Presentation at the annual Sociology & Social Policy Seminar Series, 2015-16. It is connected to forthcoming research article due to be published in Tourist Studies (Sage) under the title "Tourism in the European economic crisis: Mediatised worldmaking and new tourist imaginaries in Greece" (Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK & Maximiliano E Korstanje University of Palermo, Argentina) The presentation explores the rationale and origins of changing imaginaries of tourism in Greece in the context of the current economic crisis. I highlight a radical change in the picture of the country that circulates in global media conduits (YouTube, Facebook, official press websites and personal blogs). To examine this shift, I reflect on past media representations of Greece as an idyllic peasant and working-class site. Then I highlight that today such representations are being recycled by Greeks living and studying abroad in virtual sites. These representations, which focus on embodied understandings of happiness and well-being, are challenged by the current economic crisis.

1. Towards an art of ‘Being Human3.0’?Interrogations of Greece’s newimaginaries of mobility
Rodanthi Tzanelli
27.08.2016

2. Thematic and context
• Not about: demise of welfare state; re-racialisation of Greece in the event of
a Grexit; racism and the new migrations; the refugee crisis
• About: the worldmaking agents and authors of Greek tourism in the current
crisis; how are tourism markets being redefined? On the basis of what ‘script’?
(Etiologies=archaeologies=complexities) – THESE INTERACT WITH THE
ABOVE BUT ARE TREATED HERE AS CASE IN OWN RIGHT
• Background: ‘Great Recession’ as a period of general economic decline
observed in world markets beginning around the end of the first decade of the
21st century (2008).
• From globe to Europe: generally progressing from banking system crises to
sovereign debt crises, as many countries elected to bailout their banking
systems using taxpayer money.
• 2014-15: a Grexit that would not happen (yet?).

3. Problematique:
from troika to tourist gaze to tourismimaginaries
• Troika: system of systematic monetary surveillance orchestrated by decision group
(EC, the European Central Bank(ECB) and the IMF).
• Troika’s coordination of economic stability and now also monetary harmonisation
with direct consequences for Greek sovereignty and autonomous regulation of
region/ local markets…of which the tourist most significant.
• For optimists: 11% increase in visitor numbers to Greece between January and
August 2015, compared with the same period 2014, with arrivals from the UK rising
by a quarter. A total of 25 million tourists were expected to visit in 2015, up from 22
million in 2014.
• For pessimists: refugee influx from war zones will destroy tourism economies,
digging localities’ grave…loss of income adding pressure to heavy domestic taxation
that turns Greece into a country of slums.
• For pessimists, troika’s gaze compares to an overcritical ‘tourist gaze’ geared towards
customer satisfaction at the expense of the host & its labour.

4. Why tourism? Hard facts (Buhalis, 2001; 2015)
• Greece: a total area of 131,957 km2, featuring world-class tourism
resources, 13,676 km coastline, and about 6,000 islands, 227 of which are
inhabited. Population is approx. 11 million.
• 1950: 33,000 international tourists; by 2012, number increased to 15.5
million. In 2014, arrivals were predicted to exceed 20 million, resulting in
US$15.92 billion (€13.5 billion) income, contributing to 18.3 % of the
total employment, and generating 16.4 % of GDP.
• Main international markets include Germany, United Kingdom, France,
Russia, and Bulgaria (GNTO 2014).

5. Symmetries: tourist gaze, professional gaze & neoliberal gaze
• The systematic and regulated nature of various gazes, each of which
depends upon social discourses and practices, as well as aspects of
building, design and restoration that foster the necessary ‘look’ of a place
or an environment. Such places both implicate the gazer and the gazee in
an ongoing and systematic set of social and physical relations. These
relations are discursively organised by many professionals […] (Urry, 2002)
1. Tourism as system of leisure and multi-industry organising the gaze of the
global market
2. Tourists as disciplined gazers, who nevertheless can escape or reject
tourismification of places by industry
• Who organises the Greek tourist gaze? Which professionals become
involved in its dissemination in the current context?

6. Beyond optimism and pessimism:
tourismimaginaries asproblematique
• Tourism is about the interrogation of native social norms in the context of
transnational interactions (‘host-guest’)
• BUT society is both envisaged and performed in ways we cannot predetermine
– the social is ‘emergent’ (Castoriadis, 1974)
• The social world revealed in the human capacity for creative imagination, both
at the personal (radical imaginary) and collective (social imaginary) levels –
generate practical responses to stimuli/crises that (re)institute it.
• Tourism imaginary: the making of visited/toured worlds, an unstable magma
of meanings of place/culture & its inhabitants mostly produced through
interactions between hosts and guests (tourists & tourist industries) (Salazar
2009, 2010)

7. My thesis: recession, Grexit scenarios and troika overdetermineshift from
imaginary of ‘bright, cultured Greece’ to one of dark and slumtourism
• Multiplicity of factors: troika policies
impoverishing Greeks; media discourses
of destitution within and without
Greece recycling dark images of
protest; increasing unemployment and
precarious labour turning youth to
migration…
• ADD NEW GEOPOLITICS OF
MIGRATION: influx of Syrian
refugees via Turkey to Greece turning
both cities, towns and villages into
slums
• Especially urban Greece as
thanatological stage (death of social
harmony)

