Ethnicity as Conspiracy Theory

• In Event: Conspiracies and Misinformation in Comparative Political Psychology

Abstract

Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul, Afghanistan, I study how everyday people engage with conspiracy theories to form different identities. The conspiratorial political conversations in Afghanistan, I argue, are performative, which means people are ‘doing’ something rather than ‘reporting’ about events. Through these performative political conversations, my interlocutors formed identities and established boundaries, at times claiming national unity among all Afghans and, on other occasions, highlighting the deep divide based on ethnic boundaries.
This paper contributes to the established tradition that approaches ethnic identity as a construct. Fredrik Barth’s formulation of the flexible boundaries of ethnic identity considers ethnicity to be a social organization of cultural differences. For Barth and constructivists after him, ethnicity is a matter of political maneuvering, and the focus should be on the social processes that produce and reproduce boundaries of identification. Roger Brubaker and others later highlighted the discursive processes of group formation, “groupness.” In this article, I argue that one of the main ways that groupness based on ethnicity is constructed is through conspiracy theories. I argue that ethnic identity, as a construct, is a conspiracy theory that assumes a collective conspiring together against another collective. In this sense, ethnicity is a conspiracy theory.

Author

• Mohsen Jalali, Midwestern State University