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.

在巴西 Jair Bolsonaro 总统选举前几个月，El País报纸发表了一篇题为“也不是法西斯主义者，也没有电视导览：来自阿雷格里港外围的“Bolsonarist”人是谁的报告？（国家报 2018），这是基于我们在莫罗达克鲁斯贫民窟中极右翼候选人的选民中的民族志。文章以深度故事讲述了我们的对话者的不满和希望，他们被以深思熟虑的方式介绍给了公众。选民在他们当地的环境中被情境化和呈现。他们没有被描绘成愚蠢或本质上堕落的人。他们是普通的低收入人群——被压迫者应该支持意识形态的另一面。就公众反应而言，与该报对类似选举报告的衡量标准相比，这篇文章的访问量和阅读量低于编辑的预期。此外，虽然我们预料到极右翼的负面反应，但我们无法预料到进步界和学术界的强烈反对。我们的一些同行建议我们正在发明一种“残留的波索纳主义现象”、“为怪物发声”，最终是“人性化的法西斯主义者”。我们在那里展示的背景是不可接受的、可怕的和令人反感的：它应该被掩盖。

人类学出现于 20 世纪之交，通过研究世界体系中最脆弱的群体，使用一种寻求他异性并促进类别和意义翻译的主体间过程，主张全人性、非本质主义属性和他者的认知复杂性。尽管对非弱势群体或压迫者的研究在我们的学科中并不新鲜，但 21 世纪的人类学家越来越面临研究“敌人”的挑战：我们往往不喜欢的人（Gusterson 2017 ; Pasieka 2019)，那些反对多样性、人权和我们学科所依据的所有基本正义原则的人。在这种研究背景下，我们是否应该简单地放弃我们人性化和反本质主义的专业努力？

Dullo ( 2016 ) 认为，当民族志学者和当地人的道德原则之间存在共鸣时，研究对象往往会被“足够认真”对待。当接近令人反感的他者时（Harding 1991)，与研​​究人员的政治立场不同，人类学家怀疑并谴责他们。杜洛关于人类学家喜欢或不喜欢当地人的论点提出了一个隐含的权力、对称性和向下/向上研究的问题。然而，我们的民族志不能位于这种移情分歧的任何一边。因此，我们的工作提出的一些关键问题是：当可怕的法西斯主义者和脆弱的当地人之间的界限变得越来越模糊时，会发生什么？当我们注意到敌人和被压迫者是同一个主题时会发生什么，正如 Mazzarella（2019 年）所说，常识可能是丑陋且难以下咽的？

这些是这篇短文旨在在本论坛中提出的一些问题。我们概述了对研究穷人保守主观性的人类学责任的反思。我们坚持构建我们学科的长期方法论价值观，即相对主义，即正确看待事实。这不是虚无主义或倡导的问题。因此，“人性化法西斯主义者 [原文如此]”并不意味着将他们转变为可爱的主题，而是可以理解的主题。这项任务的风险是意识到它们与我们相似或接近，这可能是一个难以消化和令人不安的事实。也就是说，这不是一篇关于相对主义的文章，而是关于将极右翼支持者描绘成复杂而模棱两可的个人的职业道德和政治道德；它们不存在于真空中，

这篇文章有两个主要目标。首先，我们概述了我们在阿雷格里港周边的实地考察的方法论反思。我们提出了三个可能的视角，通过这些视角来审视专制转向，尤其是在底层群体中：纵向、整体和多重视角，它们共同为对保守主体性兴起和去本质化极右翼身份的理解增加了细微差别和复杂性. 随后，我们最后提出了关于如此详细的人种学知识对公共辩论的贡献的问题，认为细微差别是民主崩溃时期的人类学责任。