The black swans of Greece's global countrysides: Post-socialist immigrant farmers, small Greek farms, integration, and [under]development

Rural sociologists, social geographers, anthropologists and other scholars concerned with rural Greece typically confirm accounts of xenophobia and 'backwardness' that have seemed to plague the Greek countryside since the state's inception. My fieldwork concerning immigrant marginalization in rural Laconia gradually revealed profound socio-ecological transformations which have begun to occur there. Isolated though they may be, these socio-ecological changes have the potential to be still more transformative, on the ground by contributing to a post-colonial agriculture as well as within anthropological theory by foregrounding a post-colonial Greek history of rural development and identity.;Specifically, small-scale olive farmers in semi-mountainous areas who have found themselves economically uncompetitive, especially in light of the current European financial crisis, have developed a variety of unprecedented relationships with many Southeastern European immigrants they now work with. In reclaiming abandoned fields and centuries-old farm enterprises, collecting foodstuffs that Greeks now seldom collect, and continuing other traditional rural activities, immigrant farmers link rural Greeks back to their agrarian lives, grounding them all in the security of agricultural livelihoods amidst the European social and financial crises and connecting them to new international value-added food markets for boutique or heritage food products. These new socioeconomic relationships, outside the historical confines of the binary relationship between Greece and northern Europe or the United States, have become significant solutions to the most prescient problems in contemporary rural Greek communities.;Such instances of ethnic rapprochement and 'repeasantization' amongst small-scale Greek and non-Greek famers may seem overshadowed by arguably larger pictures of wholesale xenophobia, rural stagnation, and global agribusiness trends. Yet these acts of resistance vis-a-vis the future-visions of certain non-Greek farmers in Greece are highly symbolic and are shaping Greek, non-Greek, as well as academic perspectives on 21st century agriculture there.