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Italy

After a one-month exploratory pilot trip to Italy, during which ethnographic and archival material was collected to guide the choice of research site, Milan was selected as the fieldwork location. The research focused on the Five Star Movement (5SM), a political party founded in 2009 and widely recognized both for its almost textbook populist features and its extensive use of conspiracy theories.

Between July 2022 and April 2023, Dr. Loperfido conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork aimed at exploring—ethnographically and theoretically—the relationship and mutual interaction between populism and conspiracy theory, as well as their variations throughout the history of the “Movement” in relation to both institutional and social forces. The 5SM was chosen not only for its relevance to these themes but also for its unusual trajectory: whereas populist and conspiracist movements that reach power are typically expected to intensify their charismatic narratives to redefine the identity of the “corrupt elite,” the 5SM, since entering government in 2018, underwent a notable process of de-radicalization — or, in Weberian terms, routinization and institutionalization. Fieldwork took place both at the party’s headquarters in the Lombardy Regional Government building in Milan and at the grassroots level, engaging with street movements that either supported or contested the 5SM. The project examined:

  1. The symbolic processes and dynamics underpinning the constitution and decline of populism and conspiracy theory.
  2. Broader tendencies of institutional transformation under the pressure of post-crisis structural adjustment policies, which were found to be constitutively linked with populism and conspiracy theory.
  3. A wider transformation of politics, particularly exemplified by the 5SM, which the project conceptualizes as the “personalization of political relations.” This process was identified as the underlying social mechanism shaping both populism and conspiracy theory, and it provides the backbone of the theoretical argument in Dr. Loperfido’s book.

Loperfido, Giacomo. Power, the People, and the Stories about Them. Berghahn Books, forthcoming.

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