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This paper examines the contemporary significance of the honour/shame dyad within the discourses, bodily performances, and leadership styles of two prominent figures of the anti-feminist far right in Spain: Santiago Abascal (Vox) and Alvise Pérez (Se Acabó la Fiesta).

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the contemporary significance of the honour/shame dyad within the discourses, bodily performances, and leadership styles of two prominent figures of the anti-feminist far right in Spain: Santiago Abascal (Vox) —currently the third-largest political force in Spain by vote count— and Alvise Pérez (Se Acabó la Fiesta). While the "anthropology of the Mediterranean" traditionally framed honour and shame as moral regulators of kinship and local reputation, this proposal argues that these concepts are undergoing a powerful political revitalisation in the context of modern populism.

Drawing on previous research on the connections between nationalism and masculinity, I explore how this often-implicit relationship is being rendered visible through the rise of ultra-nationalist, masculinist and antifeminist politics close to the manosphere. These movements are spearheaded by leaderships rooted in a "traditional masculinity" that appeals directly to the protection and defence of national values against perceived threats. Such phenomena are difficult to comprehend without accounting for the affects they mobilise and the material bodies that embody them.

Through an analysis of Abascal and Alvise Pérez, I propose that honour serves as a core performative element that transcends individual performance. By examining discursive, material and affective dimensions, I argue that honour and shame aggregate networks of meaning that resonate deeply within the fields of gender and national sovereignty. Ultimately, the leader’s body becomes a site where abstract national honour is made tangible, transforming private moral codes into a collective, public affect that sustains the current far-right surge in Spain.

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This paper explores how honor is reinvented through neoliberal masculinity in Turkey, focusing on self-discipline, performance and digital cultures, and examining the continuity between global manosphere narratives and local masculine codes.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to examine contemporary processes of masculinity construction in the Turkish context through the transformation of honor, a central concept in Mediterranean anthropology, under neoliberal conditions. While classical literature defines honor as a moral and relational status that enables the social recognition of masculinity, this study argues that honor has increasingly shifted toward an ideal of masculinity grounded in individual discipline, continuous self-improvement, and performance.

Under structural conditions such as economic precarity, authoritarianism, and digitalization, masculinity has become less a stable social position and more a performative field requiring the constant management of the body, labor, time, and emotions. Everyday and digital spaces such as gyms, entrepreneurial discourses, military discipline, and online male communities emerge as key arenas where this new masculine ideal is taught, rehearsed, and displayed. In this context, honor is no longer primarily a moral value but is reconstituted through men’s capacity for self-discipline and the public recognition of this capacity.

Drawing on discourse analysis and cultural interpretation, the paper explores how neoliberal masculine performance is normalized in Turkey and how this process establishes continuity between global manosphere narratives and local codes of masculinity. This approach invites a rethinking of dominant narratives surrounding the “crisis of masculinity” and offers an anthropological perspective on how honor is being reinvented within contemporary masculine practices. Ultimately, the study suggests that rather than representing a rupture, current forms of masculinity gain continuity through the reconfiguration of honor across different social and symbolic arenas.

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Drawing on extended research among activists operating on both sides of the Mediterranean, this paper will explore the particular performances of Amazigh masculinity that accompany the fight for indigenous cultural rights and territorial self-determination, from martial militants to elder bards.

Paper long abstract

Since the 1980s, activists across North Africa and the diaspora have militated for the official recognition of the indigenous Amazigh language and culture and for resource and even territorial self-determination in their mountain and desert peripheries. While such activism has taken many forms and occurred in a variety of sites—from the classroom to the newsroom to the music studio to the stadium to the street—even engagement in the more discursive genres of composing poetry or novels or songs have brought activists into direct confrontation with state authorities and rival political groups. Drawing on extended research among activists operating on both sides of the Mediterranean, this paper will explore the particular gendered performances of Amazigh masculinity that accompany such contentious politics. It will trace how contemporary male activists link their militantism to a history of Amazigh resistance to occupying and colonial forces, sometimes portraying themselves and their actions in decidedly martial terms. The paper will argue how engagement in the transnational Amazigh movement has become, for some men, an active response to what is sometimes perceived by them to be a “crisis of masculinity” when, in the context of (post)colonial detribalization, emigration, under-employment, and rural precarity, traditionalized performances of “honor” have become disrupted. Moreover, it will longitudinally trace how such masculine performances change over the lifecourse, as individual men age out of certain forms of embodied confrontation and take on new roles within the movement as elder statesmen and the repository of historical knowledge.

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I reflect on my fieldwork in men-only events in Portugal, exploring what these communities mean by engaging in 'men’s work’ amidst physically and emotionally demanding activities. A moral boundary emerges: men who show up to confront their socialization by 'doing the work' and those who do not.

