“NEW” GREEK FOOD SOLIDARITIES (ALLILEGGIÍ) Communalism vis-à-vis Food in Crisis Greece

Abstract

In this paper I extend the anthropological analyses of “new” solidarity (allileggii) networks or movements in Greece to rural regions and agricultural life as well as new groups of people. Food networks such as the “potato movement”, which facilitates the direct sales of agricultural produce, reveals rural aspects of networks that are thought to be simply urban phenomena. “Social kitchens” are revealed to be humanistic as well as nationalistic, bringing refugees, economic migrants, and Greeks together in arguably unprecedented ways. Through a review of such food solidarity movements – their rural or urban boundaries as well as their egalitarian or multicultural tenets – I consider whether they are thus more than mere extensions of earlier patterns of social solidarity identified in the anthropological record.