CHSS, Edinburgh Napier, 29 July 2016 The presentation interrogates the rationale of contemporary Greek hospitality through two types of tourism imaginaries in the context of the current European economic crisis. A radical change in the ‘picture’ of the country circulates in global media conduits that connects to past and present conceptions of philoxenia: the love of strangers, who can nevertheless be both tourists and refugees for Greeks. More specifically, I detect the emergence of a new dark and slum imaginary, which is propagated by both native and global intellectuals-activists and artists and globally disseminated in the blogosphere, the press and via other new media formats. I argue that the new imaginary of darkness, which is not dissociated from the gentleness and aesthetic-cum-emotional engagement with the other/stranger, bears the potential to re-invent Greece as a tourist destination. The change, which is informed by the European histories of art, slum and dark tourism, draws on middle-class refinement and philanthropy. But it also has its by-products in the domestic public sphere, which attains a revamped cosmopolitan ethos. This is so, because such blended foreign and domestic activist participation promotes a heroicised native ethos of salvation, closer to native histories of uprooting and forced relocation. The impoverished Greeks are recognised in this new imaginary as welcoming, empathic hosts (phíloi tõn xénõn) for the new non-Greek refugees from war-trodden world zones, and not just for affluent tourists. The paper interrogates the axiological basis of such ‘worldmaking processes’ that exceed but do not eliminate the monetary rationale of hospitality, as this is fed back into dark travel. Fusing cognitive/strategic, aesthetic and emotional motivation, these processes bear the potential to bring together tourism and wider global social imaginaries not in spite of, but in coordination with new neoliberal imaginaries of mobility.

1. The return of philoxenia?
mediatised worldmaking and
thanatourist imaginaries in
Greece
Rodanthi Tzanelli
School of Sociology & Social Policy,
university of Leeds,
r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk

2. 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

3. 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

4. New ways of imagining a benevolent society through new dark and slumtourisms
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

5. 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)

6. A cosmopolitan dark-slumanalytic (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

7. 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)

8. A cosmopolitan dark-slumanalytic
• 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 betweengood and bad migrants?