Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the ongoing process of collectivisation and pharmaceuticalisation of care in austerity- laden Athens. It thus explores how ideals of health and belonging are tied to the access of pharmaceuticals which, in turn, come to represent new modes and practices of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper ethnographically engages with the ongoing process of collectivisation and pharmaceuticalisation of care in austerity- laden Athens. It thus explores how ideals of health and belonging become increasingly tied to the access of pharmaceuticals which, in turn, come to represent new modes and practices of care.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in multiple social clinics of solidarity in Athens, I describe how pharmaceuticals circulate across different social spheres, crisscrossing the domestic, the public and the grassroots voluntary sector: in the social clinics, leftover medications are checked and redistributed to those people who cannot afford to buy them. In such context, the provision and distribution of pharmaceuticals come to represent the main mode of care that the social clinics are able to provide to an increasing numbers of citizens that have, over time, been denied access to the public healthcare resources.

Whereas sharing medications is locally seen as an act of care and solidarity, I will show how the medical and the social conflate, actually producing two different and contradictory orders of discourse: sharing pharmaceuticals is indeed a metaphor for collective care in the face of the state’s failure to provide it but it also entails the potential for new forms of dependencies and vulnerabilities.