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Ethnos
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Locked into security, keyed into modernity: The selection of burglaries as source of risk in Greece
Alexandra Bakalaki
a a

Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

Available online: 02 Dec 2010

To cite this article: Alexandra Bakalaki (2003): Locked into security, keyed into modernity: The selection of burglaries as source of risk in Greece, Ethnos, 68:2, 209-229 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0014184032000097759

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Locked into Security, Keyed into Modernity: The Selection of Burglaries as Source of Risk in Greece
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Alexandra Bakalaki
Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

abstract Consensus among Greeks claims that the rates of burglaries and thefts have been increasing during the last ten years and that this constitutes a major social problem for which immigrants, and, especially Albanians, are responsible. This article theorizes that the selection of burglaries as source of risk deploys the understanding that the flip side of the increase in property crime is increased affluence and that both are part of modernization. The selection of houses as targets of aggression enables people, especially men, to construe themselves as protectors of houses objectifying the longstanding ideals of household management and as members of a modern society in which security is a matter of individual consumer choice. The portrayal of immigrants as destitute thieves reinforces the construct of the Greek nation state as a successful albeit vulnerable household writ-large. keywords Crime, emmigration, gender, modernization, household, Greece

n the last ten years a consensus has grown among Greeks that crime has been increasing. Although hardly the only crimes causing concern, burglaries and thefts are particularly disquieting. While fragmentary and, according to experts, unreliable, the available statistics indicate that these crimes have increased.1 However, the reasons why certain hazards are defined as sources of danger against which people must actively protect themselves do not necessarily lie in the frequency with which such hazards occur or in the severity of their potential consequences. Following Mary Douglas (1992), I assume that the selection of break-ins functions to legitimate political and moral claims and to distribute responsibilities. I argue that the construction of break-ins as a major source of danger and the blame cast on immigrants Eastern Europeans and, especially, Albanians living in Greece are part of a complex discourse on social organization. Seen as part of modernization, the

