This talk explores how kinship has been central to collective recovery after political crisis in Iceland. Revelations of elite corruption following the 2008 global financial crisis and more recent international whistleblower leaks have led to several government collapses and declining trust in economic and political institutions. In this context, political reform has been mounted by concerned citizens from below the state against an 'inert' government, primarily through regular protest and efforts to rewrite the constitution. Drawing on ethnography among citizens’ groups, kinship is shown to be an organising framework through which reform is envisioned and enacted. I explore how ‘empathic solidarity’ (samkennd), understood historically through kinship idiom as a shared sense of connection through care for self and other, is today re-invoked and reformulated as the basis for political reform following elite impropriety. This includes empathic witnessing of corruption in the present set against a broader historical and cultural script of the inherent richness and uniqueness of the nation form. This witnessing, I argue, is premised on a kincentric politics for revitalising the political arena and is giving rise to renewed assertions of ‘the collective’, thus further demonstrating the enduring, if under-researched, relationship between politics and kinship in contemporary anthropological scholarship.

Timothy Heffernan is a postdoctoral fellow at UNSW School of Built Environment and a visiting fellow (2022–24) at ANU School of Psychology and Medicine. His research focus is the crisis-recovery nexus after event-based hardship, including in post-economic crisis Iceland and in Australia after recent bushfires and floods. His work has appeared in the journals History and Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Environmental Hazards, and Conflict and Society, and he is co-editor of the new volume The anthropology of Ambiguity (Manchester UP, 2024).