10. 4. 2026

Anthropology’s Populism Question: A Note on Studying Populism from Below

Our research project MEMPOP departs from a deceptively simple observation: most of what we know about populism comes from social scientific literature that focuses on the ‘top down’. Over the past two decades, political scientists have developed an increasingly differentiated set of tools for studying how populist actors construct and mobilise their political worlds. Some approach populism as a political strategy (Weyland 2017), others as a distinctive political style (Moffitt 2020), and others still as a “thin-centred ideology” that must attach itself to a host set of substantive commitments in order to acquire political traction (Mudde 2007; Mazzarella 2019). Despite their differences, these approaches share a common orientation: they analyse party platforms, elite discourses and rhetorics, and the strategic production of us and them binaries.

Emilia Palonen’s recent work on Hungary offers a good example of what this kind of analysis can achieve. Seeing populism as a mode of political articulation (Palonen 2025: 32), tracing how Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party moved through successive ‘populist dynamics’ from fringe challenger to mainstream hegemon, then to a position from which it could simply dismiss all critics as internal or external enemies, Palonen leads us through how political polarisation is produced through the repeated construction, and contestation of a frontier between ‘the people’ and its demonised others (Palonen 2025). Hers, at its core, is a story told from above, one focused on what Johana Wyss, setting out MEMPOP’s agenda, calls the supply side of populism.

The urgency that drives the growing inquiry about populism across several disciplines is inseparable from the broader historical conjuncture in which they arise. The return of populism as a global phenomenon has coincided with the unravelling of what Mazzarella calls the ‘liberal settlement’, the post-war Euro-Atlantic ideological consensus, that sought to reconcile liberal democratic norms with capitalist accumulation (Mazzarella 2019). That settlement, had been already badly strained by neoliberal restructuring, but in recent years it seems to have eroded with remarkable speed. Russian expansionism, from hybrid warfare in Georgia to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, along with the radical reorientation of American foreign and domestic policy under Trump, the consolidation of illiberal regimes across Europe, are increasingly seen as a structural dismantling of the Cold War geopolitical order, and with this, the existing status quo.

Studying populism in this political moment, with the Central and Eastern European geographic focus MEMPOP offers, comes with high moral and political stakes. MEMPOP wants to mobilise ethnographic research as a tool for a fuller understanding populist politics and the ensuing socio-political changes that have already challenged much of what we thought about traditional political divisions and the limits of possible alliances.

MEMPOP’s wager is that this supply-side dominance in the literature leaves unaddressed a number of key questions. Why and how does populism resonate? What does its success tell us about former elites and their failure? How does affect map onto political behaviour, and how do new political mobilisations challenge earlier forms of solidarities and divisions? The project turns to ethnography, offering to complicate broad-brush assumptions about the groups that mobilise around populist projects and actors. It asks, in essence: how do concrete mnemonic narratives pertain to populist agendas, and how do ordinary people relate to, react to, and make sense of the past in their own vernacular mnemonic practices?

These are important questions. But it is worth pausing over what it actually means to study populism “from below” or from the demand side. What happens to these categories once they are approached ethnographically? Asking this, I suggest, will help us reflect on our own assumptions and the cosmologies of our discipline. Who counts as a political actor, what counts as political knowledge, and where does the line between producing and consuming populist discourse run?

Wyss’s framing of MEMPOP’s contribution begins with the observation that anthropology has, until recently, had relatively little to say about populism, and especially about mnemonic populism. She argues that the discipline is uniquely placed to say more about the demand side, to scrutinise the affinities that populist mobilisation draws on, appropriates, and often distorts. I second this. But I want to suggest that before we proceed, we need to examine a characteristic and underacknowledged affinity between anthropology and populist sensibilities. What do we mean when we say we can study populism “from below”? And what happens to these categories — supply and demand, elite and people — once they are subjected to ethnographic scrutiny?

Anthropology, Populism, and the Suffering Slot

Robert Samet, in his essay Anthropology’s Democracy Problem (2026), offers a useful account of the reasons behind the discipline’s relative lack of engagement with populism. He argues that anthropologists have been largely silent on populism and dilemmas around popular sovereignty because they inherited a technocratic and liberal intellectual framework that was deeply suspicious of the people as a political category. In the context of Soviet Stalinism and fascism, this was a political strategy that sought to contain insurgent popular energies – a status quo bound to the geopolitical context of the Cold War.

Even though the discipline has contributed to a sustained critique of liberalism, anthropologists often operate in a Foucauldian idiom, where power is rather monolithic, and sovereignty exists in the singular. While the discipline has focused on the violence, including structural violence of states and elites, it often has done so from the perspective of those affected by this. Samet calls this tendency to treat all forms of sovereignty as equivalent and equally threatening ‘sovereign equivocation’.

