Resisting submission?

the obstinacy of "balkanist" characteristics in Greece as dissidence against "the West"

Sappho Xenakis

pp. 178-196

in: Leonidas K. Cheliotis (ed), Roots, rites and sites of resistance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

One of the challenges that were set to the contributors of this volume was to explore the distinctions between banal and reflective, superficial and effective and recalcitrant and progressive resistance to power. Each of these distinctions is difficult to prove. The first, because it requires an insight and certainty about the internal decision-making of the "actor" in question that may well be impossible (see, for example, discussion in Murdoch, 2003; 2006); and the latter two, because their very definition may be regarded, self-evidently, as culturally and politically determined (see discussion in Jusdanis, 1991). In contemporary Greece — as with other postcolonial societies that continue to experience direct and transposed Western guidance in their strategies of governance (see Gourgouris, 1996) — the conundrum of assessing resistance appears to be even more pronounced in light of the omnipresent clash between "Western" and "traditional" norms governing social values. Citizens of such societies confront, at a "banal", everyday level, the imperative of negotiating two competing sets of social expectations of "correct" behaviour, as much as understandings of the core values that constitute the overarching "good" towards which such behaviour is directed.