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Paper short abstract:

Conspiracy theory should be analysed as a cognitive project that explores "other" areas of knowledge that is often obscure and equally often speaks "truth" to power. It is a form of "truth" activism premised on a method of linking dots of disperse evidence, gravitating around distant centres.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the epistemology of "conspiracy theory", arguing that, as a theory, it requires attention to its own methods and forms of creating knowledge. The paper shows that conspiracy theory is premised on a method of linking-the-dots, where disperse events are sewn in in coherent narratives. I argue that "conspiracism" is not an ideology of rupture but a radical method of linking disperate dots of evidence. Thinking of it that way invites comparisons with our own epistemic thinking in anthropology. I thus also draw parallelisms between the very formation of anthropological and that of conspirational knowledge. The aim is to elucidate how they never conflict or converge but constitute separate realms, which might share a lot in common as cognitive projects that explore the alternative/the alter/the other/the unconventional. I suggest that conspirational thinking, like anthropology, gravitates around distant centers, arguing in different ways that "truth lies out there". This alloucentric phenomenon is important to acknowledge when assessing the alleged paranoia" of conspiracy theory. Like other forms of knowledge not raised to the recognition of academic scholarship, conspiracy theory, at least the way its pundits see it, is a form of truth-activism.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes conspiracy narratives within Turkish families of leftists revolutionaries affected by State violence. It shows how such narratives are cultural frameworks through which a practical knowledge of the State and experiences of political subjugation are conveyed through generations

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnography conducted in Istanbul, this paper analyzes the circulation and uses of conspiracy narratives within Turkish families of the leftist revolutionaries affected by State violence in the wake of the 1980-1983 coup. In the 1970s leftist movements had a considerable following in Turkey; following the coup they have been relegated to the margins of politics. Conspiracy narratives are interpretative-frames that circulate not only in leftist circles, but also in the wider Turkish public: the social and political life of the Turkish Republic has been marked by real or alleged conspiracies since its birth, reflecting both a top-down and bottom-up frames. Since the 1990s, conspiracies have become a synonym for power, and public opinion has become the "detective" of the "Deep-State". Recently, the AKP government has resorted to conspiracy theories to justify its authoritarianism.

My aim isn't to offer a study their circulation in the public sphere, but to analyze their uses within the family environment. By setting aside a true/false dichotomies, conspirational narratives can be seen as social practices conveying family and political values. I will show how they are cultural frameworks, through which a practical knowledge of the State, and a belief in the impossibility of challenging the "system", are conveyed. Together with cynicism and disillusion, conspirational narratives in leftist families offer "structures of sentiment", which shapes domestic life and political subjectivity. Their appropriation or rejection are crucial to comprehend how people experience the State, and how biographical experiences of political subjugation are conveyed through generations

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines "conspiracy consciousness" in Cyprus through a case study: the theft of the body of a former president from his grave in 2009. Examining theories and counter-theories of conspiracy surrounding this event in the press, I reconsider the meaning of "local context."

Paper long abstract:

This paper begins from the theft of the body of Tassos Papadopoulos, former president of the Republic of Cyprus, from his grave in December 2009. Stories of this event radiate in many directions from the figure of Papadopoulos, a paramilitary tactician and ethnonationalist politician regarded by many as paranoid; his presidency began with a vigorous campaign to defeat the Annan Plan for reunifying the island, which has been divided into Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot regions since the war in 1974. The theft of Papadopoulos's body one year after his death attracted intense public speculation, including widespread accusations against Turkish Cypriots and Turkish nationals later determined to be false when members of an organized crime family were convicted of the crime. This paper works through some of this speculation, tracing theories and counter-theories about the theft of the President's body published in the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot press in the months afterward to other "conspiracy theories" about the division of Cyprus that have circulated in oral and published forms for the last forty years. In thus crossing time, borders, languages, fields of discourse, and forms of expertise, this paper examines pathways and tactics of "conspiracy theory" in Cyprus in relation to Cypriots' knowing and critical consciousness of it. This meta-epistemological perspective entails a reconsideration of what anthropologists mean by "local context" when we contextualize conspiracy theory. Ultimately, I argue against any stable distinction between "conspiracy theory" and social theory on epistemological, ethical, or political grounds.

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Paper short abstract:

Do people really believe in conspirations? Do they really not know better? Or can we imagine conspiracies as comforting fetishes, as 'beliefs without believers'? This paper attempts to answer these questions by exploring the outlaw biker anti-establishment narratives and those who subscribe to them.

