harvey
2005:88; see also Wacquant 2012:69). Social suffering as
a consequence of austerity can thus be dismissed in the
echelons of European government on the premise that
economic justice is to be found in the market. In scorning
the Greek insistence on continuing to “waste” money in
cafeterias and on clothes, my Scandinavian friend, like the
Troika policymakers, falls into the trap of essentializing not
only national identities but also the neoliberal process as
being defined by a “set of universal political and economic
circumstances” (Chomsky 1996:95). Continuing “to be
someone” is an act of political agency defying the heavy
hand of neoliberal reform.
“Food will win the war” (slogan unveiled by
Herbert Clark Hoover, September 29, 1917)
Even as past slogans referencing food and critical events
have been rediscovered, new phrases have been invented
and gained popularity. Here I briefly assess two influential
slogans with contrasting historical roots that are nonethe-
less similar in their reference to food and moments of
the past. The first, “Bread, Education, Freedom” (Psomi,
Paideia, Eleftheria), was the slogan of the 1973 Athens
239
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
Polytechnic demonstrations against the military dictator-
ship and has become a national pillar for protest against
Troika austerity measures. It promotes what are regularly
described as “the three basic rights of all Greek citizens,”
which, in 1973, after six years of autocratic rule, were
severely inhibited. The second, “Antoni leave the Wi-Fi and
give food to the people” (Antoni ase to Wi-Fi kai dose ston
lao na faei), first appeared in graffiti and on notices pinned
to telephone poles around Trikala in late 2013 in the context
of increasing hunger among the poorest citizens. The slogan
gained popularity after Facebook and Twitter campaigns
against Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s plans to provide
free Wi-Fi access across Greece. Redeploying his policy as a
dismissive slogan, people recollect how out of touch their
prime minister is with the priorities of everyday citizens.
The message contained in both slogans is rapidly spread
through social media and television coverage (cf. Brown
and Theodossopoulos 2000; Haugerud 2010:123, 2013:166).
Bread, as I note above, now can be observed in diverse
contexts as symbolic of national suffering and protest. The
slogan “Bread, Education, Freedom” unites a cross section
of the Greek public in demanding basic rights and remind-
ing the government of the priorities of its citizens. Aris, 63,
explains,
Everyone knows about the polytechnic demonstra-
tions. I was in Athens at the time [1973] and I re-
member the chanting of the slogan “Bread, Education,
Freedom.” I truly believe that the power of this slogan
reminded all people, regardless of wealth or politi-
cal persuasion, of the main things about being Greek.
It even reminded people who were not 100 percent
opposed to the dictatorship that some people were
really suffering . . . I believe that the power of the slo-
gan and the passion in which we chanted it in 1973
played a big role in bringing down the dictatorship and
restoring democracy. [conversation in December 2013,
Kalampaka]
Aris truly believes in the power of words to effect real
social change (cf. Holmes 2014). He says that bread has a
“long history” in Greek imagination, since it is linked to
ideas of “famine and suppression” and is “central to the Or-
thodox religion,” and that the regular use of bread in slo-
gans is “not coincidental.” Arguably the most basic of foods,
bread represents the inability of people to provide sufficient
provisions for their families during the late Ottoman era be-
cause of land ownership reforms and through the wars of
the 1940s and the 1967–74 dictatorship. Bread has become a
generic symbol of suffering and the ultimate way to express
basic human needs for sustenance. Bread is a central orga-
nizing metaphor for shared identity, commensality, ties to
the past, and collective moral legitimacy in the present.17 In
the current economic crisis, “Bread, Education, Freedom”
is chanted at protest rallies in urban centers, spray-painted
240
on walls, and discussed on social media websites. Overhear-
ing my coffee-shop conversation in central Trikala, a young
Greek woman told me that the slogan had been “reborn” be-
cause “living under the current austerity measures is akin to
living under a dictatorship.”
