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

最近的经济危机及其对欧洲南部外围国家的影响极大地影响了数百万公民及其家庭的日常生活。在希腊和葡萄牙，这些人中的许多人刚刚进入消费社会，但他们新养成的习惯已经受到了质疑。他们在多大程度上能够再次依赖以前的（以社区为基础和以家庭为基础的）社会保障模式？民主所培养的合法的个人自我推销意识（伴随着识字率的大幅提高）现在正以暴力的方式破灭，尤其是在年轻人中，他们对未来的期望已经被搁置了。人们常常用政治辞让和宽泛的数字来评估这一危机的社会层面，但人们的个人经历及其对婚姻、抚养子女、接受高等教育、代际依赖、养老和心理健康的影响却很少受到关注。为应对这一深刻变化，我们的项目调查了两个同等规模的国家（希腊和葡萄牙）的家庭对紧缩政策的反应，这两个国家受到金融危机的严重影响，其人口目前正在经历严厉的紧缩措施。这两个国家有类似的政治历史（例如，从独裁统治中恢复过来，加入欧盟，在危机前经历了一段消费主义现代化时期），但也有不同的文化历史（例如，天主教与东正教，殖民主义期间的角色/地位），这可能会激发对危机和外部援助或干预的不同反应（和看法）。为了记录经济危机的后果和应对措施，因为这些都是希腊和葡萄牙当地背景下的经验，我们采用人种学方法进入社会亲密空间，特别关注家庭预算和大家庭成员之间的经济合作。我们关注的是对危机的日常适应，而这些迄今为止还没有被自上而下的账户所关注。我们探讨了新兴家庭对工资降低、税收增加、工作稀缺和社会保障减少的反应。我们的研究目标是对希腊和葡萄牙的工薪阶层和中产阶级家庭的应对机制进行系统的研究。我们将特别强调大家庭成员之间的合作模式，例如共享住宿或膳食，在互惠的基础上照顾家属，重新利用继承的财产或以前未开发的家族资本，以及新的商业或人道主义倡议。我们将调查特定的家庭成员如何经历这些重新调整，邀请我们的受访者分享他们生活中最近的转变，这可能包括感知到的隐私或独立性的丧失，以及对依赖大家庭网络的文化根深蒂固的模式的回归。为了摆脱对危机的静态、民粹主义和自上而下的分析，我们的项目将记录危机的当地后果以及应对危机的日常模式。我们充满活力和创新的方法为危机的日常维度以及它们如何反映自我价值的体验提供了宝贵的启示。我们的比较重点（希腊和葡萄牙，以及每个国家的两个实地考察地点）也有助于评估经济和道德约束的社会文化差异。由于两国在应对危机方面存在分歧，我们评估了在更宏观的社会层面上进行的政治和金融表现分析中可能考虑到的分歧因素。

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.