Solidarity dilemmas in times of austerity: Auto-ethnographic interventions

This article introduces an autobiographical analytical tool that aims to elucidate the complexity and interweaving of opposing ideological positions as these emerge in the field and during writing ethnography. The technique introduced makes visible the split of the author’s identity in to two; between that of a hard and soft Marxist, where each authorial Self resonates with a particular local perspective. The split and those who have stimulated it—the real life protagonists in the field—are reanimated and embodied through the self-mirroring representational lens of graphic ethnography. Overall, the article provides an experimental exercise in reflexive Marxist anthropology, which, apart from ethnographic innovation, engages with the ambivalence and co-dependence of competing arguments about the ethics of humanitarian solidarity in austerity afflicted Greece. It is argued that local arguments about solidarity are co-constituted through pragmatism and productive self-critique in times of protracted austerity.