Bread is symbolic of past and present trajectories in
other contexts of protest. Nefissa Naguib (2013:348) notes
how, in 1977, Egyptian protestors waved bread during
demonstrations against plans to reduce food and fuel sub-
sidies. In 2007 and 2011, protestors once again took to
the streets, bread held high above their heads or worn as
a helmet, to demonstrate against rising food prices, de-
manding the government provide “bread, dignity and jus-
tice” (Naguib 2013:348). Naguib (2013:351–352) argues that
Egyptians recollect an undated near past when bread was
delicious and plentiful and now want that old taste and
quality of life back. In Egypt, as in Greece, with bread at
the center of social, political, and economic life, people can
imagine a better future through an iconic item of food.
The slogan “Antoni leave the Wi-Fi and give food to
the people”—perfectly rhyming in Greek—also provides a
critique of past and future political and economic trajec-
tories (see Figure 3). In discourse, the slogan is usually in-
terpreted as referring to past periods of hunger of the sort
that local people believe may once again be imminent. It
is a direct call for Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to ditch
a controversial plan to provide free Wi-Fi access across the
nation. My informants in Trikala are adamant that Sama-
ras has got his priorities wrong and is completely out of
touch by shamelessly promoting a luxury product when
people’s basic needs are left unmet. Taunting a figure of po-
litical power (cf. Brown and Theodossopoulos 2000, 2003;
Haugerud 2013:11), the slogan demonstrates how, on the
basis of past experiences of hunger, people resent the sym-
bolic gesture of futuricity and modernity provided by free
Wi-Fi. They are also suspicious of the reasons behind the
prime minister’s sudden passion to provide Wi-Fi connec-
tivity. Voula, 50, is animated in her response to my questions
about the relevance of the Wi-Fi scheme,
Who needs Wi-Fi? People are searching through
garbage bins in Athens to find food. This hasn’t hap-
pened in Greece since World War II and the Famine.
[She counts on her fingers.] Immigration, unemploy-
ment, starvation, corruption, medical care, education,
petrol prices, heating the home, drug trafficking, and
selling Greek islands, these are problems . . . but Wi-
Fi! Ha! Wi-Fi will save the country, feed my children,
pay for my heating bills. He [Samaras] must be get-
ting something out of it. He is as corrupt as the rest of
them [politicians] and must have done a deal with a big
company. Either that or he is trying to distract public
attention whilst he passes another controversial taxa-
tion law. Nonsense, absolute nonsense. [conversation
in January 2014, Trikala]

Figure 3. “Antoni leave the Wi-Fi and give food to the people,” a sign at a junction on the main Trikala-Kalampaka road in Thessaly, January 2014. Photo
by Daniel Knight.
The slogan’s phrase “give food to the people” can lit-
erally be translated “give to the people to eat” and, I sug-
gest, is symbolic of the general desire to return to times of
comfortable living, like the period before the crisis. Perhaps
similar to the ironic slogan “I’m starving, bail me out” dis-
played by the satirical Billionaire activists at the time of the
2008 financial crash (Haugerud 2010:114), the Wi-Fi slogan
may have a twisted meaning. In invoking powerful public
concepts of hunger, it suggests that the redistribution of
government money currently in the hands of the wealthy
few can rectify falling living standards. This is not to sug-
gest that Pangalos was right when implying that all Greek
citizens were corrupt and equally culpable for the financial
collapse—thus bypassing the role of Western banks in mak-
ing the financial decisions that contributed to the crisis—
or that Greece is more corrupt than other EU countries.
Rather, the slogan could be interpreted as a nostalgic re-
flection on years of prosperity when people did not have to
worry about money as well as the general belief that an elite
minority continues to profit from the financial turmoil. The
slogan asks the government to provide money for citizens,
rather than endorse luxuries such as Wi-Fi, at a time when
many fear a recurrence of famine. Desperate and fearing a
return to historically known levels of starvation and violent
conflict, some of my interlocutors feel that the government
should be providing for the everyday citizen—“giving them
money to eat,” to allocate as they please and not go hungry.
