Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon past research on right-wing regionalism in northern Italy and ongoing research on populism in Poland, the paper examines some challenges anthropologists face in researching 'populism', and argues that participant observation remains a powerful tool for understanding populism's dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

Populism has surged back into use in anthropological debates with the consolidation of increasingly populist regimes and the radicalization of populist rhetoric in Europe and the Americas. Yet the questions of what anthropologists' encounters with the 'populist' are like, and of what theoretical and methodological tools anthropologists should avail themselves while researching right-wing populism still await answers. Drawing upon ethnographic sketches from past research on right-wing regionalism in northern Italy and from ongoing research on populism in Poland, the paper examines some of the challenges anthropologists face in the 'field'. Its point of departure is the idea that encounters with right-wing populism do not necessarily involve dealing with extremism, but rather with collective forces that are not organized by hegemonic social forms. Such forces often include people who move from left to right and back again in search of someone who will address their concerns. What makes these groups intriguing, as Douglas Holmes has suggested, is that although their political leanings cannot be aligned along a simple left-right axis, they can espouse agendas animating something like right-wing populism. The paper pursues the argument that because populism is a complex phenomenon that defies easy definition, anthropologists are very well situated to contribute to understanding both its nature and its dynamics. They can accomplish this by availing themselves of 'traditional' tools such as participant observation, and particularly by focusing on the sites where populism manifests itself in different forms, which are not reducible to spaces of institutional governance.