An anthropological introduction to the island of Lesvos in historical and ethnographic perspective. Special issues in the ethnography of Lesvos. The transformation of Lesvos from a “peripheral” island of modern Greece to a “cosmopolitan” hotspot of Global South.







Do you recognize any of these images? What is their place- and time-specificity?
How do we get to know about things? How do we learn about the world around and beyond us? Before arriving to Lesvos, what are your ideas and expectations about the place? How do you think they were formed?
What are the public images of contemporary Lesvos in political, touristic, journalistic, activistic and other discourses? What is the role of the internet in the global mediation of site-specificity?
Do you have any favorite and/or unfavorite artworks on Lesvos and the recent refugee and migrant situation in southern Europe?
Read, surf, select and comment freely!
Suggested Reading
Kantsa, V. 2002. “‘Certain Places Have Different Energy’: Spatial Transformations in Eressos, Lesvos”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1-2): 35-57.
Papataxiarchis, E. 2016. “Being ‘there’: At the Front Line of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’”. Anthropology Today, Part 1 32(2): 5-9, Part 2 32(3): 3-7.
Pdf file part 1 // Online version part 1
Pdf file part 2 // Online version part 2
Karathanasis, P. & Kapsali, K. 2018. “Displacement and the Creation of Emplaced Activism: Public Interventions on the Walls of a European Border City”. Entanglements: Experiments in Multimodal Ethnography 1(2): 52-61.
Hi Panos!
Thank you for the resources and images. They reminded me of Susan Sontag, whom I’ve been meaning to read for a long time but have kept postponing.
Refugees often appear in representations with a repetitive visual language that seems to imprison them in a certain image. The subjects in these photographs, with their obscured faces and emphasized massiveness, don’t allow us to perceive them as individuals with past lives.
Both dominant media and artists like Ai Weiwei tend to portray refugees as masses that threaten the peace of developed countries. This depiction reinforces prejudices, creating a division between “us” and “them,” and fuels discrimination.
Although not directly related to Lesvos, Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate is one of my favorite works on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIJDn2MAn9I
Dear Çağla, many thanks for your constructive comment and your reference to Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo. Apart from its interest on borders and divisions, Shibboleth can contribute to our discussions on site-specificity as well, since the space in which it was exhibited, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, has turned into a kind of a “Catherdal” of contemporary art in the last decades. I remember my first visit there, in 2005 if I am not wrong, when Bruce Nauman’s Raw materials were exhibited, a sound piece leaving the space “empty”, apart from the characteristic phrases of Nauman’s oeuvre. In a sense Shibboleth made something similar, adding gaps as well. Works of spatial abstaction both, with an immense impact on the viewer/listener.