This slogan is not a declaration that Troika are right in
administering punitive measures but an acknowledgment
that circumstances have dramatically changed and life is
much more difficult nowadays. Vassilis’s comments are rep-
resentative in justifying the acceptance of what is locally
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
termed “free money”: “What were we supposed to do over
the past 30 years, turn down this money? The government
assured us it was okay to accept. They never told us it was
going to end in tragedy.” He says that he “longs for eas-
ier times” and that he wishes he had “realized earlier that
things were too good to be true.” Nevertheless, Vassilis in-
sists that the government should now provide money for
“everyday people to live at least a minimal existence” as the
ruling elite “continue to get fat through money eating” (on
money, eating, and power, cf. Argenti 2007; Bayart 1989).
Following discussions with people like Vassilis, I sug-
gest that, as well as drawing on notions of past tragedy in
the form of hunger, the Wi-Fi slogan also shows that peo-
ple would rather the government provide small amounts of
money to facilitate a more comfortable lifestyle for the ma-
jority of citizens than spend it on technology (western Thes-
saly was only recently connected to broadband Internet).
Ioanna, a 60-year-old housewife, observes,
Some people would certainly rather have their share of
the money to eat than think about their future based
on technology that they are not familiar with . . . I can
tell you for sure that nobody cares about Wi-Fi. I don’t
mean that people want to “eat” because they are cor-
rupt, but they want some money that they can allocate
as they please to make their lives a little easier. I am sure
that the Wi-Fi slogan does also refer to this, a plea to
provide money to the everyday person and end the tor-
ture of austerity. [conversation in January 2014, Trikala]
The slogan emphasizes the immense pain and suffer-
ing brought about by neoliberal reform as people lament
the lies, broken promises, and absurdity of the political elite.
241
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
Vassilis says that with “years of famine in front of us . . . how
can they [politicians] justify holding all the wealth them-
selves and promoting ridiculous policies like Wi-Fi? . . . I
want to tell them to give us the money they waste on these
programs so that I can allocate it myself.”
Conclusions
Slogans draw attention to the past to champion alterna-
tive futures as people challenge Troika neoliberal reform
packages and government promises of modernity and
progress. Although slogans protest the current neoliberal
reform packages, they celebrate the years of prosperity
that some enjoyed from the 1980s onward, which are
popularly perceived as an epiphenomenon of opening up
Greece to international markets in the 1980s and 1990s
(cf. Pryce 2012; Varoufakis 2013).18 Since the 1980s, people
have lived with a government advocating neoliberalism
while simultaneously taking advantage of deeply engrained
clientelistic practices such as exchanging favors in return
for votes, finding prestigious jobs for friends and family,
and accepting bribes in return for contracts to improve
transport infrastructure (Featherstone 2008; see also Camp-
bell 1964; for Italy and Malta, see Boissevain 1974). Through
ironic slogans, people in western Thessaly now express
their fears of returning to a past perceived as premodern or
pre-European. For instance, the cost of heating the home
with petrol-powered central heating is now beyond the ma-
jority of Trikalinoi, leading to a return to wood-fueled open
fires and stoves “not seen since the 1960s” and “associated
with peasant life” (Stavros, 66, retired teacher, Trikala, De-
cember 2013). Lower-wage Trikalinoi claim that they were
“promised that Greece was European, was Western, was
modern” but now they have been “thrown back in time to an
era before the [1967–74] dictatorship” (for extensive anal-
ysis of temporality and the “energy problem,” see Knight
2014a). Other fears include the return to times of hunger last
experienced during the Great Famine of 1941–43, percep-
tions of a new German occupation, and the reappearance of
landlord–tenant relations akin to those of the late Ottoman
era (Knight 2015a). The slogans simultaneously destabilize
and reinforce discursive frames of neoliberalism and gov-
ernance. Consumerism and increased expendable income
are desirable, but the erosion of cultural belonging and
self-identity and the lack of political accountability are not.
This contradiction is partially due to the “incomplete
and uneven character of capitalist penetration” in Greece
(Seremetakis 1994:39; also Featherstone 2008) since EU
accession, and it is here that ethnography permits deeper
understandings of neoliberal reform as localized, nuanced,
and lived. Especially in rural areas such as western Thes-
saly, since the liberalization of Greek markets in the 1980s,
socioeconomic life has developed into a complex amalgam
of neoliberal rhetoric and “traditional” modes such as
242
patronage and clientelism (cf. Featherstone 2008).
