53
Advocacy: Fighting for a New Migrant Experience of Greece
One of the major factors shaping the settled undocumented migrant’s experience
of being local, and thus the various strategies of survival they employ, is their
understanding of their place relative to the mainstream population, an opposition
enforced day to day through ongoing dialogical negotiation (Hermans & Kempen 1993;
Hermans 1996; Hermans 2001)53. This is a model rooted in Mead (1934) and Bakhtin
(1992) which permits us to examine culture and self as mutually constructed. The
dialogical self concept provides access to the social, historical, and cultural context, the
communicative relationships become the center of analysis, and the ‘voices’ that appear
in the individual discourse give us access to the significant others with whom the
individual is in dialogue. Mainstream Greek voices54 (in their various manifestations)
play a large part in shaping the idiosyncratic identity negotiations migrants undertake
subjectively and intersubjectively. Irini Kadianaki at the department of psychology,
Cambridge University, recently conducted a study examining migrant perceptions of the
Greek population, in which the latter was characterized as closed, inaccessible, hostile
and materialistic (2009). In the same study Kadianaki examined African migrant
perceptions of Greek views on migrants which were reported as ignorant (some migrants
thought that many Greeks were unaware of them), xenophobic, and stereotyping
(migrants believed local Greeks associated them with poverty and disease). In all, the
settled migrant community sees no possibility of social integration with the mainstream:
53 This work improves on previous work focusing on “states of being”, favouring instead processes rooted
in cultural practice.
54 Of note, for more on popular understandings of ‘racism’ and ‘prejudice’ in Greece see Condor et al.
(2006) and Figgou & Condor (2006).