Paper short abstract

Ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec led me to emphasize evolutions in partisan polarization as well as Quebec’s relationships with a wide variety of political spaces and cultural traditions. This enabled me to question received knowledge about my field site and context.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I will show how my ethnographic fieldwork at the Parliament of Quebec led me in an initially unexpected theoretical direction that coincidentally and simultaneously became a way to raise questions not asked during partisan political debates. By chance, I ended up focusing simultaneously on the interactions in practice between (1) a context-specific evolution in political polarization and (2) the manifestations of the parliament’s relationships with a plurality of political spaces or cultural traditions. Both of these matters were observable ethnographically. Firstly, during my fieldwork, I saw how Quebec’s parliamentary polarization evolved from two political parties on opposing sides of a singular constitutional cleavage to four elected parties representing an ever-expanding multiplicity of cleavages depending on the immediate political context or the specific issue under debate. Secondly, the Parliament provided me with a vantage point on the intersections of Quebec’s historical and present-day relationships with the rest of Canada, the Commonwealth, the Francophonie and, less systematically, with other parts of the world. By theoretically comparing Quebec to initially counterintuitive parts of the world—Europe, international organizations—I was able to produce anthropological knowledge that complemented the polarized partisan debates within my immediate (parliamentary) field site and questioned received knowledge about my broader cultural context.

Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork in a French digital ethics committee, this article examines how institutional ethics aimed at combating polarisation might reproduce the tensions it seeks to resolve around democratic norms and expertise, state legitimacy and knowledge politics, and cultural universalism.

Paper long abstract

Through both their political history and the practices they enable, digital technologies have proven to be vectors of polarization as well as tools for commoning. This ambivalence became especially manifest during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly concerning knowledge production and its translation into public policy. The health crisis also sparked strong opposition to digital technologies for epidemiological or social surveillance.

This paper draws on over two years of fieldwork (October 2019 - December 2021) within a French national digital ethics committee, created just before the pandemic began. Along with various other European initiatives, this committee promotes "ethical" or "human-centered" digital technologies, frequently presented as alternatives to dystopian models of state surveillance or surveillance capitalism.

Yet the way this committee presents ethics as a tool against polarization masks fundamental tensions that become manifest as members collectively draft opinions addressing, for example, ethical issues raised by telemedicine during the pandemic or digital tools for deconfinement. These tensions sometimes echo the polarization that the ethical approach claims to overcome: in the democratic construction of norms, in the relationships between politics and knowledge, and in the articulation between culturally situated values and universalist claims.

This ethnographic presentation of ethics-in-the-making highlights its ambiguities and internal tensions – made especially obvious by the context in which this committee was built. This detour through institutional ethics offers a sidestep to extend questions that have run through anthropology's history. Indirectly, it questions the possibility of opposing growing polarization without reproducing forms of domination.

Paper short abstract

This paper stems from the context of organising an exhibition and its subsequent display in Lisbon. The aim is to reflect on the polarised ideas and very different discourses about Portuguese colonialism and the myths that are still associated with it today.

Paper long abstract

This paper stems from an exhibition in Lisbon that aimed to reflect on polarised ideas and the various discourses surrounding Portuguese colonialism.

The exhibition formed part of the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Carnation Revolution, which took place on 25 April 1974. These commemorations celebrated the end of the colonial war, the liberation of peoples under colonial administration, and political democratisation in 2024.

The exhibition, titled Deconstructing Colonialism, Decolonising the Imaginary, opened at the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon in October 2024 and ran until March 2026.

The exhibition has been reported on in the media, primarily in newspapers and magazines. However, it has been noticed in some articles that the content and critical tone of the exhibition have not always been well received. Some articles reveal significant unease regarding criticisms of Portuguese colonialism, slavery, sexual violence, the colonial war and the difficulty of accessing citizenship for much of the colonised population. Moreover, criticism of this exhibition, as well as hatred and discrimination, is most often expressed in an extreme way on social media and blogs.

The current moment, with the rise of far-right movements and political parties across Europe, has contributed to this polarisation and the return of myths. Furthermore, street demonstrations inciting violence and hatred against populations of African descent or immigrant populations have been organised.

This context, which considers Europe and beyond, prompts urgent reflection, to which anthropology can make a significant contribution.