Paper long abstract

Over the last 1,5 year I have been participating in men-only events across Portugal, both as a man and an anthropologist. Men-only events span a wide and polymorphous spectrum of configurations. Seen from ‘inside’, they exist as discussion and sharing circles (so-called men’s circles), hikes in the nature, multi-day retreats in the countryside, meditation and fitness events, coaching sessions. Seen from ‘outside’, they impose different intersectional boundaries around the specific configuration of ‘man’ declared to be the ‘only’ one invited to join the ‘inside’: e.g., “GTB men” (gay-trans-bisexual men), “fathers and sons” or – by far the most common – “men” as a category mobilized without further specification. In Portugal, men-only events intersect diverse communities, ranging from digital nomads, expats, religious circles, queer groups, shamanic milieus, and short-term tourists.

In my presentation, I reflect on what these communities mean by engaging in what they commonly refer to as ‘doing men’s work’ – an extremely polymorphous spectrum of activities carried out with the intention of approaching masculinity and manhood as something that men themselves can and increasingly should work upon, something malleable and, to a degree, apt to redefinition. 'Doing men's work' is often physically, emotionally, interactionally challenging - it requires "sitting with the uncomfortable". Here, 'showing up to do the work’ exists a key moral distinction through which participants differentiate themselves from men who are perceived as unwilling to enter a space of male homosociality with "consciousness, presence, and intention" to confront themselves, their socialization, their past experiences.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a men-only “Ancient Leadership Retreat” in Greece, I analyze how Manosphere influencers translate ancient Greek idioms of honor into a pedagogy of masculine excellence and embed them in anti-egalitarian, misogynistic worldviews and parallel institutional networks.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the contemporary Manosphere interprets and circulates “Greek” idioms of manliness, virtue, and honour. Drawing on ethnographic research at a men-only “Ancient Leadership Retreat” in Greece, I analyze how a U.S. influencer with a Classics background trains an international cohort (Americans, Germans, Greeks, Brits, and Spaniards) in public speech, competitive debate, and “ancient virtue.” For participants, Greece functions as a charged pedagogical setting: Spartan and Athenian statesmen as well as Orthodox Church Fathers serve as moral exemplars that reimagine masculine performative excellence in the contemporary transnational Manosphere: confident public presence, vitality, and decisive action - coupled with misogynistic and anti-egalitarian views.

I first show how participants cast ancient Greece as a “masculinist utopia,” contrasted with allegedly feminized contemporary institutions that they describe as hostile to masculine excellence and responsible for men’s frustrations and precarity. Second, I trace how the ancient warrior-statesman is translated into the contemporary entrepreneur-investor who embodies the celebrated performative excellence: acting without permission, withstanding sanction (“cancellation”), and exiting mainstream institutions by building parallel ones. In this moral economy, the degraded opposite is the salaried employee - the “wagecuck” - imagined as dependent and unable to act freely. Finally, I argue that despite the rhetoric of individualism, these retreats cultivate community and infrastructure: networks, contacts, and mutual support make the ideals feel achievable.

The paper uses this rare ethnographic access to show how online ideology is converted into embodied practices: how misogyny and anti-egalitarianism become attached to “honor” and “virtue” through training and everyday interactions.

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Focusing on viral images of Israeli soldiers wearing women’s lingerie taken from Gazan homes and performing Jewish prayers in Palestinian mosques, I argue these are performances of sovereignty—gendered and religious transgressions shaped by the Jewish experience in the eastern Mediterranean.

Paper long abstract

Focusing on very widely circulated images of symbolically violent acts by Israeli soldiers, including viral images of Israeli soldiers wearing women’s lingerie and clothing taken from Gazan homes and performing Jewish prayers inside Palestinian mosques, I argue that these practices are not merely instances of individual deviance or cruelty, but performances of sovereignty, gendered and religious transgressions shaped by the Jewish experience in the eastern Mediterranean. This talk examines a volatile formation produced under conditions of seige warfare, territorial enclosure, and asymmetric sovereignty. Historically, Zionism sought to refashion the “diasporic Jew”, stereotyped in Europe as feminized, into a "New Jew", a sovereign, militarized, heterosexual male subject. The current mysoginistic drag performances by Israeli soldiers do not undo this project but radicalize it. The occupation of Palestinian women’s garments and Islamic ritual space becomes a site where the soldier enacts not only military dominance but symbolic jurisdiction over the categories of gender, sexuality, sanctity, and the domestic. These acts stage sovereignty itself as theatrical excess: the power not only to govern but to ‘play’ in these seige spaces, to profane, mock, and reorder moral worlds. These performances index layers of Jewish historical emasculation and its anxious overcompensation, the reappropriation of orientalist fantasies of Muslim spirituality, masculinity, and femininity, and the moral distortions characteristic of prolonged militarization. I further situates these practices within Israel’s contradictory regime, where liberal LGBTQ inclusion and supposed religious freedom is publicly mobilized as a marker of modernity and civilizational supremacy.