Paper short abstract:

This paper explores performances of stateness amidst welfare retraction in Xanthi, a crisis-afflicted town of Northern Greece.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on alternative healthcare provisioning amidst prolonged austerity. I argue that the domain of grass-roots healthcare provisioning involves performances of state, stateness, and statecraft. The object of my ethnographic analysis is the Social Medical Practice of Xanthi, Northern Greece. Overseen by the Diocese of Xanthi and operated by volunteering doctors, the Practice provides primary healthcare to the destitute and the uninsured. While a product of determined and intimate self-organisation, the Social Medical Practice is contingent on statutory frameworks and processes of vertical encompassment. I trace the Social Medical Practice's regulations, protocols, and documenting devices to suggest that they constitute a reversed bureaucracy that inverts statutory rejection and exclusion and turns it into entitlement and inclusion. In this configuration, the documents that no longer serve as proof of statutory membership, comprise entry tickets for the Social Medical Practice. In this sense, amidst welfare retraction, the Social Medical Practice hosts continuations of the state healthcare provisioning practices. Crucially however, inasmuch as these performative and affective continuations alleviate suffering, they also capitalise on governmental technologies and sovereign enactments. As such, the state emerges triumphant in its absence and tangible in its abstraction, to offer hope and engender despair.