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Paper short abstract

This essay weaves through snippets of fieldnotes to dwell in moments of impasse produced in the social worlds around refugee solidarity in Athens, Greece—moments when people are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them toward actions not possible, or not enough.

Paper long abstract

Between 2015 and 2019, a social movement of support developed, and also disintegrated, as millions of people crossed Europe. Participants in this translocal movement and the social worlds around it included anarchists expanding upon “NoBorder” networks, volunteers working with grassroots NGOs, refugees fleeing political persecution, and victims of non-targeted violence seeking sanctuary. In Athens, Greece, these stakeholders uneasily, impermanently came together in a networked field of “refugee solidarity” projects that crossed vast divides of political ideology and material capacity.

As first a participant and then an anthropologist studying the social worlds around refugee solidarity in Athens, I was consistently caught up in the contradictions and excesses that imbued the field—a community of people defined by precisely those binaries (“European” versus “migrant,” “refugee” versus “solidarian”) they sought to transcend. This essay is concerned with a fundamental mismatch between affect and ethics in political community-building: What happens when people (refugees, solidarians, anthropologists) are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them towards actions (support, healing, representing, making visible) that are not possible, or where the scope of possible ethical activity can’t satisfy the affective push to act? I understand such moments as impasse (Malkki 2015), in the sense of irresolvable non-passage (Povinelli 2002) or affective and ethical “deadlock” (Mazzarella 2017). Across five weeks in summer 2020, weaving through auto-ethnographic reflections on my own bodily and emotional reactions and collected bits of media, this essay seeks to understand relationality in Athens refugee solidarity worlds by dwelling, momentarily, in the inevitability of impossibility.