T Rakopoulos
Biographic Data
| ID | 19327 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Rakopoulos |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Rakopoulos |
| SIGNATURE | RAKOPOULOS T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1902-0274 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Er antropologi (fortsatt) en humanistisk disiplin
Nationalism(s), Island Version
Clashes between ethnic and civic nationalism are not the turf of high politics but everyday currency in the formation of the citizenry's relation to the state in postcolonial communities. A focus on the hyphen (-) in the nation-state nexus works to unpack how vernacular forms of nationalism take shape in a post-conflict, postcolonial polity. In Cyprus, two opposed vernaculars are used by the Greek-speaking population to engage with statehood and …
Cthulhu Anthropology
Tribute to Signe Howell (1942-2025)
Professor Signe Howell passed away on 25 January, leaving a virtually unfillable void at the University of Oslo's Department of Social Anthropology, where she had been working since 1987. She joined us from the University of Edinburgh, coming as a welcome breath of fresh air with her combination of erudition, theoretical sophistication and a remarkable fascination with all things human. The latter trait had followed her since her childhood in the…
Of an ongoing crisis
My homeland is a low cost flight; it lives by sapping off shorelines like goats grazing on salt in postcard anthologies.It is being dragged along by a ferry on loan; all sorts of hoists lift its parts, and snipers in the corners cover the procession.I make one-shot films of it; I recognize it from its bond-like format.A sound investment, which I accredit androgynously in the script.I wear vintage glasses so that it might be mirrored as if it were…
The Golden Passport 'Russian' Eutopia
English Abstract: In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of offshoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citiz…
Of Fascists and Dreamers
English Abstract: Examining conspiracy theory authors has not been seen as worthy of ethnographic inquiry in anthropology as of yet. This is intriguing, as encountering conspiracy theorists inspires a process of reassessing the critical nature of our own discipline, with its doubting mechanisms and thrill for alternative realities, and the essay offers analogies between such theories and the discipline. This article tackles conspiracy theory thro…
Property as sovereigntyin micro
This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereigntyin micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of 'community' offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's 'communal' character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypr…
Two kinds of mafia dependency
This article proposes a movement between two sorts of dependency in the secretive bonds of violent men. The first forges an interdependent set of relations between mafia men, independent of the state; the second arises as a dependency of these former on the state in order to break the interdependencies that formerly made them as mafia men. In this ethnographic and oral history narrative, we first witness a dyadic, homosocial relation between two …
The shared boundary
This article looks at boundaries as shared points of conflict and sociality in rural Sicily where the mafia and their opponents ('antimafia' cooperatives) have lately been at loggerheads. My focus is on neighbourly relations between owners of plots on both sides. This uncomfortable proximity of enemies allows us to see boundaries as more than markers of separation. For sure, Sicilian boundaries imprint a history of violence on the landscape and d…
Reply to Puccio-Den
Self in (And With) the World
Afterword
Instead of taking for granted that austerity is unidirectionally associated with Europe, the anthropology of austerity should be paying attention to the situatedness of its effects. The levering potential that a comparative analysis of austerity allows is precious, for it opens new critical perspectives on our understanding of temporal and geographical consciousness. An antipode of perspective invites a more historical analysis of a phenomenon th…
The anthropology of austerity
This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline should employ the comparative approach to bring t…
The Social Life of Mafia Confession
Exploring Sicilian secular confessions, this essay discusses anthropological impasses on talk and silence. Such dilemmas reveal ethnographic frailties in engaging with concealment and revealing. The delicacy of negotiating between those demanding silence (the mafia) and those demanding self-revelation (the antimafia activists) unsettles the fieldwork ethics of our own anthropological entanglement in the gray areas of fieldwork between silence and…
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
Show me the money
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stori…
From Clans to Co-ops
From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to pe…
Antimafia families
This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separa…
Façade Egalitarianism? Mafia and Cooperative in Sicily
What happens when a criminal organization operating through hierarchical relations establishes a cooperative institution committed to equal participation? This article explores the organizational intersection of a Mafia cooperative, drawing from a trial case involving several Sicilian mafiosi sharing a social life (convivenza) with laypeople in an agrarian winemaking cooperative. This intersection begs exploration of the Mafia's striving for soci…
From Crisis to Resistance? 'Exception', Neo-liberalism, and Two Voices in the Left
Solidarity
In looking at the other side of the crisis regarding solidarity networks in Greece, this piece provides an introductory overview for a special section of that deals with topical issues such as the effects of austerity measures
Economy for and Against Democracy
Solidarity's Tensions
Which community for cooperatives
