Mapping Populism Approaches and

Methods 1st Edition Amit Ron

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/mapping-populism-approaches-and-methods-1st-editi
on-amit-ron/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Social Research Methods Qualitative Quantitative and

Mixed Methods Approaches 1st Edition Sigmund Grønmo

https://textbookfull.com/product/social-research-methods-
qualitative-quantitative-and-mixed-methods-approaches-1st-
edition-sigmund-gronmo/

Comparative Education Research Approaches and Methods

2nd Edition Mark Bray

https://textbookfull.com/product/comparative-education-research-
approaches-and-methods-2nd-edition-mark-bray/

Methods in Consumer Research Volume 1 New Approaches to

Classic Methods 1st Edition Gaston Ares

https://textbookfull.com/product/methods-in-consumer-research-
volume-1-new-approaches-to-classic-methods-1st-edition-gaston-
ares/

Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches

Danielle Drozdzewski

https://textbookfull.com/product/doing-memory-research-new-
methods-and-approaches-danielle-drozdzewski/
Quick Sketching with Ron Husband: Revised and Expanded
2nd Edition Ron Husband

https://textbookfull.com/product/quick-sketching-with-ron-
husband-revised-and-expanded-2nd-edition-ron-husband/

Neurophotonics and brain mapping 1st Edition Chen

https://textbookfull.com/product/neurophotonics-and-brain-
mapping-1st-edition-chen/

Knowledge Solutions Tools Methods and Approaches to

Drive Organizational Performance 1st Edition Olivier
Serrat (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/knowledge-solutions-tools-
methods-and-approaches-to-drive-organizational-performance-1st-
edition-olivier-serrat-auth/

Methods in Consumer Research Volume 2 Alternative

Approaches and Special Applications 1st Edition Gaston
Ares

https://textbookfull.com/product/methods-in-consumer-research-
volume-2-alternative-approaches-and-special-applications-1st-
edition-gaston-ares/

Unifying Business, Data, and Code 1st Edition Ron

Itelman

https://textbookfull.com/product/unifying-business-data-and-
code-1st-edition-ron-itelman/
Mapping Populism

This collection, which can serve as an introduction to the field of populism,

provides an array of interdisciplinary approaches to populist mobilizations, the­
ories, meanings, and effects. In so doing, it rejects essentialized ideas regarding
what populism is or is not. Rather, it explores the political, social, and economic
conditions that are conducive for the emergence of movements labeled populist,
the rationalities and affective tenor of those movements, the political issues
pertaining to the relationship between populists and elites, and the relationship
between populist groups and political pluralism. Grappling with accord and
discord in assumptions and methodologies, the book will appeal to scholars of
sociology, political science, communication and cultural studies interested in
populism, social movements, citizenship, and democracy.

Amit Ron is Associate Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University,

U.S.A. His research focuses around two central themes: the political and normative
dimensions of the history of political economy, and the democratic theory of the
public sphere.

Majia Nadesan is Professor of Communication Studies at Arizona State Univer­

sity, U.S.A. She studies the political logics shaping the government of life, with
particular emphasis on the constitution and distribution of risk. Her research has
emphasized the government of autism, ability/disability, childhood, democracy,
and most recently financial and environmental crises.
Mapping Populism

Approaches and Methods

Edited by Amit Ron and Majia

Nadesan
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Majia Nadesan and Amit Ron; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan to be identified as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-27144-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-29508-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents

List of figures viii

List of tables ix
Note on contributors x
Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction to collection: problematizing populism 1

AMIT RON AND MAJIA NADESAN

PART I
Explaining populism 15

1 Explaining populism introduction 17

MAJIA NADESAN AND AMIT RON

2 Populism and citizenship: toward a “thickening” of American populism 22

MATTHEW DEAN HINDMAN

3 From personal opinion to social fact: interactional dynamics and the

corroboration of populist support 32
MARCO GARRIDO

4 The people and the public: cyber-demagoguery and populism

as war 42
JACK Z. BRATICH

PART II
Populism and pluralism 55

5 Populism and pluralism introduction 57

MAJIA NADESAN AND AMIT RON
vi Contents

6 Democratic populism as constructive nonviolence 63

HARRY C. BOYTE

7 Lessons for left populism: organizing revolt in Babylon 74

MICHAEL J. ILLUZZI

8 Popularism, pluralism, and the ordinary 85

BENJAMIN L. MCKEAN

PART III
Populism: conditions of possibility 97

9 Populism: conditions of possibility introduction 99

AMIT RON AND MAJIA NADESAN

10 Does globalization produce populist parties? a cross-national

analysis 104
ANDREW P. DAVIS AND ALBERT J. BERGESEN

11 Populism, monopoly, and the urban liberal–rural populist coalition 113

JEFF BLOODWORTH

12 Farming failure: the origins of rural Trumpism, 1950–2016 124

BENJAMIN DAVISON

13 Austerity and ethno-nationalism: the politics of scarcity in

right-wing populism 134
NED CROWLEY

14 Populism and war-making: constructing the people and the enemy

during the early Lebanese Civil War era 146
DYLAN BAUN

PART IV
Between “the people” and elites 159

15 Between “the people” and elites introduction 161

MAJIA NADESAN AND AMIT RON

16 The social psychology of populism 166

PARIS ASLANIDIS
 Contents vii

17 Populist corruption talk 176

ROBERT G. BOATRIGHT

18 Populism, democracy, and the Ukrainian uprisings of the Orange

Revolution and Euromaidan 185
BARBARA WEJNERT

19 Twenty-first century American populist movements: the challenges

of organization and institutionalization 199
DAVID S. MEYER

20 Crisis government: the populist as plebeian dictator 210

CAMILA VERGARA

PART V
Issues and methodologies 221

21 Issues and methodologies introduction 223

AMIT RON AND MAJIA NADESAN

22 Political theory and its problem with populism 227

CHRIS BARKER

23 New directions in quantitative measures of populism: a survey 236

MATTHEW E. BERGMAN

24 Populism from the bottom up: ethnography from Trump’s

U.S. and Kirchner’s Argentina 248
RACHEL MEADE

Conclusion: emerging issues and future directions 259

MAJIA NADESAN AND AMIT RON

Index 261
Figures

10.1 Changes in world system centrality over time 108

13.1 Total fiscal cuts in a local authority and (a) anti-immigrant
attitudes and (b) approval of UKIP 140
13.2 Ethno-nationalist attitudes and public education spending cuts 141
14.1 al-Anba’, March 7, 1975 147
14.2 al-Nida’, April 30, 1975 147
14.3 al-Nida’, April 8, 1973 154
14.4 al-Anba’, May 1, 1975 154
18.1 Interaction of populism and democracy in the Orange Revolution
in Ukraine 190
18.2 Interaction of populism and democracy in the Euromaidan
uprising in Ukraine 194
Tables

10.1 Comparisons of changes in world trade network centrality and

populist parties 109
10.2 Pooled logistic regression estimates for populism in
cross-national context 110
18.1 Characteristics differentiating populism from democracy 187
23.1 Survey battery from Akkerman et al. (2014) 237
23.2 Dictionary terms associated with populism (Pauwels, 2011) 238
23.3 Suggested disaggregation of survey measures of populism
(Castanho Silva et al. 2018) 242
Note on contributors

