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The austerity crisis has radically altered the economic landscape of Southern Europe. But alongside the decimation of public services and infrastructure lies the wreckage of a generation's visions for the future. In Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is a new, difficult reality of downward mobility. Grassroots Economies interrogates the effects of the economic crisis on the livelihood of working people, providing insight into their anxieties. Drawing on a rich seam of ethnographic material, it is a distinctive comparative analysis that explores the contradictions of their coping mechanisms and support structures. With a focus on gender, the book explores values and ideologies, including dispossession and accumulation. Ultimately it demonstrates that everyday interactions on the local scale provide a significant sense of the global.
List of contents
List of Abbreviations
Series Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Grassroots Economics in Europe - Susana Narotzky
PART I: MAKING A LIVING
2. Bondage Unemployment and Intra-class Tensions in Greek Energy Restructuring - Theodora Vetta
3. Work, Wage and Subsidy: Making a Living Between Regulation and Informalization - Antonio Maria Pusceddu
4. Criminalizing Livelihoods: "Illegal Vegetables" and the Return to the Home - Carmen Leidereiter
5. Austerity, Social Values and Value: The Social Economy and Entrepreneurship in Catalonia - Patricia Homs
PART II: SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
6. Austerity Welfare and the Moral Significance of Needs in Portugal - Patrícia Matos
7. Family, Housing as an Asset, and the Production of Welfare - Jaime Palomera
8. Social Reproduction in Times of Crisis: Inter-Generational Tensions in Southern Europe - Susana Narotzky and Antonio Maria Pusceddu
PART III: EXPERIENCING AND EMBODYING AUSTERITY
9. The Entrepreneur's Other: Small Entrepreneurial Identity and the Collapse of Life Structures in the "Third Italy" - Giacomo Loperfido
10. The Body Politics of Austerity in Portugal and Spain: Women, Dispossession and Agency - Diana Sarkis and Patricia Matos
11. Austerity from Below: Class, Temporality and Scale in Grassroots Analyses of Crisis - Diana Sarkis and Stamatis Amarianakis
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and past President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Summary
A comparative ethnography of the responses on the ground to austerity policies in Southern Europe
