Maria Antónia Pedroso de Lima

Preliminary abstract: This workshop aims to bring together and contrast analytically the ethnographic material from Southern Europe gathered by our three large anthropological projects and compare it with evidence from Northern and Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America. We seek to demonstrate that the anthropological conceptual toolkit is essential to understand what is happening on the ground in the world of ‘austerity’. Our comparative debate will go beyond the already familiar claims of increased socioeconomic inequality by confronting it with such classic anthropological topics as household economics, intergenerational relations, gender differentiation, approaches to the meaning of work, family and kinship networks, forms of socio-cultural belonging, regimes of indebtedness, and modes of personhood. We aim to achieve a broad comparative view of national responses to austerity and to generate new methodological, conceptual and theoretical frameworks.The projects: PI Ant’_nia Pedroso de Lima, CRIA, ‘Care as sustainability in crisis situations.’ FCT-PT;PIs Dimitrios Theodossopoulos and JoÌ£o Pina Cabral, University of Kent at Canterbury, ‘Household survival in crisis: austerity and relatedness in Greece and Portugal’, ESRC-UK; PI Susana Narotzky, University of Barcelona, ‘Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood’ [GRECO], ERC Advanced Grant-SP.