Paris Aslanidis is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and the Hellenic
Studies Program at Yale University. His work on populism analyzes the phenom­
enon at the level of political party systems as well as a type of social movement.
He is currently working on an intellectual history of populism that seeks to under­
stand how the concept has been employed by political scientists, historians, soci­
ologists, and economists. Among other academic journals, Aslanidis has
published with Political Studies, Democratization, Sociological Forum, Mobiliza­
tion, and Quality & Quantity. His chapter on “Populism and Social Movements”
was recently published in The Oxford Handbook of Populism.
Chris Barker teaches political science at the American University in Cairo
College. He has previously held positions at Southwestern College, Harvard
University, Boston College, and Ohio University. He has published several
articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century liberalism and contemporary
political theory. His book, Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in
J.S. Mill’s Political Thought, was published by the University of Rochester
Press in 2018.
Dylan Baun is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. He received his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and North African
Studies from the University of Arizona. His current research focuses on
popular youth clubs, political organizations, and social movements in mid-
twentieth-century Lebanon.
Albert J. Bergesen is Professor of Sociology and Director, School of Sociology,
University of Arizona.
Matthew E. Bergman recently joined the Department of Government at the Uni­
versity of Vienna as a postdoctoral research scholar affiliated with the collab­
orative research center “Political Economy of Reforms” based at the University
of Mannheim. He has previously served as a Lecturer of Political Economy,
Research Design, Political Analysis, and Legal Reasoning at the University of
California—San Diego. His research focuses on niche parties, issue competi­
tion, voting behavior, and electoral systems in Advanced Industrial Societies.
 Note on contributors xi

Jeff Bloodworth is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department

of History & Archaeology at Gannon University (Erie, PA). He specializes in
twentieth-century political history and published a book, Losing the Center:
The Decline of American Liberalism 1968–1992, with the University of
Kentucky Press. In addition, he has published articles and op-eds in Political
Science & Politics, Wisconsin Magazine of History, The Historian, Pacific
Northwest Quarterly, Just Security, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wichita Eagle, and
additional journals and newspapers.
Robert G. Boatright is Professor of Political Science at Clark University and
the Director of Research at the National Institute for Civil Discourse
(NICD) at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the effects of
campaign and election laws on the behavior of politicians and interest
groups, with a particular focus on primary elections and campaign finance
laws and practices. He is the author or editor of six books. He received
a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Carleton College.
Harry C. Boyte is Co-founder of the Public Work Academy, Senior Scholar in
Public Work Philosophy at Augsburg College, Founder of the Center for
Democracy and Citizenship, now merged into the Sabo Center of Democracy
and Citizenship, and Founder of the international youth empowerment and
political education initiative Public Achievement. Boyte is the leading archi­
tect of the public work approach to politics and citizenship, which has gained
international recognition for its practical effectiveness (for instance, in citizen
professionalism) as well as its theoretical innovations. He has authored and
edited ten books on democracy, citizenship, and community organizing.
Jack Z. Bratich is Associate Professor in the Journalism and Media Studies
Department at Rutgers University. His research takes a critical approach to
the intersection of popular culture and political culture. His work applies
autonomist social theory to topics such as reality television, social movement
media, and the cultural politics of secrecy. He is the author of Conspiracy
Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and an co-editor,
along with Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, of Foucault, Cultural
Studies, and Governmentality (2003). He is a zine librarian at ABC No Rio
in New York City.
Ned Crowley is Ph.D. Candidate in sociology at New York University. His
dissertation is a political sociology of public finance and economic policy in
the contemporary United States.
Andrew P. Davis is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State
University. His ongoing research interests are in political sociology, the
sociology of human rights, global conflict, and quantitative methods. His
most recent work applies formal organizational and network theory to
understand widespread human rights violations in the global system. His
xii Note on contributors

research has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed outlets, including

Social Science Research, Poetics, International Journal of Comparative
Sociology, Punishment & Society, Comparative Sociology, Sociological
Perspectives, and The Sociological Quarterly.
Benjamin Davison is Ph.D. Candidate in American History at the University of
Virginia who specializes in modern business, political, and cultural history.
He has served as a coordinator for Loyola University of New Orleans’ Food
Policy, Culture, and Commerce Program. His current project focuses on the
supermarket industry and the creation of industrial food systems and he is
also writing National Roots: Chefs, Environmentalism, and the Creation of
American Cuisine, under contract with the University of Florida Press. His
work has been featured in The Washington Post and National Public Radio.
Marco Garrido is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chi­
cago. His work on the relationship between the urban poor and middle class
in Manila has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces,
Qualitative Sociology, and International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research. More recently, he published a book entitled The Patchwork City
(University of Chicago Press). His new project draws a link between demo­
cratic recession and the explosive growth of the middle class in the developing
world. Specifically, he locates the Philippine middle class’ support for Rodrigo
Duterte in their experience of democracy.
Matthew Dean Hindman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of Tulsa. His research interests include political representation,
interest groups and advocacy organizations, political parties, LGBTQ politics,
and American political development. His book Political Advocacy and Its
Interested Citizens: Neoliberalism, Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations
was published by Penn Press in 2019.
Michael J. Illuzzi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lesley Univer­
sity in Cambridge, MA. His work focuses specifically on nineteenth- and twen­
tieth-century American political thought, the intersections of inequalities in
race, class, and gender, as well as issues in civic engagement.
Benjamin L. McKean is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ohio State
University. His research concerns global justice, populism, and the relation­
ship between theory and practice. His work has been published in American
Political Science Review, Political Theory, and Journal of Politics.
Rachel Meade is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown Univer­
sity. She studies why people support populism, using comparative ethnographic
research on populist social movements in the United States and Argentina. Her
research also examines how social identities and political polarization affect
democracy. Her work has been published in the journal Idées d’Amériques.
 Note on contributors xiii

David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University

of California, Irvine, and author of several books and many articles on social
movements. He is particularly interested in the relationship between protest
and public policy.
Majia Nadesan (Editor) is Professor of Communication Studies at ASU.
Dr. Nadesan’s interdisciplinary research examines the ethical implications of
societal governing logics and risk- management strategies. Recently, she has
looked at how politics and scientific uncertainty complicate risk assessment
and addressed risks to democratic society through comparative risk analyses
of technological crises. Across these analyses, her work interrogates how
we construct the conditions and possibilities for biological and social life in
language, laws, institutions, technologies, expert knowledge, and activism,
with normative critique aimed at differentiating those forms that optimize
diverse and sustainable forms of living versus those that suppress them.
Amit Ron (Editor) is Associate Professor of Political Science at ASU.
Dr. Ron’s research focuses around two central themes: the political and nor­
mative dimensions of the history of political economy, and the democratic
theory of the public sphere. With regard to the democratic theory of the
public sphere, Dr. Ron is particularly interested in the role of the public in
the cognitive division of labor that is required for a social scientific inquiry.
Camila Vergara is Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Eric H. Holder
Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Columbia Law School. Combining
a materialist interpretation of republican thought and normative political
theory, her work explores alternative constitutional frameworks aimed at
containing corruption by giving institutional form to popular authority.
Barbara Wejnert is Professor of Politica Sociology, and Sustainability Studies,
and prior Chair of the Department of Global Gender Studies at the University
at Buffalo, SUNY. She has written and edited several books and numerous
papers related to democratization and globalization, including a book Diffusion
of Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press that challenges estab­
lished thinking about the global spread of democracy across the past 200 years.
Acknowledgments

