Saglam, Erol;
(2024)
Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices: Toward a Theory of Conspiratorial Style, Agency, and Politics.
Annual Review of Anthropology
, 53
pp. 261-275.
10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-125802.
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Abstract
This article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces the nascent threads across anthropological scholarship to reach an emic understanding of those narratives and their sociopolitical reverberations and proposes approaching conspiracy theories through their style, agentive implications, and political effects. Conspiratorial style, the article argues, pertains not to the content of the narrative but to its incessant seeking of covert operations beyond readily visible forms as well as a growing flexibility regarding the narrator's belief in the narrative's veracity. The agentivizing dynamic generated through conspiracism differentiates contemporary conspiracism from its predecessors and involves an empowering current. Finally, the article focuses on how contemporary conspiracism is intricately linked to political contestations.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices: Toward a Theory of Conspiratorial Style, Agency, and Politics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-125802 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-1258... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information. |
| Keywords: | Conspiracy theory, narrative, agency, truth, subjectivity |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > UCL Institute for Global Prosperity |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198917 |
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