Throughout the 1990s, government rhetoric emphasiz-
ing Greece’s belonging to the neoliberal West was used to
justify increasing national debt and changing consumption
patterns and helped obscure the clientelistic state. For
three decades, this fusion generally meant that people
could benefit from the best of both worlds (Narotzky
2004:57, 2006:338). The cultural dimensions of “doing
economics” on clientelistic bases, coupled with state pol-
icy advocating immersion in global markets, left people
exceptionally vulnerable to the negative impacts of the
2008 global economic downturn and ensuing austerity
measures, hardship that is expressed through reference to
past events and culturally embedded metaphors of food.
The slogans thus highlight the real impacts of decades of
political decisions and economic policy.
Food is ever present in the discontent with austerity in
Greece and is the primary medium through which people
raise warnings from the past. Items of food denote cultural
belonging, national and local pride, collective hardship, and
shared history. Food also constitutes the ultimate embodi-
ment of crisis—if you do not eat, you will die. Slogans in-
cite collective victimhood and solidarity in opposition to
faceless systems and help promote the priorities of every-
day people as they struggle against hegemonic political and
economic policies and practices.
Slogans provide an avenue to express political agency
in the face of the juggernaut that is neoliberal reform.
Haugerud puts it expertly: “Plotted as satire, an eco-
nomic meltdown is not a force of nature or freak accident
but rather the entirely preventable outcome of politics
and policy” (2013:10). Irony and satire reclaim political ac-
countability where there is none and, in the Greek case, em-
phasize the universal belief that everyday citizens are being
persecuted by people rather than an abstract self-regulating
market (in the context of Malaysian villages, see Scott 1985).
Slogans locate the causes of and possible solutions to the
crisis and the role of specified external forces in dismantling
the state (Clarke 2008:136; Harvey 2003). Elaborate austerity
measures not only contribute to the dispossession of public
and private property but also attempt to destroy the materi-
ality of cultural identity—including relationships with food
and commensality. Austerity has become associated with
fears of economic colonization, political authoritarianism,
and a return to past eras of hardship. These insecurities
are highlighted in slogans aimed at defying the disas-
trous economic circumstances while drawing attention
to what is perceived as the corrupt, meddling influence
of authority figures in the governance of the neoliberal
austerity program. In short, this study illustrates that an
ethnography of neoliberal reform as actually lived can help
us understand the complex ways people relate to dramatic
shifts in economic policy, expressing their political agency
through narratives of victimhood, resistance, and solidarity.

Satirical slogans help locate accountability for economic
crisis within a system often portrayed as abstract and
faceless.
Postscript
Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing antiausterity SYRIZA
party, came to power after a general election held on Jan-
uary 25, 2015. His campaign was based on promises to rene-
gotiate the terms of the international bailout agreement and
restore hope and dignity to the nation. Given past experi-
ences, many of my research participants are very cautious
regarding the promises of new governments. The new fi-
nance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has demonstrated consid-
erable strength by telling Troika representatives face-to-face
“we cannot work with you.” But SYRIZA is a disparate party,
made up of numerous small left-wing constituents—former
members of the center-left PASOK, staunch communists,
euroskeptics, liberals, and more conservative antiausterity
campaigners—all pulling in different directions with com-
peting priorities. To complicate matters further, SYRIZA
formed a coalition government with the right-wing anti-
austerity Independent Greeks party. The election of SYRIZA
was most certainly a vote against Troika austerity and the
two-party political establishment that had run Greece since
the fall of the junta in 1974. Standing up to the injustice
of Troika austerity is a popular position, but other policies,
such as reintroducing the “14 wages per year” system and
increasing the minimum wage, and the promise that peo-
ple will be able to return to the living standards of precri-
sis years (including the common perception that personal
bank loans will once again be freely available) do worry
some citizens.
