Paper short abstract:

This paper draws upon the presence of independent local and international volunteers during the refugee crisis in Greece to focus on socialities of voluntarism. These socialities are loci for alternative visions of society informed both by local idioms and the anti-globalization movements.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological studies of humanitarianism have produced stark critiques of humanitarian interventions. Studies bring to the fore the modalities of humanitarian government, the political production of the recipients of aid, the politics of life in humanitarianism and so on. This scholarship largely draws upon political philosophy and the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, in particular. Despite the fact that they produce meticulous depictions of humanitarian action, such studies are bound to universalizing claims. With a few exceptions, humanitarians remain largely unseen, their motives and trajectories obscure. The humanitarian relationship is also reduced to generalized assumptions. It seems peculiar that anthropologists devoted to ethnography resort so fully to political philosophy and to Eurocentric theoretical frameworks. Yet this also reflects the powerful underlying moralism in a significant part of this work.

Based on research with volunteers assisting refugees in Greece since 2002 and recent fieldwork on responses to the refugee crisis since 2015, this paper studies humanitarianism as an intersubjective realm. I draw upon the impressive presence of independent local and international volunteers during the refugee crisis to focus on socialities of voluntarism and the humanitarian encounter. As I argue, the harsh experience of austerity and neoliberalization in the last years has also transformed Greece into a laboratory of alternative political imaginations against neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. Voluntary work with refugees emerged as a privileged locus for the production of alternative visions of society that is informed both by local idioms of sociality and international anti-globalization movements.