that, like myth, are said to underlie daily life and practice. Moreover, rather than emerging in contradistinction to law and bureaucracy, myth-making is crucial to the workings of asylum in Greece and unfolds through the technocratic values of transparency and bureaucratic accountability. Much as Charles Stewart (1991) argues that the demonic buoys up the Orthodox in contemporary Greek cosmology, I show that these knowledge forms at the margins of law and bureaucracy are in fact central to their everyday functioning. In the vein of Evans-Pritchard’s (1937) analysis of Azande magic, my ethnography highlights how the search for sense, origins, causes, and effects beyond the visible or self-evident is, in its own way, deeply rational. Yet these more indeterminate forms of knowledge take on lives of their own: documents acquire their own agency; persons disappear or become phantoms and ghosts; bureaucratic processes become products of hearsay; and stories, true or not, come to form the ground of judgment.
While, for Turner (1967, 1974), social dramas often end in moments of reconstitution, when balance is restored and norms are reasserted, I emphasize their creative potential and radical indeterminacy. Paul Friedrich (1986) formulated the concept of “poetic indeterminacy” to highlight the role of individual imaginations in (re)shaping the structural dimensions of language and culture. By this, he sought to bring into view the processes by which individuals “integrate knowledge, perceptions, and emotions in some creative way … in order that they may enter into new mental states or new relations with their milieus” (18). I show here that in processes of decision making and adjudication, the enactment of judgment is accompanied by unofficial, often highly creative practices that have crucial consequences in the experiences of claimants and adjudicators. The forms of governance, sociality, knowledge, and ethical engagement generated through krisi, with their many dilemmas, take on new and unpredictable formations, with equally indeterminate effects. Projects of governance may lead to their own undoing, even as they enact regulation. Knowledge is wedded to myth. Socialities predicated on power inequalities, structural violence, and exclusion also generate attachment, humor, and intimacy. Ethics, while grounded in the binary dilemmas of tragedy, become kaleidoscopic and multilayered, as persons find myriad ways to manage and destabilize these dilemmas.
Such asides, afterthoughts, and finaglings could easily fall by the wayside if one were to focus only on the formal asylum process, Greece’s apparent failures in implementing it, and the issuance—or denial—of refuge. Yet these excesses and even byproducts of law and judgment, with their elements of superfluity, are crucial to the asylum process and its lived effects on contemporary Greek citizenship. This book, in many ways, is an exploration of how certain persons and lives are constituted as superfluous,6 cast out of home countries through multiple kinds of violence, and suspended in politicolegal precariousness in Greece. These forms of excess, however, also make possible productive encounters that have an important role in reshaping modes of social, political, and legal belonging. Those left out of dominant formations of citizenship are central to how the Athenian body politic, like the city, is remade and rearticulated.
An Office in Athens
On the loud central Athenian boulevard of Peiraios, a small “Chinatown” has sprung up in the past ten years—a row of Chinese wholesalers that supply many of the less expensive clothing shops in Athens. Both Greek and Chinese shop owners, as well as many street vendors, acquire their goods from these distributors (see Rosen 2013). Just in view of the Acropolis, and just outside the zones where tourists wander, a five to fifteen-minute walk in any direction will take you in very different trajectories.
