The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece

摘要

Alexandra Halkias crafts a fascinating ethnography that aspires to offer an interpretation of a central paradox in modern Greek society: while the nation is anxiously watching its diminishing birth rates (a phenomenon known as demografiko), abortion is widely practiced and is openly used as a form of birth control. Greece's demographic data are indeed staggering: when Halkias did her fieldwork, the population was about 11 million, with only 100,000-120,000 births per year. People in Greece perceive this failing collective fertility as an indication of the nation's slow disappearance within the context of an imaginary that has their Christian Orthodox country surrounded by enemies who are reproducing in larger numbers. Within this collective paranoia, Halkias performs a thorough ethnographic fieldwork, mainly in the capital city of Athens, and shows how abortion is not necessarily functioning against the nation: both abortion and the low birth rates are naturalized symptoms of the encounter between modernity and tradition, nationalism and subjectivity. On the one hand, modernity focuses on incorporation into the political and economic system of Western Europe that promotes small, nuclear families with few children.