Stavroula Pipyrou – författare

The Grecanici are a Greek linguistic minority in the Calabria region of Italy, remnants of a population that has resided there since late antiquity. Their language represents a holdover from the Middle Ages, at least, and possibly even to the Greek colonies of the classical period. For decades the Grecanici passionately fought to be recognized by the Italian state as an official linguistic minority, finally achieving this goal in 1999. Violence, corruption, and mismanagement are inextricable parts of the social fabric, but Grecanici have crafted the means to invert hegemonic culture and participate in the power games of minority politics.The Grecanici of Southern Italy provides a comprehensive ethnography that examines the ways the minority developed and sustain enduring cultural forms of solidarity and relatedness. Stavroula Pipyrou proposes the concept of "fearless governance" to describe overlapping and sometimes contradictory systems of power, authority, and relational networks that enable the Grecanici to achieve political representation at the intersection of local, national, and global encounters. Refuting easy assumptions of top-down governmental influence, Pipyrou shows how the Grecanici find political representation through the European Union and UNESCO, state policy, civic associations, family networks and illegal organizations; not being afraid to take risks, incur wrath, lose friends, or risk death in challenging the political status-quo.

This volume places scarcity as a defining aspect of minorities’ experience and as a tool to comprehend ongoing and unresolved societal friction and global environmental challenges, strategies for survival and reproduction of the status quo, and aspirational desires for social mobility. The book is an experimental collective intellectual project departing from conventional approaches to scarcity solely as a resource-based economic or demographic concept. Boldly, the book looks at the ways in which disadvantaged social groups navigate their lives through scarcity, and how these circumstances are endured, interpreted, accepted or challenged.In a thought-provoking turn, the book makes a novel contribution to minority studies by engaging with scarcity not only concerning resources but also emotion, memory and affect. In analysing scarcity as a multidimensional analytical framework and interrogating it from manifold angles, the book unpacks uncharted ramifications of debates around scarcity and opens new lines of enquiry.The collection will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policymakers working in the areas of law, political anthropology and sociology.

This book highlights the diverse and complicated ways that violence becomes axiomatic, namely through political rhetoric, epistemological impositions, and colonial legacies. Considering how axiomatic violence emerges from events of rupture as well as slow-moving structural inequalities, authors interrogate both the novelty and mundane quality of the current political moment. Approaching violence as axiomatic expands the conceptual lexicon for discussing how rhetorics, metaphors, and prescriptive assumptions can be inherently violent and become normalised, losing their event-like status. Through the routinisation of the extraordinary, truths become indisputable. Axioms combine neoteric and foundational violence to lend legitimacy to apparently incontestable categories of domination, disenfranchisement, and epistemological governance.This book will be an asset to students and researchers of political theory, philosophy, and social anthropology and those interested in learning about the intersections of post-colonial and post-liberal anthropology, violence, and power.The chapters in this book were first published as a special issue of Anthropological Forum and are accompanied by a new Afterword.