Back at the end of June 2016, a few days after the Brexit vote in Britain and
three weeks before the Convention of the Republican Party nominated Donald
Trump as its presidential candidate, our then colleague Carol Mueller
approached us with the idea of organizing an interdisciplinary conference on
the study of populism. With her support and leadership, we were able to bring
in March 2018 a group of 40 scholars to present and discuss cutting-edge
research on populism. This volume came out of the papers presented in this
conference. We wanted to thank Carol, who is now retired, for her leadership
in organizing this conference and for being a great colleague, friend, and
a mentor to both of us. We also wanted to thank the participants in the conference,
especially our key note speakers, Harvard Professor Theda Skocpol and historian
Thomas Frank, as well as New College of Interdisciplinary Studies, the School of
Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the College at Arizona State University for
their financial and organizational support.
One of the participants in the conference was Thomas J. Keil, who presented
empirical research tracking populism in the coal country of Pennsylvania. Tom
passed away at the beginning of August 2018, less than four months after the con­
ference. Prior to his retirement, Tom was our colleague at the School of Social
and Behavioral Sciences and was a friend and mentor. We are grateful that the
conference provided an opportunity for us to see him again. We miss him.
Each one of us also wanted to thank their spouses and the families for their
continued support in our academic endeavors.
Introduction to collection
Problematizing populism
Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

Populism was among the 2017 “words of the year,” with Wendalyn Nichols,
publishing manager at Cambridge University, observing that what
distinguished the word populism from other terms circulating that year was
that it “represents a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as
populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immi­
gration and trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent.” Populism
is a term whose first use in print has been traced to the U.S. magazine The
Nation in 1898, where it was deployed to describe the “People’s Party,”
a political movement of the “common man” opposed to the excesses of the
Gilded Age (Jäger, 2017). The meaning of populism was contested from its
first use to describe a movement located outside of conventional politics,
pitted antagonistically against industrialized America.
Were populists virtuous reformers or paranoid nativists? In the mid-twentieth
century, Richard Hofstadter (1964) argued the latter position, seeing a common
“paranoid style” in U.S. politics that linked turn-of-the-century populism to
McCarthyism. Populism was subsequently linked with authoritarianism and
fascism in an international research trajectory suspicious of its anti-pluralist
tendencies. Yet, this view of populism as antithetical to democracy has been
repeatedly challenged in debates over historical details and counterexamples of
inclusive populist mobilizations. These debates over populist meanings, forms,
and effects have assumed more urgency in the context of new avenues for political
participation enabled by the web 2.0 environment, leading some academic obser­
vers, such as Benjamin Moffitt (2016), to describe populism in relation to political
performativity.
Although today, populism is ascendant as a term used to explain outbreaks
and mobilizations of political activity, there is little agreement on other aspects
of the meaning of the term and its designations. Populism is most often defined
as a concept of morally righteous people pitted against corrupted elites. Groups
often targeted in populist discourses include cultural, corporate, and governmen­
tal elites. Populist objectives can be reform oriented or revolutionary. Examples
of movements described as populist span the political and cultural spectrum,
including social mobilizations as diverse as the 1960s-era civil rights movement
2 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

and early-twenty-first-century Tea Party movement. The meaning of populism is

confusing when applied to such a heterogeneous array of social mobilizations
and political leaders, the latter including the right-leaning Donald Trump (U.S.),
Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), and Matteo Salvini
(Italy) and the left-leaning Bernie Sanders (U.S.), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Andrés
Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), and Hugo Chávez (Venezuala) (Rice-Oxley &
Kalia, 2018).
As illustrated with these examples of populist meanings and leadership, map­
ping and navigating academic and news media accounts of populism can be
challenging for the uninitiated, particularly for scholars wrestling with the funda­
mental ambiguities and debates over populist meanings and praxis. Perhaps the
most central problem of research on populism is that there is no agreement
about what it is that needs to be explained. That is, the nature of the populist
phenomenon is highly contested, beginning from the very question of who
counts as a populist. Populist groups sometimes name themselves through their
political agitation (such as the self-conscious “Tea Party” identity) (Skocpol &
Williamson, 2016) or at other times are first called out as populist by outside
observers suspicious of energized circulations of contagious ideas or practices
that in some way(s) challenge the observer’s status quo.
The urgency with which populism is singled out and interrogated in mass
media, academic, and security accounts can be regarded as a response to
a perceived rupture in the taken-for-granted symbolic order. In an important sense,
populism names an ambiguous exigency or rupture in political relations, particu­
larly because populist movements are often situated antagonistically in relation to
established protocols and/or ideologies. Sociologist and social theorist Manuel
Castells (2019) argues that the most pressing antagonism today is the “rupture that
has occurred between citizens and governments” (p. 5). Academic research aims
to tackle the challenges of naming, differentiating, dissecting, and governing
disruptive populist mobilizations that pit the people against real or imagined polit­
ical, corporate, or social elites. Yet, this academic research is heterogeneous and
dispersed across disciplines, reflecting specialized interests that can silo discus­
sion. Accordingly, this collection offers a broad and interdisciplinary introduction
to the study of populism intended for readers who are making their initial forays
into this field. Our collection maps key issues and debates in the literature
on populism, focusing on the central research and methodological questions that
animate some of the most important debates across academic disciplines, ranging
from political science to sociology to communications and cultural studies.
Representative case studies and discussions in this collection illustrate the
concerns of particular research areas and explain their implications for issues
and questions that transcend disciplinary boundaries: What types of questions do
researchers ask about populism? What does it mean to be populist? What
assumptions about “the people” are built into diverse understanding of popu­
lism? What other assumptions inform vernacular and expert understandings of
the term, historically and in the contemporary context? What are the conditions
 Introduction to collection 3

of possibility for mobilizations labeled populist? What does populist praxis look
like today in the era of the Internet and user-generated content? Are populists
today more susceptible to demagoguery? What effects are posited in response to
populist mobilizations? What is the relationship between populism and liberal
democracy? This collection grapples with these issues, focusing on fundamental
questions about the meaning of “the people” and unpacking relationships across
“the people,” populism, and democratic pluralism. In so doing, it raises funda­
mental questions about the possibilities and challenges of inclusive democracy
free from mob rule in the Internet era, the tyranny of the majority, and the types
of expulsions that have been characteristic of democratic social organization.
These questions are especially pressing in the context of the urgent ecological
and population crises confronting human societies across the planet. The ques­
tion of whether liberal democracy can deliver a sustainable future hinges in
significant part on the nature and objectives of populist social mobilizations.
Although the term “populism” is modern, used by late-nineteenth-century
agrarian reformists, the concerns expressed by observers at the time regarding
populists’ susceptibility to demagoguery echoed classical skepticism regarding
the merits and democratic capabilities of “the people.” At the height of ancient
Athenian democracy, Plato promulgated pessimism regarding citizens’ capacities
to distinguish between pure rhetoric (truth) and sophistry, defined most bluntly
as persuasion devoid of truth and ethics. This example captures not only ancient
doubts about the wisdom of popular governance, but also the narrow delineation
of those designated as citizens with participatory rights in democratic societies.
Movements of the people have historically been engendered by such exclusions.
Exclusions can provide the unifying logic that binds “the people” into an entity.
Specific exclusions are locally determined, but there are historical patterns of
exclusion against ethnic and religious minorities, non-propertied residents,
women, and children. The constitution of peoplehood around exclusions has
historically raised observers’ concerns regarding reformist or revolutionary inten­
tions. Efforts to manage social mobilizations of the people were enabled by the
new expert space of “public opinion,” which became a primary target of inter­
vention by industry and government (Lippmann, 1965). Public opinion data
offered insights into the concerns of “the people,” represented as fragmented
into distinct demographic and interest groups. Issues identified through surveys
could be managed strategically, enhancing public consent and domesticating
the unknown dangers posed by democratic crowds. However, the capacity for
democratic elections in Europe and Latin America to produce popular, but authori­
tarian, leaders amplified concerns about populism’s role in delivering democracy.

