ABSTRACT
While the goals of ethnographic research encourage one to make rather than thwart connections, also through the lived erotics of the body, the powerful role of desire in fieldwork is not often discussed candidly in academic anthropology. Developing a canny awareness of desire and sexuality in one's field site is not usually treated as a hallmark of graduate training, even though many would agree that such complexities can often be defining aspects of fieldwork. The framing of sex as "taboo" in anthropology risks positioning the anthropologist as intrepid hero/adventurer, going where no one has gone before and invoking longstanding colonial and patriarchal tropes associated with knowledge production and the penetration of exotic others. Greece has long been positioned at the margins of not just power relations but also of global interest and relevance. Yet this "refugee crisis," overlaid on Greece's "economic crisis", have solidified Greece's new position in a "global hierarchy of value" attached to crisis-watching.
