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Humanising fascists? Nuance as an anthropological responsibility

2021; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1469-8676.13048

1469-8676

Rosana Pinheiro‐Machado, Lúcia Mury Scalco,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

A few months before the presidential election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the newspaper El País published a report entitled 'Nor fascists, neither teleguided: who are the "Bolsonarist" people from the periphery of Porto Alegre?' (El País 2018), which was based on our ethnography among voters of the far-right candidate in the favela of Morro da Cruz. The article contributes an in-depth story that narrated the grievances and hopes of our interlocutors, who were introduced to the public in a thoughtful manner. The voters were contextualised and presented in their local settings. They were not portrayed as stupid or essentially depraved human beings. They were ordinary low-income people – the oppressed who should supposedly support the other side of the ideological spectrum. In terms of public reaction, the piece was less accessed and read than the editors expected in comparison with the newspaper's metrics on similar electoral reports. Moreover, although we were expecting a negative reaction from the far right, we could not anticipate the backlash from progressive and academic circles. Some of our peers suggested that we were inventing a 'Bolsonarist phenomenon that was residual', 'giving voice to monsters' and ultimately 'humanising fascists'. The context we are presenting there was unacceptable, awful and repugnant: it should be swept under the rug. Anthropology emerged at the turn of the 20th century through the study of the most vulnerable groups in the world system using an intersubjective process that seeks alterity and promotes translation of categories and meanings, arguing in favour of the full humanity, de-essentialist attributes and the cognitive complexity of the Other. Although the study of non-vulnerable or perpetrators of oppression are not new in our discipline, anthropologists in the 21st century are increasingly facing the challenge of studying the 'the enemy': the people we tend not to like (Gusterson 2017; Pasieka 2019), those who act against diversity, human rights and all fundamental principles of justice on which our discipline has been structured. In this research context, should we simply throw away our humanising and anti-essentialist professional endeavour? Dullo (2016) argues that research subjects tend to be taken 'seriously enough' when there is sympathy between the ethnographer's and the native's moral principles. When approaching the repugnant Other (Harding 1991), who has a different political stance from the researcher, anthropologists suspect and denounce them. Dullo's argument about the natives whom anthropologists tend to like or not like presents an implicit question of power, symmetry and studying down/up. Our ethnography, however, could not be situated on any side of such an empathic divide. Consequently, some of the key questions that our work raises are: what happens when the line between the horrendous fascist and the vulnerable native becomes increasingly blurred? What happens when we notice that the enemy and the oppressed are the same subject and, as Mazzarella (2019) put it, common sense can be ugly and hard to swallow? These are some of the questions that this short article aims to raise in this forum. We outline a reflection on the anthropological responsibility in the study of the conservative subjectivity among the poor. We stick with long-standing methodological values that have structured our discipline, namely relativism, which is about putting facts in perspective. It is not a matter of nihilism or advocacy. 'Humanising fascists [sic]', thus, does not imply transforming them into adorable subjects, but intelligible ones. The risk of this task is realising they are similar or close to us, which might be an indigestible and disturbing fact. That said, this is not an essay on relativism, but on the professional and political ethics of portraying far-right supporters as complex and ambiguous individuals; they do not exist in a vacuum, but in entanglements of relationships and adversities in a wider structural context and dynamic changing process. This essay has two principal goals. First, we outline a methodological reflection on our fieldwork in the periphery of Porto Alegre. We present three possible lenses through which we examine the authoritarian turn, especially among subaltern groups: longitudinal, holistic and multiple perspectives, which together add layers of nuance and complexity to the understanding of the rise of conservative subjectivity and de-essentialise far-right identities. Subsequently, we conclude by raising questions about the contribution of such detailed ethnographic knowledge to the public debate, arguing that nuance is an anthropological responsibility in times of democratic collapse. We started our ethnography in 2009 and finalised it in 2012, with a follow-up in 2014. At the end of 2016, when Brazil was going through a major multidimensional economic, political and social crisis – and experiencing a boom of youth social movements – we returned to the field site to check how these uncertain times were affecting our interlocutors. To our surprise, a significant proportion of our former interlocutors were already fascinated with the figure of Jair Bolsonaro, who came to power in October 2018. In another article, we framed these two moments of fieldwork amid economic growth and recession as 'hope' and 'hate', respectively, although we cautioned that these categories were not totalising, since