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Paper short abstract

Amid the rise of a far-right oikumene and its version of multipolarity, this paper examines anthropology beyond the metropolis. From Brazil, it analyzes bolsonarismo’s impact on post-redemocratization anthropology and compares approaches to the far right in Brazil and the Global North.

Paper long abstract

Anthropology has long been shaped, at both institutional and discursive levels, by geopolitical processes - from colonialism and decolonization to the Cold War and neoliberal globalization. Internally, it has been differentiated across projects of nation-state formation, theoretical lineages, and anthropologists’ embodied positionality. Today, this entanglement is being reconfigured under a new geopolitical dispensation marked by the global rise of a far-right oikumene and a deepening crisis of liberal-democratic orders. This conjuncture unsettles established anthropological commitments and demands renewed reflexivity regarding the discipline’s political and epistemological stakes. It has displaced the South–North axis that structured earlier debates on decolonization and multipolarity, while reactivating the ideological divide between left and right. Within this configuration, multipolarity has itself been appropriated by the right through the language of “zones of influence.”

This paper examines these shifts from Brazil’s standpoint. It revisits anthropology’s repositioning in public discourse after redemocratization and analyzes the challenges posed by the rise of bolsonarismo as a mass movement. It asks how this phenomenon has strained anthropology’s dominant alignment with human-rights-based and multiculturalist grammars of alterity. The argument unfolds through a dialogue with Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, particularly his notions of perspectivism and relationism. How can anthropological critique help resist the erosion of liberal democracy in Brazil while remaining attentive to the limits of liberal humanism and multiculturalism? And how does the anthropology of the far right in Brazil converge with, or diverge from, frameworks predominant in what was once called the “Global North”?