Unpleasant pleasantries: On whiteness, privilege, and "being implicated" in far-right ethnography

This paper focuses on emotional challenges and matters of positionality (regarding gender and race) in ethnographic research on the far right. The considerations stem from research that I have been doing since 2018 in Eastern Germany, with different agents and organisations of the near and far right. One focus of that research was on the campaigning efforts of the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany, and another focus was on the politicisation of the return of wolves to Germany by far-right initiatives. Both topics have been part of a broader ethnographic research project on nationalism and national narratives in Eastern Germany, both in their more banal and ordinary appearances and in the more radical far-right ones. It was a conversation with students at Humboldt University Berlin that prompted the considerations for this paper. In a seminar on far-right ethnographies, I was invited to present my research and discuss methodological challenges. The students were interested in my experiences, in particular in how spending time and interacting with people on the far right affected me personally and emotionally. As I was talking about these challenges, touching on experiences of fear and discomfort, I also mentioned my surprise about how nice my informants often acted toward me. On that matter, one student of colour made further inquiries: Why were they nice to me? How did that relate to my position in the field? And would they have been that nice if I wasn’t white? I kept thinking about their questions, long after the seminar was over, and I started to further investigate the role of whiteness and privilege in research on the far right. In most of the interactions between me and my informants on the far right in the field, they presented themselves as polite, considerate, and nice – which I usually felt as unwanted, unpleasant, and generally irritating considering my own expectations and opinions about far-right politics that I have been bringing into these situations. The reasons why they were nice to me when they clearly acted horrible toward a lot of other people are painfully obvious: because I – the researcher – am white, a woman, German-looking and -speaking. But I argue that their niceness has another function, and that my discomfort about their niceness is also doing something. It has to do with how the field is constituted, how it can be accessed, and how the researcher becomes implicated in the politics of the field. In this paper, I will provide a close reading of my ethnographic material of interactions between me and my far-right informants. Analytically, I want to focus on 1) what these dynamics tell us about the exclusiveness of this research field, and 2) how this bizarre manifestation of white privilege can be addressed, reflected, and used to explore notions of the researcher as "implicated subject" (Rothberg 2019) in the study of racism and white supremacy. Ultimately, how can I use this privilege in the field, in writing up, and in support of an antifascist anthropological project?