Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article contributes to anthropological scholarship on the politics of (post-)truth by linking anthropology’s legacy of epistemic contingency to the memetic truth practices of far-right digital culture. Drawing on fourteen months of digital ethnography among German far-right activists on Discord, 4chan, Twitch, and X (2021–2023), I analyze “red-pill stories” as performances of truthiness—affective narratives of awakening that consolidate community through stickiness rather than factual verification. Reading these stories as “deep stories” in Hochschild’s sense, I show that red-pilling is a form of secondary enculturation. In the second part of the article, I use my field encounters with a would-be red-piller as a lens to examine how far-right actors exploit anthropological concepts—epistemic contingency, partial truths, ontological difference—to demand legitimacy, thereby forcing anthropologists to confront the unruly heritage of their own epistemology.
DOI: 10.1086/743196
Author: Konstanze N’Guessan
Institution: Center for Advanced Internet Studies
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7223974319