Anthropology of the far right: What if we like the ‘unlikeable’ others?

Abstract

Drawing on her own experience of studying the far right, the author discusses the recent tendency to establish far‐right activists and supporters as anthropology’s new ‘exotic others’. Three main tools of ‘exoticization’ and ‘othering’ are described, which the author deems to be co‐responsible for the peculiar status of the subject of the far right within the discipline. She relates these tools to three research steps: ‘naming’, ‘locating’ and ‘explaining’. In providing her own reflections on these problems and relating them to the literature on the subject, the author attempts to shed some light on the growing presence of various far‐right extremisms and to show the ways in which the study of the far right reflects some broader problems that anthropology and anthropologists have been addressing in recent years.