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Institutional and transformational migration and the politics of community: Greek internal migrants and their Migrants' Association in Athens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Margaret E. Kenna
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Extract

This paper is about migration from a small Cycladic island (1) to Athens, the capital city of Greece, and chiefly concerns those male migrants for whom migration entails a change from agricultural labour to work in the building trade. The first part of the paper briefly sets the depopulating island of Nisos in the context of Greek rural depopulation, migration within and from Greece, and the growth of Athens. Migration from Nisos from 1840 to 1940 fitted into traditional expectations about an island-man's wage-earning activities at a certain stage in his life and is therefore interpreted here as supporting established island institutions. Migration since World War II and the Greek civil war (1945–49) is interpreted as transforming island life and even threatening the continued existence of a viable community. The second part of the paper gives an account of the involvement of Nisiot migrants in the building trade as workmen, subcontractors and property-owners, and discusses the tensions which have arisen between members of old-established migrant families and more recent migrants enriched by the building boom.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , November 1983 , pp. 263 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1983

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References

(1) I have given this island the pseudonym ‘Nisos’.

(2) Adapted from Kolodny, E. Y., La population des îles de la Grèce (Aix-en-Pro-vence, Édisud, 1974), pp. 794–5Google Scholar.

(3) The rise in numbers in 1940 was due to a large influx of migrant Nisiot families who left Athens for safety and remained on Nisos until the end of the Civil War in 1949.

(4) Sixty per cent of migrants to Athens are in the 15–29 age range and 66% of migrants to Athens are from rural areas: see Evelpidis, J. C., L'exode rural en Grèce, in Peristiany, J. G. (ed.), Contributions to Mediterranean Sociology (Paris, Mouton, 1968)Google Scholar.

(5) In the period 1951–61 over 160 settlements were abandoned; see Wagstaff, J. M., Rural Migration in Greece, Geography, LIII (1967), PP. 175–9Google Scholar.

(6) See Dicks, T. R. B., The Greeks, how they live and work (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1972), p. 112Google Scholar.

(7) See Allen, P. S., Social and economic change in a depopulated community in Southern Greece (Ph. D. thesis, Brown Univ., 1973)Google Scholar.

(8) Bennison, D. J., Aspects of urbanization in Greece from 1920 (M. A. thesis, Univ. of Durham, 1970)Google Scholar.

(9) In the 1950s less than a third of the Athenian working population was employed in industry, and about half of this third were employed ‘in units of less than ten persons, usually family enterprises’, Tsoucalas, C., The Greek Tragedy (Hardmondsworth, Penguin, 1969), pp. 127–128Google Scholar.

(10) In the period 1952–63 three times as much money was invested in housing as in manufacturing. Ibid., p. 132, n.

(11) Brandes, S. H., Migration, Kinship and Community: tradition and transition in a Spanish village (London, Academic Press, 1975), p. 14Google Scholar.

(12) For a more detailed exposition see Kenna, M. E., Houses fields and graves: property and ritual obligation on a Greek Island, Ethnology, XV (1976), 21–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(13) Evelpidis, , op. cit. p. 202Google Scholar.

(14) Bernard, H. R., Kalymnian sponge diving, Human Biology, II (1967), pp. 103–30Google Scholar.

(15) Kolodny, op. cit. ch. XXXI.

(16) Hannan, D., Rural exodus (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1970), p. 255Google Scholar.

(17) Schwarzweller, H. K. and Crowe, M. J., Adaptation of Appalachian migrants to the industrial work situation: a case study, in Brody, E. C. (ed.) Behaviour in new environments: adaptation of migrant populations (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1969)Google Scholar.

(18) See Lineton, M. J., Mina past and present: a study in depopulation (Ph. D. thesis, University of Kent, 1971)Google Scholar. There are interesting opportunities here for further research on the connection between migrants from particular parts of Greece and certain types of urban employment.

(19) Bennison, , op. cit. p. 79Google Scholar.

(20) When they left Athens to escape the troubles of the war years they were glad they had kept houses and lands on the islands. The memory of this experience, together with hopes for the future tourist development of the island, are important reasons for permanent migrants' reluctance to sell island property.

(21) Kayser, B., Les migrations intérieures en Grèce, in Peristiany, J. G., op. cit. p. 197Google Scholar.

