State of the art

Historians were the first to study voluntary associations. They have usually linked their proliferation with middle class formation and the emergence of bourgeois sociality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent decades, social scientists and anthropologists have also shown interest in collective public action, mainly in its new forms, such as non-governmental organisations, volunteerism, transnational networks of intervention, etc.

Researchers agree that voluntary organisations played a central historical role in three distinct but interrelated social processes: the formation of the multiform urban strata, the consolidation of the hegemonic ideology separating the public and the private spheres, and the conceptualisation of 'society' as a distinct analytical category.

With the legal institutionalisation of their autonomy in the 20th century, the features and the social role of voluntary associations change. They even become indicators of the extent to which democratic institutions are successfully implemented. Their dramatic proliferation and their subsequent diversification exemplify the growth of new domains of sociality and the formation of new cultural notions of time and space. At the same period, while formally autonomous voluntary associations retain multi-levelled relationships with the state: they address their demands to the state, they develop actions that substitute for the state or they co-operate with it in order to face 'social issues', while, not rarely, they even receive state funding. Voluntary associations become a form of organising the urban population, aiming through organised action at dealing with issues and demands that emerge from everyday life, memories of the past or expectations for the future.

In Greece, voluntary associations have been studied mostly by historians. It is widely accepted that they played an important role during the nineteenth century in both the Greek State and the Greek-Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire or the European diaspora, where they substituted the state in the fields of social policy and the handling of the social and the national issue. Few historical studies extend to the 20th century. However, the instauration of Law 281 of 1914 on associations created a new institutional framework, which fostered their rapid increase in number as well as in aims and scope.

Lately, anthropologists and social scientists have been studying contemporary forms of voluntary associations, namely local and refugee associations, and also voluntarism and non-governmental organisations.

We know very little about the informal forms of public sociality in 20th-century. Greece. The networks of social intervention and the collective subjectivities of various kinds that appeared in the public space during the century were shaped, acted and dissolved in ways that left scarce traces. Therefore they are more difficult to detect and require micro-level studies. This field is almost completely open.