On November 13, 2025, at 11:30 a.m., Giacomo Loperfido, a member of the GER-Grup d’Estudis sobre Reciprocitat and the project PACT-Populism and Conspiracy Theory group at the University of Tübingen, will present a lecture at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal.
The lecture is titled: Austérité de l’État et les logiques politiques de la “personification”: populisme et théories du complot chez le Mouvement 5 Ètoils a Italie (State Austerity and the Political Logic of ‘Personification’: Populism and Conspiracy Theories within the Five Star Movement in Italy).
Abstract: While processes of individualization/personalization have been widely associated with the establishment of neoliberalism in the West and elsewhere, a growing number of critical, and more recently anthropological, theories have begun to view populism and conspiracy theories (CTs) as a disruption of the neoliberal situation—a rupture in which collective life reasserts itself against the alienating processes of abstraction, atomization, and fragmentation. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from the Italian Five Star Movement; I challenge this view. Instead, I emphasize that current forms of populism and CTs, at least in the West, are based on what I call processes of personification of political relations. While they demonstrate an intention to deconstruct the state and the institutions produced by collective politics, populism and CTs are consistent with the transformations imposed by the neoliberal order and the austerity policies it entails.
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