Studying and understanding populism

Concerns about populism have fueled 100 years of governmental scrutiny,
media reporting, and academic research providing descriptive reports and tools
aimed at identifying, describing, deflecting, and/or orchestrating particular
4 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

populist mobilizations. What is new today is the mass media environment,

whose contours have shifted dramatically in the last ten years with the rise of
web 2.0 and user-generated content. Twentieth-century gatekeeping and mass
communication filters faltered as mass-mediated control of political messaging
was shattered by new sharing technologies, with effects that have reverberated
across the vast and bureaucratic apparatuses of representative democracy.
Today, the opinions and will of “the people” flow across social media plat­
forms, energizing existing and enabling new social mobilizations, sometimes
around ideas that promote democracy and sometimes around ideas that
threaten it. Energetic flows across social media platforms and public squares
are seen as dangerous when their emotional economies are too forceful in
their antagonisms and too exclusive in their conceptualizations of the will of
“the people.” Inertia against desired popular reforms can further radicalize ener­
getic social media flows and lead to efforts to purify coalescing movements of
less revolutionary ideas and programs. In an important sense, the relationship
between populism and democracy is being tested because democratic pluralism
is seen as at risk by contemporary populist mobilizations that are fueled online
by outraged affective economies.
In order to unpack these issues in this collection, we begin by outlining and
addressing key ideas about “the people” that have animated debates about
populism, such as the extent to which mobilizations and/or leaders labeled as
populist have some essential characteristics deriving from their conceptualiza­
tion of “the people” that distinguish them from other types of social
movements. Second, we explore conditions of possibility for populist social
mobilizations (e.g., the relation between populist mobilizations and economic
disenfranchisement). Third, we explore the types of affective economies
most commonly displayed across case examples of populist movements. More
specifically, we address the question of whether populist movements are anti-
rational as a result of their emotional antagonism to elites. Relatedly, we ask
whether populism is inherently anti-pluralist as an outcome of the basic distinction
drawn between populists and elite groups.
In structuring this survey of the research on populism, we try to assist new­
comers in navigating their way through the scholarly terrain, using sample read­
ings and editorial discussion, while sidestepping the risk of becoming preoccupied
with the question of how to define populism. Fine-grained debates concerning
what populism is or is not have led some academics to reject the term altogether,
arguing against its conceptual utility. We accept that populism is polyvalent in
meanings and aim to introduce readers to helpful overviews of the scholarly
debates concerning what it means to be populist.

Populism and “the people”

As a minimalist definition, populism is a mode of political interaction that refers
in some way to “the people.” Beyond this minimalist or “thin” definition, there
 Introduction to collection 5

is a wide disagreement concerning populism’s essential features. For example,

Cas Mudde (2018), a prolific writer on the subject, defines populism as a belief
system—more specifically, “an ideology that considers society to be separated
into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the
corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of
the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” In Populism: A very short
introduction (2017), Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser historicize this
formal definition of populism with detailed analyses of the particular charac­
teristics of populist movements and leaders across time. A historical approach
to populism sees every mobilization given that name as uniquely conditioned
by the particularities of time and space. In contrast, empirical accounts seek
to identify recurring relations and patterns across time. To a large extent, this
idea of populism as a basic antagonism between “the people” and an elite
group is a unifying thread in the literature despite heated debates over
whether other generalizations can be made about the nature of those people,
the characteristics of their grievances, and the relative importance of particu­
lar economic and political circumstances.
The political philosopher Ernesto Laclau (2005) suggests that the symbolic
or “discursive” characteristics of key antagonisms are relevant to the study of
populism, which he describes as a “political logic” that can be deployed by
any political persuasion (p. 117). For Laclau, populism’s political logic is
expressed in discourses that pit unequal and oppositional powers against each
other by establishing equivalences and antagonisms across a “horizon within
which some objects are representable while others are excluded” (p. 117). The
logic of equivalences connects disparate and historically situated mobilizations,
as illustrated by the integration of various “rights” discourses—for example,
African-American voting rights, women’s reproductive and employment rights,
disability rights—as “civil rights,” which opposes an entrenched exclusionary
other of white, masculine, establishment values. Laclau’s approach is useful
for illustrating that the notion of “the people” is emergent, constructed, and
multifaceted, and given unifying meaning through a fundamental antagonism.
In Laclau’s view, “the people” is a term of choice precisely because it does not
have one accepted meaning. Chantal Mouffe (2018), another political theorist
and former collaborator of Laclau, agrees that what is important is the logic of
the we–they relationship in pluralist politics, but offers a distinction between
“agonism” and “antagonism,” with the latter being reserved for conflicts that
threaten the very foundations of liberal democratic societies. Mouffe’s view of
agonism captures irreconcilable, but productive, tensions in democratic soci­
eties and distinguishes them from those threatening core values.
Drawing upon diverse theoretical foundations, the chapters in this collection
present useful overviews of the scholarly terrain, mapping key conceptualizations
of “the people” and offering innovations and empirical cases that capture the
complex ways this construct can capture multifaceted meanings. In preparation
for reading these chapters, it is useful to review the distinct and recurring
6 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

images of “the people” that are typically at play in discussions about populism:
as an identity group, as a social class, and as a political unit. We argue that even
though the three images we describe below often overlap, they each raise differ­
ent research questions for those who are interested in studying populism.
The first image of “the people” is as an identity group, an ethnos, a people
who are tied together by a shared identity with allegedly deep bonds. Arguably,
this is the image of “the people” invoked by the Old Testament when it
describes how God instructs Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go”
(Exodus, 5:1). The research program that revolves around this image examines
the processes through which a particular identity, or a particular type of identity
category, is forged. For example, research can ask how certain ideas, values,
or groups come to be perceived as “American,” while others are excluded. Fur­
thermore, the processes that shape political identities often shape the interests
associated with these identities. Accordingly, there are research questions about
how identities get affixed to interests and then to specific policies. Social science
provides a wide array of approaches for answering these questions, from theoret­
ical frameworks that are rooted in social psychology and interpersonal dynamics
to those that understand identity production sociologically, in broader systemic
contexts composed of institutionalized social relations.
The second image of “the people” is as a social class, the plebs. This is the
image of “the people” invoked by Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (1532/
1988) when he writes that “[w]ell-ordered states and wise rulers have always
been very careful not to exasperate the nobles and also to satisfy the people
and keep them contented” (p. 66). In this image, what distinguishes “the
people” is their marginal social position vis-à-vis the elite, inextricably tying
the question of who constitutes “the people” to access to economic or social
power. For those who view “the people” through this image, research revolves
around the question of how the more fundamental properties of the hierarchical
social order present themselves as forms of political identities or political
movements. In this image, “the people” may have objective or real interests
that are different from their perceived interests. Not every political identity or
social movement that claims to speak on behalf of “the people,” or get wide
support from the non-elite, necessarily speaks for the real entity of “the
people.” That is, sometimes the people can be manipulated by elites who claim
to speak on their behalf (we will return to this theme in our discussion of
demagoguery).
The third image of “the people” is as a political entity unified by shared
terms of social cooperation. This is “the people” of “We the people” from the
Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. This image, which is rooted in the liberal
social contract tradition, understands the source of the authority of government
to be rooted in the consent of “the people.” Government is created, as John
Locke (1689/1980) describes, “where-ever any number of men, in the state of
nature, enter into society to make one people, one body politic, under one
supreme government” (pp. 47–48; §89). The power of government has to be
 Introduction to collection 7

