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- Convenors:
-
Nicolas Petel-Rochette
(Université du Québec à Montréal)
Rosana Pinheiro Machado (University College Dublin)
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Short Abstract:
This panel wants to gather engaged scholars to think collectively on the significance of (anti)fascism in anthropological theory, in fieldwork, and beyond academia. Apart from taking fascism as an object of study, what are the epistemological implications of anti-fascist engagements in research?
Long Abstract:
As Douglas Holmes suggested, fascism of our time is “emerging not as a single party or movement within a particular nation-state but rather as a dispersed or distributed phenomenon that reverberates across the continent” (2019, p. 82). This observation makes the distinction between fascism and its externalities somehow blurred. Rather than seeing this confusing situation as an impossibility, we need to come to grips with it to approach anthropologically not only fascism as an object, but also anti-fascism as a practice and a posture. Anthropology, says Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, is “always about sticking one’s neck out through the looking-glass of ontological difference” (2015, p. 15). Relaying on this reflection, could ethnographies of fascism deploy insights that take into account their engagement, that is, the way they deal with their political “looking-glass” self? Instead of reproducing fascism’s “us and them” ethics and politics (Stanley, 2018), maybe we need to focus on the field as a kind of complex and nuanced epistemological tool (Pine, 2023) and on fieldwork’s political and cultural afterlife (Cammelli, 2021). To put it differently, maybe anti-fascism as a practice shall be considered as a research outcome – the unmaking of acting dichotomies and frozen interpretations of reality (Pinheiro-Machaod & Scalco, 2021, p. 334), for example – instead of a promise of good intentions. How can we use anthropology to defuse fascism’s ability for producing enmity? We think that this question is crucial if, as researchers, we pretend to embrace postures meant to diverge “ontologically” from fascism.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2024, -Wagner Guilherme Alves da Silva (University College Dublin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper delves into the digital economy's effect on workers, moulding them into "digital entrepreneurs." It argues this fosters political radicalization through eroding professional ties, inducing individualization, and triggering subject atomization, aligning workers with extremist ideologies.
Paper long abstract:
The interaction between ordinary individuals with fascist discourses and the production of enemies is radically different in this moment of capitalist development. How disillusionment transforms into political aspiration (Pinheiro-Machado & SCALCO, 2021) takes on new contours in the era of social media. This paper aims to reflect on the digital journey of workers aspiring to social mobility through digital platforms. It wimm explores how creating a hyper-individualized mindset of becoming an entrepreneur allows for the conversion of disappointments and personal frustrations stemming from the digital world into the creation of enemies and the sustenance of extreme speech (UDUPA, 2020). However, there is still a set of positive values capitalized upon by extremist movements.
Recent decades have witnessed a shift and transformations in the understanding of entrepreneurship (Amorim & Grohman, 2021). The expansion of market logic into the realm of labour in this entrepreneurial phase entails semantic shifts capable of maximizing individual surveillance mechanisms of the subject in their entrepreneurial process. Consequently, the notion of the political subject is modified. Within this context, social media emerges as a fertile space for the development of this process, whether through the management of labour supply or strategies for account reach and the management and publicity. Mobilized by populist leaders, this set of neoliberal aspirations, for upward mobility based on individualism and competition (STEWART & SHANAHAN & SMITH, 2020) through hard work begins to transform into political aspirations (PINHEIRO-MACHADO & SCALCO, 2021/2) under the ideology of entrepreneurship. Here lies a crucial point of understanding, as we face a new grammar of the far-right, advancing its agenda through a positive set of values capillary to millions around the world.
Ana Gretel Echazu (UFRN - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, BR)
Paper short abstract:
In Brazil, the rise of Bolsonaro´s government intensified concerns among anthropologists about denialist discourses. Also, other problems were raised while anti-denialist reactions emerged in the public space, questioning the plurality of sciences under the label of “pseudo-sciences”.
Paper long abstract:
In Brazil, the rise of Bolsonaro´s government intensified concerns among anthropologists about denialist discourses emerging from extreme-right political positions that severely affect various aspects of social life: the pandemics, global warming, vaccine efficiency, and even the ongoing Indigenous and Black people genocide. Such denying positions treat Brazilian democracy. The discourses coming from the extreme right seemed to highlight cultural relativism - a concept coming from anthropology and appropriated by reactionary agendas - to explain and justify multiple forms of social negligence and abuse producing highly visible, anti-denialist reactions. In this proposal, I will analyze one specific anti-denialist answer elaborated by a virologist and a journalist, working as coauthors (Pasternak & Orsi, 2023), Their contribution highlights the importance of science as a matter of State, but it also goes beyond this affirmation, questioning all kinds of sciences under the label of what they called “pseudo-sciences”. They doubted the “veracity” of popular curanderismo, the legitimacy of health and knowledge production in Afro-Brazilian religions, and even the “effectiveness” of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic tool. Through an attentive (n)ethnographic analysis of such statements, and also the answers to those statements coming from specific actors from civil society, I identify the need to produce other ways of answering and facing denialism, showing that we can face and dismantle denialisms without necessarily adhering to an apology of a hard-looking Science narrowed to the raw model of Westernized sciences.
