The return of philoxenia? mediatised worldmaking

and thanatourist imaginaries in Greece

Rodanthi TzanelliSchool of Sociology & Social Policy,

university of Leeds,

r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk

From Derrida and O’Gorman to Nietzsche and Scheller

• Philoxenia: the love of strangers, who can nevertheless be both tourists and refugees for Greeks

• O’Gorman’s (2007) definition of hospitality based on binary of philoxenia-xenophobia allows for classification of mobile strangers on the basis of their citizenship, class and status (affluent and ‘refined’ vs. poor and disenfranchised) BUT does not account for emotions in an axiological landscape

• Derrida’s (2001, 2006) notion of forgiveness and reciprocity accounts for power imbalances in the host-guest relationship BUT suggests that there is no way to achieve rebalancing because of gaps in temporal successions of giving/receiving

• Nietzsche and Scheler would make hospitality a question of political (for hosts) and socio-cultural (for guests) balancing of power, inducing negative emotions due to status inconsistencies between hosts and guests

Implementing ressentiment in Greek context

• Ressentiment rising from transvaluation of values: those held by resented party (the holders of power) are made to be seen as worthless

• But ressentiment also hides in enhancement of self-worth through performances of generosity to disenfranchised parties

• Greece 1960s-2000s: host to tourist masses, with status enhancement and affluence following from joining the EU

• Greece of 2010s: host to non-European refugees and demoted to European and IMF ‘beggar’

• Engineering axiological rectification: groups of world intellectuals endeavouring to bestow Greeks with new hospitality badge as new cosmopolitan subjects in the face of rising racism and xenophobia

• Philoxenos not as commercialised host (tourism) but as lover of human beings (philanthropos)

• Worldmaking not as remaking of culture by tourist industries (Hollinshead 2002) but as rectification of status inconsistency by groups of experts/intellectuals/artists/academics drawing on media power

• Mediatisation of new philanthropic values very important for global dissemination

New ways of imagining a benevolent society through new dark and slum tourisms

1. Dark tourism as visitations to sites of disaster, death but also personal/family and heritage sites with memorials and migration histories• Death at the heart of definition as end of a lifestyle, cluster of

values but also regenerative possibility (family/communal memory)

2. Slum tourism as visitation to shantytowns for recreational, educational or philanthropic purposes ca. late 18th c. in industrial cities, involving activism for welfare of poor masses• European tourism theory, which sees continuations between

dark and slum tourism, matches Greece’s past (Anatolian/ Balkan and global economy & war-induced migration histories) with its present (recession & new global migration crisis)

• The (largely utopian) idea is that if Greeks started as migrants and refugees, now they are philanthropists/philoxenoi to new refugee masses

Greek refugees from Turkey to Afghan and Syrian refugees to

Greece

Current configurations: a cosmopolitan dark analytic (Ai

WeiWei)• Tourism as justice issue: WeiWei next a

UNHCR worker, promises that his studios in Beijing and Berlin will be involved in the production of new material focusing on the crisis, and that the Lesbos studio would be occupied by six to ten of his students

• Recent pose on one of Lesbos’ beaches as a corpse with his face down, emulates the dead migrant child washed ashore in Bodrum, 2015

• Weiwei’s intervention based on emulations of dark gazing upon contemporary realities and within himself, as a committed tourist (artistic thanatopsis as integral to thanatourism – Seaton, 1996)

A cosmopolitan dark-slum analytic (Nobel Prize Petition by global academy)

• Formal letter to address the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which on February 2016 was countersigned by 236 international scholars from all over the world, nominating the ‘Aegean Solidarity Movement (ASM)’ for the award. The ASM is an umbrella term including 17 exclusively local migrant/refugee-relief groups formed by anonymous volunteers from the Aegean islands with the participation of many foreigners. The nomination is also supported by two Nobel Laureates, Archibishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and the Economist Sir Christopher Pissaridis, and 700,000 citizens, who provided their signature through the online Avaaz petition.

• Cypriot-born and Athens-networked Pissaridis praises Greek islanders for ‘forgetting their impoverished state and the humiliations they have gone through in recent times…standing alone as the bastions of what Europe stands for – the caring state that puts human dignity above everything else’, renowned anthropologist of Greece Herzfeld stresses that ‘as a child of refugees’, he understands the importance ‘of looking beyond ethnic or religious identity to the humanity of those who suffer the indignity and pain of violent displacement’ and of the Nobel-nominated islanders ‘at a time when Europe is beset by racist doctrines and practices’

• Petition enabled by group of highly mobile younger scholars living between Athens and home (abroad) and engaged in activism

Beyond tourism and into welfare imaginaries of

(im)mobility?• Professional/intellectual profile of

participants analogous to welfarist vision of first slum and dark travellers in late 19th century European cities

• Focus of petition on discharge of debt to ancestry and to moving dispossessed humans homologous to dark tourism logic

• Focus of petition on honouring heroic Greek marginality a utopian project of ‘recovering’ communal solidarity lost in postindustrial configurations of modernity (also integral to slum tourism as Western European and American political project)

A cosmopolitan dark-slum analytic

• Massive dissemination of both examples of international support in Greece and abroad via new (Internet) and older (press, TV) media channels as worldmaking initiative in support of Greek emotional welfare

• Status rectification for marginal Greek philanthropists = status rectification for entire Greek society (international recognition)

• New imaginary of darkness not dissociated from the gentleness and aesthetic-cum-emotional engagement with the other/stranger

• Could this trigger re-invention of Greece as a tourist destination (from beach tourism to new cultural tourisms with focus on welfare)? And would that be good or would it play in the hands of neoliberal profiteering?

• And does this professional ethos consolidate divides between good and bad migrants?