employed for the “good of the people” or the “public good.” This insistence
on the social contract legitimizes dissent when government is perceived as
acting inconsistently with the public will. Within the liberal-democratic trad­
ition, there are different approaches to how these general intuitions about the
purpose of government and the source of its power can translate into a full
account of political power. The main philosophical and research questions are
therefore related to the notion of the legitimacy of the exercise of political
power in democratic societies. Are those who exercise political power acting
in the interest and consent of “the people?” What are legitimate avenues of
political expression and what happens when they fail?
Critics of populism sometimes ally themselves with political realists in claiming
that political processes cannot be evaluated using the standard of popular “legitim­
acy,” and that the very attempt to rank more or less legitimate forms of political
representation is misguided. But rankings of legitimacy have a certain utility, par­
ticularly when many stakeholders are involved in producing and applying criteria.
Questions of legitimacy have taken on added importance in a context Castells
(2019) described as a “rupture between citizens and governments,” deriving in
significant part from the “gradual collapse of a model of representation” (p. 5)
capable of excising the tools necessary for collective collaboration. It is important
to stress with this example that public opinion is used to invoke a concept of “the
people” as a real social category, the values and interests of which can be directly
represented and addressed. For example, a politician can claim to speak for “the
people” as a class by virtue of the results of an election or other empirical data
concerning constituent values and attitudes.
Given the complexities of representing populist movements and their
relationships to “the people,” research must speak to and be reflexive about issues
of communication, power, authenticity, and legitimacy. We must ask how commu­
nications produced by everyday people, politicians, the media, and academics,
among other forms of agency, invoke “the people” and how symbolic and material
populist mobilizations reproduce or transform existing power relations in society.
We must interrogate the authenticity of populist movements and representations,
and in so doing grapple with complex issues of representation, including the ques­
tion of authenticity itself, especially in the Internet era. We must also acknowledge
our positionality as researchers, confronting the possibility that our representations
of populist mobilizations are also shaped by power relations.

What are the conditions of possibility for populism?

If we bracket the deep question of what populism is and operate with the min­
imal definition in mind, then a second set of important questions concerns how
to go about explaining emergence and variations in populist mobilizations.
Which networked beliefs and similarities of conduct (“contiguities”) give rise
to mobilizations named populist by mobilizers or outsiders? When and where
are we likely to find more populism? What are the economic, technological,
8 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

and cultural conditions that make the emergence of populism possible and
shape value inflections and political performances? These types of questions
are central to historical and comparative approaches to populism that address
how social institutions and inequalities engender populist mobilizations, whose
rise to power is enabled or confined by the strength of key leaders, core insti­
tutions, and access to communications networks. Several chapters in this col­
lection address these questions by examining the economic conditions that
make it possible to mobilize on behalf of “the people.” In particular, they
emphasize the increase in economic inequality that sharpens the experiential
distinction between “the people” and elite groups, foregrounding the failures
and inadequacies of existing ideational and institutional foundations.
Other chapters in this collection address the socio-psychological conditions of
possibility for populist beliefs. The first approach to understanding how people
hold populist beliefs entails cognitive and ideological mapping. This entails delim­
iting populist beliefs among targeted populations (such as anti-elitist sentiments
among working-class white voters) and situating them in the context of a web of
beliefs that are tied together by some inner logic (such as a narrative of American
decline). This form of explanation opens the door to an engagement with the val­
idity or truth value of particular belief systems (such as the existence of a “new
world order”). It also encourages another approach, which addresses how populist
leaders and/or mobilizations strategically articulate and deploy existing beliefs in
their communications to target audiences.

Is populism irrational?
The role of contemporary media in enabling populist mobilizations and in
shaping representations of their aims and ethics cannot be underestimated. The
Internet has disrupted centralized control over the production of mass-mediated
messages, enabling outreach and fostering social networks that have the poten­
tial to become visible populist mobilizations. Moffitt’s The Global Rise of
Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (2016) argues that
new media play a critical role in contemporary populist movements and
that a historicized view of populism today is best represented by the idea of
political style, “a repertoire of embodied, symbolically mediated performance”
(pp. 28–29). If populism today is a political style, then what affective (i.e.,
emotional) characteristics dominate its performative style?
Ronald Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley (2018) argue that new media encourage
an “agonistic process of positioning” defined in terms of today’s unrestrained pro­
liferation of divergent performances of truth and justice on mediated platforms,
which add to challenges to institutional authority (p. 345). They point out that
these divergent performances illustrate reflexive modernization as social groups
interrogate the conditions of their everyday lives and mass-mediated realities.
However, this reflexive modernization can promote and amplify political and
cultural alienation and resentment in a technological context of high connectivity
 Introduction to collection 9

but deep economic inequality. Populism can emerge as a sort of social contagion
in this line of research, characterized by a politics of resentment and irrational
political beliefs.
In an academic review of American and European theorizing about popu­
lism, Paul Jones (2018) argues for the primacy of Theodor W. Adorno, Else
Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford’s The Authoritar­
ian Personality (1950) in understanding nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century populism, even in the American context. Historians have been tempted
to romanticize late-nineteenth-century American populists by marginalizing
nativist, racist, and anti-Semitic leanings, a point made by Hofstadter’s The
Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R (1955). Jones argues that Hofstadter’s
description of the paranoid elements of American populism is indebted to the
psycho-political “authoritarian” personality style.
This collection problematizes universalizing accounts of the populist phe­
nomenon as irrational political affect by introducing and interrogating multiple
populist rationalities. There exists no singular form of populist rationality and/
or irrationality (Laclau, 2005). Yet, one of the questions troubling empirical
research on populism is whether in explaining populist beliefs, or the bond
between populist leaders and followers, it is necessary to “look under the
hood,” disclosing psychological processes and they are embedded in and inter­
act with particular social and political contexts.

Who is pulling the strings? Is populism an elite-driven

phenomenon?
At its core, populism imagines, calls for, or tries to bring about a particular set
of relationships between putative “people” and putative elites. It is a discourse
about the relationship between “the people” and the elites. But the question is:
How do populist discourses construct the social relationships in which they are
located? Populists often view themselves as authentic representatives of “the
people,” but others demur, suggesting that, at the end of the day, it is the elites
who are pulling the strings or who are ultimately benefiting from populist
fervor. Others point out that the fundamental antagonism between the populist
people and the elite is ultimately based on inescapably corrosive exclusions
that are inescapable and also increase populists’ susceptibility to demagoguery.
To be sure, those who argue that populism can be authentically of “the people”
are not naive and are aware of internal and external dangers. Nonetheless, they
suggest that in some cases, or under some conditions, populist movements are
vanguards of the human struggle for justice in the context of intolerable social,
political, and economic conditions. But even if the claim of populist movements
to mobilize “the people” is authentic and defensible, there remains the question of
whether this authentic spirit can be sustained over time. Direct democracy is cum­
bersome; yet, power entrusted by “the people” to their representatives can be
misdirected.
10 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

Is populism necessarily anti-pluralist?

