Paper short abstract:

The paper rests on ethnographic material from island Greece. It brings to attention collective practices adopted by university students and analyses alternative conceptualisations of the political.

Paper long abstract:

In late 2000s, just a few years prior to the emergence of a financial and (as it has come to be understood) a political crisis in Greece, university students in a provincial town engage into daily practices that aim to resist party relations as the mainstream form of political engagement in the Greek university context. Drawing from discourses of the Left and a rich cultural background that rests on the notion of "autonomy", those men and women, speak of self definition and self organisation and propose understandings of the political which defy all forms of hierarchy and place collective decision making and collective action at their core.

The paper follows the students in their daily life in space and in time (ethnographic material in ways extends to the present) and attempts to present both the procedures through which they constitute themselves as non-hierarchical and symmetrical political collectives and highlight the challenges and the restrictions they face in their encounter with the university institutional context and other broader political formations. `In doing so, it aims to problematize on anthropological understanding of the political and contribute to the growing literature on alternative politics.