Chronic crisis and the psychosocial in Central Greece

Abstract

In Central Greece, the 2009/10 economic crisis has lost its eventedness, with crisis becoming a chronic condition with its own set of temporal rhythms and orientations. Even with Greece officially ‘out’ of crisis, local vernaculars of captivity have come to the fore as people relate to lives deemed without a future, feelings of stuckedness, futility, and an intimate uncomfortable comfort with an endemic condition. As the rupture of crisis becomes a chronic state, people report experiencing a form of societal Stockholm Syndrome, a profound familiarity with routinized axiomatic violence. Contributing to emergent debates on chronic crisis, the psychosocial, and the aesthetics of captivity, societal Stockholm Syndrome provides an alternative framework to understand lives trapped in the spin-cycle of seemingly permanent crisis.