Some forms of populism, often described as right-wing populism, are built on
a conception of “the people” that is largely cultural and often exclusive. For these
populists, the boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside” of “the people”
are taken as a given and of moral import. Oftentimes, they warn that the very
identity (and/or civilization) of “the people” is under threat from outsiders who try
to infiltrate or contaminate ways of life. Critics of populism argue that populism
itself, not only one of its variants, is inherently anti-pluralist because the binary
relationship at the heart of populism is insidiously corrupting.
This claim about the homogenizing and anti-pluralist character of populism
is a mix of a normative claim about the meaning of democracy and an empir­
ical claim about the consequences of certain rhetorical moves. The normative
claim is related to debates in democratic theory about how to understand the
ways “the people” (demos) can hold the power (kratos) in a democracy
(demokratia). The empirical claim is that regardless of legitimacy, the binary
logic deployed in populist mobilizations inevitably breeds paranoia and vio­
lence. However, the question of whether populist social organizations can
avoid these tendencies is ultimately empirical, a point made in this collection.
Case studies reveal that populism can drive reform by energizing democratic
societies, but it can also drive revolution, because there is no guarantee “the
people” will choose democracy. Democracies that are too responsive to “the
people” risk promoting illiberal tendencies. Nadia Urbinati makes this argument
in Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (2014), asserting that
populism is a disfiguration of democracy. Populism too radically polarizes the
public forum while unpolitical democracy elevates expertise over political opin­
ion, and plebiscitary democracy is too responsive to the nonrational and aesthetic
aspects of opinion. The legitimacy of the raw voice of “the people,” particularly
as expressed in public opinion, must therefore be mediated in relation to
a “dialectic between pluralism and unity” (Urbinati, 2014, p. 136) that is seen as
crucial for democracy, with unity representing cornerstone values.
Yet, an alternative approach grounded in contrasting cases views populist
mobilizations as constitutive of robust pluralist democratic practice, rather than
as symptomatic of crisis or decline. In this alternative approach, the “will of
the people” is not a metaphysical entity that needs to be carefully uncovered,
but is at best a useful metaphor to describe a democratic praxis reflecting the
expression of emergent and heterogeneous interests and symbolic systems.
From this perspective, fixed categorical representations of “the will of the
people” are inherently anti-democratic because the very need to represent the
raw “will of the people” simplifies and distorts. Populist representations must
be acknowledged as ephemeral and contingent, coalescing in time and space
and inflected by local circumstances. Each case must be addressed in its par­
ticularities, and normative judgments about legitimacy must be reserved or
deployed carefully.
 Introduction to collection 11

This affirmative view of populist praxis is not, perhaps, the most popular
among academic and news media observers. The historical record suggests
there are empirically grounded consequences regarding deployments of binary
logic as a rhetorical strategy for unifying a collective. The binary logic of
a discourse or rhetoric based on the distinction between those who belong to
“the people” and the “other” has two consequences. First, it makes it easier to
slip into Manichaean language and portray the others, the outsiders, as the
enemy of “the people.” Second, it pushes those who use this framework to
treat “the people” as a single entity and thus to under-emphasize, ignore, or try
to eradicate the differences between and across groups within “the people.”
This skeptical approach to populism is illustrated in Jan-Werner Müller’s What
Is Populism? (2006), in which he adopts the language of populism as
a political logic, but identifies key attributes of that logic, including a strong
anti-pluralism deriving from populists’ belief in their moral singularity. Steven
Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt adopt this pessimistic reading of populism in How
Democracies Die (2018), in which they argue that authoritarian populism pre­
sents a clear danger to fragile pluralist democracies.
Despite these concerns, few of the chapters in this collection adopt the
position that populism is necessarily anti-pluralist. Although contributors
acknowledge the validity of the slippery slope invoked with “the people,” they
argue that “the people” can both be plural and recognize themselves as such.
Generally speaking, the pluralist populist argument focuses less on the particular
arguments that are made, rightly or wrongly, on behalf of “the people,” and
more on the processes that allow people to engage collectively. One implication
of this focus on the process is that more pluralist populists are less interested in
establishing clear boundaries between “the people” and their enemies. While cer­
tain populist rhetorics view “the people” unidimensionally as members of
a single group, when real people interact, especially in the intense purposeful
interaction of forming social movements, they encounter each other as complex
human beings. These interactions allow participants to identify commonalities
and to develop respect and appreciation for differences.

Practical problems in studying populism

The final set of challenges addressed in this collection concerns the practical and
methodological problems of studying populism. A survey of approaches to the
study of populism risks replicating broad philosophical and methodological debates
in the social sciences and the humanities—between positive, interpretive, and
critical approaches, between quantitative and qualitative methods, between “N” and
“n,” and so forth. Yet, we also recognize that methodological matters shape the
types of questions asked and data collected. We therefore seek to offer a brief over­
view while avoiding detailed mapping of existing methodological divisions.
Although there are many ways of organizing diverse interdisciplinary scholar­
ship on populism, the three-part typology introduced by Francisco Panizza in the
12 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

edited collection Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (2005) is particularly

helpful. First, Panizza delineates empirical research on populism as seeking
observable generalizations from cases of populism with the hope of identifying
distinctive attributes characteristic of populist phenomena, which help build dis­
tinct typologies. Paul Taggart’s Populism (2000) adopts this empirically
grounded approach when outlining key themes across populist mobilizations—
including a hostility to representative politics, a shared idealized heartland, and
a reaction to a sense of extreme crisis—that persist despite populism’s chame­
leon-like adaptations to local circumstances and lack of transcendent core
values. This empirical approach to populism is found throughout this collection
but most specifically in the case studies of populist mobilizations explored in
Parts III and IV and the methodological issues raised in Part V.
Panizza’s (2005) second approach to research on populism adopts historicist
accounts with the aim of linking populism to specific historical periods, social
formations, historical processes, or sets of historical circumstances. Mudde and
Kaltwasser’s Populism: A Very Short Introduction (2017) utilizes this formula­
tion when positioning populism specifically in the context of liberal democracies.
Historical approaches can emphasize institutions or individual agency in
accounting for populist mobilizations. Mudde and Kaltwasser observe that efforts
to valorize “popular agency,” with human action seen as driving history, are
often adopted by U.S. historians when explaining populism as a mobilization of
the common people around a more communitarian democracy. However, this
valorization of people’s movements does not exhaust historicized approaches,
which can also address the socio-economic conditions of possibility for popu­
lism, an approach more concerned with institutions and events than historical
agency, as explained in Part III.
The third and last approach to populist research outlined by Panizza (2005)
adopts a “symptomatic” reading that may incorporate empiricist and historical
accounts, but focuses on “populism as an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies
the political space by symbolically dividing society between ‘the people’ (as the
‘underdogs’) and its ‘other’” (pp. 2–3). “The people” and “the other” are political
constructs symbolically produced in language. The incompleteness, or “lack”
inherent in language and our identifications with it, enables and fuels populist
mobilizations. Panizza argues that what is critically important is the process that
articulates demands, positioning demands and identities into an antagonistic rela­
tionship with the social order. Panizza describes this process as an “awakening”
because the articulation not only expresses preexisting angst, but also names and
defines antagonistically. In this fashion, Panizza articulates populism within the
post-structuralist approach introduced by Laclau (2005) and Mouffe (2018).
There is yet another approach to populism that can be added to this list:
populism as a political style or performance. This approach is distinguished by
its emphasis on populism as a strategy exploited by political entrepreneurs,
rather than a set of ideas distinguishable by form or content. For example,
Moffitt (2016) emphasizes the impact of new media technologies, new modes
 Introduction to collection 13

