Kapetanaki Elina

Elina Kapetanaki is a schoolteacher. She holds a Doctor of Anthropology (Panteion University), sponsored by Latsis Foundation (Foundation IAOA) and an MA in Political Science and History (Panteion University).  Currently she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Balkan, Slavic, and Oriental Studies, of the University of Macedonia -Thessaloniki, Greece. Her current research concerns creative femininities produced and performed via small clothing industries at the Historical Center of Thessaloniki. Her previous extended ethnographic fieldwork was contacted in Albania and was connected to practices and understandings of selfhood and mobility between Greece and Albania (2009–2013). Her research interests focus on migration and mobility, gender, anthropology of time and space, urban anthropology, experience, and the sense of selfhood.

Contact:
Email: elekapeta@gmail.com

Title
“Dressmakers, tailor shops, fashion houses and craft businesses: manufacture of clothing and femininities in the historic city centre of Thessaloniki”.

Abstract
As per the manufacturing of clothing in Thessaloniki from the 1960 ‘s up until now, the historic center of the city hosted a considerable proportion of this procedure, which over the years appeared to be a route of continuous turns, and crises within the business society of the city. The objective of this post-doctoral research is the study of the continuous formation of the conditions of work for women employed in the sector of clothing manufacture in the historic center of Thessaloniki. This is a reflective project of a complex native anthropological work, in which I am deeply involved in throughout my whole life. However, in this work are playing a central role the stories of life, the experiences, as well as the performances of the self of women who moved to Thessaloniki from 1960 ‘s onwards. What is more, other important narrators of this research are the female workers on the clothing industry and manufacture who migrated to the city after the fall of socialism in 1989, together with stories of old female residents of the city or of women who arrived after the humanitarian crisis of 2015. These women are workers, fashion designers, dressmakers or entrepreneurs who run businesses such as clothing “ateliers”, fashion houses, and retail or wholesale clothing stores. They perform femininities via their own connection to the manufacture of clothing, else the previously crucial sector of the economy of the city. In addition, via their everyday practices of life, they conceptualise all over again issues such as gender, class, or “beauty”. It is a process in which personal aesthetics and materialities cross the native and global economy and finally become the ethnographic field of this research that focuses on discourses, performances, class diversification, and expectations of social advancement. This is a field of analysis and reflection as per the formulation process of the selves, the bodies, and the femininities of the protagonists of this research project.

Keywords: Women ‘s work, gender, self, material culture, class, native anthropology, reflective anthropology, memory, city, anthropology of time and space