Five minutes to the southeast, you could push your way through Psiri, the old meat-packing district, silent during the day with shuttered windows, but at night coming alive with bars and restaurants that open into the street. Psiri connects labyrinth-like with some of the back streets where long-standing Greek inhabitants and recent migrants live side by side, and the grilled fish, onion, garlic, and lemon smells of old tavernes mingle with the scents of curries, sour bread, and spicy eggplant. Or you could take a tourists’ walk that Athenians also love, snaking through Psiri to Thisseio and Monastiraki, where the lines of the Acropolis vault above the narrow streets and faded shop fronts of old Athens. In a mixed sea of Greek speakers and fair-skinned tourists speaking German, English, or French, you could follow the tracks of the ιlektrico (ηλεκτρικό), Athens’s first public train system, which carves a moat on the side of the Acropolis, beneath the ancient Agora. You would also pass street vendors. Men from Bangladesh sell goods they have obtained from Chinese wholesalers—sometimes sunglasses and jewelry, but mostly knick-knacks, plastic toys such as windup dolls and windmill hats, and surprisingly useful items like whistles, key chains, and LED flashlights, which you can buy for 3 Euro. There are also West African traders selling “designer” purses—replicas of Louis Vuitton and Gucci spread out on soiled white sheets, which make for both a quick get-away and a quick way to reopen shop. When other vendors—or often customers—whisper warnings of “police” or astinomia [αστυνομία], sellers gather up their goods, only to lay them down again moments later, once danger has passed.
If you head five minutes to the southwest away from Chinatown, you will find Gazi, a relatively new center of Athenian nightlife, housing the temple of Athens’s contemporary art scene, the “Technopolis,” a converted factory that is now an exhibition space. Here, if you know where to look, you will also find the ancient gates of Athens and the ancient cemetery of Keramikos, an oasis of quiet green, replete with a small brook and the occasional snapping turtle. If you go a little to the southwest beyond Gazi, with its recently opened metro stop that has dramatically increased the crowds of club goers, you will find another crucial node in my map of Athens: the Boulevard of Petrou Ralli, and the Police Department for Aliens, where, until recently, people lined up in order to apply for asylum.7
If you take Peiraios in the other direction, to the northeast, in fifteen or twenty minutes you will reach Omonia Square, the Square of “Harmony,” with its heavy traffic of people and cars. The walk I took most weekday mornings from September 2006 through July 2008, during my primary stint of fieldwork in Athens, involved just a few city blocks: from the metro stop in Omonia to a run-down office near Exarcheia Square. Dense with people, smog, and traffic, moped engines and car horns, Omonia is known among long-time Athenian residents for its heavy concentration of tourists, drug users, and migrants, but it is also a vibrant and buzzing neighborhood full of contradictions. Exiting in the direction of Eleutherios Venezelou Street, I would walk down a pezodhromos (pedestrian walkway), past shoeshine men, kiosks, professionals in suits and sunglasses drinking coffee, bakeries, street vendors, a mid-class hotel, and a legal brothel. Rounding the corner, I would cross a broad boulevard, then head down cramped and pitted side streets into the neighborhood of Exarcheia, where dense buildings frame a sky often tinged with the tarry film of smog. Exarcheia is the site of the Polytechneio, the Polytechnic University, where the student uprising against the military dictatorship on November 17, 1973, ended in the deaths of students, sparking a much wider series of protests that eventually contributed to ousting the Junta in 1974, in the face of the Cyprus crisis. Every November 17, crowds come here in memoriam and protest, then march across town to the American embassy, in angry remembrance of the U.S. support of the Junta. A bastion for anarchist and leftist politics, this neighborhood is also hospitable for migrants, and it houses a number of NGOs and community organizations devoted to assisting migrants and refugees. For me, Exarcheia is most significant as the site of the Athens Refugee Service (ARS, a pseudonym),8 the largest and oldest asylum-related NGO in Greece.
The ARS signals its presence before one reaches the street where it is located. People speaking Arabic, Dari, Urdu, Bangla, or other languages make their way toward the office carrying files and papers; the public phone on the block often has a line. Each morning, I would find a crowd waiting at the entrance: sometimes twenty to fifty people, sometimes as many as one hundred or one hundred and fifty, some pressed against the door, others sitting on the sidewalk outside, some smoking, some just waiting. As I made my way to the entrance, the crowd would part, people tapping each other on the back to give me space, and embarrassed by their politeness, I would push through bodies and the sharp tang of old sweat. I would greet Luc, an African man who staffs the door and has worked at the ARS for a number of years. A few of those waiting most likely would be chatting with him, along with a couple of other