Compassionate Solidarity

Compassionate Solidarity Synopsis

Compassionate Solidarity demonstrates that crises are not only destructive but can generate new ways of understanding and being in the world. In the aftermath of Iceland's 2008 financial collapse, citizens who had lost their personal savings, homes, and faith in elites began fashioning a new moral framework from the wreckage of failed institutions based on a politics of care, responsibility, and mutual obligation.

Timothy Heffernan's ethnographic account of this transformation, premised on compassionate solidarity (samkennd), offers a sustained inquiry into "kincentric" politics, the process by which the relational obligations of kinship become the organising principles of collective life, challenging the dominant logic of market society. Moving between intimate ethnographic encounters, street protests, and the offices of fledgling political parties, Heffernan shows how economic collapse became a generative moment: one in which the question of who we are to one another was not merely asked but answered from below the state.

With implications extending far beyond Iceland, this book contributes to kinship anthropology, political anthropology, and the comparative study of democracy. At a moment when crises are remaking the world, Compassionate Solidarity offers an urgent rethinking of contemporary life and its moral foundations.