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rise in break-ins is an issue in terms of which Greeks represent their society, evaluate changes within it, and negotiate their own identities as household members and as members of a nation state which has finally joined the modern world. What follows is based on seven months of intermittent research in Athens, Thessaloniki (Greeces second largest city of about one million), and Mytilini, the capital of the island of Lesbos, which has a population of about 30,000. In all three places, I listened for conversations about burglaries likely to erupt in just about every corner of the street, and I found that I myself could initiate them with very little effort. Interviews with men and women of various ages and class backgrounds centered on their actual experiences and fears, their security-related practices, and on their understandings of the causes of the problem. I also spoke with security specialists locksmiths and others who manufacture and sell security equipment and employees of companies providing electronic technology and guard services. Drawing on data I collected in different places and on insights offered by other ethnographers, this presentation runs the risk of giving the impression that Greece is a homogeneous society an image contested by many anthropologists. But the understanding that there is no singular natives point of view need not entail denial of the fact that Greeks acknowledge a national level of cultural identity (Herzfeld 1982b:67). As the work of several scholars shows (see e.g. Cowan 2000; Danforth 1995; Gourgouris 1996; Herzfeld 1982b, 1987, 1997; Karakasidou 1997; Tsoukalas 1977), the task is neither to affirm nor to deny the homogeneity of Greece in absolute terms, but to elucidate the processes by which it is constructed, promoted or contested. According to Herzfeld (especially 1982a, 1987), Greeks have tended to represent their society as homogeneous when juxtaposing it to the more affluent societies of northwestern Europe. I suggest that in selecting break-ins as a source of risk to which practically all are exposed, Greeks also represent their society as homogeneous this time by juxtaposing themselves to an internal Other, the less affluent foreigner-outsiders, held responsible for the rise in crime. On Burglaries as a Modern Evil The reasons why the rise in break-ins is seen as a source of danger which people must actively try to prevent and avoid are far from self-evident given the widespread tendency among Greeks to acknowledge many everyday hazards as more or less given parts of life. The attention paid to ecological risks by political parties, the media and ordinary people is limited in comparison to
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other countries of the European Union. Although publicity about food-associated risks, and especially those posed by infected beef, has caused many to modify their eating habits, protection from Mad Cow disease is discussed less frequently than protection from burglaries. Similarly, people discuss the ways of avoiding break-ins rather than the dangers posed by smoking, drinking, or safety regulation violations in the workplace and in the streets.2 Indeed, indifference to danger or even proclivity to risk constitutes something of a national character stereotype attributed to Greeks by Euro-American visitors and observers, but also maintained by Greeks about themselves. Depending on context, the former view it as constitutive of a carefree, optimistic, death-defying, Zorba-the-Greek-like stance, or as a sign of fatalism, backwardness, irresponsibility, and faulty state administration. Greeks commonly acknowledge lack of safety-consciousness as the cause of many accidents, and the educated middle class often deplore it as a sign of lack of self-discipline and a symptom of a backward mentality attributed to the masses. However, in contexts of cultural intimacy they also construe engagement with danger as a positive national character trait, which distinguishes themselves from Europeans.3 As several ethnographers have noted, the eagerness to take risks is a highly valued aspect of masculine identities enacted in the context of animal theft and other agonistic honor performances (Herzfeld 1985; Astrinaki 2003), the soccer field (Papageorgiou 1998), the gambling table (Papataxiarchis 1999), or adolescent games (Handman 1987:219233). However, there is nothing redeeming about actively seeking out the risk of a break-in. According to Mary Douglas (1992:2425), in modern industrial societies risk is largely synonymous with danger in that it refers to negative outcomes. However, the prevalence of risk in such societies is due to the fact that it is part of a probabilistic way of thinking, according to which the magnitude and likelihood of hazardous events may be objectively calculated (Douglas 1992:15). In everyday conversations about break-ins in Greece, the word danger appears more frequently than risk. Interestingly, however, risk is used mainly in relation to behaviors which are thought to increase ones exposure to the danger of a break-in or fail to reduce it. Who takes that risk? is a rhetorical question that points to the dangers of sleeping with the balcony doors open at night, opening the door to strangers, leaving ones door unlocked, or not installing adequate security technology. In all three places where I carried out fieldwork, newly built houses are likely to come equipped with security locks and anti-burglary doors. However, in Athens and Thessaloniki it is more common to update the security technology of the homes people
