Varieties of Political Ethnography: Caring for the Far Right?

Over the past two decades, political science has produced varied examples of ethnographic approaches. These approaches have not only tackled epistemological dilemmas but also exposed a second methodological dimension of ethnographic practice that is not so systematically explored: the relationship of researchers to their research participants. In this article, we focus on this second dimension, using emblematic texts in political science, especially in comparative politics, to develop a fourfold typology of political ethnographies that takes into account the emotional dynamics between researchers and participants. We use this typology to analyze various gradations through which these emotional dynamics develop in fieldwork. Focusing on the navigation between distance and proximity that these dynamics entail, we propose the concept of “emotional proximity” to capture relations between the researcher and the participant. We investigate the validity of this novel typology by applying it to ethnographic studies of far-right actors. The political distance separating researchers and participants in these studies allows us to investigate the methodologies of disconnecting political from emotional dynamics across this fourfold schema of ethnographic varieties. We argue that the “infidelity” of emotional distance (instead of proximity) is not an objectivist epistemological necessity but a methodological tool that is indispensable to the practice of participant observation.