On Affects and State Documents

In this article, I explore the incremental bureaucratisation of a grassroots, self-organised medical facility (KIA) in austerity-ridden Athens, focusing ethnographically on the conflicting affects it triggers in both prospective patients and the volunteers-turned-bureaucrats. Through detailed ethnographic vignettes, I discuss how the volunteers attempt to circumvent the bureaucratic rules they put in place by engaging in small acts of bureaucratic subversion. I argue that the volunteers often bend these rules and protocols to realign their politics and morality: while the KIA grants access to resources and services to those able to provide the necessary documents, both volunteers and prospective patients appeal to a shared sense of humanity ( anthropia ) to negotiate and compensate for missing paperwork. By unravelling emic interpretations of humanity and examining the affective and imaginative dispositions that paperwork and documents – and their absence – evoke, I expose the dual nature of bureaucracy. On the one hand, it functions as a ‘hope-generating machine’, embodying utopian values for the volunteers. On the other hand, it amplifies socio-medical inequalities, re-creating the state's presence within a volunteer organisation.