Open AccessSOLIDARITY DILEMMAS IN TIMES OF AUSTERITY: Auto‐ethnographic Interventions
Author(s) -
THEODOSSOPOULOS DIMITRIOS
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.14506/ca35.1.10
Subject(s) - solidarity , marxist philosophy , austerity , sociology , ethnography , field (mathematics) , ideology , reflexivity , epistemology , aesthetics , ambivalence , dialectic , gender studies , social science , anthropology , psychoanalysis , philosophy , political science , law , psychology , mathematics , politics , pure mathematics
This article introduces an autobiographical analytical tool that aims to elucidate the complexity and interweaving of opposing ideological positions as these emerge in the field and while writing ethnography. The technique introduced makes visible the split of the author's identity into two: between that of a hard and a soft Marxist, where each authorial self resonates with a particular local perspective. The split and those who have stimulated it—the real‐life protagonists in the field—become reanimated and embodied through the self‐mirroring representational lens of graphic ethnography. Overall, the article provides an experimental exercise in reflexive Marxist anthropology, which, apart from ethnographic innovation, engages with the ambivalence and codependence of competing arguments about the ethics of humanitarian solidarity in austerity‐afflicted Greece. The essay suggests that local arguments about solidarity are coconstituted through pragmatism and productive self‐critique in times of protracted austerity.