Paper short abstract:

What do you answer when a member of a neo-fascist movement asks if you consider her a good person? In this paper, I explore the challenges an anthropologist studying morality encounters when researching far-right activists' everyday moral practices and their socio-political embededness.

Paper long abstract:

“Do you think we are good people?,” a member of a neo-fascist Italian movement asked me during an event I was invited to join during my fieldwork. In this paper, I use this question (as well as a related question I asked myself then, that is: “How should I answer this?”) as a point of departure for a discussion on the challenges the project of moral anthropology encounters when its subject is the far-right moral universe. Drawing on the research with Italian, Polish and Hungarian far-right activists, I illustrate different ways in which a study of far-right movements allows us to explore questions vital for any study of morals, such as: relation between ideas and practices; construction of moral personhood through collective activism; sources of moral exemplars.

In so doing, I aim to reflect on the limits of the project of moral anthropology. First, I argue that despite the calls for less moralizing in the study of morals (e.g. Fassin), we still observe opposition to discussing certain themes in terms of “morals” or “ethics.” Second, inspired by the research on ethics and conservative/fundamentalist religious movements (e.g. Harding; Coleman), I discuss two different modes of engagements with “repugnant others,” that is “political” (militant) and “disciplinary” (call for understanding) ones, and first and foremost an inevitable tension between the two. Third, highlighting the problem the conveners invite us to explore, I discuss the connection between the ethnographer’s own practices and convictions and the moral world she/he explores in course of fieldwork.