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already inhabit than it is in Mytilini. In these large cities, supply and demand of security technology and associated services are increasing. Most locksmith shops have enlarged their scope to include a wide range of mechanical and electronic products, small electrical appliance shops also market simple electronic alarms, while a growing number of large firms provide comprehensive electronic surveillance and patrol services for private citizens.4 Security technology seems to spread in waves. Usually people install it following the example of neighbors, but often also after they themselves or people they know have already suffered attempted or actual burglaries. For example, a middleclass school teacher told me that her mother wanted to change their apartment door after the neighbors did within three months every apartment in the building had a new door. And a taxi driver said that, although he already had two dogs, he also got multiple locks for his front doors after his brother-in-laws house had been broken into. Following the burglary, the brother-in-law himself secured his house with an expensive (1,500 Euros) security door, and a month later he also bought a gun. As consumer goods, security products come in different price ranges and promise different degrees of efficiency. To a certain extent access to them reflects ones economic means the poor can not afford the expensive sophisticated technology with which the suburban houses of the wealthy are usually equipped. But peoples sense of vulnerability does not vary neatly by class.5 Those living in poor neighborhoods often feel in danger because they believe the police are more concerned with protecting the middle-class and the wealthy. Conversely, owners of expensive-looking houses in rich neighborhoods told me they feel threatened because burglars go where there are things worth stealing. Finally, during fieldwork, I met a few people of varying class backgrounds who said that they did not really worry about being personally victimized, or who admitted to being careless about locking, because they feel that having ones house broken into is a matter of luck, or because they are confident that nothing bad will happen to them, or because they refuse to succumb to a fear, which, however realistic, will make their everyday life uncomfortable. Despite variation in the degree to which they feel personally threatened and in the self-protection strategies they adopt, people generally agree that burglary rates have increased, and that this increase is a recent phenomenon, a part of modernization as many put it, an evil of progress. Among Greeks, as among other nationalities, it is a common fantasy that in the past people could trust one another more, because the world was a safer place. Most of
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the people I spoke with believe that not only were there fewer crimes, but that they were different in kind: Traditional crimes were less arbitrary and more predictable, because they involved perpetrators and victims who were known to each other and were usually motivated by the same honor-related values (see Avdela 2002). Signs of the breakdown of an old social order variously perceived as prevailing traditionally, in the old times, even ten years ago, or in the villages, rising rates of break-ins committed by strangers who strike randomly are seen as diagnostic signs of Greeces transition to modernity: We [Greeks, or the inhabitants of a particular city] have become like Chicago, ...this is Texas, ...this is chaos or ...this is a jungle are popular phrases describing the evolution of Greek society in the direction of increased complexity, disorder, unpredictability, and aggression, that is, of an anomic life imagined to prevail in the u.s. the most developed country of all but also in primitive settings. Referring to various negative aspects of modernization including the rise in break-ins, these ironic phrases imply nostalgia for tradition. At the same time they confirm that, for better or worse, life in Greece is beginning to look like life in the modern world. Interestingly, the idea that rising crime is part of modernization is matched by sociological formulations. Thomas Gallant (1999) has correlated Greek crime statistics with Louise Shelleys (1981) model, according to which development involves an overall increase in crime rates, a decline in crimes against the person and a rise in property crimes, the spread of crime beyond cities and into suburbs and rural areas, and the increasingly large representation of migrants among criminals. Gallant found that, although between 1972 and 1986 crime increased rather steeply in Greece, the percentage of property crimes was only 4.5 percent of the total. He also found no clear correlation between crime rates and urbanization a phenomenon which he attributed to urban migrants participation in households and social networks resembling those prevalent in rural areas (1999:181). He concludes (1999:167, 177) that Greece did not fit neatly into either the model of the developing or the developed countries, but displayed features of both. The increase in theft and burglary incidents that took place after 1986 indicates that Greece has moved closer to the developed countries model. Like other peoples who have experienced colonial domination or semicolonial westernization (see Aug 1999), Greeks have been given to reflexive concerns over the nature of their society and its relations to other more developed societies. The specific features of the modernity desired or achieved and, likewise, of the backwardness to be transcended or the tradition to be
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transformed have been contested issues feeding heated debates among politicians and intellectuals as well as lay people at least since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. What was not contested, however, was the overall ideal of modernity perceived as progress.6 Modernization has been conceptualized as the progressive approximation of statehood, technology, science, and especially lifestyles, aesthetic values and levels of consumption perceived as characteristic of Europe a term referring to the wealthy Western European countries, but also used as a gloss for the developed world generally. The membership of Greece in this universe has been far from self-evident in the eyes of Europeans and of Greeks themselves. Powerful and longstanding, albeit nebulous, becoming modern was perhaps the traditional ideal par excellence (see Bakalaki 1994; Herzfeld, 1982a, 1987; Skopetea 1988; Vitti 1991). Strangely then, the anxiety over the rise in break-ins is reassuring in that it points to the fulfillment of a longstanding collective dream that Greece transcends poverty and backwardness and integrates itself into the modern world. Meanwhile, the widespread sense that crime is no longer confined to the cities, but is spreading to small towns and villages, reinforces the feeling that the urban-rural divide is becoming less rigid, in other words that villages are becoming more like the cities just like Greece is becoming more like Europe.7 But however integral a part of modernity, burglaries are also perceived as an evil. In the next section I will argue that the reason why they are selected as a major social problem is that they target households; that is, the ideally autonomous units within which gendered people combine their efforts toward economic and social success, a showcase of which is the house and its contents. On the Selection of Houses as Vulnerable Targets In everyday conversation, break-ins are described as acts of penetration. The most common expression for a burglary is, bikane sto spiti, literally, they entered into the house. On a couple of occasions I also heard patisan to spiti, literally, they stepped into the house an expression that implies both defeat and defilement and is most commonly used for the conquest of towns or fortresses after siege. Burglars are said to undress both the house and its owners to/tous gdysane. The following comes from a conversation between a bank teller and a client: X. Is not here today, they [burglars] got into their [her family] house yesterday. She is in shock. They [the burglars] undressed them completely, they took everything, literally, they took all their clothes from the closet. The only thing they did not do was screw them, but then they were not at home. This description aptly conveys the feeling, hardly unique
