Grassroots Economies

The austerity crisis has radically altered the economic landscape of Southern Europe. But alongside the decimation of public services and infrastructure lies the wreckage of a generation’s expectations and visions for the future. In Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, there is a new, difficult reality of downward mobility. Grassroots Economies interrogates the effects of the economic crisis on the livelihoods of working people, providing insight into their real-life anxieties and contradictions. Drawing on a rich seam of ethnographic material, the contributors construct a distinctive comparative analysis from across the region to explore the tensions and struggles in people’s coping mechanisms and support structures. The book traces grassroots economic practices located in place – with concrete meanings, values and ideologies – to wider processes of dispossession and accumulation, and ultimately demonstrates that everyday interactions on the local scale provide a significant sense of the global.