Participating in the “PEGIDA-ritual”: An interpretive approach to the political culture of populist far-right protest.

This presentation engages with the value and specificities of interpretive, particularly ethnographic theory and methodology to shed light on the recent rise of the populist far right in Europe. Drawing from scholarship at the intersection of political science and anthropology as well as an extended fieldwork experience within populist far-right protest, it argues that interpretivism adds important insights by shifting the focus to local sites, actors, and processes of meaning-making. Conceptually, this presentation makes two contributions: Acknowledging the limited explanatory potential of conventional behavioral approaches to political culture to account for the increasing popular success of the populist far right, it proposes an actor-centered perspective on political culture as a set of meanings and meaning-making practices. Second, it suggests ethnography as the best suited methodology to investigate the actors that create populist far-right political cultures, alongside the scripts, symbols, and rituals that they deploy. Empirically, the presentation demonstrates its argument drawing from primary data generated in demonstrations by the eastern German “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (PEGIDA) in Dresden in 2019-20. The interpretive lens allows to shift the focus from structural to internalist explanations for mobilization, namely to public demonstrations as sites of meaning-making. Specifically, the analysis emphasizes the constitutive role of the “PEGIDA-protest ritual”, arguing that the protest phenomenon first and foremost consists of the creative practices in the context of the ritualized demonstrations, which also account for its unexpected persistence in Dresden since 2014.