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The consumer society and the Mediterranean town of Rethemnos, Crete, southern Greece. / Athanasios K Gkaragkounis
Swansea University Author: Athanasios K Gkaragkounis
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Abstract
Fernand Braudel (1972) in his study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II suggested, among other things, that the Mediterranean world despite its differences should be conceived of as a unit. The present study is not an attempt to challenge Braudel's entire work...
| Published: |
2010
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42716 |
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| Abstract: |
Fernand Braudel (1972) in his study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II suggested, among other things, that the Mediterranean world despite its differences should be conceived of as a unit. The present study is not an attempt to challenge Braudel's entire work on historical, empirical or pragmatological grounds, but an effort to question the unitary and totalitarian conception of the Mediterranean region. Specifically, I explore how a small Mediterranean town, Rethemnos, Crete, Southern Greece, was theorized on the back of this widespread conception that wants the Mediterranean to be a unit, and how a differential reading of the town is possible once various theories and conceptions of postmodernism and poststructuralism are put forward with respect to Rethemnos. I will be drawing on theories of the consumer society (Jean Baudrillard's and Zygmunt Bauman's analyses) in an attempt to document that Rethemnos is a society that is currently organized by recourse to the internal contradictions of the consumer society and on theories of the event and the subject (Alain Badiou's analysis) in order to explain that the Rethemniot subject is undecidable and bound to truth procedures as long as there is an event named after an intervention. Prior to that, I will be challenging, with respect to how the Greek subject was depicted on the back of the unitary fashion of conceiving of the Mediterranean region, a variety of studies of anthropological origin, based on Greece; and I will be also criticizing with respect to how the Greek social formation was dissected, on the back of the same unitary fashion, a variety of other studies of politico-economic origin this time, based on Greece as well, by focusing and drawing on certain aspects of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive strategies and Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's geo-philosophy's lines of flight. |
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| Keywords: |
Cultural anthropology. |
| College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |