To Clap or Not to Clap? Some Reflections on Ethnographic Methods in the Study of the Far Right

This paper reflects on the value and some of the specificities of interpretive, particularly ethnographic, methods for the study of far right mobilization at the sub-national level. Based on the experience of participant observation of a series of public events organized by a variety of far right actors in the eastern German city of Dresden and its surroundings between September 2019 and February 2020, it suggests that interpretive methods importantly contribute to scholarly understandings of and explanations for the political mobilization by bottom-up far right actors. For instance, the insights from the participant observation of public events set up by the far right “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (acronym: PEGIDA) shed light on the puzzle of PEGIDA’s survival for more than five years even though right-wing political parties have long adopted its political agenda. Moreover, this paper discusses the researcher’s reflexivity confronted with an object of study whose political ideology and goals are opposed to her own. In particular, it explores some of the ethical dilemmas as well as processes of political identity formation in the context of the intense immersion into the subjects’ political universe created through participant observation. This paper aims to make a contribution to the literature on the interpretive study of the far right in general, and the ethnographic study of far right mobilization in particular. As much social movement scholarship hushes away from studying far right mobilization, and party researchers tend to favor positivist approaches to the conditions for the emergence and the impact of far right parties in democratic party systems, interpretive ethnography still is a rather uncommon method in this field of study.