In 1973 convict Jan-Erik Olsson attempted to rob Kreditbanken, a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. During the robbery Olsson took four employees hostage for six days. When Olsson and his accomplice Clark Olofsson were captured and later taken to court, all four hostages refused to testify against them, instead launching a money-raising campaign for their defence. In analysing the condition of the former hostages, Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist, Nils Bejerot, identified a form of brainwashing that was later coined in the popular press as ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (Namnyak et.al, 2008:5). As well as feeling affinity or understanding for the motives and methods of the captor as a survival strategy, other characteristics of Stockholm Syndrome include wanting to remain or later return to the place of captivity, maintaining a relationship with the captors, feeling extreme anxiety about life after captivity, and expressing futility for the hostage situation. Stockholm Syndrome is existentially paradoxical in that the sentiments captees feel towards their captors oppose the fear and distain an onlooker might experience.

Stockholm Syndrome, it has been argued, can be both a personal psychological condition and a societal issue shared by a group living through the same transformative conditions (Graham, 1994). The primary concern in both cases is simply survival. It is on these terms that I suggest that Stockholm Syndrome can be used as a ‘vernacular resource’ to represent individual and societal reactions to a chronic Time of Crisis, namely the structural austerity experienced in Greece since 2010. The permanent state of crisis in Greece has fostered increasing feelings that ‘resistance is futile’ to conditions of chronic austerity, creating an affective structure of Stockholm Syndrome marked by an intimate uncomfortable comfort with living in perpetual crisis, framing as futile any hopes for futural change (Knight, 2019).

Explicitly drawing on master narratives of captivity and imprisonment rather than resignation, Stockholm Syndrome appears regularly in the Greek print media to frame the experiences of a nation held captive by foreign creditors and inept political figures. Articles discuss how living with crisis has become ‘naturalised’, the ‘new normal’, even at times emphasising the ‘positives’ of living in austerity (increased e-commerce, plastic transactions, and reduced tax evasion) (Kathimerini, 27th March 2017, accessed 20th April 2020). Justifications for current living conditions are widespread and further illustrate how people have become accustomed to the futility of the current status quo, making sense of logicizing an era of significantly increased social suffering, vindicating the actions of the perpetrators, and duly taking their deserved punishment. From the perspective of an ethnographic theory of captivity, I propose that the Time of Crisis has given rise to vernaculars of permanence where futility as a stance toward the future reigns supreme and societal Stockholm Syndrome has set in.

In Greece, the strangeness of captivity has become ordinary. In the anthropological literature, captivity is often described as a transformative atmosphere or aesthetic which is difficult to define ethnographically (e.g. Lepselter, 2019). Captivity, Kevin Lewis O’Neill elaborates, contains ‘affective, emotional resonances’ that are ‘nebulous and vaporous, that … are difficult to grasp’ for the onlooker. Yet the ‘atmosphere’ of captivity surely ‘grabs’ those in its vicinity, enclosing them in an inescapable aesthetic (O’Neill, 2019: 541). It is in precisely this atmosphere of captivity that my analysis plays-out, among people grasped by affective, emotional, nebulous incarceration, in a situation that the outside world may find difficult to justify or comprehend.

Permanence as Orientation. Permanence as a primary temporal orientation of crisis can be considered more devastating than apocalyptic scenarios of annihilation since the latter leaves nothing for reflection (Gordon, 2015:126). This ethos is captured expertly by a precariously employed 40-year-old research participant Kostas when he says, ‘When you realise there is no end to crisis, that you can trust the promises of nobody, you seek sanctuary in that which you know. I know how to live in the crisis’. When I quiz Kostas to further explain his desires to maintain current political and economic conditions even when politicians and bureaucrats are boldly claiming a bright future for the emergent post-crisis Greek nation, he says ‘I know that you (outsiders) might not understand it. It might seem strange. But fighting for our future now seems futile. We no longer know who to trust and who is lying. I laugh at them all and just say ‘I will focus on my own life’ and for that I need security … I have become accustomed to crisis. I know it (crisis)’.. Kostas places more trust in his current captors – who he sees as ‘northern European neoliberals … Germans and big banks’ – than in his own prime minister who offers promises of emergence.

This seemingly illogical preference to remain in a Time of Crisis, with its associated social suffering, decreased living standards, stresses and anxieties, is the Stockholm Syndrome effect of the epoch. Within the timespace of crisis, people have managed to find a degree of self-determination and after years of struggle and protest find a sense of security and stability in the familiar environment of crisis (cf. Shevchenko, 2009:9). Rather than being defined as ‘resignation’ to a life of crisis, people have found a space of relative comfort where familiarity with crisis provides direction to everyday life.

Stockholm Syndrome as Vernacular Futility. Stockholm Syndrome is a useful tool to analyse everyday explanations of crisis and the futility of desires for the future, furthering an attempt to populate the affects and orientations of a Time of Crisis (Bryant and Knight, 2019). In employing the term, I do not intend to pathologise a Time of Crisis in a way that detracts from the agency and creativity of my research participants. To the contrary, coping with crisis under the so-called Troika ‘occupation’ and its aftermath has led to many people fashioning a space of self-determination within the confines of austerity; permanent crisis does not necessarily equal destruction. Stockholm Syndrome is a useful analytical tool to better understand how people describe a Time of Crisis as a timespace of paralysis, justifying their punishment, finding security in entrapment, and articulating the futility of resistance. They have chiselled out a space within the Time of Crisis in which they can survive.

As a vernacular resource Stockholm Syndrome helps unpack the affective structure of a Time of Crisis and the atmosphere of futility in captivity. Kostas describes how he trusts the structure of internationally enforced reforms that have guided his life for nearly a decade more than he trusts his own prime minister’s promises to rescue him from the hands of foreign captors. One informant describes how crisis is his ‘safe place’ in the ‘here and now’, a paralysis he can ‘no longer fight’. The vernacular of Stockholm Syndrome captures the futility of a life in chronic crisis and helps populate the timespace with affective structures and orientations.

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