Paper short abstract:

Fascism and anthropology share an epistemology of discrete social wholes that must be fully abandoned. This paper revisits Hobbes’s Leviathan to show how its massification of precarious people into discrete groups presages fascism. It then offers an alternative “relational subject of sovereignty.”

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists rightly identify neoliberal economic precarity as a condition of today’s fascist turn. Yet, they struggle for analytical angle to undercut fascism’s roots thus risking complicity. This paper argues that an anti-fascist anthropology begins with exposing the common epistemological basis of fascism and anthropology. That basis lies in the early modern claim that the world consists of discrete bounded subjects – individuals, cultures, classes, nations, races – the knowledge of which leads to their progress, freedom, and becoming. Classic anthropology, thus, sustains a politics of liberation of essentialized categorical types that fascists usefully invoke. Of course, anthropologists now critique these constructions, but a genuinely alternative angle will remain elusive until that legacy is fully removed. This paper begins that task by revisiting Hobbes’s Leviathan to expose fascism’s centrality to modern political society. This core text of Western sovereignty focuses not on an absolute monarch, as commonly recited, but rather a bourgeois subject who, in an emergent capitalist economy, is prone both to isolation, insecurity, and precarity and to a mass conformity that is inherently racist and potentially authoritarian. The paper next offers an alternative in the form of the “relational subject of sovereignty”, who is both internally divided and inherently related to all other subjects so that egalitarian action leads in unprecedented directions. It thus offers a politics of renewal that dissolves clear divisions between “us” and “them.” The paper concludes with the suggestion that finding an anti-fascist anthropology is inseparable from finding an anti-colonial one.

Paper short abstract:

With war again threatening Eastern Europe, we, as scholar activists who accompany antifascist and anticapitalist movements, consider traditions and contemporary practices of antifascism that have evolved against a shifting backdrop of fascism, imperialism, ethnonationalism, and anticommunism.

Paper long abstract:

Eastern Europe is simultaneously associated with the social, political and economic tendencies that brought about the Shoah, as well as those that fostered State Socialism. As war once again threatens the region, here we consider traditions and contemporary practices of antifascism, as well as processes that bring about ethnonational personhood. Drawing upon our individual and collective research, we approach fascism and antifascism here not solely as outside observers, but rather as scholar activists who accompany regional antifascist and anticapitalist movements.

We are interested in placing the current struggles in Ukraine, Russia, and the wider region within a constellation of work being done to undo and organize against imperialism. On one hand, Eastern Europe has seen populist fascist movements proclaim a nationalist nativism that renders the enemy Western empire; on the other, antifascist organizers and scholars are parsing out how an interlocking of multiply existing empires–both those of the West and Russia–are responsible for the current moment. Meanwhile, liberal anticommunist and anti-corruption movements have been quick to link socialism to authoritarianism and even fascism, reducing complex histories of actually existing socialism (and other historical socialisms) and communist internationalism to a retrograde stain on Western progress. In this paper we explore the rearrangement and reinterpretation of historic fascist, imperial, and racial contexts in the postsocialist present. We also think through how contemporary antifascist and anti-imperial scholar-activism is pushing back upon simplistic, reductive understandings of these histories and questions, interrogating liberal assumptions and transitional narratives.

Paper short abstract:

How can ethnographers of fascism critically assess the ways in which they have become entangled with their object? By examining two relationships with far-right interlocutors, the author of this paper develops an understanding of reflexivity as an indispensable tool for an antifascist anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

The ultimate goal of an anthropology of fascism has to be the eradication of fascism. But naming one’s ethnographic approach ‘antifascist’ does not prevent one from becoming entangled in one’s object of analysis. Indeed, as the ethnographer develops relationships in the field, clear-cut boundaries between ‘the good ethnographer’ and ‘the repugnant other’ become more and more difficult to sustain. However, the ways in which spending a lot of time with far-right activists affects one’s own worldview and politics are not always obvious, and simplistic ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomies obscure more than they reveal. Neither is it possible fully to disentangle the myriad ways—thoughts, actions, affects—in which one might have become complicit with the field.

In my contribution, therefore, I will suggest (radical) reflexivity as an indispensable tool for an antifascist anthropology. Based on ethnographic material from fieldwork in the far-right party, “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) between 2017 and 2019, I will argue that an ethnographic approach to fascism will never be free of contradictions, but it is by thinking through our entanglements with the field that we can hope to develop an antifascist anthropology. By contrasting my relationships with two of my interlocutors, I will engage in an exercise of reflexivity in this paper, and think through the ethical and political repercussions of my fieldwork.

Paper short abstract:

To propose an antifascist anthropology (vs. an anthropology of fascism) is to take an explicit political stance. In this paper, I argue that antifascist anthropology can be a key tool in the broader, urgent struggle against global fascism, but only in the form of strategic, solidarity ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

Today, we confront existential threats to humanity—including the possibility of nuclear war and certainty of global warming—that are inextricable from neoliberal fascist and more traditional fascist processes. Anthropologists who study fascism from various ethnographic perspectives select subjects and sites (located almost exclusively outside academia) that we identify with fascism in order to do so. Traditional approaches to hierarchical anthropological dichotomies reifying researcher/subject and home/field have long been critiqued as racist and colonialist. Yet the notion persists that academics are somehow immune to the embodiment of fascism, and that the ivory tower is a fascism-free space. Similarly, we are told that when we apply our work to the “real world,” our “engagement” must take the form of pragmatic solidarity or policy advising—rather than revolutionary anti-fascist struggle—even when our collective survival is at stake.

To propose an antifascist anthropology (vs. an anthropology of fascism) is to take an explicit political stance. In this paper, I argue that antifascist anthropology must take the form of strategic, solidarity ethnography. Framing our work as strategic solidarity ethnography requires us to reimagine the ethnographic project—currently structured by individualistic neoliberal logics of funding and employment—as instead part of a collective, emancipatory project of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggle. Drawing on urgent contemporary case studies, I explore how an anti-fascist anthropology employing such an approach, from research question and methodology design to data analysis and dissemination of results, can be a revolutionary tool—in contrast with research produced within institutional logics aligned with neoliberal fascism.