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among Greeks (see Young 1991:280), that burglaries amount to symbolic rape: the violation of the house is an assault against the embodied selves of the household members. In Greek the word spiti, house, is often used as synonymous with household, spitiko or noikokyrio. Home ownership and financial and social autonomy of the household are strong, widely shared ideals, which, however, are not always easy to attain. Apart from encapsulating the relations between their inhabitants, houses usually also objectify amiable or conflict-ridden relations between them and other relatives from whom houses have been transmitted as dowry or inheritance, and sometimes also with state officials or politically powerful patrons who may have helped with loans or permits (Herzeld 1991:13233). Commitment to the integrity of ones household entails control of the physical boundaries of ones house. Older people have told me that, in the past, people may have left their front doors unlocked during the day, or hid the key in a place which was known to just about everybody. Even before the emergence of the concern over burglaries, the nightly locking up of the house was part of peoples taken for granted commitment to the orderly maintenance of their houses and households. However, unless celebrating a name day or having a wake, they always closed the shutters and locked up the yard and/ or the front door at night. In Thermi, a village near Mytilini, a woman contrasted her own casualness about locking up to the more scrupulous habits of some of her neighbours. She said of her neighbors: They are not necessarily fearful or particularly stingy and possessive. They are just careful and orderly, they look after their things. They have always been so. She added that she herself would be reluctant to admit her own casualness to them, because they would take it as lack of noikokyrosyni commitment to the welfare of the household. Talking about Athens, where he had moved in the 1960s, a man used the adverb noikokyremena to describe the care with which Athenians, then not particularly afraid of burglars, locked up at night. Finally, an elderly neighbour in Mytilini, who came to my house at night to tell me I had left the basement door open, cautioned me that there are many foreigners around, and one might get in there and steal the heating oil from the tank or even set fire to it. In any case, he said, you should lock up anyway; if doors and keys were unnecessary, God wouldnt have made them. As ethnographers of Greece have noted (e.g., Salamone & Stanton 1986), effective householding requires the concerted efforts of husband and wife. However, domestic space is primarily female (see Dubisch 1986:1011, du
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Boulay 1974, 1986; Hirschon 1978, 1981). In contrast to men, who socialize with one another in the coffee shop or in other extra-domestic all-male contexts (Loizos & Papataxiarchis 1991a, 1991b; Papataxiarchis 1992), womens lives are mainly defined by their household roles and duties. Commitment to these is integral to the success of the household and to the effective management and display of its wealth, but also serves as index of womens personal virtue, and especially of their sexual purity. In turn, the latter is essential to the achievement and maintenance of mens status as honorable householders a status important in the context of kinship but also of all-male relations. Thus, although ideally both husband and wife should be committed to the household, maintenance of order within it and control of the boundaries of both the house and of womens bodies is ultimately a male responsibility. Insofar as they challenge the impenetrability of houses as well as of the bodies of their inhabitants, break-ins expose men not only to injury but also to the insult of cuckoldry and feminization (see Herzfeld 1997:9596). In the context of growing consumerism since the 1960s (see Karapostolis 1984), the house increasingly objectifies the households achievement of modern standards of consumption (Vlahoutsikou 1998; Vlahoutsikou & Baharopoulou 1991). Commenting on the extent to which people worry about making their houses break-in safe, two security specialists told me condescendingly, to the Greeks, houses are more than living places; they are fetishes. The perception of houses as vulnerable targets of aggression by the have-nots is the flip side of houses as mirrors of success. The idea that success may provoke aggression lies behind traditional evil-eye practices (see Veikou 1998). In contrast to the covert aggression involved in evil-eye accusations, the aggression burglaries represent is overt and literal; perhaps this may be understood as part of a sociality that privileges display of wealth rather than modesty and as sign of the increasingly literal ways in which people calculate success, by measuring it in money. Sites of consumption and the display of consumer goods, houses are increasingly protected by devices which are themselves consumer goods. Unlike seat belts or fire extinguishers, mandated by law, acquisition of security technology is a matter of individual consumer choice. Depending on the degree of its technical sophistication, this technology, which is largely imported, is also valued as representing modern solutions to modern problems. During fieldwork, I often came across the view that underestimating the danger of burglaries and failing to take precautions are indications of a backward mentality. After all, the idea that one should control the future by means of techethnos, vol. 68:2, june 2003 (pp. 209229)