Paper long abstract:

Outlaw motorcycle clubs (OMC) have grown rapidly in the last two decades, especially across Europe - due to a skilful marketing of their rebellious image, and to the increasing inequality and resentment felt by parts of the population. Labelled by law enforcement agencies as violent organized crime groups, OMCs have become a visible internal public enemy. Increased pressures from law enforcement contributed to outlaw bikers developing new strategies of legitimizing their informal power. Among others, the self-proclaimed apolitical rebels turned into influential conspiratory anti-establishment truth-tellers. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among outlaw bikers in Europe, this paper maps this strand of anti-establishment narratives familiar from movements such as Bikers for Trump, finding a parallel expression in anti-Merkel biker initiatives, while formulating a theory of the structure of belief at play here. Some ascribe belief in conspiracy theories to cognitive blunders, irrationality, or online echo chambers, or correlate it with anomia, insecurity of employment, lack of interpersonal trust, and while both relevant, I argue that we must ask a more fundamental question: do people really believe in these conspirations? My material shows that this is rarely the case; they know very well that what they peddle has little to do with 'truth'. Conspiracy beliefs thus exhibit the structure of a 'belief without believers', and hence are better understood as a form of fetish (an embodiment of this disavowal) that comforts, an embodiment of the lie that enables one to sustain the unbearable 'truth' - the truth of one's socio-economic subordination and powerlessness.

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Paper short abstract:

The very essence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity involves the opposition to Catholicism. As a response to this comes the attitude of "better the Turkish turban than the Pope's tiara" in Greece.

Paper long abstract:

The very essence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity involves the ideological opposition to Catholicism in Greece. As a response to this comes the attitude of "better the Turkish turban than the Pope's tiara". The "West" as a whole is thus demonized in Greece, because the Orthodox perceive the whole of Western Europe as Catholic. For a hard core of at least 100,000 Orthodox in Greece, the European Union in particular is seen as the "State of Antichrist" in asccordance with the interpretation of the Revelation of John in the Bible. The preparation for the Summer Olympics of 2004 brought Greece to a situation of rapid socioeconomic change, with an emphasis on the retrieval of the classical past, an ambiance which paradoxically boosted and revitalized Eastern Orthodox Christianity as a reaction to the "atheism" of the invading West. With the advent of economic crisis in Greece in 2010 and in recent years, the negative attitude towards Europe has prevailed and strengthened the position of those people who support the move that is known as "Grexit", the exit of Greece from the European Monetary Union.

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This paper explores the theory of intentional depopulation shared by supporters of the 'Anonymous' movement in Britain. It argues that the theory is an analogical response to real crises of social and biological reproduction that have deepened in Britain since 2010.

Paper long abstract:

As a loose assembly of hackers, activists, and marginalized persons, Anonymous proclaims a populist message. Adherents maintain that 'anyone can be Anonymous', that it has no limiting ideology nor doctrine. In practice, those most committed to the movement in Britain share a theory of the world known as the 'Depopulation Agenda' or 'Agenda 21'. Drawing on a UN resolution passed in 1992 to address the threat of climate change, Agenda 21 in their conceptualisation is a project by the world's rich and powerful to depopulate the world by around six and a half billion people. The internet provides an important resource for this theory, as it enables the marshalling of various forms of documentary, visual, and audio-visual 'evidence' for the existence of mass existential threat.

Rather than deconstructing the flawed epistemological bases on which the theory rests, I offer that the fear of organized depopulation is an analogical response to real crises of social and biological reproduction that have deepened in Britain since 2010. Drawing on Orlando Patterson's concept of 'social death', the paper argues that Anonymous in Britain arises from experiences of invisibility that have been aggravated by precaritization and austerity policies. Social death is fundamentally a symbolic state, a position outside a hierarchy of value; yet it is also tacitly connected to biological death, as those outside a sphere of recognition might not benefit from life-giving institutional protections. Agenda 21 thus becomes a way for Anons to rationalize the social and biological risks that invisibility can produce.

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Paper short abstract:

This essay will explore the emerging politics of 'Love-Jihad', an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory embedded in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. I show how these campaigns move from the realm of 'theory' to gain the status of 'absolute truth' through strategic dissemination among the urban poor.