The literature on cooperatives often conceptualizes cooperativism as an organized effort to embrace community participation. Through the analysis of agrarian cooperatives in Sicily that were formally established to counter the Mafia and by ethnographically exploring the notion of community for cooperativism, this article aims to problematize this idea of cooperatives as "community economics". It proposes an anthropological approach that criticall…
Solidarity
In looking at the other side of the crisis regarding solidarity networks in Greece, this piece provides an introductory overview for a special section of that deals with topical issues such as the effects of austerity measures
Resonance of Solidarity
Scholarly approaches to the Greek crisis usually centered on its political character, tackle it as "a state of exception" or emphasize its "exceptional" features. Departing from a discussion on the nature of the crisis, in this article I examine social reactions to "it," focusing on grassroots economic activity. I undertake a case study of a "solidarity economy" movement and from there I explore the wider political repercussions of this activity …
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
Show me the money
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stori…
Cooperative modulations
Debate on the antimafia movement has placed the phenomenon mainly in the urban civil society tradition of new Italian social movements. While acknowledging the resonance of antimafia mobilization in this context, this article explores a different tradition, wherein struggles against the mafia in Sicily are analysed alongside, and in constant interconnection with, the development of the agrarian cooperative movement of the island. Focusing on the …
The anthropology of austerity
This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline should employ the comparative approach to bring t…
The Social Life of Mafia Confession
Exploring Sicilian secular confessions, this essay discusses anthropological impasses on talk and silence. Such dilemmas reveal ethnographic frailties in engaging with concealment and revealing. The delicacy of negotiating between those demanding silence (the mafia) and those demanding self-revelation (the antimafia activists) unsettles the fieldwork ethics of our own anthropological entanglement in the gray areas of fieldwork between silence and…
Responding to the crisis
This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the anti-middleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece.…
Antimafia families
This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separa…
Façade Egalitarianism? Mafia and Cooperative in Sicily
What happens when a criminal organization operating through hierarchical relations establishes a cooperative institution committed to equal participation? This article explores the organizational intersection of a Mafia cooperative, drawing from a trial case involving several Sicilian mafiosi sharing a social life (convivenza) with laypeople in an agrarian winemaking cooperative. This intersection begs exploration of the Mafia's striving for soci…
Of Fascists and Dreamers
English Abstract: Examining conspiracy theory authors has not been seen as worthy of ethnographic inquiry in anthropology as of yet. This is intriguing, as encountering conspiracy theorists inspires a process of reassessing the critical nature of our own discipline, with its doubting mechanisms and thrill for alternative realities, and the essay offers analogies between such theories and the discipline. This article tackles conspiracy theory thro…
The Golden Passport 'Russian' Eutopia
English Abstract: In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of offshoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citiz…
The shared boundary
This article looks at boundaries as shared points of conflict and sociality in rural Sicily where the mafia and their opponents ('antimafia' cooperatives) have lately been at loggerheads. My focus is on neighbourly relations between owners of plots on both sides. This uncomfortable proximity of enemies allows us to see boundaries as more than markers of separation. For sure, Sicilian boundaries imprint a history of violence on the landscape and d…
Which community for cooperatives
The literature on cooperatives often conceptualizes cooperativism as an organized effort to embrace community participation. Through the analysis of agrarian cooperatives in Sicily that were formally established to counter the Mafia and by ethnographically exploring the notion of community for cooperativism, this article aims to problematize this idea of cooperatives as "community economics". It proposes an anthropological approach that criticall…
Of an ongoing crisis
My homeland is a low cost flight; it lives by sapping off shorelines like goats grazing on salt in postcard anthologies.It is being dragged along by a ferry on loan; all sorts of hoists lift its parts, and snipers in the corners cover the procession.I make one-shot films of it; I recognize it from its bond-like format.A sound investment, which I accredit androgynously in the script.I wear vintage glasses so that it might be mirrored as if it were…
Property as sovereigntyin micro
This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereigntyin micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of 'community' offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's 'communal' character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypr…
Cooperative modulations
Debate on the antimafia movement has placed the phenomenon mainly in the urban civil society tradition of new Italian social movements. While acknowledging the resonance of antimafia mobilization in this context, this article explores a different tradition, wherein struggles against the mafia in Sicily are analysed alongside, and in constant interconnection with, the development of the agrarian cooperative movement of the island. Focusing on the …
Responding to the crisis
