Paper short abstract:

This paper urges scholars of conservative social movements to attend not only to the elective affinity between (some) forms of Christianity, nationalism, and conservative socio-political platforms, but to the specifically legal mechanisms through which such ideas are often promulgated.

Paper long abstract:

Socially and theologically conservative Christian movements are often accused of being "against" the practices and assumptions entailed by inclusive human rights, particularly the rights of women, LGBTQ+ persons, and non-Christian religious minorities. This is certainly the case in the United Kingdom, where support for human rights tends to be associated with cosmopolitan globalism and liberal social values. Yet conservative Christian activists are also increasingly likely to rely on rights-based law in their efforts to remake the nation "in the image of the sacred" (Comaroff, 2009). Drawing on the author's fieldwork with conservative Christian activists in England, this paper explores the use of rights-based discourse by those longing to, in their words, "see the United Kingdom return to the Christian faith." It urges scholars of conservative social movements to attend not only to the elective affinity between (some) forms of Christianity, nationalism, and conservative socio-political platforms, but to the specifically legal mechanisms through which such ideas are often promulgated; mechanisms that, in the context of the European Union, often apply beyond national borders. Indeed, the use of these European instruments highlights the transnationalism of projects often defined by nostalgic nation-centredness. As such, the paper suggests that getting "the Right" right requires ethnographers to get rights right, too.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent fieldwork in Budapest, Hungary, this paper asks what happens when the a hegemonic authoritarian right-wing regime becomes the all-encompassing context of ethnographic fieldwork, and what does that mean for the anthropological conceptualizations of 'the new right'.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the task to anthropologically conceptualize right-wing, authoritarian and/or neonationalist movements in Europe begins with thinking of different conditions of ethnographic fieldwork.

In Hungary, authoritarian right has become the defining context of research. During the 2010s, the ruling party Fidesz has cemented hegemonic rule by centralization of economy, overhaul of democratic institutions, and transformation of political language. While in public communication the regime is hostile towards the European Union, it also positions itself as a safeguard of "true" European values that guide the continent into the 21st century: Christianity, nation-states, and marriage.

While Hungary has become a symbol for rightwing movements across Europe, domestically Fidesz' reforms permeate all sections of the society. Put bluntly: regardless of one's actual ethnographic focus, one will have to deal with Fidesz. In this paper, I draw on my doctoral fieldwork among different generations of liberal intelligentsia in Budapest (2017-2018) and ethnographically show how my interlocutors' lives became increasingly defined by the regime in terms of family relations, work, and sense of personal security.

Although ethnographers' access to the actual institutions run by Fidesz can be restricted for multiple reasons, anthropologists in Hungary will also study the authoritarian right by proxy. Moreover, ethnographers themselves necessarily become entangled in related acute moral and political questions. When there exists no "outside" of the regime, what does it mean to ethnographically study the authoritarian right? And most importantly, what consequences do such conditions of ethnographic fieldwork bear towards anthropological conceptualizations of right wing movements?

Paper short abstract:

Accounts of 'the Right' are full of misconceptions resulting in more or less demonization of it. Anthropology should bring back a human face to 'the Rightist' since this is what anthropologists do with the Other. I will discuss four issues: rightism, extremity, hatred and anthropological mirroring.

Paper long abstract:

Accounts of 'the Right' are full of misconceptions resulting in more or less demonization of it. As an anthropologist I feel obliged to bring back a human face to 'the Rightist' who are normal people not the demons of hatred. This move is also necessary outside the academia for, like it or not, 'the Rightists' live in our world.

An ethnographic context for my discussion is Poland. Extreme right wing Slavic Pagans forming the Order of Zadruga 'Northern Wolf' is my main point of reference, howeverI will also refer to Law and Justice, a leading political party in the country since 2015. By such an extension of my material, I hope to strengthen the power of my theoretical argument and to improve our understanding of 'the Right' in Poland.

In order to get 'the Right' right I will: (1) consider three potential disjunctions between political and economical level, non-identifying and being identified and finally identifying and othering, (2) draw a line between extreme and non-extreme Right, (3) argue that defining the Right in terms of hatred is one-sided and overmoralized and finally (4) demonstrate that anthropologists mirror (replicate) some attributes ascribed to 'the Right'.

By all of that I hope to prove that fellow anthropologists have a serious problem with putting an imperative of (in short) tolerance into practice when it comes to 'the Right'.