8. The conflict within the Greeksocial imaginary:
save the refugees or fight for the lost good life (well-being, welfare)?
Greece was formed by successive refugee arrivals
between 1880s-1960s, so philanthropic habitus
appealing both to history & present status insecurity
Constant reductions from pensions and
taxation has impoverished agricultural
farmers – the latest wave of protestors

9. Tourismas well-being but not for the ‘vagabonds’…. (Bauman, 1992)…andthe ‘tourist’ does
not like to encounter too muchdissonance
Protests organised by the Greek
Communist Party (KKE) outside Acropolis
My Life in Ruins (2009) first film shot in
Acropolis since 1960s with government
permission to attract global cultural tourism

10. Or is this incorrect?
Hypothesis: newtourist imaginaries emergingfrom past andpresent native andforeignsocial imaginaries
1. Dark tourism as visitations to sites of disaster, death
but also personal/family heritage sites (as in African
diasporic dark tourism to ‘slave castles’ and
Johannesburg’s Soweto)
2. As visitations to war/heritage sites, replete 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)
• European tourism theory sees continuations with
slum tourism, shantytown visits commencing ca. late
18th c. in industrial cities, involving activism for
welfare of poor masses
• Greece’s slum archaeologies: past (Anatolian/ Balkan
and global economy & war-induced migration
histories) – present (recession & new global
migration crisis)
• But what happened between then and now?
Greek refugees from Turkey to Afghan and
Syrian refugees to Greece

11. First phase in evolving tourist imaginaries:
mediatising the embodied exotic
• Migrations intensified till the 1960s, when
Greece welcomed first tourists (hippy
movement, family holiday packages)
• 1980s: entry to EU with economic aid packages
added to feeling of affluence…and gave Greek
peasant society its own middle class
• 1990s-2000s: student EU mobilities added to
societal outlook
• Meanwhile, tourism imaginaries attained a
mediatised aura based on global artistic
mobilities
• Dominant narratives from archetypal social
marginalities (urban prostitution in Never on
Sunday, island Cretan masculinity in Zorba the
Greek)

12. Current reconfigurations:
the embodied exotic in re-mediatised praxis
• In current social media reproductions of these
histories a strong pop feel appealing both to
aesthetically reflexive student masses and to
declining domestic middle class
• Social imaginaries allowing for ‘distribution of
the sensible’ (Ranciere, 2004) but with a strong
‘camp’ dimension (dark ethos of past artistic
migrations)
• 2012/2015 dancing student groups at
Birmingham in Zorba rhythms
• 2014 dancing and singing Greeks at Exarchia
Square, Athens after the negative Grexit
referendum
• The dark but happy imaginary of tourist
industries may be mediatised but it is
thoroughly embodied and affective as in hexis

13. Second phase:
dark/slumtourism and social thanatologies
• European imaginaries of disaster
working towards an affirmation of
collective supra-political belonging.
• Thanatologies as interrogations of the
death of the social circulating amongst
committed virtual and embodied
travellers to Greece
• As was the case with great European
pictorial art produced by old Grand
Tourists, today’s travel thanatologies are
mediated – journalism, visualised digital
activism, art and political intervention
by Greek and foreign public
intellectuals

14. 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
• Suggestion to build monument on Lesbos
dedicated to refugees
• 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)

15. Current configurations: 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

16. 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: a
suggestion that we shift from imaginary
spectator to touring actor (middle class
radical habitus – Crossley, 2003).
• 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)

17. A suspicious ‘upgrading’ of Greek tourismimaginaries?
• Thurot and Thurot’s conception of ‘tourist imaginaries’ returns us to great
European traditions of travel as cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984)
• Improvement of tourist ethos looked to:
1. Contestations of aristocratic habitus and a middle-class return to naturalist
egalitarian simplicity
2. More adventurous (gout du risqué) and well-documented journeys by
various classes and especially youth,
3. Finally, voluntourist and edutourist activity (Graburn, 2014; Tzanelli, 2016).
Each of these stages claimed higher moral ground over its predecessors, thus
establishing various mobility hierarchies, a phenomenon ubiquitous in
contemporary evaluations of tourism as a ‘cheap’ or ‘praiseworthy’ activity
(McCabe, 2005).

18. Questioning Greece’s new imaginaries of (tourism) mobility
• POLITICALLY: Inciting nationalism or patriotic pride?
• MORALLY: Who speaks (via new/old media) on behalf of whom and
to what end
• PHENOMENOLOGICALLY AND PRACTICALLY:
1. Remarking tourism imaginaries ↔ remaking social imaginaries within
and without Greece…but who capitalises on this ‘refashioning’ of
Greece as a global destination?
2. Do such digital and audio-visualised forms of morphing pronounce
the rise of a ‘benevolent’ Mobile Humanity 3.0 (Archer, 2010; Fuller,
2011; Urry & Larsen, 2011)?