there was 'hate and hope' and 'hope in hate' (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2020). In a previous paper (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2020), we told the story of Milton (46), one of our key interlocutors, who had a tragic life story because he emerged from the rubble in a favela landslide. He acquired his first house in 2012, under the Workers' Party (PT) Administration and policies of facilitating credit to the poor. He was an example of a generous community leader and gave shelter to abandoned pets. In the peak of social crises in 2015, drug dealers expelled his family from the house and took it for themselves. In 2018, Milton became a passionate Bolsonarist because he believed that the country needed authority and a radical change. He despised PT as a corrupt party. In 2020, Milton was disappointed with Bolsonaro's measures to fight coronavirus. During the pandemic crisis, he engaged in community campaigns to distribute soap and food to his poorer neighbours. As Fabian put it, 'the production of knowledge occurs in a public forum of intergroup, interclass [and international] relations' (1983: 144). Thus, the temporal construction of our object is an ideological and political act: the politics of the time. If we had carried out our fieldwork only in times of hope or hate, it would be easy to freeze our research subjects in opposite stereotypes, namely the good or the bad poor. We have no doubt that we would have encountered a good audience for these romanticised or demonised constructs. In times of 'hope', it was common to come across media reports celebrating the new consumer citizens of Lula's policies of financial inclusion, the subjects that symbolised Brazil as an emerging democratic country. If we had not returned to the field, people like Milton would have remained fixed in time as the empowered poor. They would remain untouched, meeting social fantasies about the desired poor. Alternatively, if we had conducted our research only in times of 'hate', it would have been simple to confine our interlocutors' identity on the other side of the pendulum. It would be easy to frame some of them, especially the white male men, as the new fascists, and this would also meet the eagerness for a straw-man target for our frustrations. The fact that the good and the bad poor were exactly same subjects is disturbing. It complicates matters and adds several layers of complexity, unfreezing subjects and melting stereotypes over time beyond the social expectation for binarism. Now we must face ambiguous individuals as well as the changeability and dynamic nature of humans. Now the poor are merely ordinary people. One of the anthropological lessons for the study of the far right in the long term is to understand that rage sedimentation is a process; it is an emotion that gains robustness silently over time. While some part of the public debate reproduces essentialist views about the 'fascist nature' of people and blames the pobre de direita (the right-wing poor person) for Bolsonaro's election, the anthropological responsibility to the public remains to be to denaturalise essential attributes attached to various human groups. Agreeing with Kalb, we understand that it is mistaken to assume 'nationalistic populism as something deeply rooted and more or less a constant historical force among particular populations' (2011: 11). The support for authoritarian politicians is a contingent process 'synchronized with political cycles and events' (2011: 11). A priori fascists do not exist, but people are subjected to authoritarian promises of a brighter and safer future as they suffer from several layers of vulnerability, democratic failures, state abandonment and dispossession. Current ethnographies on the new authoritarian and/or populist turn have focused on different perspectives and deployed disparate research formats. Some anthropologists have carried out ethnography in the context in which politics is dramatised, for instance, demonstrations (Kalil 2018; Pasieka 2019) and online engagement (Cesarino 2019). Others – like us – have focused on ordinary and/or low-income people in their everyday settings (Balthazar 2017; Bulgarelli 2020; Kalb 2011). A consequence of doing traditional community-style ethnography is that our understanding of far-right adhesion among the poor cannot be detached from other dimensions of everyday life (e.g. family, social networks, leisure and the economy). We also followed our interlocutors online to broaden – and even to blur – the narrative about them. We were having coffee and watching TV in a couple's house when we witnessed an argument in which the wife (Joice, 42 years old) manifested her despise for Bolsonaro, and the husband (Marco, 52 years old) disagreed. If we had met Marco online and read the posts and memes he posted on Facebook, it would be possible to conclude he was a conservative, punitivist, anti-PT and hyper-individualistic person. But another part of his profile was devoted to the collective, by voluntarily teaching people with disabilities and vulnerable children in the community. In everyday conversations, he seemed to be much more open to discussing sexuality matters than his online persona. He also commented about past PT administrations in a less critical way. Because we were following people like Marco online and offline, we noticed how different identities were being activated according to the relational context. Encapsulating Marco in a far-right identity is a form of anthropology that goes to the field site merely to validate pre-conceived assumptions. Thus, we reject a simplistic conclusion that his online self was 'truer' than his offline self. They were both part of the same, relational, political