Emergent Conversation 28

This essay is part of the series “Solidarity for Anthropologists”
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 28

By Samira Marty

I relocated from Zurich to Binghamton, a postindustrial university town in upstate New York, during a period of heightened political anxiety. The 2024 Presidential election was approaching, and residents across the political spectrum feared the worst. Despite a lively campus hosting some 20,000 students and faculty, Binghamton and its surroundings bear the signs of multiple devastations: environmental decay, a pervasive crack epidemic, housing shortages, and economic struggles following the closure of the IBM  campus some thirty years ago (O’Donovan 2014; Reno 2024). What is more, the abrupt end of the foliage bliss and an onslaught of everything pumpkin morphed into an impenetrable grey cloud cover. Having spent long periods in Scandinavia, where winters occur under similar dark covers,  I was familiar with both the rejuvenating sensation and the health benefits of exposing my body to the alternating extremes of heat and cold that saunas entail. So when I learned of a privately run women’s sauna group in my new corner of the world, I was eager to join.

The sauna group members, around two dozen women, reflected the area’s social composition, with many working in agriculture-adjacent industries or as homemakers. Having grown up in rural Northern Switzerland, I was no stranger to their intricate techno-vocabulary of agricultural life, such as in-depth knowledge of tractors’ horsepower or the fragility of young crops at the mercy of early spring weather. While my European background shielded me at first from picking up the cues (and enabled me to ask seemingly naïve questions), I quickly realized that the sauna was also a firsthand ethnographic exposure to the multiplicity of narratives that locals used to describe the socioeconomic and ecological detriment of the area. During these weekly encounters, I also received a personal introduction to the toxicity of seed oils and the benefits of baking with bacon grease, of manipulated weather and environmental catastrophes, of humans’ chip-induced control, and of the effects of vaccines on a person’s aura.

The saunagoers’ alternative cosmologies provide explanatory frameworks for how rural, postindustrial communities derive meaning from devastation, weaving concerns about bodily autonomy, environmental control, and social collapse into worldviews that offer both diagnosis and agency in the face of overwhelming structural forces. These alternative cosmologies, often in relation to New Age-infused health practices, reflect the broader political and economic landscape in the U.S., where alternative wellness communities increasingly align with the orbit of the alt-right. This convergence was also perceptible in one of the several antique stores in town: second-hand crystals with healing capacities were displayed in a glass case adorned with a big “Trump: Make America Great Again” sticker (see Figure 1). These trends are not accidental but the result of a carefully orchestrated campaign to lure yogis and organic-farmers’-market lurkers to the MAGA/MAHA project, which, despite their previous libertarian convictions, many of the saunagoers came to support.

Figure 1: an antique store selling healing crystals, decorated with a Trump MAGA sticker in Downtown Binghamton, NY, 29 November 2024 (picture taken by the author).

The penny dropped when a fellow saunagoer, who had supported her local Republican chapter for Trump’s election campaign, praised our tight-knit community by declaring proudly one night that “sauna is solidarity.” Although my first impulse was to laugh this off, there was a sincerity in her statement that I want to take seriously. Indeed, there were communal efforts reminiscent of solidarity practices: discussions and mutual aid, as well as discreet financial contributions via a donation box to cover firewood and the abundant use of essential oils. I came to realize that the hours spent alternately sweating in the wood-fired sauna and steaming off under the stars after icy water dips reflected the same complications I was wrestling with in my academic work. How had communal practices traditionally associated with leftist values, such as mutual aid and solidarity, become fertile ground for this emerging alt-right ideology?[1]

This interpretation, I have come to believe since, signals a broader phenomenon: the systematic appropriation and reclaiming of progressive principles by the far right, which is fundamentally disrupting our hitherto understanding of the political landscape. What does it mean for a core political practice of egalitarian politics if solidarity has become a tool fundamentally opposed to its liberatory origins?

Productive Gaps

The malleability of solidarity as a political principle struck me not only in an upstate New York sauna but also during my fieldwork on the transnational solidarity movement with Nicaragua in Berlin. In 1979, Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution had inspired leftist movements worldwide, making the country a symbol of political possibility during the Cold War. The translocal and transtemporal links of the Nicaraguan revolution and its afterlives had shaped the cityscape for the past four decades (see Hansen et al. 2015; Helm 2018). With its vibrant student and flourishing alternative subcultures, former West Berlin was a major hub for the Nicaragua-solidarity movement. The successful revolution in Nicaragua transformed the small Central American country on the world stage, a bearer of political utopian possibilities for hundreds of thousands of mostly young leftwing activists.

By 2018, however, the same revolutionary leader, Daniel Ortega, (see Weegels 2019). This manifested the “extreme fluidity” of Nicaraguan postrevolutionary politics once again (Rodgers 2009, 97). Ruling under the slogan of “socialist solidarity”, which, after the violent response to the 2018 protests, were increasingly branded as the governance of Peace and Reconciliation, Ortega’s administration increasingly drifted toward a narco-state autocracy (Rocha et al. 2024). This contradiction with the left-wing, revolutionary origins of Ortega’s party is hard to grasp for many, especially for those who strongly believed in the movement’s transformative potential, many of whom joined the project from Latin and North America and Europe[2]. These supporters were under the impression that the umbrella of solidarity shielded them and the overall Sandinista project from misguidance. This contradiction poses a crucial question: if solidarity can both uphold revolutionary ideals and justify authoritarian practices, what does this contribute to a renewed understanding of solidarity as a core political principle of our times?