Aastha Tyagi (Universität Hamburg)
Paper short abstract:
This paper details the 10-year journey of an anthropologist studying the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement in India, detailing how access of the researcher and the changing nature of the movement were reflected in an inversely proportional relationship to the power the movement was acquiring.
Paper long abstract:
My doctoral thesis is titled ‘Hindutva Self-Fashioning: Young Hindu Nationalists of India’. In this study, I sought to show the socialisation processes and everyday lives of members of India’s largest Hindu nationalist coalition, the Sangh Parivar (Sangh Family). For this I studied the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP; All India Students’ Committee). ABVP is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; National Volunteers Corp). The RSS is the most influential ideological fountainhead of the Hindu nationalist movement. ABVP was founded in 1949 and currently has three million members, operating largely in universities in India. It is the largest students organisation in the world. The ABVP has two goals: its primary goal is to work to further the Hindu nationalist movement on university campuses. Its secondary goal is to work as a student party on university campuses to raise issues for students’ benefit. Through the ABVP, the ideology has been able to reach other sets of demographics that were previously inaccessible to the Sangh: university students, distinct caste groups, women with access to higher education, and students coming from a non-Sangh habitus. These are student Hindu nationalists who describe themselves as ideological warriors and political agents.
In this paper, I will discuss my method, explicitly focussing on a decade-long fieldwork to understand the nature of Hindu nationalist power today. Through this, I will show how studying powerful movements may not be in the hands of the fieldworker after all.
Chiara Magliacane (University of Turin) Marta Panighel (University of Turin) Maddalena Gretel Cammelli (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
This intervention reflects on the epistemological implications of a feminist ethnographic methodology in the analysis of contemporary fascist practices. The paper interrogates the diffusion of fascism on the ground level, paying attention to its relationship with the process of knowledge production.
Paper long abstract:
As part of the ERC project F-WORD, this intervention reflects on a new paradigm in the anthropological exploration of contemporary fascism. Framed by the methodology of feminist ethnography, the paper interrogates how specific methodological choices are involved in the process of knowledge-production and their epistemological consequences.
F-WORD addresses the question of fascism continuities in Europe through comparative ethnographic research among youth in Belgium, Italy and Poland, with the objective of mapping where youth encounter political discourses in non-political spaces such as combat sport’s sites.
Previous fieldwork on the topic has revealed the need to interrogate not only methodological research practices (Avanza 2008, Bellé 2016, Blee 1998), but also the epistemological dimension of the production of knowledge. Based on those premises, this project proposes to use feminist ethnography (Davis Craven 2016) together with the tool of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) to research fascist practices and meanings in the everyday lives of European youth.
This approach aims to engage with the relational dimension of ethnographic research (Dechezelles Traïni 2018; Stathern 2020). Therefore, feminist ethnography informs and guides the process of research giving attention to the way memory politics dialogue with the personal geography of the research team and proposing a critical reflection on power differentials in the research context. Moreover, intersectionality helps to focus on how different gender and past-colonial identities or migration processes inform the relationship and patterns of encounter with fascism. Overall, the intervention interrogates which theoretical contribution feminist theory could provide in fostering our understanding of an anthropology of fascism.
Adrienne Pine
Paper short abstract:
I draw on work in the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine to explore anthropological praxis as antifascist strategy. Our primary research product—itself inseparable from ethnographic process—must be determined through collective struggle rather than neoliberal academic dictates.
Paper long abstract:
Days before South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a coalition had formed with the goal of mobilizing social movements to pressure states to do just that. By the time we held our first meeting, our focus had shifted to urging states file Declarations of Interventions in support of the South African case, and connecting them with the necessary legal and technical support to do so. Within two weeks, the International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine had garnered signatures representing over 2,000 worldwide organizations (with a combined total membership of over half a billion people) on our initial call to action. Members have coordinated extensively on high-level diplomatic meetings, with dramatic, concrete results. Less than a month after our first meeting, our leadership has intentionally shifted from the U.S.-based antiimperialist activists who initiated the coalition, to major organizations representing the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the Right to Return, and some of the largest and most militant antiimperialist, antifascist movements from the Global South.
I have previously argued that antifascist anthropologists’s primary research product—itself inseparable from the ethnographic process—must be determined through collective strategic processes rather than neoliberal academic dictates. While I am one of the original lead organizers of the ICSGP, my aim in this paper is not to center myself, but rather to articulate, using the ICSGP as a case study, the key roles that anthropological praxis can play in developing successful strategies to build global antifascist movements.