subjectivity that was being negotiated, tested and formed. When Rosaldo (1991) mentioned that the process of knowing involves the whole self, he was referring to anthropologist's emotions in the understanding of how rage is socially constructed. But the same could be said about our interlocutors' subjectivity. Kleinman et al. (2011) pointed out that, in times of drastic change, Chinese people could operate with a divided political self: the entrepreneurial (related to neoliberal rationality) and the patriot self (aligned with the Communist Party). Following the perspective that people hold multifaceted, divided political belongings, we encountered more ambiguous than homogeneous political identities. For several months during the campaign, most of our interlocutors flirted with different sides of the ideological divides. Sometimes, this apparently contradictory political view represented a very coherent worldview that perceived the need for a patriarchal national saviour, and this could be either Lula or Bolsonaro. Sometimes, there was no apparent coherence at all; people expressed ambiguous ideas and changed their minds in a dynamic way. Political ambiguities became apparent on several occasions. For example, we conducted focus groups among young people, encouraging debates between conservative men and feminist women. Outside the interviews, however, we encountered Bolsonarist young conservative men saying they supported legal abortion and condemned the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff as a misogynistic coup. We heard progressive young feminists endorsing punitive discourses, such as the defence of the death penalty. One of the most curious cases about political ambiguities was Maninho, who had strong links with both the drug trafficking and funk cultural movement. Both were thematic constituted key targets of Bolsonaro. Maninho wrote several funk songs with high pornographic content. Yet, like many other people from his group, he became a Bolsonarist because 'it was necessary to defend the family values'. It is not the case here to explore why those people decided – or not – to vote for Bolsonaro. Most of the time, they had arguments related to their life trajectories marked by hardship, religious belongings and everyday violence. The point here is simply to argue in favour of a nuanced knowledge that cannot be lost. Ambiguities are signals of our complex and reflexive subjectivity. We should look at these nuances in a positive way, understanding subjects are not coherent static entities but malleable subjects that change over time – and this has a political and practical value. Returning to the field site during 'hate' times demanded us to look at intersectional layers of inequality to which people were subjected, in order to understand the adhesion to far-right discourse. We now had a clearer picture of the effects of social inclusion policies of the Lula era on the community, and how they empowered women and men differently. In the 2010s, poor women gained access to finance credit and some autonomy. Additionally, the so-called fourth wave of feminism has been fostered by social media and empowered female youth from low-income communities. The male vote for Bolsonaro should be understood within this context and taking into account a wider web of social relationships. The conservative memes and fake news that arrived in our male interlocutors' cell phones made sense in a perceived changing world in which they felt they had lost both moral and economic authority. We can better understand how a young man voted for Bolsonaro when we witness them debating with same-age girls, and losing the debates. The male conservative turn was a relational everyday process vis-à-vis new female political subjects that now raised their voices to talk about national politics. To study male voters, we employed Dullo's methodological suggestion of 'multiplying the points of view being analysed …. We should seek to describe and analyse the perspective of a number of Natives, and especially how they see and interact with each other' (2016: 146). Such an approach released us from the burden of being in a constant vigilant posture of 'relativising' far-right voters, which could, therefore, lead us to a nihilistic perspective. As educated, white, middle-class studying the white and black poor, we are aware of our positionality as well as our responsibility in contextualising how poverty and political engagements were mutually constituted. Yet at the same time, listening to the women – the voters' wives, daughter, schoolmates – enabled us to find grounds of identification in the fieldwork as well as to perceive male voters as the oppressed and oppressors alike. The class dimension was crucial to situate them in a structural context of vulnerability; gender dimension, in turn, uncovered how patriarchy aligned with conservative politics to operate as an extra layer of oppression for poor women. Moreover, understanding the authoritarian turn from multiple points of view is also helpful to broaden the lenses to interpret not only a specific community but also current world politics at large. Focusing on the winners of elections is an important part of the story, the hegemonic one, but it is not the whole story. In the community, young girls did not stand with Bolsonaro. Many of them had not yet achieved the minimum age to vote. They belong to a new generation of young feminists rising in Latin America and contest the neoliberal, authoritarian and conservative rule. From an anthropological perspective, focusing on the girls' everyday forms of solidarity, affection and resistance helps to avoid totalising and fatalistic interpretations of the current authoritarian turn. From a political