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Escaping Gentrification?: The Athenian Metaxourgio Grassroots Carnival as a Contested Event

Escaping Gentrification?: The Athenian Metaxourgio Grassroots Carnival as a Contested Event Contemporary carnivals represent rather banal spectacles, harnessed by institutional control and stripped of their meaning as disruptive processes of revelry, expressivity and defiance. However, when organised at grassroots level, carnivals may retain their subversive character, revealing intentions to cross the limits of urban normality. By drawing on ethnographic data, this article explores the carnival of Metaxourgio in Athens, performed in a multicultural neighbourhood at the heart of the metropolis by a small group of young artists and creatives. Based on the notions of liminality and threshold, it analyses how the carnival creates a temporal universe that challenges mainstream perceptions of public space and Otherness, contests gentrification and seeks to maintain a sense of community in a world of ever-shifting boundaries of precarity. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Anthropological Journal of European Cultures Berghahn Books

Escaping Gentrification?: The Athenian Metaxourgio Grassroots Carnival as a Contested Event

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Publisher
Berghahn Books
Copyright
© 2022 Berghahn Books
ISSN
1755-2923
eISSN
1755-2931
DOI
10.3167/ajec.2022.310208
Publisher site
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Abstract

Contemporary carnivals represent rather banal spectacles, harnessed by institutional control and stripped of their meaning as disruptive processes of revelry, expressivity and defiance. However, when organised at grassroots level, carnivals may retain their subversive character, revealing intentions to cross the limits of urban normality. By drawing on ethnographic data, this article explores the carnival of Metaxourgio in Athens, performed in a multicultural neighbourhood at the heart of the metropolis by a small group of young artists and creatives. Based on the notions of liminality and threshold, it analyses how the carnival creates a temporal universe that challenges mainstream perceptions of public space and Otherness, contests gentrification and seeks to maintain a sense of community in a world of ever-shifting boundaries of precarity.

Journal

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures – Berghahn Books

Published: Sep 1, 2022

Keywords: creative culture; gentrification; grassroots movements; liminality; urban carnivals

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