The name is absent

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spontaneously coming together against a nation that they perceived had robbed them of
their rights and their dignity. I wondered if he would have regarded them as citizens, or
at least recognized their actions as civic in nature. My Kypseli consultant had known this
collection of individuals during a time when they enacted their citizenship quietly, but he
had missed the period when they moved squarely into the public sphere and subsequently
returned back to their pre-December 2008 lives. I am certain that my consultant would
have been very excited to discuss the events, if not with me, then certainly with his
family and friends as much of the country was doing. In fact, in the months following
December 2008, most people I spoke with wanted to tell me their interpretations of the
civil unrest. I received numerous emails with links to YouTube videos depicting
undulating crowds and visceral chanting. The events had thrust the question of major
political change to the forefront of the Greek public consciousness. In both private and
public conversations, individuals considered a different Greece in which the collective of
rioters would not have acted out. One is compelled to think that if the nation is only as
real as the social imaginary permits it to be (see Gourgouris 1996), then in those
conversations, in those intersubjective moments, the nation and the citizen flirted with, or
perhaps in some albeit local regard achieved, socio-political transformation.

Points of Contact: A Hidden Political Front

In the months after the protests, and as Greeks discussed the December civil
unrest, those that took part in the protests went back to their usual lives. As I write this
chapter, Christos and one of his Roma friends are moving a box of unspecified “goods”
from the small town of Kaki Thalassa (just south of Porto Rafti) to Omonia Square in

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