The election immediately provided a great source for
political satire, especially on the television program Ra-
dio Arvila (Radio Arvila S8/E9 2015), which lambasted both
ends of the political spectrum (and included the appear-
ance of a cucumber in reference to austerity and an ironic
mention of New Democracy plans for free Wi-Fi). Varo-
ufakis and Tsipras have become subjects of satire as much
as their predecessors—caricatured for their “cool” fashion
sense, laid-back public personas, and Tsipras’s problems
with the English language (Radio Arvila S8/E10 2015). The
satire often highlights public disbelief, or at least caution,
about the new government’s economic promises.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Nicolette Makovicky inspired me to start
investigating crisis slogans after a conversation at the 2013 Amer-
ican Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago. Stavroula
Pipyrou provided insightful comments throughout the writing pro-
cess, and Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Charles Stewart, and Dimitrios
Theodossopoulos gave constructive feedback, either oral or writ-
ten, while David Sutton and Christina Toren offered exciting per-
spectives on slogans and food. Discussions with Nicolas Argenti,
Wit and Greece’s economic crisis  American Ethnologist
Victoria Goddard, Renée Hirschon, and Susana Narotzky also
shaped parts of this article. Angelique Haugerud provided inspi-
ration, as well as unparalleled guidance and encouragement, for
which I am truly thankful. I am also grateful to Linda Forman for
her meticulous copyediting.
1. Focaal (51[1], 2008), Social Anthropology (20[1–4], 2012), and
Cultural Anthropology (27[1], 2012) have recently hosted extensive
debates on the nature of neoliberalism.
2. In 2012, government debt hit 170 percent of GDP. At the end
of 2014, debt to GDP stood at 174.9 percent (Trading Economics
2014).
3. I have conducted research in western Thessaly since 2003,
returning for approximately three months each year, with an
18-month visit in 2007–09. My research participants represent a
cross section of society; some of my closest informants include
a university professor, a dentist, a hairdresser, and farm laborers.
Some elderly informants are well into their nineties and recall such
events as the 1930s depression and 1940s Axis occupation and
subsequent civil war, and unemployed youth recently graduated
from high school also form part of my company. The political
allegiance of my research participants is equally diverse—and
some have changed sides over the course of the decade—from
left-wing Communist Party (KKE) supporters to families loyal to
the two main political parties of the past 30 years, namely, the
center-right New Democracy and center-left PASOK, and, in one
case, a supporter of the far-right Golden Dawn party. Despite their
social and political diversity, my research participants seem united
in their general disapproval of Troika austerity measures and the
perceived victimization of Greece.
4. With reference to resistance to and complicity with auster-
ity measures in Greece, Theodossopoulos (2014), argues for a “de-
pathologizing” of local indignant discourse. Both John Campbell
(e.g., 1964) and Michael Herzfeld (e.g., 1985, 1997) have discussed
local modes of resistance in Greece at length.
5. Sutton has also discussed his views at the 2013 American
Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago and the 2013
“Democracy in Crisis: Crisis in Democracy” workshop at Durham
University.
6. Haugerud (2013:63) notes how the slogan “Because we’re all
in this together, sort of” is an ironic commentary on the shredding
of the social safety net.
7. In West Africa, the fear of hunger and fear of the insatiable ap-
petites of the political business elites are “twin demons” (Argenti
2007:110). As Jean-François Bayart (1989) points out in Cameroon,
myriad subtleties of the trope of eating encompass every form of
political life, especially the accumulation of wealth as a result of
crime, graft, and corruption. Both Bayart and Nicolas Argenti ex-
plore local idioms that construe the belly as the source of power.
8. Official website: http://www.antenna.gr/minisites/radioar-
vyla/. Episodes are also available on YouTube.
9. Haugerud (2013) offers an extraordinary account of how satire
can be employed to engage with serious political and economic is-
sues. She shows how members of a satirical network known as “the
Billionaires” confront the increasing U.S. wealth gap by challeng-
ing the political and economic status quo through satire, humor,
and irony. In ways similar to those encountered in central Greece,
they employ ironic and satirical slogans such as “Corporations are
people too,” “Still loyal to big oil,” and “Taxes are not for everyone”
to raise awareness of their cause.
10. For discussion of affective history in Greece and Cyprus, see
Stewart 2012, Navaro-Yashin 2012, and Pipyrou 2014b.