This article discusses a case of popular social response to imposed austerity and recession in Greece. It focuses on the anti-middleman movement in an Athens suburb. It also addresses the broader picture of the current Greek crisis, explaining how participants in this grassroots response extend their activity beyond food distribution, beginning to imagine modes of economic conduct and interaction different from those currently dominant in Greece.…
The crisis seen from below, within, and against
Resonance of Solidarity
Scholarly approaches to the Greek crisis usually centered on its political character, tackle it as "a state of exception" or emphasize its "exceptional" features. Departing from a discussion on the nature of the crisis, in this article I examine social reactions to "it," focusing on grassroots economic activity. I undertake a case study of a "solidarity economy" movement and from there I explore the wider political repercussions of this activity …
Economy for and Against Democracy
Solidarity's Tensions
Which community for cooperatives
The literature on cooperatives often conceptualizes cooperativism as an organized effort to embrace community participation. Through the analysis of agrarian cooperatives in Sicily that were formally established to counter the Mafia and by ethnographically exploring the notion of community for cooperativism, this article aims to problematize this idea of cooperatives as "community economics". It proposes an anthropological approach that criticall…
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Arts of the Political
From Crisis to Resistance? 'Exception', Neo-liberalism, and Two Voices in the Left
Solidarity
In looking at the other side of the crisis regarding solidarity networks in Greece, this piece provides an introductory overview for a special section of that deals with topical issues such as the effects of austerity measures
From Clans to Co-ops
From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to pe…
Antimafia families
This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separa…
Façade Egalitarianism? Mafia and Cooperative in Sicily
What happens when a criminal organization operating through hierarchical relations establishes a cooperative institution committed to equal participation? This article explores the organizational intersection of a Mafia cooperative, drawing from a trial case involving several Sicilian mafiosi sharing a social life (convivenza) with laypeople in an agrarian winemaking cooperative. This intersection begs exploration of the Mafia's striving for soci…
The Social Life of Mafia Confession
Exploring Sicilian secular confessions, this essay discusses anthropological impasses on talk and silence. Such dilemmas reveal ethnographic frailties in engaging with concealment and revealing. The delicacy of negotiating between those demanding silence (the mafia) and those demanding self-revelation (the antimafia activists) unsettles the fieldwork ethics of our own anthropological entanglement in the gray areas of fieldwork between silence and…
Introduction to an anthropology of wealth
In this introduction, we aim to demystify the concept of wealth, too entangled in financial discourses, which have generally reduced it to 'accumulated assets'. This is at odds with the intricate cultural history of wealth as a concept, as well as with abundant anthropological accounts, instead defining wealth as a question of reproduction, relational flows and life vitality. When we view wealth as firstly a product of relational capacities, we b…
Show me the money
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stori…
Reply to Puccio-Den
Self in (And With) the World
Afterword
Instead of taking for granted that austerity is unidirectionally associated with Europe, the anthropology of austerity should be paying attention to the situatedness of its effects. The levering potential that a comparative analysis of austerity allows is precious, for it opens new critical perspectives on our understanding of temporal and geographical consciousness. An antipode of perspective invites a more historical analysis of a phenomenon th…
The anthropology of austerity
This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline should employ the comparative approach to bring t…
Two kinds of mafia dependency
This article proposes a movement between two sorts of dependency in the secretive bonds of violent men. The first forges an interdependent set of relations between mafia men, independent of the state; the second arises as a dependency of these former on the state in order to break the interdependencies that formerly made them as mafia men. In this ethnographic and oral history narrative, we first witness a dyadic, homosocial relation between two …
The shared boundary
This article looks at boundaries as shared points of conflict and sociality in rural Sicily where the mafia and their opponents ('antimafia' cooperatives) have lately been at loggerheads. My focus is on neighbourly relations between owners of plots on both sides. This uncomfortable proximity of enemies allows us to see boundaries as more than markers of separation. For sure, Sicilian boundaries imprint a history of violence on the landscape and d…
The Golden Passport 'Russian' Eutopia
English Abstract: In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of offshoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citiz…
Of Fascists and Dreamers
English Abstract: Examining conspiracy theory authors has not been seen as worthy of ethnographic inquiry in anthropology as of yet. This is intriguing, as encountering conspiracy theorists inspires a process of reassessing the critical nature of our own discipline, with its doubting mechanisms and thrill for alternative realities, and the essay offers analogies between such theories and the discipline. This article tackles conspiracy theory thro…
Property as sovereigntyin micro
This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereigntyin micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of 'community' offers us a lens with which to investigate that relation. Property's 'communal' character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek-Cypriot or Turkish-Cypr…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Economics (7 works)