Paper long abstract:

This essay will explore the emerging politics of 'Love-Jihad', an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory embedded in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. According to the Hindu right-wing rhetoric disseminated through a range of state and non-state platforms (including public lectures, pamphlets, intelligence reports, legal dictates and media debates), 'Love-Jihad' entails the seduction, marriage, forced conversion and trafficking of vulnerable Hindu women by affluent Muslim men. This conspiracy is definitively linked to Islamic terror groups that ostensibly fund this covert war against Indian Hinduism. While right-wing groups constantly develop strategies to counter this menace, 'Love-Jihad' is positioned as a great threat to the integrity of the imagined Hindu nation. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the slums of Mumbai, a site for many inter-religious love affairs, sexual unions and marriages. I show how the slumdwellers' persistent use of anecdotal 'evidence' about deceit in these interpersonal liaisons, can displace allegedly conspiratorial practices from the realm of 'theory' (a flexible hypothesis with the potential to be challenged), and place them in the domain of 'unfalsifiable fact' (where it occupies the state of absolute truth). I contend that well-publicised conspiracy theories tend to gain political currency in poor neighbourhoods. These forms of anti-Muslim campaigns are stable, creative and more convincing than the fleeting and outrageous content of rumours and local gossip, and can generate widespread public paranoia by speedily fastening quotidian love choices and marriage practices, to an illusory national crisis.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores antifeminist conspiracy theories by scientists about gender mainstreaming, the liberalization of gender relationships and gender studies, based on a discourse analysis (Jäger 2009) and expert-interviews.

Paper long abstract:

In the course of rising neo-conservatism, in Germany gender mainstreaming, the liberalization of gender relationships and also Gender Studies have recently become the target of critique by scientists of different fields, among them biologists, sociologists, philosophers and economists. The critics, often renowned professors, stage themselves as enlighteners fighting for rationalism and against the endangerment of science, freedom of speech, and the society as a whole by "genderism". Conspiracy theories form a vital core of their argumentation: Political actors, feminists and gender researchers are thought of plotting to suppress men, promote homosexuality, convert society, create the "unisex"-human and to establish a totalitarian regime. Such texts have been received by mass media and gained power of interpretation because the scientific discourse level functions, as Arnold Gehlen (1957) has stated, as "super-structure", as an untestable final justification. How does conspirational thinking manifests itself in the text of gender-critic scientists? What narratives and argumentation figures do they employ, and from which epistemological standpoint do they speak? Inhowfar are their conspiracy theories about "genderism" interwoven with historical antifeminism, and how are they connected with current discourses among new far-right groups and parties? These questions I will explore based on a discourse analysis (based on Jäger 2009) of texts of gender-critics within the scientific community as well as interviews with spokespersons from expert associations.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between conspiracy thinking and Christian faith by examining how Orthodox Romanians made sense of two topical events happened in the autumn 2015 in Bucharest: the fire of the Colectiv nightclub, and the street demonstrations occurring a few days after it.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the production of conspiracy theories among Orthodox Romanians starting from a specific question: in what ways are conspiracy thinking and Christian faith related? On October 30th 2015, the Bucharest nightclub Colectiv took fire during a hard-rock concert, causing the death of 64 people and the injury of other two-hundred, mostly youngsters. In the following days, inquiries were started to evaluate the responsibilities of the owners for not having respected safety measures, and of the city district administration, which, in turn, did not carry out inspections properly. Nevertheless, for some Christian-Orthodox priests and believers the reasons behind such tragic event resided elsewhere: it was God's will to punish those who evoke the evil by performing or celebrating satanist rock music.

Conspiracy theories and Christian cosmologies reinforce one another as are both grounded on the idea that there is an underlying, unknown plan explaining what happens on the surface, that is, in the everyday life. This becomes clear not just when believers try to make sense of tragic events like the fire of Colectiv, but also when it comes to understand the political conflicts occurring after it, as for the case of the street demonstrations going on in the main cities of the country for a whole week. By looking at how Orthodox Christians attempt to find an explanation for what happens around them, I will argue that today's renewed attention towards conspiratorial rationalities should be accompanied by equal attention towards the religious and sociopolitical context where these are produced.

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Paper short abstract:

The 911 truth movement argues that the World Trade Center was an 'inside job' by elements inside the US military. This paper discusses how Truther academics attempt plausibility by deploying scientific discourse and authority as a new kind of evidential practice.

Paper long abstract:

The 911 truth movement argues that the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center was an 'inside job' using explosives, led by rogue elements inside the US military/security establishment. This paper discusses how Truther scientists deploy evidence to prove the conspiracy using peer reviewed open access journals, the Truthers own Journal of 911 Studies and other ostensibly scientific forums discussing architecture, engineering, chemical reactions, building fires and controlled demolition, in order to build '911 theory'. Cultural relativism, 'understanding' and empathy with informants and vulnerable groups may be desirable, including 911 Truthers, but what about the Truther scientists who clearly cherry-pick evidence and disregard canons of plausibility? Where is the limit? Are we left with 'anything goes'?