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nology is prevalent among those who think themselves modern (see Ellin 1997:24). In Thermi, when someone installed an electronic surveillance device on the door of his newly built large house, fellow villagers responded with irony: where does he think he lives; who does he think he is?, they asked rhetorically. They thought he was being pretentious. Although social scientists disagree as to the proper meaning of individualization (e.g. see Beck 1994:13) and privatization, the idea that increased reliance on ones resources, and especially those bought in the market, is part of modernization everywhere has been widely popularized. Greeks apply this received wisdom when, in seriousness or irony, they predict that soon here too there will be gated communities and private police corps as is the case in the more modern countries. Interestingly, however, the eagerness to take ones security into ones hands with the help of modern technology may also be situated in the context of a traditional ethic which holds men responsible for the safety and welfare of their families. After all, since the days of Banfield (1958), individualization in the form of familism and resistance to state authority has been theorized as a characteristic of a traditional orientation, which constitutes an obstacle to modernization and development,8 and which is mainly characteristic of men. I have already argued that in Greece recognition as the master of ones household was an essential component of ones identity as an adult male. Although the clientele of businesses supplying security products and services is not exclusively male, advertisements and sales talk address men both in their capacity as modern consumers possessing technical know-how and as householders responsible for the protection of their family and property. Finally, it is important to note that readiness to resort to commercially purchased security products and services may be interpreted in light of a longstanding hostility or, at best, ambivalence toward the state. Variously perceived as oppressive internal enemy, as colonizer to be resisted, as resource to be exploited in the name of the welfare of ones family, as immovable, impersonal force akin to fate, or as ineffective householder, the state is often blamed for being unwilling or unable to face up to the responsibility of protecting its citizens (see Herzfeld 1982b, 1987, 1997). On the Targeting of Foreigners as Criminals The view that the rising crime rates constitute a problem which affects everybody and which the government cannot solve is part of the rhetoric by which people in the security business try to attract clients. Politicians, especially those of the opposition, emphasize the dangers posed by the rise in
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crime to discredit governmental security policies. Thus, during the 2000 election campaign, New Democracy, the leading right-wing party of the opposition, sponsored a television spot featuring a man telling another that he should be grateful it was just his house that had been broken into and not his own head bashed as well. Finally, the media, whose crime coverage has often been criticized as sensationalist, mis-leading and panic-inducing (e.g. Koukoutsaki 2000; Romanidou 2000:197, 204; Zarafonitou 2000:499), also contribute to the creation of a feeling of vulnerability. Demands for more effective crime control by the government center largely on more efficient policing of the countrys borders, which would check the flow of immigrants from neighboring former communist countries into Greece. Respondents to a recent Ministry of Public Order survey were almost unanimous that immigrants are the cause of the rise in crime (To Vima 20.2.2000), as were 92 percent of police officers of all ranks who answered a survey in the mid-1990s (Karydis 1996:132).9 The media, politicians, police authorities, but also Greek burglary suspects themselves reinforce the stereo-type of foreigners as criminals by attributing practically every unresolved crime to them.10 Portrayals of the entry of immigrants into Greece as a massive, uncontrollable, invasion-like influx, rest on the representation of the country as a household operating on the principle of agnatic decent (see Herzfeld 1997:7488). Matter out of place, the very presence of foreigners amounts to unauthorized entry into a private house. Portraying immigrants as potentially criminal intruders enables Greeks to assert themselves as exclusive beneficiaries to the fatherlands resources and as rightful guardians of its integrity,11 and also to cast the government as an ineffective householder, unable to righteously manage the property in his charge and protect his dependents. Casting themselves as members of a large household with an ineffective master and as being threatened by outsiders, Greeks downplay class, ethnic, gender, regional, and political differences among themselves, and claim trust and solidarity toward one another. A personal anecdote is illustrative. Upon realizing that he had frightened me, a man who had entered my yard and was standing in front of my open window on a summer night, assured me that I had nothing to fear. Sorry to scare you, he said, but no need to worry, I am Greek. I could use some of these bricks that you have stocked out there, so I thought, why not go in and ask. It was as if his being Greek should automatically cast us as intimates. It is widely assumed that anonymity, living among non-intimates, and, especially foreigners, that is, extreme strangers12 is part of life in the modern world. In addition, immigration is associated with modernity, because its onethnos, vol. 68:2, june 2003 (pp. 209229)