11. Herzfeld (1985) explains how Cretan shepherds employ the
notion of hunger to justify stealing livestock. His informants insist
that they were hungry under Turkish rule and then again under the
243
American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 2 May 2015
German occupation, so they had to steal to fend off starvation (even
though they stole flocks from other Cretans and not the enemy),
and today a young Cretan “may still plausibly cite hunger as his mo-
tive for stealing several sheep in a night’s work” (Herzfeld 1985:21).
Hunger is an integral idiom through which to express ideological
notions of oppression and deprivation (Herzfeld 1985:22).
12. Sutton (2013:347) notes that food plays a significant role in
globalization and neoliberal business, citing, for instance, the pri-
vatization of collective resources and the global impact of chains
such as McDonald’s. For more on the perceived link between Mc-
Donald’s and conditions of economic crisis and prosperity, see
Loftsdóttir 2014.
13. Another variation of this saying reads “Life is a cucumber
that some people eat and it refreshes them; others eat and cry in
pain” [I zoi einai aggouri pou allos to troei kai drosizetai kai allos to
troei kai zorizetai].
14. See Theodossopoulos and Kirtsoglou 2009 on local re-
sponses to globalization, cosmopolitanism, and perceptions of for-
eign interference.
15. According to Herzfeld (1997:95), as a powerful component of
national ideology, successive degrees of social inclusion and exclu-
sion are structured to produce collective solidarity.
16. As early as the 1960s, Ernestine Friedl (1962:44) noted that
clothing signified a family’s degree of modernity and provoked
neighborly competition.
17. Sheila Lecoeur (2013) notes in her documentary film “A Bas-
ket of Food: Greece in the 1940s” that during the 1940s Great
Famine people on the island of Syros made “brush bread,” adding
straws from brooms to the flour.
18. From 1967 to 1974, Greece was under military dictatorship
with a very rigid inward-looking economic policy (as documented
in the Ministry of Coordination’s 1968 Economic Development Plan
for Greece, 1968–1972). Joining the EEC in 1981 and opening up to
international markets provided access to programs that had pre-
viously been inaccessible. Many of my informants, and academics,
associate this era with the introduction of “Western capitalism” into
Greece (e.g., see Featherstone 2008; Kamaras 2001). As an epiphe-
nomenon of the new economic scene, coupled with the public
perception of abundant wealth and, as James Faubion (1993) and
Herzfeld (1997) have argued, a political confidence that Greece
finally “belonged to the West” (see also Clogg 1992), the pop-
ulist center-left PASOK government expanded the public sector, in-
creased wages, and improved pensions (Clogg 1992). Greece relied
on cheap imports from the Balkans (Kamaras 2001), and freedom of
movement in the EEC also meant that package tourism flourished.
The EEC model both expanded the potential markets for small
Greek businesses and helped small-scale entrepreneurs to access
new sources of European funding—from programs for agricultural-
ists to schemes for local people to set up their own businesses (in-
cluding travel agents, hairdressers, and automobile mechanics; see
Knight 2015a). Gradual market deregulation during the early 1990s
saw the boom of two distinctive practices that had great impact at
the grassroots level—easy access to bank loans for leisure purposes
and a nationwide phenomenon of playing the stock markets (for an
anthropological analysis of the 1999–2000 stock market crash, see
Knight 2012b). Some academics claim that Greece has never been
“truly neoliberal” because of continued clientelistic practices and
populist political policies of the governing PASOK and New Democ-
racy parties (Featherstone 2008). Troika representatives have noted
that the 2010 austerity package was a result of Greece not prop-
erly following the “neoliberal path” it was offered in the 1980s. In
December 2014, the leader of the radical left-wing party SYRIZA,
Alexis Tsipras, declared that it was time to end the “neoliberal ex-
periment” in favor of “a model of social protection and growth”
244
(Queally 2014). Similarly, some research participants place the
blame for the current austerity measures on “unrestrained neolib-
eralism” and the unregulated nature of international markets, lo-
cating the blame in the aftermath of the 1981 EEC accession.
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Daniel M. Knight
Anthropology Department
Durham University
Dawson Building, South Road
Durham, DH1 3LE
United Kingdom
daniel.knight@durham.ac.uk