States of indifference: administering solidarity in post-crisis Athens

Characterised as the Solidarity Movement, the grassroots response that followed the Greek debt crisis has widely been understood as a challenge to neoliberal imperatives and an alternative to austerity. This thesis upsets such understandings by attending to the ironies of solidarity. Unpicking anthropology’s moral attachments to the Solidarity Movement, it questions the limits of scholarship that presupposes resistance, and where solidarity collapses with the idea of the ‘alternative’. Contrary to prevailing academic accounts, solidarity was not harmonious but rooted in fractured understandings of dependency, as volunteers struggled with their own habits of care and those of others. Driven by anxieties about corruption, the volunteers developed an administrative regime that limited how participants interacted with the space of solidarity. Through this proceduralisation, the volunteers displaced the indifference of the bureaucratic state with an indifferent rendering of solidarity. Egalitarianism had the further effect of compelling them to set themselves apart as the arbiters of equality. By cultivating themselves as disinterested agents, the volunteers concealed the ethical nature of their efforts and distinguished charity from solidarity. Pursuing solidarity thus led the volunteers to confront a number of ironies: that the space they created was not one of harmony but repeated conflicts; how a longing for the mundane was enfolded in radical aspirations; and that caring meant finding ways not care. In conclusion, the thesis considers the interplay of engagement and disengagement, offering a comparison between volunteers and anthropologists, by considering them as adjacent moral subjects. Interrogating the power rooted in the ability render ethical attachments, it reflects on how solidarity participates in a nostalgic desire for certainty in a moment, concurrent in anthropology, whereby potentials of self and engagement have become occupied by a politics of compassion