Paper short abstract:

Citizens with an immigration background (IB) are viewed as mostly leaning towards leftist political parties. Little is known about IB citizens who vote for and are active in populist radical right-wing parties, which pursue an anti-immigration agenda.

Paper long abstract:

While the political engagement of IB citizens in right-wing parties may seem contradictory at first glance, several examples of IB citizen groups supporting anti-immigration politics have emerged (e.g. "Latinos for Trump" in the U.S., "Neudeutsche" in Germany, "Neue Heimat Schweiz" in Switzerland).

Leaning on the concepts of boundary-making, as well as ascribed and self-defined identities, this paper explores the reasons for IB citizens to participate politically and to join anti-immigration parties.

Our empirical analysis looks at the case of Switzerland, a country where one-fourth of the population are foreign nationals and one in eight citizens hold two passports. However, Switzerland adopts strict immigration and naturalization laws. Furthermore, the most successful political party in Switzerland is the Swiss People's Party, a populist right-wing party which owes its electoral success to its anti-immigration and anti-Islam agenda initiated in the 1990s.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with IB citizens involved in the Swiss People's Party, we show how self and party identification, political socialization, migratory experience, political beliefs as well as rationalized boundary-making towards other IB groups and parties play into their commitment to this anti-immigration party.

The results raise questions about the gaps between ascribed and self-defined identities, the role of boundary-making in defining new identities, and the democratic legitimacy of the current political party system.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the ethnographic research with far-right activists in Italy and Poland, my paper discusses the ways in which particular EU policies and particular strands of social scientific scholarship affect far-right activism, constituting both an object of critique and a source of inspiration.

Paper long abstract:

Prompted by the conveners' call to consider the European project as one of the sources of the present-day anti-liberal, exclusionary politics, in my paper I would like to offer some reflections from my fieldwork with far-right youth militants and present their ways of thinking about and acting for (what they consider) "Europe." Drawing on the ethnographic research in Italy and Poland, I shall highlight the ways in which particular EU policies and particular strands of social scientific and philosophical scholarship converge and affect far-right activism, constituting an object of critique or, in turn, being picked up and adopted by militants. I am particularly interested in activists' discourses on "diversity" and "pluralism" which foreground the ways in which social scientific scholarship and "multicultural" policies become "complicit" in the process of strengthening the far-right agenda. In so doing, I combine the reflections on the "dark shadows" of the European project with yet another argument recently put forward by Douglas Holmes, the one suggesting we cannot limit ourselves to proposing an "anthropology of fascism" but we also need to strive to understand the "anthropology that operates within fascism (Holmes 2016).

My presentation will draw on ethnographic materials from Italy and Poland, which, despite a different history of "Europeanization," can be said to demonstrate a series of similar developments, including the growing appeal of the neo-nationalist rhetoric and the presence of different political realities dubbed the "Right."

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an ethnography of the definition of politics in contemporary Moscow. In doing so it revisits a classic political theory question if politics is confined to a political system or if everything is political including the domestic and the social.

Paper long abstract:

How are the limits of politics understood in complex and rapidly transforming Russian political landscape? Does its 'apolitical' majority constitute the political regime's power base and in doing so mirror the rising political mood of conservative and right-wing populist movements across Europe? Candea (2011) argues that the political and the non-political are performatives. They do not describe what politics is but do things with these definitions as in Austin's performativity theory — by making, as he puts this, the spaces of the political and non-political exist or inexist. I take this argument further by suggesting that the very distinction of the political and non-political is performative and, furthermore, foundational for the 'political' as originally Euroamerican but now global cultural category. I do so in a micro-ethnography of the definition of politics in Moscow's municipal elections of the summer of 2019.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the panel's aim to cast a critical light on common explanatory models anthropologists deploy to make sense of the rise of right-wing political parties across Europe. It does so by zooming in on anti-liberal cultural practices in an Austrian mountain village.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will present fresh findings from a research project that investigates the backlash against liberal and cosmopolitan agendas marking much of Europe's current political landscape. The Brexit referendum in the UK was the first in a succession of events throughout Europe that revealed how many people are craving the return to an idealised, imperial or authoritarian past - a past they believe holds a stronger sense of community and social cohesion. Against the backdrop of this political turmoil, a growing number of scholars and commentators argue that we are entering a postliberal era - an era of eroded support for liberal values such as individual freedom and diversity. In my paper I aim to complicate these common explanatory models. Based on fieldwork with heritage clubs in mountain villages in the South of Austria that form a traditional bastion for reactionary political movements, I will shed light on the kinds of histories people search out to create a sense of belonging and temporal cohesion. By looking into the socio-cultural genealogies underwriting illiberal cultural practices, I will trace the question of whether there has ever been a "pre" to what is widely assumed to be the aftermath of a liberal democratic era of modernity. Or put differently, is postliberalism a misconception that risks exceptionalising xenophobic and anti-liberal practices rather than actually addressing them?