For Samet, populism re-emerged as a “terrain on which something like democracy might be constituted”. It is a signal not just of democratic crisis but of democratic possibility, a moment in which popular sovereignty might find new institutional forms. Even where populism fails to produce a new settlement, he argues, its prominence exposes the inability of mainstream political forces to contain popular energies and address disenfranchisement.

This diagnosis is more persuasive for some contexts than others. In most of our contexts, the trajectory of populist politics has been less a story of democratic renewal than one of institutional capture, the systematic erosion of checks and balances, and the consolidation of illiberal regimes that use the language of popular sovereignty while hollowing out its substance. It is important not to lose sight of the degree to which populist sentiments are actively cultivated, appropriated, and steered by transnational networks of capital, political consultants, and media infrastructures — actors who operate across scales and whose interests are articulated at levels far removed from the communities that end up carrying populist projects forward.

Regardless of these reservations, Samet’s call to scrutinise key disciplinary assumptions and political vocabularies, such as ideas about ‘the people’ is commendable. His argument that our analytical categories are embedded in geopolitical contexts (that the sovereign equivocation was itself a product of a specific Cold War settlement) opens up the more productive question of what analytical vocabulary we need now that that settlement is coming apart. His call for greater attention to diverse forms of sovereignty and the specific ways power unfolds in the contexts we study ethnographically is, I think, exactly right.

Even if we agree that the anthropology of populism has much to call for, and this might be linked to wide-spread political cosmologies in the discipline, I think there is more to see here.

There is a deeper sense in which anthropology has been engaged with something structurally very close to populism all along, without naming it as such. Joel Robbins, in his influential essay Beyond the Suffering Subject, traces how anthropology moved, from the 1980s onwards, away from the study of radical cultural otherness and toward the study of those “living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression” (Robbins 2013: 448). Robbins calls the structural tendency to organise research around marginalised communities, asymmetrical power relations, and exclusion the discipline’s ‘suffering slot’ – we might even think of this as inherent populist sympathies in the discipline. This shift has reshaped what counts as legitimate anthropological knowledge, who counts as a proper subject of anthropological attention, and what kind of political work the discipline is understood to be doing in the world.

Robbins does not address this head on, but the suffering slot, when it becomes an unexamined reflex, part of the disciplinary habitus, often comes with a practical consequence. We tend to mobilise a binary that is structurally similar to the one at the heart of populist political discourse, contraposing elites and ‘the people’ with sometimes arbitrary, fuzzy boundaries in-between. It is difficult not to do so, when both elite political discourses, and often the communities we work in, themselves deploy this binary, and when ideas about the suffering subject quietly shape our own taxonomies.

Not mapping these binaries onto clear sociological contexts, actual social stratification can compromise ethnographies severely. At their worst, they make us blind to how power operates, even foreclosing ethnographies that tackle power as it is produced, cultivated and maintained. I think, overall, this contributes to Samet’s sovereign equivocation, our insufficient engagement with the differences between forms of sovereignty.

What adds a final twist to all this, is that trauma and victimhood have become central in the dominant language of political and moral claim-making in the past three decades (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). This discourse blurs the boundary between victims and advocates, between those who suffer and those who speak and write on their behalf, including, one might add, those who conduct ethnographic research among them.

Studying populism as anthropologists, attempting to write ethnographies of populism, then, unfolds in a political context where the discipline’s suffering slot, the populist politics of grievance, as well as liberal and post-liberal forms of claim making are all centred around appropriate victims, wounds and reparations.

I make these points to suggest that the relationship between anthropology and populism is entangled, possibly more so than it appears when we focus on works that deal with the concept head on.

Memory Professionals and the People’s War in Ukraine

My own fieldwork offers a modest but, I think, revealing case of how ethnography might complicate our binaries. The group of military support volunteers I encountered in a small town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, elderly women, who coordinated the collection and delivery of aid to frontline units every weekend from the Museum of Local Lore occupy a structurally ambiguous position in the social fabric (Vonnák 2025). Financially precarious and institutionally marginal in the broader landscape of Ukrainian public life, they nevertheless command significant local trust and cultural authority.

These people are not, by any conventional sociological measure, members of a political or economic elite. Many work in chronically underfunded institutions; some are relatively poor, even as they carry considerable cultural standing and discursive authority within their communities. I identified them as ideal subjects for my bottom-up study of mnemonic populism. At the same time, they decisively shape local and regional politics.

And yet, the picture becomes more complicated upon closer inspection. I have often observed these memory professionals describe the current war in Ukraine as a “people’s war” rather than a state’s war. They stressed their distance from the political elites, especially the central state, explicitly distancing the popular experience of armed resistance from elite politics and institutional narratives. They construct ‘the people’ as the authentic bearer of moral legitimacy, often mobilising mythical imageries about the Cossack past and local traditions of resistance, insurgence and horizontal mobilisation. All the while, many of these same individuals are civil servants, or work in close institutional proximity to the state apparatus, dependent on state funding and, to varying degrees, on state-sanctioned frameworks for historical interpretation. They are simultaneously on both sides of the supply/demand divide.