The Berlin solidarity movement brought together an unlikely coalition: Cold War-era German solidarity activists, the Nicaraguan diaspora in Berlin (many of whom came to Germany either as affluent students or working-class migrant workers), and recent Nicaraguan exiles. Despite vast differences in socioeconomic background, generation, gender, nationality and immigration status, they united around a shared response to repression in Nicaragua. In that particular moment of “altered states” (Greenhouse 2002), where thousands of Nicaraguan protesters were wounded, scores imprisoned, and several hundred assassinated, they managed to produce a meaningful community despite their differences. This solidarity was not necessarily derived from sameness but from what I refer to as productive gaps, the term I use to describe the force of solidarity’s capacity to unite otherwise socially, culturally, and politically heterogeneous groups. The emerging “we-thinking” binds them together in a meaningful way (Laitinen 2023, 48).

For the older Germans, solidarity activism exemplified larger struggles traditionally situated within the left, such as Global South justice, anti-imperialism, and anti-authoritarianism (in the sense of liberating the working class). Especially for younger Nicaraguans, the Berlin-based solidarity was a means to expand their national struggle (see Khasnabish 2013, 71). This meant seeking alliances across the political spectrum, culminating in demands for US President Trump to sacar a Ortega del poder (“remove Ortega from power”), as a Nicaraguan interlocutor in Berlin put it back in 2018. Yet, through protests, cultural events, and political organizing, this diverse group managed to transform this long-distance struggle into localized, vernacular forms of solidarity, creating what Featherstone (2012, 247) calls “productive and transformative relationships” that reshape places, politics, and social relations.

The reconfigurations of solidarity that I observed both in my local sauna group and during my fieldwork (and the long periods of reflection since) point to larger questions of the universality of solidarity and the relationship of the left with its old principles. What can we learn, then, about this overbearing principle that we so easily apply? At first glance, the upstate sauna community reflects the universalizing potential of solidarity with its regularity of social interaction and a sense of mutual identification. This echoes Durkheim’s late-nineteenth-century conception of solidarity as a social glue (1995) that treated organic solidarity as a binding capacity in industrial societies among workers, or, generally, those who share the same predicament, which continues to shape anthropological and sociological thinking about social cohesion. In this collection of essays, Whitney Russell situates solidarity’s history in Europe’s late 19^th century, where solidarity was understood as a political practice within the working class, and foregrounds that this history continues to inform present-day leftist understandings of solidarity.

However, if solidarity is indeed a universalizing principle, fostering connection across difference, it hinges on the possibility of being reclaimed across political divides. This reconfiguration challenges the left’s, and, in a wider term, anthropology’s association with solidarity as a foundational left-wing political principle. After all, solidarity and care are not–and have never been–an exclusive privilege of the left, as historians and anthropologists studying fascism have cautioned us (e.g., Hamre 2025; Holmes 2000): far-right movements have consistently mobilized solidarity as a cornerstone of blood-related nationalism that establishes a rigid inside-outside binary, which has become an integral part of our understanding of community (Pasieka 2024, 17). This means that solidarity is not inherently leftist, but has to be understood as a malleable concept that can serve multiple and seemingly contradictory political projects simultaneously. This understanding highlights that solidarity–even across difference– generates political possibilities beyond the categorical frameworks that we are necessarily accustomed to.

What had begun as potentially heated politics became an unexpected ethnographic window into one of political anthropology’s most pressing blind spots. In analyses of political movements, solidarity has long been employed as an analytical and political doppelgänger with implicit leftist associations of progressive, egalitarian politics. If solidarity is indeed malleable, by which I mean structurally available to political projects of any ideological flavor, then our analyses must make room for these complications. The travelability of solidarity and its contrary political mobilization demonstrate how solidarity deserves a more nuanced understanding than conventional left-right frameworks have suggested. Rather than dismissing these communities as co-optation or “false solidarity,” my point is that anthropologists should rethink the analytic potential of solidarity; it is an inherent sociopolitical force that creates unexpected alliances and transformative possibilities precisely because it operates through, rather than despite, productive gaps.

Samira Marty (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). She has conducted long-term research on and in conflict zones and revolutionary afterlives in Central America and Germany. Her current research focuses on the revolutionary afterlives of Germany’s Red Army Faction. Samira was a Charles E. Scheidt postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton University, and held visiting fellowships at Cambridge University, the Graduate Institute Geneva, and the University of Arizona (Tucson). Samira is the co-editor of the journal “Anthropology in Action”.

Notes

[1] The irony was not lost on me that in February 2025, a panel participant at the International Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) alluded to a leftist rallying cry with the phrase “Conservatives of the World, Unite,” as reported by participating journalist Feeld (2025).

[2] Nicaragua was also a place of socialist utopia for those on the East of the wall: the Sandinista revolution represented a fresh start for an ideology of which many believed in its merit but were disillusioned by the Soviet (and satellite states’) implementation (see Harzer and Volks 2009).

Acknowledgements

This piece owes its existence to a series of conversations with Douglas Holmes, whose insights and comments were indispensable to my thought process. I am also grateful for the enthusiasm that SJ Dillon, this series editor, demonstrated for my work and for offering a platform to think through solidarity at this particular moment.

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