(22) I have seen the children and grandchildren of Nisiot migrants to America and Iraq return to Nisos and open up houses which had been locked for over forty years.

(23) There are other Migrants' Associations in the city with links all over Greece. Writing about a village on the Cycladic Island of Tinos, Dubisch says that ‘an association (sillogos) of villagers living in Athens raised money from migrants to finance village project’. Dubisch, J., The ethnography of the islands: Tinos, in Dimen, M. and Friedl, E. (eds.), Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 268, 1976), p. 25Google Scholar.

(24) This was the year when the quota system was introduced to restrict migration to America. So few Nisiots migrated to America that they would not need to found an association to better their chances of making a place on the quota. Unfortunately the Association's records were not available in the summer of 1973 as they had been taken away by government officials investigating the Association's charitable status.

(25) Fallers, L. A. (ed.), Immigrants and associations (Paris, Mouton, 1967), p. 12Google Scholar.

(26) Nagata, J. A., Adaptation and integration of Greek working-class immigrants to the city of Toronto, Canada: a situational approach, International Migration Review, IV (1969), 52Google Scholar.

(27) See Gulick, J., Urban Anthropology, in Honigmann, J. J. (ed.), Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Chicago, Rand McNally, 1974), p. 1007Google Scholar; Hopkins, N. S., Traditional Tunis and its transformations, in Ruffa, A. L. La et al. eds.), City and Peasant: a study in sociocultural dynamics (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 220, 1974), p. 428Google Scholar.

(28) Moustaka, C., The Internal Migrant: a comparative study in urbanization (Athens, Social Sciences Centre, 1964)Google Scholar; Kayser, B. et al. , Exode rural et attraction urbaine en Grèce (Athènes, Centre national de recherches sociales, 1971)Google Scholar.

(29) Friedl, E., Kinship, class, and selective migration, in Peristiany, J. G. (ed.), Mediterranean Family Structures (Cambridge 1976)Google Scholar. Friedl's paper was first presented in 1970 at a Mediterraneanists' conference which I attended; it therefore predated and influenced aspects of the research reported here which was carried out in 1973.

(30) Friedl, E., Vasilika: a village in modern Greece (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), p. 22Google Scholar.

(31) Ibid. p. 26.

(32) Friedl, 1976, op. cit. p. 384Google Scholar.

(33) Friedl's category A households own 40–150 stremata of land, category B own 15–40 stremata, category C own 15 stremata or less, while category D are shepherds who ‘did not participate in the migration to Athens until after 1965’. Ibid. p. 367. Nisiot shepherd families are included in the figures given here; all have migrant children.

(34) ‘The ranking was based on a combination of the level of education required for the occupation, the opportunities for security and advancement it afforded, and the consumption standards that the income from it could support’. Ibid. p. 364.

(35) In assessing these wage rates it is important to note that most clerical workers and civil servants are paid monthly and have more secure jobs with sickness benefits and pension schemes. Workers in the building trade are paid weekly (daily in the case of cementers) and are liable to be laid offa ccording to the weather or fluctuations in demand.

(36) The figures for white-collar workers were taken from the Athens daily newspaper Ta Nea, 19th September 1973.

(37) Photiadis, J. D., The position of the coffee house in the social life of the Greek village, Sociologia Ruralis, V (1965), 45–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(38) Kolodny, , op. cit. p. 685Google Scholar.

(39) Friedl, E., Lagging emulation in a post-peasant society, American Anthropologist, LXVI (1964), 569–586CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(40) Schein, M. D., Social stratification in a Greek village, in Ruffa, La, op. cit. pp. 486–7Google Scholar.

(41) In a paper concerning the changing functions of migrants' associations in Lima, Skeldon discusses the development of factionalism among members: Skeldon, R., Regional associations and population migration in Peru, Urban Anthropology, V (1976), 233–252Google Scholar.

(42) See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Economic Surveys: Greece’, June 1975, pp. 16–17; New Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Macropaedia’, 1974, 8, pp. 320–1.

* I carried out anthropological fieldwork there in 1966–67, and later received a research grant from the Social Science Research Council for fieldwork in the summer of 1973 among Nisiot migrants in Athens. Earlier versions of this paper benefited from comments and criticisms at seminars at the University College of Swansea, the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics. This version was accepted for publication in May 1977.