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R O S A N A P I N H E I R O ‐ ­M A C H A D O A N D L U C I A S C A L C O

Humanising fascists? Nuance as an

anthropological responsibility

A few months before the presidential election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the news-
paper 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 ordi-
nary 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 phenome-
non 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 politi-
cal 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, how-
ever, could not be situated on any side of such an empathic divide. Consequently, some

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2021) 0, 0 1–8. © 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals
LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
doi:10.1111/1469-8676.13048
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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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 conser-
vative 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 profes-
sional 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, argu-
ing that nuance is an anthropological responsibility in times of democratic collapse.

Three lenses

Longitudinal perspective

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 eco-
nomic, political and social crisis –­and experiencing a boom of youth social move-
ments –­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 interlocu-
tors 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 cau-
tioned 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

© 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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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 dis-
tribute soap and food to his poorer neighbours.
As Fabian put it, ‘the production of knowledge occurs in a public forum of inter-
group, interclass [and international] relations’ (1983: 144). Thus, the temporal con-
struction 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 sup-
port 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.

Holistic approach

Current ethnographies on the new authoritarian and/or populist turn have focused
on different perspectives and deployed disparate research formats. Some anthropolo-
gists 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).

© 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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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 con-
versations, 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 dif-
ferent 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 encoun-
tered more ambiguous than homogeneous political identities. For several months
during the campaign, most of our interlocutors flirted with different sides of the ideo-
logical 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 conser-
vative men and feminist women. Outside the interviews, however, we encountered
Bolsonarist young conservative men saying they supported legal abortion and con-
demned the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff as a misogynistic coup. We heard pro-
gressive 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

© 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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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.

Multiple points of view

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 adhe-
sion to far‐­right discourse. We now had a clearer picture of the effects of social inclu-
sion 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 under-
stand 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 ‘multi-
plying 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 patri-
archy 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, affec-
tion 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.

© 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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Nuance in public ethnography

Understanding far‐­right activists has long been a fundamental endeavour of anthro-

pologists, 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 elec-
tions 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 real-
ity. Nuance is an ethical and public responsibility of anthropologists in times of demo-
cratic 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: trans-
forming 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, espe-
cially in a context in which mainstream political analysis was still parroting the institu-
tional 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 knowl-
edge 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

© 2021 The Authors. Social Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of European Association of Social Anthropologists.
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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 anthro-
pological 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 per-
spective, 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.

Acknowledgements

We thank Lucas Bulgarelli, Eduardo Dullo, Cristina Marins, Tatiana Vargas‐­Maia and
Fabricio Pontin for their insightful comments and generosity during dramatic pan-
demic times.

Rosana Pinheiro‐­Machado
Social and Policy Sciences
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
rpm47@bath.ac.uk

Lucia Scalco
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul 90040‐­060
Brazil
lucia@coletivomdc.org

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