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set followed international developments, and because the problems it poses for Greece are seen as matched by those also facing the developed countries of Europe.13 However, the foreigners stereotyped as criminals impersonate qualities that stand in opposition to modernity backwardness, illiteracy, wildness, and deprivation. In fact, the criminality attributed to different nationalities is proportionate to the degree of their perceived primitiveness.14 Thus, Albanians are especially stigmatized not only because they constitute the largest immigrant group, but also because they are stereotyped as the most destitute, literally hungry, and, therefore, unscrupulous (Karydis 1966). It is important to mention that the term Albanian is often derogatorily used in a non-literal sense to refer to all foreigners. Albanians are frequently represented as subhuman as ants one may kill without even noticing (Karydis 1996:162),15 or as wild animals. In 1997, after a series of burglaries which took place in Peania, a residential region on the outskirts of Athens, local men appeared on the television news with shotguns, boots, and hunting outfits, and declared that they were about to embark on another nightly hunt. The stereotype of Albanians as a dangerous class (Karydis 1996:156; Romanidou 2000) exonerates violence against them. During the last few years there have been twenty murders of Albanians and several gang beatings by Greeks. That in some cases the victims were said to be caught stealing foodstuffs has reinforced their being stereotyped as hungry and animal-like. In turn, the stereotype of the hungry immigrants reinforces the perception of Greece as an affluent society one where ordinary people, even villagers, enjoy a standard of living superior to that of neighboring countries. At the same time, the idea that Greece is poor in relation to Europe or America is still dominant. The understanding that foreigners have left their countries of origin to seek a future in Greece affirms that the distance between Greece and the west has been shortened, without necessarily annulling the argument that we still have a long way to go. According to Karydis (1996:132), the conflation of Balkan peoples with Albanians reflects Greeks negation or at best reluctant admission of their own membership in this part of the world. Given the tenacity of the generalized notion of Europe as touchstone of cultural hierarchy in the Balkans (Herzfeld 1997:16), it is not surprising that ones identification as a Westerner and as a Balkan would be seen as incompatible. The blame cast on immigrants as cause of the rise in break-ins and as foreign bodies in the midst of an otherwise homogeneous and affluent society enables Greeks to repress certain disturbing analogies and synecdoches between their own perceptions of the current situation obtaining in the former
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communist countries and earlier periods of Greek history. The predicament of many migrants from these countries who are of Greek origin is similar to people who, having been expelled from Turkey as Greeks in 1922 and settled in Greece as refugees, found themselves stigmatized as Turks. Having suffered discrimination as Greeks in their countries of birth, once in Greece, immigrants are distinguished from true Greeks, or, worse, they are cast as foreigners. Finally, immigrants are separated off from true Greeks even in the eyes of Greeks whose ancestors originated from the same regions which immigrants left behind. For example, the northern Peloponese Arvanites, whose ancestors came from southern Albania and settled in Greece between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, sometimes express admiration for the toughness of Albanians a quality, which they also claim for themselves. However, on the whole they distance themselves from them, and they do so as Greeks (Kazazis 1998). Negative stereotyping of foreigners also enables Greeks to distance themselves from their recent past. That Greece was poor and backward, and life in the rural parts was harsh is a widely held explanation for the large wave of emigration of Greeks to western Europe, but also overseas in the 1960s.16 Practically every Greek family has at least one member who emigrated, and everyone is familiar with stories about the racism and exploitation guest-workers suffered. Upon their return from abroad many Greeks invested the money they had made in housing and small businesses. Signs of prosperity, and construed as targets of aggressive and destitute immigrants, these are also reminders of their owners or their parents past dependence on European employers and of Greeces long-term economic and political dependence on wealthy nations west and north. Negative stereotyping of foreigners enables Greeks to repress the knowledge that the predicament of immigrants is similar to that of Greek guest-workers some decades ago, and that their own position in relation to immigrants now is analogous to that of the natives of the countries which benefitted from emigrant cheap labor. Stereotyping foreigners as thieves, Greeks also project onto them feelings of desire and envy for their own superior standard of living, which are then evoked as explanations of the immigrant criminality. During fieldwork I often came across the view that the turn to crime of foreigners is the consequence of their sudden exposure to the affluence enjoyed by Greeks. According to Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart (1999), living for the present, that is, indifference toward securing material possessions and planning for the future, is a characteristic of people who accept their own marginality. Perhaps the sense
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that Greeks need to be protected from foreigners who are after their wealth, affirms that they themselves have left marginality behind. At the same time, construing foreigners as starving, Greeks also project onto them the willingness to go to extremes, painfully hard, exploitative work and saving, or criminal appropriation. Interestingly, these are among the strategies to which Greeks refer when describing their own efforts to survive under difficult circumstances. Condemned when seen as unnecessarily victimizing innocent others, theft, deceit, or aggression motivated by hunger and directed against those with plenty to eat are valued positively when serving moral ends, like the welfare of ones family and community, or resistance against oppressive local authorities or external enemies of the nation.17 By stereotyping foreigners as destitute, Greeks represent themselves as powerful, and construe their own lifestyle as a model for imitation. Again, this stereotype involves projection. Historically, adoption of European ways has meant prestige, and for this reason, the construction of others as imposters and imitators of European ways has been a standard strategy in social antagonism. That for many Greeks the capacity to maintain a modern lifestyle still rests on access to stolen goods is evidenced by the high demand for cheap-priced commodities (locally manufactured, but often also illegally imported from third world countries) bearing the fake names and logos of prestigious American and European brands (see Bakalaki 1994:102103). In conclusion The extent to which risk is an exclusively modern phenomenon has been the subject of much debate. According to Mary Douglas (1992:15, 28), the concept of risk has a strong hold in modern industrial societies because of its abstractness, its universalistic overtones, and its scientificity. However, although risk is invoked to protect the individual rather than the community [I]t is part of the system of thought that upholds the type of individual culture which sustains an expanding industrial system (Douglas 1992:28) it is a concept which addresses problems of social organization that are not exclusively modern. Being at risk is equivalent to being sinned against or being victimized by events which followed the transgression of a taboo by others. It is also a gloss for a blaming system which may be compared with those obtaining in tribal societies, which enable people to charge hazards to specific agents. According to Ulrich Beck (1992, 1994) and Anthony Giddens (1991, 1994), risk is a fundamental feature of reflexive modernity, that is, of a distinct type of sociality the emergence of which is predicated on detraditionalization.
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However, this evolutionary view which rests on dichotomous categories like modernity and tradition, present and past, or west and rest has been repeatedly challenged on several different grounds. Tradition maintenance or construction and modernization are often simultaneous and interdependent processes (Heelas 1996) as reflexive traditionalization is the flip side of reflexive modernization (Lash 1994:126127). The sense that the past is irrevocably gone and the present is quickly slipping away is an effect of a postmodern reflexivity which deploys nostalgia to construct rather than record changes and losses (Appadurai 1996:2931). Finally, although there are many kinds of social reflexivity, engagement with the nature and trajectories of ones society and its relations to others is hardly the prerogative of moderns or an exclusive feature of modernity (Aug 1999:129175). The selection of burglaries as a source of risk in Greece may be interpreted either as evidence of the tenacity of cultural constructs and values upholding the integrity and autonomy of the household, or as part of modernization. These opposite interpretations would entail symmetrical drawbacks. The first appears to underestimate the view shared by Greeks that burglaries represent a radically new form of risk, which requires that people change their behaviors and resort to new strategies of protection. The second view appears to take this agreement at face value and substitute it for social analysis. Rather than thinking about tradition and modernity as ontological states with different essential characteristics such as the presence or absence of risk (see Caplan 2000:25), I have approached them as discursive constructs by means of which people negotiate the relation between the present and the past and, in this context, also assess the implication of the rise in burglaries. In turn, rather than thinking about this rise as an objective index of modernity, I have focused on its discursive uses, that is, on the ways in which people deploy the risk posed by burglaries to represent modernization as an ambiguous process: one that is desirable, but also fraught with danger. I have suggested that burglaries are selected as a source of risk because they represent a new kind of danger and because they target the longstanding institution of household. In recognizing their vulnerability to the burglary risk Greeks affirm both their identification with traditional values and patterns of sociality and they also reassure themselves that they have transcended poverty and backwardness. In other words, they exempt themselves from underdevelopment without exiling themselves from tradition, or, at least, without giving up tradition as a perspective from which to criticize modernity.

