Times of Crisis and Seeds of New Intimacies on a N orth A egean I sland: Activism, Alternative Exchange Networks, and Re‐Imagined Communities

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102138/1/sena12040.pd

Neighbourliness, conviviality, and the sacred in Athens’ refugee squats

To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacement‐affected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge – spaces whose production is contingent on support from neighbourly relations and networks that are mediated in moments through conceptions of conviviality informed by religion. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. This helps highlight the limits built in to thinking about the movement of refugees from the global South through Euro‐centric ontologies of the social. More than this, following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socio‐cultural memories of jiwār or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. In turn, the evidence from Athens indicates that refugee perspectives on neighbourliness are imperfectly translated by migrant rights activists as solidarity, obscuring the different ways Muslim structures of feeling contribute to the production of refugee squats

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

Focusing on anthropological publications in Europe-based journals in 2016, this review reflects on the politicisation of anthropology in recent years, tracing the contours of this scholarship through the trope of ‘edges’. From debates about the marginalisation of Euro-anthropology and analyses of lives ‘on edge’ within Europe, to efforts to push political thinking to its conceptual edges as a form of ‘alter-politics’, this review explores the ‘edgy’ politics of Euro-anthropology in 2016. The paper examines how the edges of state and solidarity, self and sociality, human and non-human futures intersect in the political emphasis of European scholarship in 2016. At the same time, it critically reflects on how and why it is important not to allow this form of political optimism to turn into Eurocentrism, arguing for the continued importance of comparison and encounter outside of epistemic central Anglo-European worlds

Socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises

This article addresses solidarity and the opening of social spaces in the relations between refugees and residents of Greece who try to help them. ‘Socialities of solidarity’ materialise alternative worldviews; they are loci for the production of lateral relationships; places inhabited by the prospects that derive from the political production of sociality. The article discusses the ‘gift taboo’, dominant in the pre-crisis era, that reflects the risks of giving to the formation of horizontal relationships. In the contemporary ‘European refugee crisis, and other crises, the gift taboo has collapsed, posing challenges to the egalitarian visions of sociality