The dream of a better, modern and dignified life in a democratic state that must belong to the West: an ethnography of social change in post-war Thessaloniki.

In post-war Greece, Western Allies, the country's conservative political elite and parts of the middle class share a dream of consolidating and maintaining the country's Western, bourgeois-liberal orientation. In 1947, with the civil war still raging in the country, the Greek government chooses the path of the capitalist countries and joins the American program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Miltiadis Zermpoulis focuses on the impact and significance of the social and political changes brought about by the civil war, the dominance of conservatives in the political arena and the promotion of political surveillance and compliance technologies in the daily life of Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki.

Besprochen in:https://afebalk.hypotheses.org, 13.09.2023

Autorentext

Miltiadis Zermpoulis holds a PhD in social anthropology from the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece. Between 2017 and 2021 he worked for a migrant organization in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Since June 2021 he has been working as a research associate and deputy head at the Institute for Transcultural Competence at Police Academy of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. His academic interests include material culture, anthropology of space, state culture, social classes, post-colonial theories, ethnic/religious minorities and migration.