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Acknowledgments I thank sa Boholm and Wilhelm stberg as well as the anonymous reviewers of Ethnos for their helpful comments. The final version of the paper owes a lot of editing advice generously offered by Costas Canakis and Costas Douzinas. Notes 1. In 1988 out of a total of 311,179 crimes committed, 17,750 were thefts and burglaries (Nikolakopoulos 2000). According to records I obtained from the Ministry of Public Order, in 1998 there were 60,829 thefts and burglaries out of a total of 119,488 serious crimes, a category including homicide, fraud, rape, begging, animal theft, robbery, illegal gun possession, forgery, sexual exploitation, and vehicle theft the number of stolen vehicles was 25,935. The 1999 Ministry of Public Order records indicate that in that year the number of thefts and burglaries had declined to 45,739, while the total number of serious crimes had fallen to 100,899 (see also Vythoulka & Lambropoulou 2000). The decline may have been caused by the war against crime undertaken by the government, but it may also reflect changes in crime reporting and police record-keeping patterns. In any case, most of the people I spoke with during fieldwork were not aware of this decline, and those who were doubted that a more permanent solution to the problem was in sight. 2. The rate of labor accidents, which historically has been high (Avdela 1998), continues to be so. Violations of safety regulations by employers, but also resistance to such regulations on the part of workers are contributing factors (Ioannou 1996). Greece is way ahead of all other European countries in traffic accidents. It is the only country in the European Union in which the number of traffic accidents has not decreased. In fact between the years 1975 and 1995 it has increased by 105 percent (Ethniki Statistiki Ypiresia 1999; Bistika 2000; Hatzidis 2000). 3. Herzfeld, who has coined the term, defines cultural intimacy as the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment, but that nevertheless provide insiders with the assurance of a common sociality... (Herzfeld 1997:3). On fatalism as a component of a dominant stereotypy about Greeks see Herzfeld 1982b. For the argument that lack of self-discipline and resistance to laws and regulations perceived to constrain individual freedom are cultural obstacles to modernization in Greece see Tsoukalas 1999:196201. 4. No official statistics are available, but according to the estimates of professionals in the security business, which I have correlated with Yellow Pages listings, in Athens alone, the number of firms supplying electronic surveillance and guards has increased from about fifteen to over a hundred and fifty during the last fifteen years. 5. On the growing fear of crime in Greece, and especially Athens, see Zarafonitou (2000). For an empirical study on the distribution of fear of crime by sex, age and marital status and on perceptions regarding the relative seriousness of different crimes in a municipality of Athens see Zarafonitou et al. (2000). 6. Indeed modernity is so broad a notion that it may englobe and legitimate values and practices apparently anachronistic. For example, one of the arguments against the governments recent decision that identity cards to be issued by the state from now on will not include information concerning the citizens religious affiliation, ethnos, vol. 68:2, june 2003 (pp. 209229)

