Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis ed. by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos, and: Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis ed. by Evdoxios Doxiadis and Aimee Placas, and: Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives ed. by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, and: Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity ed. by Dimitris Tziovas (review)

What was the Greek crisis? Readers may reasonably expect a recent spate of edited collections about this crisis to provide insight into this question. Between these readers and any straightforward answer, however, lies a more elementary question to contend with—what does it even mean to produce scholarship about crisis? All but the least reflective writing about crisis grapples with a tension between the concept's capacity for lucidity on the one hand and exclusion on the other—between what is gained by evoking and delimiting a crisis versus what gets lost or rendered unthinkable through these very same efforts. As a result, scholarship is necessarily about the crisis in two distinct senses—it teaches us about crisis as an object of analysis and it reveals to us how crisis operates as a frame through which to analyze.

The editors of these four collections are certainly cognizant of this dual role of crisis as both an analytic object and an analytic frame. Each collection focuses on a distinct aspect of the Greek experience of crisis: Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos' volume on social change and everyday life, Doxiadis and Placas' on austerity, Hatzidaki and Goutsos' on discourse, and Tziovas' on culture. The resulting collections are revelatory of how crisis becomes a shared frame—not only for authors and editors, but also for their subjects and their readers—that shapes the scholarship produced and received through it. So what do we learn about crisis by approaching it through the lens of each collection's particular focus? And what do we learn about each field of focus by studying it though the frame of crisis?

Before reading too much into the crisis framing, it is worth acknowledging the academic and publishing conditions that insist that scholarship about Greece is most legible when presented through the figure of crisis. This is especially the case when it comes to presumed audiences outside of Greece, for which all four of these volumes in English are presumably intended by their publishers. From this perspective, the flowering of scholarship seemingly about the Greek crisis may disclose more about academic imagination than about empirical realities in Greece or inherent qualities of crisis as a concept or phenomenon. Nonetheless, there are surely consequences, many of which have yet to be revealed, to...