ABSTRACT
There is something unsettling about watching my ‘native’ culture from abroad; an almost unwelcome lucidity, a bitter, disengaged sobriety. I, the ‘native ethnographer’, feel at once less entitled to commentary and critique, and yet better able and more eager to articulate it. As I observe the radical political developments in Greece since the economic collapse in 2010, I switch between diverse modes of engagement: watching the news (online), reading articles (online), and conversing with friends and family, sometimes through real-time speech (mostly online video-calls) or occasionally through carefully written email texts (still consistently online). These periods of physical absence and virtual presence are juxtaposed with some brief intervals of actual – legitimate, one might say – ethnographic ‘being there’, steeped in music-making (performances, practices, recordings), political participation (rallies, demonstrations, elections), or occasions that combine both (political concerts and festivals). It is the dialectic between these two configurations of presence/absence that constructs my ethnographic point of departure in this chapter, and it is also this dialectic that most interests me in the present examination of musicians-audience interaction. The interchange of online and physical presence thus serves as both the locus and the method of addressing this question: how do popular musicians and audiences speak to each other about politics in contemporary Greece?
