unveil?
The asylum process and its adjudicative logics also entail a wealth of epistemic practices, through which both claimants and decision makers seek to make sense of each other, the law, the state, and bureaucracy, including bureaucratic tools such as documentation, interviewing, form filling, and file making. Yet far from being simply technocratic, these practices rely heavily on more indeterminate forms of knowledge production: storytelling and narrative; pictures, images, and other aesthetic forms; and rumor and fantasy. These creative and fluid knowledge practices emerge, I suggest, from profound epistemic problems embedded in the Greek asylum process. Gaps in power between decision makers and asylum seekers also entail gaps in knowledge of each by the other (Laing 1983 [1967]). Furthermore, as I highlight in Chapter 2, the Greek state and its tools of regulation are deeply mystified, even for service providers and bureaucrats, who may be even more perplexed than asylum seekers themselves. The asylum procedure thus readily weds bureaucracy with practices of what I describe as mythopoesis or myth-making, through which all parties seek to make sense of radical uncertainty, unpredictability, and even absurdity.
Asylum seekers, adjudicators, and service providers are engaged in trying to acquire usable knowledge of the asylum process, each other, and their everyday lives. Since the “real,” however, frequently evades explanation, they often look to frameworks that, like myth, are said to underlie daily life and practice. Moreover, rather than emerging in contradistinction to law and bureaucracy, myth-making is crucial to the workings of asylum in Greece and unfolds through the technocratic values of transparency and bureaucratic accountability. Much as Charles Stewart (1991) argues that the demonic buoys up the Orthodox in contemporary Greek cosmology, I show that these knowledge forms at the margins of law and bureaucracy are in fact central to their everyday functioning. In the vein of Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) analysis of Azande magic, my ethnography highlights how the search for sense, origins, causes, and effects beyond the visible or self-evident is, in its own way, deeply rational. Yet these more indeterminate forms of knowledge take on lives of their own: documents acquire their own agency; persons disappear or become phantoms and ghosts; bureaucratic processes become products of hearsay; and stories, true or not, come to form the ground of judgment.
While, for Turner (1967, 1974), social dramas often end in moments of reconstitution, when balance is restored and norms are reasserted, I emphasize their creative potential and radical indeterminacy. Paul Friedrich (1986) formulated the concept of “poetic indeterminacy” to highlight the role of individual imaginations in (re)shaping the structural dimensions of language and culture. By this, he sought to bring into view the processes by which individuals “integrate knowledge, perceptions, and emotions in some creative way … in order that they may enter into new mental states or new relations with their milieus” (18). I show here that in processes of decision making and adjudication, the enactment of judgment is accompanied by unofficial, often highly creative practices that have crucial consequences in the experiences of claimants and adjudicators. The forms of governance, sociality, knowledge, and ethical engagement generated through krisi, with their many dilemmas, take on new and unpredictable formations, with equally indeterminate effects. Projects of governance may lead to their own undoing, even as they enact regulation. Knowledge is wedded to myth. Socialities predicated on power inequalities, structural violence, and exclusion also generate attachment, humor, and intimacy. Ethics, while grounded in the binary dilemmas of tragedy, become kaleidoscopic and multilayered, as persons find myriad ways to manage and destabilize these dilemmas.
Such asides, afterthoughts, and finaglings could easily fall by the wayside if one were to focus only on the formal asylum process, Greece’s apparent failures in implementing it, and the issuance—or denial—of refuge. Yet these excesses and even byproducts of law and judgment, with their elements of superfluity, are crucial to the asylum process and its lived effects on contemporary Greek citizenship. This book, in many ways, is an exploration of how certain persons and lives are constituted as superfluous,6 cast out of home countries through multiple kinds of violence, and suspended in politicolegal precariousness in Greece. These forms of excess, however, also make possible productive encounters that have an important role in reshaping modes of social, political, and legal belonging. Those left out of dominant formations of citizenship are central to how the Athenian body politic, like the city, is remade and rearticulated.
An Office in Athens
On the loud central Athenian boulevard of Peiraios, a small “Chinatown” has sprung up in the past ten years—a row of Chinese wholesalers that supply many of the less expensive clothing shops in Athens. Both Greek and Chinese shop owners, as well as many street vendors, acquire their goods from these distributors (see Rosen 2013). Just in view of the Acropolis, and just outside the zones where tourists wander, a five to fifteen-minute walk in any direction will take you in very different trajectories.
Five minutes to the southeast, you could push your way through Psiri, the old meat-packing district, silent during the day with shuttered windows, but at night coming alive with bars and restaurants that open into the street. Psiri connects labyrinth-like with some of the back streets where long-standing Greek inhabitants and recent migrants live side by side, and the grilled fish, onion, garlic, and lemon smells of old tavernes mingle with the scents of curries, sour bread, and spicy eggplant. Or you could take a tourists’ walk that Athenians also love, snaking through Psiri to Thisseio and Monastiraki, where the lines of the Acropolis vault above the narrow streets and faded shop fronts of old Athens. In a mixed sea of Greek speakers and fair-skinned tourists speaking German, English, or French, you could follow the tracks of the ιlektrico (ηλεκτρικό), Athens’s first public train system, which carves a moat on the side of the Acropolis, beneath the ancient Agora. You would also pass street vendors. Men from Bangladesh sell goods they have obtained from Chinese wholesalers—sometimes sunglasses and jewelry, but mostly knick-knacks, plastic toys such as windup dolls and windmill hats, and surprisingly useful items like whistles, key chains, and LED flashlights, which you can buy for 3 Euro. There are also West African traders selling “designer” purses—replicas of Louis Vuitton and Gucci spread out on soiled white sheets, which make for both a quick get-away and a quick way to reopen shop. When other vendors—or often customers—whisper warnings of “police” or astinomia [αστυνομία], sellers gather up their goods, only to lay them down again moments later, once danger has passed.
If you head five minutes to the southwest away from Chinatown, you will find Gazi, a relatively new center of Athenian nightlife, housing the temple of Athens’s contemporary art scene, the “Technopolis,” a converted factory that is now an exhibition space. Here, if you know where to look, you will also find the ancient gates of Athens and the ancient cemetery of Keramikos, an oasis of quiet green, replete with a small brook and the occasional snapping turtle. If you go a little to the southwest beyond Gazi, with its recently opened metro stop that has dramatically increased the crowds of club goers, you will find another crucial node in my map of Athens: the Boulevard of Petrou Ralli, and the Police Department for Aliens, where, until recently, people lined up in order to apply for asylum.7
If you take Peiraios in the other direction, to the northeast, in fifteen or twenty minutes you will reach Omonia Square, the Square of “Harmony,” with its heavy traffic of people and cars. The walk I took most weekday mornings from September 2006 through July 2008, during my primary stint of fieldwork in Athens, involved just a few city blocks: from the metro stop in Omonia to a run-down office near Exarcheia Square. Dense with people, smog, and traffic, moped engines and car horns, Omonia is known among long-time Athenian residents for its heavy concentration of tourists, drug users, and migrants, but it is also a vibrant and buzzing neighborhood full of contradictions. Exiting in the direction of Eleutherios Venezelou Street, I would walk down a pezodhromos (pedestrian walkway), past shoeshine men, kiosks, professionals in suits and sunglasses drinking coffee, bakeries, street vendors, a mid-class hotel, and a legal brothel. Rounding the corner, I would cross a broad boulevard, then head down cramped and pitted side streets into the neighborhood of Exarcheia,
