The name is absent

90

[I am clever and I yell louder than the others, but I have mountains here! Why
don’t they come to me - what, that is to say, I don’t have good fruit? I cheat them?
They’re always asking for “discounts”. Γm not a supermarket here. I can’t give
discounts to everyone. My goodness, I’m one Greek. I work for my bread, friend.
We all have problems with money, but - come now - what do they want... Once
they used to come to me for the best fruit - “to Aki for peaches from Veria”.

Now they go to Marinopoulos⁹⁰.]

The farmer’s market is a site where individuals experienced and negotiated being
Greek: shoppers viewed the market as an essentially Greek phenomenon and reported
feeling a sense of Greek-ness when they were in the crowd among the stalls listening to
competing vendor call-outs. However, these individuals were coming to redefine the
site’s significance and to shape their engagement with it, consciously, and increasingly,
in consideration of the broader transnational context in which it was situated and which
affected their lives. In other words, the traditional symbols of national identity that were
a part of the farmer’s market were coming to be experienced relative to newly
authoritative, subjectively relevant, transnational economic phenomena. The meaning
and function of the farmer’s market was coming to reflect the new sensibilities and
expectations of connected, critically reflexive individuals. The verbal exchanges between
shoppers and vendors were becoming discursive sites where this new national identity
was being negotiated.

The second significance of the changing political subjectivity I wish to examine
here concerns a transformation in the sense of unity or commonality that unites Greeks,
and the implications of this in terms of public action. As individuals came to negotiate
being Greek in consideration of increasingly authoritative locally-relevant translocal

⁹⁰ Marinopoulos is a supermarket chain (formerly, Champion Marinopoulos). The company opened its first
supermarket in Athens in 1962. In 1999 the Marinopoulos group joined with the French Carrefour group to
become the biggest retail chain in Greece. As of 2007 there were 145 Marinopoulos supermarket stores
across Greece.

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