Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with a prefigurative intentional community in Athens, this paper explores the elusive boundaries between micropolitics and care as perceived by community members who do not consider themselves political activists.

Contribution long abstract:

Based on fieldwork with self-organised activist groups in central Athens, this proposal aims to reflect on heterogenous definitions of “the political” among the inhabitants of a squatted neighbourhood. The more than 400 activists, refugees and international solidarians who cohabit in 8 squatted apartment blocks and sustain a self-managed infrastructure ranging from childcare to a bakery understand themselves as a struggle community united in prefigurative and antiauthoritarian ideals. However, while some of them perceive themselves as “political people”, making political commitment into an important part of their personhood, others joined the neighbourhood out of precariousness and neither embrace any particular ideological affiliation nor think of themselves as militants, though they do share a basic agreement with the community’s principles.

Speaking to long-term inhabitants of the neighbourhood whose life stories and subjectivities aligned with the second rather than the first group, we found them to be extremely committed to the coordination of everyday tasks such as obtaining food or cleaning collective spaces. In this context, they became deeply involved in micropolitical work related e. g. to transmitting commitment culture or revising potentially unjust systems of distribution of labour or goods inside the community. Rather than politics, which they associated with assemblies and demonstrations, they understood these responsibilities as acts of care towards the common way of life and the shared physical space in which it was housed. As ethnographers, this invites us to rethink our own conceptual divisions between activism, everyday resistance and care work when doing research with prefigurative intentional communities.