All this has much to do with the local historical experience of the state. From the mass repressions of the Soviet period through the protracted crisis of its collapse, the unchecked privatisation of the 1990s, and the partial oligarchic capture of state institutions that followed, the Ukrainian state has rarely been a neutral or trustworthy presence in people’s lives. The Maidan Revolution of 2013–14 was in many ways an attempt to close this distance, to build a polity in which the state would finally be made answerable to the society it claimed to represent.

The war has both deepened that aspiration and complicated it enormously, investing the state with a new legitimacy born of shared existential threat, and an expanded mandate to mobilise and manage the population. All the while, horizontal organisation that has long substituted for what the state failed to provide have both aided and kept a check on state power; bitterness about elite politics, especially around procurement scandals have meant, for many, that old suspicions about state power still hold substantial ground. The people, then, becomes a chimera, a political fiction that might include or exclude lower echelons of state power. How this boundary is worked through, by my informants and many others, including local businessman here, excluding a low-ranking MP there, should be understood holistically. We need the entire political cosmos from the village hall to the parliamentary speech writers to answer it adequately.

The Stakes of Getting This Right

One of the most striking features of populist politics in recent decades has been their capacity to build horizontal alliances across otherwise incompatible social positions, as Naomi Klein observed so sharply in her recent book, Doppelganger (Klein 2023). In what she calls ‘the mirror world’, this translates to a capacity to connect actors who share a sense of dispossession, marginalisation, or unacknowledged grievance. Mapping this, Klein pays thorough attention to what holds populist elite alliances together — the various tiers of the ‘supply side’ and the infrastructure that sustains them.

I think her deep dive can offer a blueprint for what ethnographies of populist mobilisation could do, if paired with a broader, sustained attention to the way elite networks are consolidated. The career of Paul Manafort illustrates what is at stake. Working with Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, with various authoritarian-leaning governments across Eastern Europe and Africa, and subsequently with the Trump campaign, Manafort produced political programmes that used the same playbook across contexts: targeted anti-elite messaging, cultural nationalism, and the deliberate seeding of anxiety and identity loss. The rhetoric deployed in Yanukovych’s programme was almost exactly the rhetorical architecture that would later appear in Trump’s “America First” campaign. This was a professional product, manufactured by an American political consultant operating on behalf of Russian-linked oligarchs, using poll-tested messaging and sophisticated media management. The MAGA network, similarly, is not a spontaneous expression of popular sovereignty but a sophisticated organisational infrastructure with deep financial roots and international connections that include figures and movements across Europe and beyond.

Unearthing these connections is the stuff of inquiries that differ from ethnography in their approach and ambition, and it is clearly not where MEMPOP seeks to contribute. But they change the kinds of questions we ask. Used well, awareness of these links leads us away from a narrow focus on the agency of ‘ordinary people’ – and they might help to do away with these political fictions altogether.

Links like Manafort lead us to certain grey zones of ethnography, to ambiguous actors and entangled positions that neither supply nor demand side frameworks capture well. They might lead us to follow the way regional neo-feudal elites appear in local civil society organisations and in low-level public sector jobs, as Franz Graf shows in Burgenland. We might then ask what this means for how frustration takes shape among local farmers, and what these aristocratic families sitting on all regional boards, stirring committees in civil society organisations tells us about the afterlife of empire. In my own case, awareness of Manafort’s work and of acts of hybrid warfare grounds the way I understand the suspicions museum workers harbour towards their colleagues during wartime, and why it makes sense for many to reframe culture as a matter of security, a terrain of espionage and struggle.

This is why I think MEMPOP’s intervention to insist on the bottom-up perspectives and the demand side, is a great step, but that we can do more. Ethnography is capable of tracking the full social world of populist politics across the scales at which it operates. When it fails to do this, when it distributes attention in ways that privilege the suffering subject without equal scrutiny for the less sympathetic tiers of populist projects, it risks providing scholarly cover for a politics whose architecture extends well beyond the communities it claims to speak for.

References

Brandenberger, David. 2011. Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Klein, Naomi. 2023. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. London: Allen Lane.

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 45–60.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2020. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Palonen, Emilia. 2025. The Birth and Death of Liberal Democracy in Hungary: The Populist Logic of Polarisation as Hegemony. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 447–462.

Samet, Robert. 2026. “Anthropology’s Democracy Problem: ‘Populism’ and the Sovereign Equivocation.” Current Anthropology 67(S28).

Vonnák, Diána. 2025. “Trust and Its Hidden Publics: Wartime Activism in a Ukrainian Town.” Anthropology News, August 25. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/trust-and-its-hidden-publics-wartime-activism-in-a-ukrainian-town/

Weyland, Kurt. 2017. “A Political-Strategic Approach.” In Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 48–72.