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compound, demonstrate the heightened importance of national symbols and discourses to
a kind of civic therapeutics that occurs within Roma spaces.
However, as noted above, the mainstream Greek population is turning away from
nationalist discourses and symbols, placing normative authority instead on increasingly
transnational discourses, flows and symbols. This is creating a rift between the
mainstream population and the Roma in terms of an imagined and experienced civic
identity. A closer look at recent changes in the purchasing habits of shoppers at urban
farmer’s markets exemplifies this growing difference. While sellers still call to each
other and to shoppers, the values of their goods are no longer affected, in any significant
way, by their competence in this performance. Instead, values are coming to be more
directly affected by competition from nearby supermarket chains, local economic
pressure on the middle class, and by the prices set by farmers, wholesalers, and brokers
who sell stock. This is changing the feel of the market, selling strategies, and
communication between sellers and shoppers. Vendors now set up their stalls in ways
that resemble supermarket displays more closely, they fluctuate their prices as the day
goes by so that the most aesthetically pleasing fruit and vegetables that sell first are
priced higher than the “less-than-perfect” fruit, and in negotiating prices with customers
sellers have come to emphasize value in terms of quality∕quantity rather than highlighting
the item’s provenience and his/her own reputation. This transformation is indicative of,
both, a broader change in mainstream idiosyncratic and intersubjective negotiations of
civic identity, and a growing disparity between this population’s experience of citizenship
and that of the subaltern Roma.