All Ages

Greece has a strong folk music culture and a tradition of Byzantine music (Greek Orthodox church music). These styles include musical features such as tropic modes and compound rhythms, musical elements that sound ‘exotic’ to the Western-trained ear. Furthermore, the music that is often associated with Greece around the world is an early 20th-century urban popular style known as rebetika (e.g. Zorba’s dance). With these musical styles and traditions, one might wonder how Western classical music could ever find its footing; the musical building blocks of each style are so far apart that it seems that a ‘Greek version’ of classical music—an amalgamation of these two worlds—would be difficult to achieve. But surely Greek classical musicians do come to mind: Maria Callas, Dimitris Mitropoulos, Nikos Skalkottas, and perhaps others. However, while these famed Greek classical musicians put Greece ‘on the map’ for the rest of the world, they were not completely embedded in the music making of Greece nor in the creation of a national school. So does Greece have a national school of music, a collective of classical music composers working to create a national genre, an equivalent to Glinka, Britten, Bartok, or Janaček?
This recital program explores this nuanced relationship between Greek music and classical music, the age-old duality of East and West. They begin by highlighting the ways in which Greek mythology and antiquity have influenced canonical Western classical music composers such as Schubert and Berkeley. They then see that Greek musical styles have actually been incorporated into the works of other canonical composers, such as Ravel. Some composers of Greek origin have studied and lived abroad (e.g. Lambelet) and have even become pupils of Ravel (e.g. Riadis), but they still endeavored to create a national school of music, a ‘genuine’ Greek classical music style adjusted to western principles. They attempted to westernize Greek music in a similar way to the Europeanization of the nation’s political system after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Composers of the Greek National School—most notably Kalomiris, Riadis, Varvoglis, and Lambelet—attempted to create a ‘national music,’ but their music was ultimately seen as foreign to the vast majority of the Greek population. In contrast, another camp of composers (e.g. Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, Constantinides), who actually lived and worked in Greece, set out to create a new style that drew elements mainly from popular and folk music. The music of the latter composers has since dominated the musical scene and is considered to be truly ‘Greek music,’ and our program pairs this ‘authentic’ style with the styles perceived to be ‘Greek’ from the rest of the world. In doing so, they present a complex musical portrait of Greece, pulled between East and West but somehow sitting at the center of the world just as it has for centuries.

This paper examines hate speech and its associated risks for human security, focusing on user-generated content (UGC) targeting Roma and related content moderation standards, tools, processes, and practices. The Romani people have experienced systemic racism, discrimination, and exclusion and faced prejudices, stereotypes, and hostility across countries. These negative attitudes are perpetuated, broadcast, and intensified in online spaces in the form of hateful and racist speech or incitement to violence. The paper outlines cases that illustrate common narratives about Roma and their translation into the online realm while highlighting the individual and community harm for targeted people. The narratives and security risks are further instrumentalized to examine the challenges and tensions that platforms encounter when developing and applying measures for content moderation. It is proposed that AI-powered detection tools are integral to tackling hate speech, but due to the highly contextual nature and differentiated risks connected to this phenomenon, they are unfit for being the exclusive means for decision-making. Policing the online ecosystem is most effective when models of content moderation are applied holistically with each layer extending the security and compensating for the limitations of the other. Social media providers need to follow a victim-sensitive approach to tackle the asymmetric threats that hate speech presents to minority, marginalized and vulnerable communities.
Pavlina Pavlova is Public Policy Advisor at the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. Prior to joining the Institute, she was an official at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) working on security assessment and capacity building of Roma human rights defenders in the OSCE area. Pavlina worked with hate crime victims and gained first-hand experience with the impacts and harm that inadequate content moderation presents for Roma in Europe.

In 1923 when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rebuilt modern Turkey on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Lausanne ordered that all Muslims of Turkish decent who were living in Greece be exchanged with any Greek Christians living in Asia Minor. This population exchange of nearly two million people has left deep traces, many of which are still perceptible today. Fortunately one thing soothed the resulting pain and resentment: both Greeks and Turks had been growing olive trees since the olden days, providing a main source of survival and wealth. They lost their homes, but found new olive groves offering the livelihoods they needed.

Robert Braun, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Political Science, University of California - Berkeley
Professor Braun’s research focuses on civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval and has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society and Social Forces. His first book “Protectors of Pluralism” tries to explain why some local communities step up to protect victims of mass persecution while others refrain from doing so and is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. his second book project, “Bogeymen”, traces the evolution of fear in Central Europe throughout the 19th and 20th century by studying the spread of frightful figures in children’s stories.

Dimitris Xygalatas
Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Around the world, people engage in ritual activities that involve obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Anthropologists have long proposed that such costly behaviors persist because they convey certain benefits to their practitioners and their communities. But how can we study these ostensible benefits, given the contextually sensitive nature of such cultural practices? This talk will present an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods to explore the puzzle of extreme rituals in real-life settings, specifically focusing on recent empirical evidence on the signaling functions of extreme ritual practices.