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Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with far-right voters in Brazil, this paper examines some of the ethical and methodological challenges of engaging with ‘uncomfortable’ others. It examines tensions with anthropological ‘orthodoxy’ and advances an anthropology attentive to urgent sociopolitical concerns.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on long-term fieldwork with far-right voters in Brazil to examine the theoretical and methodological challenges anthropologists encounter when engaging with ‘uncomfortable’ others. While the study of alterity is foundational to anthropological theory and practice, relations with alterity are often informed by ideas of mutual constitution that are unsettled by certain ‘others’. Focusing on far-right subjectivities, the paper interrogates the relative scarcity of ethnographic studies of the far right, arguing that it falls outside prevailing anthropological orthodoxy and thus constitutes a form of ambiguous alterity that raises both ethical and methodological dilemmas. The discussion illuminates some of the tensions and difficulties involved in navigating discomfort in the field, while suggesting that discomfort itself can be a productive starting point for expanding the field of phenomena and questions anthropologists engage with. In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on discomfort in anthropological research and advances an anthropology of the full spectrum (Goodale 2021), one attuned to some of the most urgent sociopolitical concerns of our time.