Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the analytical positioning of anthropologists responding to the specific historical moment of post-2015 refugee solidarity. It asks what affirmative, critical, and other anthropological stances bring to both academia and on-the-ground organizing.

Paper long abstract:

How do we, as anthropologists, position ourselves analytically when writing about progressive or radical social movements? This paper explores this question through recourse to anthropological literature concerning refugee solidarity in the wake of 2015’s so-called “crisis.”

The first section of the paper provides a general schematization of anthropologists’ analytical stances. It will provide a brief historical overview of positivism and objectivity within the discipline, and their critique (Stocking 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Rosaldo 1993). Subsequently, it will discuss contemporary currents in the study of progressive and radical movements, such as affirmative (Razsa 2015) and abolitionist anthropology (Shange 2019).

The second section of the paper is a case study of anthropological response in a specific historical moment of crisis. In summer 2015, a social movement of solidarity emerged as thousands of people crossed Europe. Almost immediately, anthropologists began documenting the scene (Papataxiarchis 2016). Many anthropologists initially adopted a largely sympathetic, sometimes allied position towards manifestations of refugee solidarity (Stierl 2016; Kotronaki, Lafazani, & Maniatis 2018; Vandevoordt 2019), while others have critically unearthed social exclusion and latent racism in solidarity practices (Danewid 2017; Zaman 2019). Moreover, scholars have warned of the risks of an anthropology that acts as moral judge of solidarity (Rozakou 2017) or behaves in complicity with the “refugee regime” in Greece (Cabot 2018). This second half of the paper considers what these different analytical positionings bring to the field—which is to say, both the field of anthropology and the field of on-the-ground response and solidarity organizing.