Cultural Actions and Reactions of Localities
Cultural Actions and Reactions of Localities

The Case of the Mountain Villages of Tzoumerka in Greece of Crisis

Summary/Abstract: The paper focusses on how the villagers of a mountainous region of Tzoumerka in Greece have dealt with and adapted to the inconsistencies and ruptures of post-civil war migration trends, a transition to capitalism and their integration in a modern market economy. It is indicatively reported that from the dramatic decade of the 1940s onwards, the tendency of rural exodus was a common outcome in most villages and a result of the region’s desertification and cultural abandonment, which appeared a more or less accepted fact. It is understood, however, that this did not occur. On the contrary, behind the assimilative logic of capitalism, the mountain people appear not only to ensure the terms of survival, but also to develop, through the use of a continuous “tradition”, their mountain culture and the identity of the locality. The vitality of both the region and the family is based on a number of foundational structures such as formal or informal institutions, attitudes and ways of life, shared memories, symbolic representations and meanings, realities, practices of cultural resistance and the area’s means of adaptation, all of which form a very diverse social reality.

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