Reinventing traditions: Socially produced goods in Eastern Crete during economic crisis

This paper is about the way the newly issued framework for social economy creates the preconditions of social cooperation in the ethnographic context of Sitia region in eastern Crete. It is argued that local agents based on their empirical knowledge for making ends meet create or enter local social networks treating them as paths of provisioning and as generators of tangible outcomes in the form of economic capital. These networks are mediated by a set of material transactions which in their turn are sustained and reproduced by the logic of generalized reciprocity as a form of exchange. We argue that local agents by taking advantage of the social economy framework, by producing goods and by using local social relations form a whole which is formed and reformed when they transact with each other in commodity production aiming at making their lives possible. The data is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in the region of eastern Crete.