Between the local and the transnational:

proximities and encounters of post-soviet Greeks in search of a cultural 'familiarity'

Abstract

Through the example of post-Soviet Greeks, this paper aims to renegotiate the notions of locality
and proximity and the ways in which the latter are refracted through transnational strategies and
practices. Thus, by placing the familiar/unfamiliar dichotomy at the heart of our research, we seek to
examine, on the basis of ethnographic data, the tropes of a cultural construction of intimacy. But
how the latter is transfigured due to events such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the western
involvement, through cosmologies of resistance on the one hand or through a consensus with the
neoliberal spirit of Western capitalism on the other? In what ways is there a production of “regimes
of intimacy” in which contradictory practices and discourses are involved, plunging into futility any
attempts to create a homogenous narrative? Greek post-soviet diasporas rather end up being fluid
categories: not only through acts of integration in Western neoliberal normality, but also through
worldviews that gaze nostalgically at the most conservative versions and values of soviet social and
political organization, found in the example of contemporary Russia. This article therefore seeks to
trace human journeys and lived experiences, and through them to re-approach relationships of
proximity, intimacy, within and beyond borders, in the real and digital world.