perspective, this is essential to reimagining world versions and new utopic scenarios of hope. Understanding far-right activists has long been a fundamental endeavour of anthropologists, who seek to understand the perspective of 'the enemy'. What we did was something different but complementary to these efforts. We have been investigating how authoritarianism gains the majority of the population through democratic elections by mobilising consensus in a common-sense among ordinary citizens. We are not studying 'the enemy' per se, but those who were endorsing the discourse of – and eventually becoming – 'the enemy'. To do so, we deployed longitudinal, holistic and multiple lenses to reflect on the rise of the far-right subjectivity. These lenses provide a multilayer perspective to analyse a polarised context. The pursuit of nuance is a denial of dichotomic and frozen interpretations of reality. Nuance is an ethical and public responsibility of anthropologists in times of democratic collapse, even when this might be indigestible in the public debate, where certain audiences are eager to burn a straw man. The political subjectivity of low-income people who supported the far right is far more complex than essential attributes that dehumanise and essentialise them. While we cannot ignore the fact that voting for Bolsonaro culminated in him winning the presidency, and subsequent crimes against humanity, it helps little to blame the poor for their choices. At the end of the day, police violence, and the lack of decent housing, potable water, transportation, education and health system remain. In this context, the anthropological commitment of telling modest but complex stories is more important than ever. In a practical sense, it demands us to leave the office and dispute narratives: straight from the fieldwork to public. The urgency of the times compelled us to do what Fassin (2020) calls as public ethnography, namely opening our data to public discussion and being both 'independent and indebted' to our research subjects. Politicisation of public ethnography, according to Fassin, means contributing to the debate by translating knowledge, but it also means action: transforming such a knowledge into practical orientations and decisions. Like many other scholars in Brazil (for example, Esther Solano and Isabela Kalil), we felt we had no choice but to immerse ourselves in the public debate during the 2018 elections, especially in a context in which mainstream political analysis was still parroting the institutional rationalised electoral interpretations, while what we had been witnessing on the ground was the opposite: an election of the collapse of an institutional system relying on emotions during a period of limbo. After the El País report on our research, Bolsonaro started growing steadily in the polls. We insisted on carving our anthropological view in the public sphere. We wrote articles for national and international newspapers, published popular books, gave interviews to media outlets, engaged in social media, participated in podcasts and TV shows, and gave talks worldwide. The scholars' efforts to speak outside of academia was not enough to change the electoral results, of course, but we achieved surprisingly positive responses after our first frustrating attempt. While anthropology-like knowledge might be useless for those who seek fascist caricatures, we understand there is a huge demand for everyday stories because Brazilians have no choice than to cohabit everywhere with Bolsonarists: parents, relatives, neighbours and workmates. Making this universe intelligible is also a form of coping. Nevertheless, these efforts of engaging in the public debate were somehow ironic. As we exposed our ideas, names and bodies arguing in favour of nuance, we encountered ever more extreme violent reactions from the far right, including activists moved by the fascist authoritarian impetus. While we have never felt at risk during our fieldwork, our public exposure limited our public circulation, challenged our mental health and ultimately threatened our lives. The line between our male interlocutors and the activists who persecuted us is fine and fragile. The more the scenario radicalises towards the far right, the more the former become aligned with the latter. In one of the online attacks that we suffered by rightist trolls, we noted that several offenders had similar demographic profiles to our interlocutors, which made us question the entire validity of our ethnographic work when we could only feel rage and despair. From the point of view of researchers' subjectivity, it may be less dramatic to do public ethnography to defend the values of the oppressed or to denounce the oppressor. But we were situated at some point in-between them. Yet, anthropology is not necessarily about advocacy. We stick with the argument that it is precisely in these contexts that the anthropological perspective of situating concrete subjects in time and space becomes even more important. The three lenses employed here show us that people change over time, have an ambiguous self and build their political motivations in a relational process. It is about the dynamic of human life, not about fixity. We must face the fact that 55.13% of the Brazilian population (57,796,986 people) endorsed an authoritarian candidate. From a political perspective, we cannot split Brazilian society in two; we cannot get rid of those people. If we want to foresee the recovery of Brazilian democracy, we must find grounds of a common world with those who remain open to change. We thank Lucas Bulgarelli, Eduardo Dullo, Cristina Marins, Tatiana Vargas-Maia and Fabricio Pontin for their insightful comments and generosity during dramatic pandemic times.