When Infrastructures Fail : An Ethnographic Note in the Middle of an Aegean Crisis

Abstract

This paper studies the coming together of two large-scale infrastructural failures in Greece in 2015: the banking system, which came to a halt because of the Greek fiscal crisis combined with the calling of a referendum on whether to accept further 'austerity' from the EU negotiators in return for a further bailout; and the numbers of refugees and other undocumented migrants arriving in Greece at exactly the same time, causing a general collapse in the state authority's capacity to manage the new arrivals. The paper argues that both of these failures reveal the deep interdependence of Greek infrastructures with others, and how that condition creates specific kinds of relative value for Greece and Greeks.