Paper short abstract:

The impetus of far-right populists to 'take back control' is often paired with a rational which associates the loss of control with a 'feminised west'. This research will investigate how conceptions of masculinity inform far-right groups living in London.

Paper long abstract:

"The people who are to blame most are ourselves, European men. Strong men do not get ethnically replaced, strong men do not allow their culture to degrade, strong men do not allow their people to die. Weak men have created this situation and strong men are needed to fix it." The

Great Replacement - Christchurch manifesto 


The focus of this anthropological doctoral research is on the far-right in London. The impetus of far-right populists to 'take back control' is often paired with a rational which associates the loss of control that carries a heavily gendered rhetoric. This involves far-right ideas which assert that the state has become 'feminised' and aims to remove traditional masculinity altogether. The ethnographic focus of this study is on understanding masculinities in relation to the shifts in cultural beliefs and practices that have occurred in London among three groups: UKIP, the think tank, and now media outlet, known as The New Culture Forum, and UK fringes of the alt-right. Despite an extensive body of scholarship on the far-right in Britain, we know far less about how people's experience of masculinity, specifically how gender identity is forged and negotiated by members of these groups. My research focuses on men and their experiences of masculinity, specifying how it is constructed, negotiated, and reproduced.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork among preppers in Germany I argue that reducing the phenomenon to a manifestation of right wing ideologies misses the informants' point of view. Rather, it is their quest for a good life which evokes the darker places of the ideological landscape.

Paper long abstract:

So called preppers imagine catastrophic scenarios for which they prepare such as blackouts, pandemics, economic crashes, culture wars, or terrorist attacks. Such events are believed to bring about the collapse of the state and a civil war. Prepping's entanglement with mass culture and the far right makes it ambiguous. Public and media discourses frame prepping as an exotic lifestyle, as an individual pathology, and as a threat to society. Contrarily, my informants in Germany complain especially about being represented as paranoid right wing extremists. For them, preparing is about doing the right thing, not about being right wing. Using "right wing" as a preformed explanatory frameworkmisses the informants' point of view. Shifting from an ideology-centred to a Foucauldian approach, I regard prepping as an ethical project allowing informants to perform and to become (from their view) "better" versions of themselves capable of leading a good life in insecure times. However, this vision of a good life emerges against the background of imagining the collapse of the state and the death of others. Because prepping is driven by mistrust and often enough hatred towards the existing national and supranational institutional frameworks, its popularity has to be understood against the background of changing relations between institutions and citizens. I argue that it is not ideological commitment but the quest for a good life which leads informants to the darker places of the ideological landscape.

Paper short abstract:

I explore memorial events for heroes staged by far-right and nationalist groups in Cyprus. These mobilizations reflect an attempt to revive the culture of public commemorative events that shaped the political subjectivities of postwar generation, but suffered a radical decline in the early 2000s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the culture of anti-occupation protest that emerged in Cyprus in the wake of the 1974 Turkish invasion and the recent resurgence of nationalism on the island. It focuses on the cult of two hero-martyrs - Anastatios Isaac and Solomos Solomou who were killed in a confrontation with Turkish Cypriot protesters during a 1996 anti-occupation rally. I explore two collective mobilizations - the commemorative events organized by the far-right ELAM party and the bikers' Initiative in Memory of Isaac and Solomou. Denouncing the Cypriot government for its "betrayal" of national interests, ELAM members pledge to continue an active struggle against the occupation. By contrast, The Initiative presents a more moderate vision of nationalist protest in which anti-systemic rhetoric is successfully combined with state discourses of democracy. Despite these differences, the two movements' visions converge in their dream of national revival as well as in their rejection of a federal solution for the Cyprus conflict. Unlike other European populist movements that focus on the issue of poverty, the discourses of ELAM and The Initiative are often directed at exposing the moral dangers of wealth, as they blame the prosperity the island has attained over the past four decades for Greek Cypriot's political apathy and loss of the fighting spirit. I argue that these mobilizations reflect a nostalgia for and attempt to revive the culture of public commemorative events that shaped the political subjectivities of the postwar generation, but suffered a radical decline in the early 2000s.