Household survival in crisis: austerity and relatedness in Greece and Portugal

The recent economic crisis and its impact on the countries of the European southern periphery has greatly impacted the everyday lives of millions of citizens and their families. In Greece and Portugal, many of these people had entered into consumer society only relatively recently, but their newly acquired habits are already being called into question. To what extent can they rely again on previous (community-based and family-based) modes of social security? The sense of legitimate personal self-promotion that democracy fostered (accompanied by a tremendous increase in rates of literacy) is now being dashed in violent ways, particularly among the young people, whose expectations for the future have been placed on hold.

The social dimension of this crisis is frequently assessed in terms of political rhetoric and broad figures, yet people's personal experience and the effects on marriage, child-rearing, access to higher education, inter-generational dependence, old-age care, and psychological health, have received little attention.

Responding to this profound change, our project investigates household responses to austerity in two countries of equivalent size (Greece and Portugal), which have been seriously afflicted by the financial crisis and their population is now experiencing heavy austerity measures. The two countries have comparable political histories (e.g. recovered from dictatorships, joined the EU, experienced a period of consumerist modernisation before the crisis), but also contrasting cultural histories (e.g. Catholicism vs Orthodoxy, role/position during colonialism) that may inspire different responses to (and perceptions of) the crisis and external aid or intervention.

In order to record the consequences of and responses to the economic crisis, as these are experiences in local contexts in Greece and Portugal, we employ ethnographic methods to access socially intimate spaces, paying particular attention to household budgeting and economic cooperation between extended family members. We focus on everyday adaptations to the crisis that have so far escaped the attention of top-down accounts. We explore emerging household responses to lower salaries, increased taxation, job scarcity, and reduced social security.

Our research objectives involve a systematic study of the coping mechanisms of working- and middle-class families in Greece and Portugal. We will place particular emphasis on modes of cooperation between extended family members, such as sharing accommodation or meals, caring for dependents on a reciprocal basis, re-use of inherited properties or previously undeveloped familial capital, and new commercial or humanitarian initiatives. We will investigate how particular family members experience these re-adjustments, inviting our respondents to share insights of recent transformations in their lives, which may potentially include a perceived loss of privacy or independence, and a return to culturally embedded patterns of reliance on extended family networks.

In an attempt to escape from static, populist, and top-down analyses of the crisis, our project will document the local ramifications of the crisis along with everyday modes of coping with it. Our dynamic and innovative approach sheds valuable light on the quotidian dimensions of the crisis and how they reflect the experience of self-worth. Our comparative focus (Greece and Portugal, and two fieldwork locations in each country) also contributes to assessing socio-cultural variation in economic and moral constraints. As the two countries diverge in their response to crisis, we assess what are the factors of divergence that may be taken into consideration in analyses of political and financial performances carried out at more macro-social levels.

At a moment when Portuguese and Greek societies are desperately trying to respond to changes that are threatening the very framework of personal self-worth, familial subsistence and community well being, the impact of a project like ours has two dimensions: (A) very broadly, giving voice to people's preoccupations so as to make them available to those who produce policy locally and to those who create opinion internationally; (B) more specifically, working with those who are in the terrain, helping them to understand the more immediate contours of the social crisis.

In broad terms, the proposed research will contribute valuable insights to all those interested in understanding the local consequences of the crisis (policy makers, but also members of the general public). It will outline such consequences (visible, or so far invisible) in a clear, approachable and systematic manner, focusing on the impact of the crisis on household and personhood. The social impact of such research is seldom observable in the short-term. Thus, it is important for the researchers to engage local media so as to divulge their research at the same time as it is made. Over the course of the project, researchers will attempt to work with local journalists and media agents in creating informed commentary. Our team will attempt to address their interests throughout the research, encouraging communication with local media to pursue dissemination, and also to access data sources and social networks that may be available to local media.

In more local terms, however, our project also aims to highlight innovative local adaptations to austerity, and record (documented, and so far undocumented) ways of coping with the crisis. In this respect, it will bring to the fore local attempts to enhance quality of life in crisis-afflicted Greece and Portugal. A number of NGOs, charities and local networks of providing humanitarian help (such as food banks, poverty-relieving charities, educational charities, etc.) are present in each of two countries. Part of the research will involve communication with (and participation in the humanitarian activities of) such organisations and local networks, so as to assess how they adapt and respond to social change. We will investigate how has the crisis related to religious and philanthropic activities. Small NGOs are especially challenged by the reduction of charitable contributions and the increase in the perceived needs of the people they support. The researchers will contact such organisations in the hope of creating collaborative knowledge and, thus, increase social impact.

Dissemination through the project's website and project block will be constant, and will be put in place from the early stages of the project. This will enable non-academic users, such as journalists and policy makers, to access emerging conclusions, and benefit from the project. We are fully aware that the macro-economic processes that produced this "financial crisis" are not resolvable at local level. It does seem important, however, to consolidate views that permit the wider international public to have a better informed opinion concerning what is happening in the margins of Europe. This is particularly important in countries such as the UK and Germany where media views of what is happening in the peripheries of Europe are seldom based on knowledge of what actually happened in these countries, and more often based on national political agendas. For example, we are today deeply indebted to the writers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and artists (namely photographers) who left us records of the austerity that afflicted United States in the 1930s. Our hope is that projects such as ours will have a similar role in the future, when more realistic attempts are made to create a more sustainable economic order in Europe.