Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility by Othon Alexandrakis (review)

Abstract

I Radical Resilience Othon Alexandrakis develops an ethnographically compelling account of resilience by conveying the forms of political disengagement and social isolation through which his Athenian interlocutors navigate the everyday and compounding injuries of neoliberal austerity and state abandonment in Greece. These are highly variable stories, gathered over more than a decade of ethnographic research in Athens (2006–2018). In them, injury and undoing become the operative terms with which Alexandrakis guides his readers through the “compounding and accumulating minor moments and small locations” (6) where the lives of his interlocutors unravel only to be reconfigured in unexpected and potentially radical ways. Across the text, we follow Niko, a disaffected Greek anarchist organizer (Chapters 1 and 5), George, a Romani adolescent boy (Chapter 2), Amalia, a young nurse (Chapter 3), and Taj and Samba, two undocumented migrants eking out their living in Athens as scrap metal collectors (Chapter 4), as each struggle to make sense of the psycho-social, political, and/or economic upheavals upturning their life worlds. Resilience is located in their respective attempts to salvage or else reconfigure a life-sustaining relationship to the social, and through it, to some sense of a shared world, political or otherwise. Crucially, this ethnography is not really about people successfully finding their way back from crisis by “making sense” of misfortune through the invocation of shared cultural resources such as historical memories of hardship or collective political identities of resistance. Rather, it is about