Paper Short Abstract:

This paper critically reflects on the relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives in ‘conspiratorial practices’. Bringing ethnographic insights from research with conspiracist far-right voters in Brazil, it problematises the precariousness of the conspiratorial agent(s).

Paper Abstract:

Conspiracy theories usually emerge only tangentially in ethnographies, rarely becoming their main focus. When they do gain centre stage, anthropologists tend to associate them with affective and meaning-making mechanisms, discarding a pathologizing approach. Part of this literature has explored conspiracy theories as a kind of ‘subaltern talk’: a strategy mobilised by people in the margins of national and global powers with which they could manifest anxieties and imaginaries that would have otherwise remained unexpressed. This has indeed been a tendency observed in ethnographies from the Global South (e.g. Didier Fassin in South Africa, Nayanika Mathur in India), which have diligently tried to answer why and under which circumstances people may embrace conspiracism by showing, for example, how state powers may discredit and ultimately silence marginal(ised) narratives by labelling them as ‘conspiracy theories’.

This paper contributes to the panel’s discussion by critically reflecting on the relationship between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives in ‘conspiratorial practices’. Bringing ethnographic insights from long-term fieldwork with far-right voters who mobilise conspiracy theories in Brazil, the paper wishes to problematise the precariousness of the conspiratorial agent(s). In conversation with recent ethnographies of conspiratorial agents who rather than being in tension or in an antagonistic relationship with state powers, align their discourse to official narratives, this paper examines the dynamic relationship between centre and margins, majority and minorities, empowered and precarious agents, below and above, in order to better account for the on the ground tensions shaping political subjectivities among far-right constituents in Brazil.