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7. 8.

9.

10.

was that Christianity, and especially orthodoxy, has contributed greatly to Greeces integration into Europe, and that declaration of religious faith on id cards is in keeping with the renewed interest in religion prevailing in the modern world. Although prevalent, this impression is not accurate. In 1999, 78 percent of the thefts and burglaries committed took place in the greater regions of Athens and Thessaloniki (Vythoulka & Lambropoulou 2000). For example, according to Tsoukalas (1999: 193, 199, 203), anarchic individualism defined as total irresponsibility toward the collectivity accounts for dysfunctional phenomena like the exceptionally high percentage of independent labor in Greece and, above all, for resistance to state policies imposing conformity to law, civic duties and contractual obligations. As immigration is a recent phenomenon, available studies are few and fragmentary. Estimates of the number of immigrants living in Greece today vary, but most studies lead to the conclusion that it is about 500,000. The migration process began in the mid-1980s with limited numbers of workers arriving from Egypt and several Asian countries. During the late 1980s large numbers of Pontic Greeks were repatriated from several former u.s.s.r. republics. After the demise of communist regimes in Eastern Europe migration escalated considerably. Until 1997 the only immigrants automatically naturalized were the Pontic Greeks. Subsequent governmental decrees enabling immigrants to register so as to eventually obtain legal status resulted in serious bureaucratic complications and remained largely inactive. Not having the necessary papers, many immigrants failed to register, and only a minority of those who did managed to get a legalization certificate (Angelopoulos 2000). In the late nineties many were deported after police round-ups, called skoupa, (literally broom or sweep). As of 1995 Albanians constituted about 70 percent of all migrants from nonEuropean Union countries. About half of them were illegal. They also constituted 50 percent of non-Greek nationals held in Greek prisons. According to Karydis (1996), an authority on the subject, in 1996 participation of immigrants in thefts, burglaries, robberies, rapes, and murders was high, but criminality among Greeks was higher than among immigrants. He suggests that immigrant criminality is to be at least in part attributed to discriminatory police practices as well as to the conditions of marginality in which immigrants live. Severely exploited as workers, immigrants and their children are discriminated against in just about any context, but most notably in schools and by proprietors who refuse to rent them apartments. They are frequently blackmailed by police officers, and they are abused in police stations. Afraid to report crimes against them, they are victimized by criminal activities on the part of fellow immigrants and Greeks alike (Karydis 1996:161; Romanidou 2000). Lambrianidis and Liberaki (2001) investigate the positive effects of immigration on the Greek economy. On the basis of a case study on employment and living conditions of Albanians in Thessaloniki, they affirm that the stereotype of the immigrant criminal is the product of imaginative myth-making (2001:252). They also challenge the view that Albanians are trapped in the worst paying jobs, and present data which shows that a trajectory toward more secure, skilled, and better paying jobs is typical for the majority. When the English teacher of my daughters primary school explained the word burglar, the children started to laugh: Bulgarian it means, they said. ethnos, vol. 68:2, june 2003 (pp. 209229)

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11. For an interesting discussion concerning Greeks perceptions of themselves as beneficiaries of the countrys cultural heritage see Angelopoulos (2000). 12. In Greek the same word, xenos refers both to stranger and foreigner. 13. In fact xenophobia itself is also a modern phenomenon. According to a statistical comparative study by Dodos, Kafetzis et al. (1996), in 1988 Greeks, along with Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians, were more tolerant of foreigners living in their countries than were the citizens of western European countries. However, between 1988 and 1992 Greeks not only leveled with Europeans in terms of negative attitudes toward non-European foreigners, but surpassed them. 14. In an interview in a leading newspaper, a high-ranking police officer who blamed foreigners for the rise in crime, classified them in five fyles tribes or races characterized by distinct psychosocial attributes, which explain their specialization in different crimes: there are the Gypsies, the Albanians, the Russian Pontics, the Romanians, and the Bulgarians (Eleftheroptypia 14.8.2000). 15. The story is unusual, but telling. In mid-August 2000, a gynecologist was arrested for trying to kill an Albanian man, whom he had taken to a remote place under the pretext of hiring him for a job. In his apology he explained that he wanted to commit suicide, but was lacking the courage: I had to do something drastic, to reach my limits in order to bring myself to shoot myself. This is why I decided to kill the Albanian (Ellinas 14.8.2000). 16. On Greek emigration, its effects on the Greek economy and society and the conditions experienced by Greeks as guest-workers see Nikolinakos 1974 and Nikolinakos 1974. According to Gallant (1999:179) emigration contributed to the maintenance of the crime rate at a level lower than that which might be expected given rapid urbanization. During the 1960s 40.2 percent of the total of 690,000 male emigrants were between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, that is, they belonged to the age cohort with the highest criminality rates. 17. For example, Cretan sheep thieves identify themselves with the celebrated heroic guerrillas of the war of independence, the kleftes (literally, thieves), and construe the authorities as exploitative Turks (Herzfeld 1997:30) On theft as resistance to social inequality see also Petropoulos (1979). References Angelopoulos, Georgios. 2000. Political Practices and Multi-Culturalism: The Case of Salonica. In Macedonia: The Politics of Identity and Difference, edited by Jane Cowan, pp. 140155. London/New York: Pluto Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Modernization. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, Public Worlds, vol. 1. Astrinaki, Ourania. 2003. : , . Ph.D. Dissertation. Athens: Department of Sociology, Panteion University. [Man Makes Agnation, or Agnation Makes Man? Identities, Violence and History in Mountain Western Crete]. Aug, Marc. 1999. . Athina: Alexandreia. [Toward an Anthropology of Contemporary Worlds]. Avdela, Efi. 1998. : 19141936. Ta Istorika, 289:171202. [Contested Meanings: Protection and Resistance According to Labor Inspectors Reports, 19141936]. ethnos, vol. 68:2, june 2003 (pp. 209229)

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