of political representation and identification, and the sheer ubiquity of populist-

style messaging as producing populism today as a globalized “political style”
performed, embodied and enacted across political and cultural contexts (p. 3).
Moffitt, following thinkers such as Castells (2019), sees the populist style as
well adapted to the plebian networked instantaneity and emotional volatility
of contemporary communications, which prioritize performativity, celebrity,
entertainment, and moral outrage over more traditional expressions of reasoned
discussion and debate. Communication is not simply epiphenomenon, not
simply a mere reflection of some underlying populist essence, as it constructs
the populist “leader” (as key performer), “the people” (as audience), and the
“crisis” (as breakdown and/or threat) (pp. 4–5). Moffitt’s framework is compat­
ible with others outlined here, especially the symptomatic and communication
approaches, but has special relevance for bringing contemporary communica­
tion environments and practices into focus.
Returning now to the questions launching this Introduction, we can see that
what it means to be populist is ultimately contingent upon the researcher’s analyt­
ical perspective. Historical and empiricist approaches are more likely to delimit
key characteristics of populist mobilizations by examining their communication
practices and political activities and contextualizing them within extant events and
institutional relations. Historicists tend to address distinctive or unique historical
conditions of possibility (including unique people, events, and organizational con­
figurations), while empiricists are typically more interested in generalizing from
unique circumstances in order to explain and predict reoccurring forms/types
of social organizing. In contrast, the symptomatic approach is less interested in
populism as a unique or generalizable social form or forms because it approaches
populism as a process—that is, it approaches populism as an antagonistic process
of articulation (delineating “the people” and “the other”) and identification. This
collection introduces readers to research representing each of these approaches,
finding value in their distinct formulations and methodologies.

References
Castells, M. (2019). Rupture: The crisis of liberal democracy. R. Marteau (Trans.).
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Hofstadter, R. (1955). The age of reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York, NY: Alfred
A. Knopf.
Hofstadter, R. (1964). The paranoid style in American politics: And other essays.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jacobs, R. N., & Townsley, E. (2018). Media meta-commentary and the performance of
expertise. European Journal of Social Theory, 21(3), 340–356.
Jäger, A. (2017). The semantic drift: Images of populism in post-war American historiog­
raphy and their relevance for (European) political science. Constellations, 24, 310–323.
Jones, P. K. (2018). Insights from the infamous: Recovering the social-theoretical first
phase of populism studies. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(4), 458–476.
doi:10.1177/1368431018772507
14 Amit Ron and Majia Nadesan

Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. London, UK: Verso.

Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. New York, NY: Crown.
Lippmann, W. (1965). Public opinion. New York, NY: Free Press.
Locke, J. (1689/1980). Second treatise of government. C. B. Macpherson (Ed.). Indian­
apolis, IN: Hackett.
Machiavelli, N. (1532/1988). The prince. Q. Skinner & R. Price (Eds.). Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representa­
tion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Mouffe, C. (2018). For a left populism. London, UK: Verso.
Mudde, C. (2018, November 22). How populism became the concept that defines our age.
The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/22/
populism-concept-defines-our-age
Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Müller, J.-W. (2016). What is populism? Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Nichols, W. (2017). “Populism” revealed as 2017 word of the year by Cambridge University
Press (2017, November 30). Retrieved from www.cam.ac.uk/news/populism-revealed-as­
2017-word-of-the-year-by-cambridge-university-press
Panizza, F. (Ed.). (2005). Populism and the mirror of democracy. London, UK: Verso.
Rice-Oxley, M., & Kalia, A. (2018, December 3). How to spot a populist. The Guardian.
Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/03/what-is-populism-trump­
farage-orban-bolsonaro
Skocpol, T., & Williamson, V. (2016). The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican
conservatism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Taggart, P. (2000). Populism. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
Urbinati, N. (2014). Democracy disfigured: Opinion, truth, and the people. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
painted in alternate bands of black and white, occasionally red and
white, and resembles a barber’s pole more than anything. The
“Djundagalla” stands in the centre of the cleared space and the rites
are performed around it. In the northern Kimberleys, we find a stone
phallus taking the place of the pole.
It is not every tribe that submits its young men to these mutilations
at the initiation ceremonies. There are some which institute great
graduation-festivals without the infliction of bodily harm to the virile
aspirants. Notably among these are the Larrekiya, Melville Islanders,
and the tribes living along the coast from the King River to the heads
of the Roper and East Alligator Rivers.
As an illustration of a tribe which celebrates the coming of
manhood without resorting to operative measures, the Larrekiya
perhaps serve best. The boy, when definite signs of adolescence
manifest themselves, is decorated with the kapok of the silk cotton-
tree (Bombatt malabaricum) and birds’ down. A straight band passes
below his eyes from ear, and the ends thereof are connected by
means of a horseshoe-shaped figure traversing the cheeks and
having its closed end at the chin. Another horizontal band extends
from shoulder to shoulder, above the nipples, and from this two
symmetrical lines are constructed down the abdomen and on to the
thighs, where each terminates in a circular band around the knee. A
white line is also drawn down the outer surface of each upper arm
and is made to end in the plaited armlets worn above the elbow. His
forehead is decorated with a broad band consisting of a number of
parallel strands of opossum fur thickly besmeared with white
pipeclay; in the middle of this is stuck a plume of emu or heron
feathers, and fur-tassels pend from either side of it. He also wears a
coiled bark belt and, over it, a human hair girdle supporting a large
pubic tassel.
The initiates are made to sit in a row before the old men and are
instructed to keep their eyes closed with their hands. The old men
stamp the ground wildly and brandish their spears poised in the
spear-throwers. Every now and then they utter harsh cries of “Arr-re!
Arr-re!” and “Gora!” Whilst this pandemonium is in full swing, the
boys are ordered to open their eyes and behold their elders
performing; then they are led away into the bush and have to wait on
the men, having especially to collect for them many things that are
good to eat. During this period they are often cowed by being struck
between the shoulder-blades, and threatened with violence if at any
time they talk publicly about anything that has transpired or in any
way betray the trust which the old men have placed in them. Upon
their return to camp, the young men have additional scars cut into
the skin of their chest and are then entitled “Böllier” which signifies
that the first stepping stone to maturity has been passed.
A second ceremony takes place some years later. Each youth is
then under the individual charge of an old man and is decorated
much the same way as the Böllier candidate described above, with
the distinguishing features of four red ochre stripes across the white
forehead band and an extra plume of white cockatoo feathers stuck
into his hair. The proceedings start soon after sundown and last till
about midnight; they include much gesticulation and vociferation. At
the solemn moment when the “conferring” of the maturity-degree
takes place, the youth, still tended by the old man, remains
motionless, with downcast eyes, and listens to the melancholy chant
rendered by the old men in low lagging accents:
“Makolär manga, malolär, ä, är, maklär, immanga.”
No beating of sticks or clapping of hands accompanies this tune,
and no further ceremonial dance follows.
The youth has now been elevated to the status of “Mollinya” which
qualifies him to the full rank and privileges of manhood. Further
cicatrices may now be added to either side of his abdomen. The cuts
are horizontal but do not extend right up to the median line.
During the period intervening between Böllier and Mollinya
festivals, bustard, flying-fox, and yam are forbidden articles of diet,
but after the latter event the fledgelings are invited to eat with the old
men. They honestly believe that if any of the young men, while
undergoing initiation, ate one of the forbidden articles secretly, the
medicine man would be able to detect the food in his stomach; and
having thus disobeyed, the medicine man would be justified in
running a spear through the offender, or at any rate compel him to
swallow certain things which would poison him. These rules are
strictly observed, and, whenever some of the privileged members
have eaten flying-fox or bustard, they take the precaution to collect
the bones and burn them.
The tribes on Nullarbor Plains will tell you that the initiation
ceremonies originated in the following way. Many, many years ago,
the emu and the kangaroo were more or less human in appearance
and possessed of mighty powers. One day the emu caught the
kangaroo with the object of making a man of it. But the great
struthious bird had no hands wherewith it might have performed an
operation; all it possessed was a “finger” on each side of its body. It
might be explained that the emu, because it cannot fly, is not
regarded as a “bird” in the generally recognized sense, and
consequently the wings are looked upon as “fingers.” In most of the
vocabularies, indeed, no distinction is made between “finger” and
“hand,” the south-western tribes of central Australia referring to one
or the other as “marra.” Nothing daunted, however, the emu removed
the præputium from the kangaroo by clutching it between its wings
and pulling it off. Thereupon the emu said to the kangaroo: “Will you
make me a man?” And the kangaroo replied, “Yes.” The kangaroo
had the advantage over the emu because it possessed five “fingers,”
with which it could perform the operation the right way. The animal
caught hold of the bird and circumcised it with a sharp splinter of
flint. But the emu requested to be further operated upon and so it
came about that the kangaroo decided upon a subincision. To the
present day the emu retains the marks of this operation. Some while
after these happenings, the tribal fathers ran across the sacred emu
and noted the change in its anatomy; they forthwith mutilated each
other in a similar way, and only then did they realize that they were
men.
Not boys alone are required to submit to the various initiation
ceremonies here mentioned, but in most tribes young women are
“made” marriageable by having to submit themselves to ordeals
which are quite similar to those of manhood’s approbation.
While discussing the female breast, we noted that when it begins
to develop a girl is taken away by the men and the breast anointed
and sung to, to stimulate its growth. This procedure is the forerunner
of initiation. The girl’s development is forthwith watched with care,
and when the unmistakable signs of ripening are detected the event
is celebrated with dance and song.
Men and women attend, and the items rendered are more or less
of the nature of an ordinary corrobboree, although occasionally some
special feature characterizes the performance. For instance the
Larrekiya and Wogait tribes pass the girl through a “smoking”
ceremony after the following fashion. An old gin places herself
behind the girl and lays her hands upon the latter’s shoulders. Then
all the other women taking part form a continuous chain by standing
in a single row behind each other and “linking up” in a similar way.
They begin to sing “Ya, Ya, Ya,” in a long-drawn melancholy note,
and the old-gin immediately stamps her feet, and, moving forwards,
pushes the girl along in front of her. All the other performers follow
her, stamping in unison and holding on to the shoulders of the
person in front. Quite unexpectedly the monosyllabic “Ya” is changed
to “Yen da min,” and at this the old gin stops short and strikes the
girl’s back thrice with her hand. The same performance is repeated
time after time during the night. Early in the morning of the next day,
the girl is led to the sea, and the whole party wades out to about
hips’ depth. Here a grotesque dance is started during which they
strike their arms, bent in the elbows, against the sides of their bodies
under water, the splash producing a peculiar hollow-sounding note.
The process reminds one of a goose flapping its wings while
enjoying a bath. At this stage, the wording of the song sounds like
“A-lö-lö-lö,” and when its final syllable has resounded, all bathers
duck under the surface of the water.
Next a fire is kindled upon the shore, and, when a good blaze has
been obtained, a heap of grass and leaves previously steeped in
water, is piled upon it. Upon this the old gin seats herself and makes
the girl sit upon her lap facing her and with her legs astride. The
volumes of smoke which are generated completely hide the two from
view. The idea is to allow the smoke to thoroughly play upon the
parts of the novice, the process being facilitated by the manipulation
of the old gin. When the ceremony is concluded, the girl is led into
the bush by the old women and for some time to follow she is not
allowed to partake of certain articles of diet, such as for instance
snake, dugong, and goanna.
Several of the northern and north-eastern coastal tribes mutilate
the hand of a young gin during the period of her initiation by
removing two joints from a finger. The forefinger of either hand is
generally chosen by the former tribes, the latter favouring the small
finger. The Ginmu at the mouth of the Victoria River make the
amputation with a stone knife. In this district a singular case came
under my notice which is of considerable interest from an evolutional
point of view since it suggests a phenomenon usually only met with
in crustations, reptiles, and other creatures whose position is very
much lower in the animal kingdom. A young girl had had two end
phalanges of a finger imperfectly removed, and yet upon the
mutilated stump a horny growth resembling a diminutive finger-nail
had formed anew. The Daly River tribes remove the bones by tying a
ligature of cobweb which they find in the mangroves very tightly
around the joint. The end phalanges of the finger, thus deprived of
the circulation, gradually mortify and drop off. Occasionally the joints
may be bitten off by a parent of the child.
As a general rule, it may be said that wherever mutilations of the
male are undertaken during initiation ceremonies, a corresponding
operation is performed upon the female; and, vice versa, where the
former practice is not indulged in, the latter is also unknown.
Generally speaking, too, the female mutilation ceremonies are much
the same wherever practised in Australia, but the implements or
devices employed for the actual mutilation vary in different localities.
Invitations to the event are sent by special messengers to
adjoining groups and neighbouring friendly tribes. These
messengers are of mixed sexes and are decorated by having their
bodies covered with ochre. The common method is to make the
ground colour of the body a rich red and to draw upon it concentric
circles of white and black. The men carry a “female” tjuringa, whilst
the women, apart from numerous necklaces and armlets which they
wear, are unaccoutred. The latter are near group-relatives of the
young woman concerned. Their mission is readily understood by the
people they look up during their walk-about, and, without much
interchange of words, acceptance is indicated by the recipients of
the message by resorting to an intimacy with the feminine
emissaries. Although considerable liberality is shown during this
indulgence, the privilege is by no means stretched to beyond the
bounds of a tolerable promiscuousness, even though the
messengers may be entertained at the distant camp for two or three
days before they return home.
The celebrating camp in the interim has been busily preparing for
the approaching event. Nightly corrobborees have been held at the
chosen spot by both the men and the women, and the novice has
repeatedly appeared before the performing crowd richly decorated
and besmeared with emu-fat and ochre. At no time, however, even
after the invited guests have arrived, does the excitement become
anywhere near as great as during the initiation ceremonies of the
opposite sex; in fact, at its best, the performance is extremely dull
and monotonous.
When at length it becomes apparent that even the principal actors
themselves are tiring, it seems as though the moment had arrived
when only a desperate decision could revive the enthusiasm. A
number of men, who stand in the same group-relationship to the
novice as her future husband, lead the girl away without any ado,
except perhaps that the remaining members slightly spur their
acting. This stage is mostly reached at daylight, as often as not early
in the morning, after the whole night has been spent in dancing and
singing.
Away from the din of her tribespeople’s celebration in honour of
the occasion of her stepping from girlhood to womanhood, the silent
victim is told to squat on the ground whilst the men surround her. Her
oldest “group-husband” produces a flat, wooden tjuringa, of the
“male” type, with which he several times touches her person, whilst
he mutters incoherent and garbled words. This is done to dispel from
her all possible pain and likely loss of blood during the operation she
is about to be submitted to.
 Then she is requested to lie flat on her back, and her head is
placed upon the lap of one of the men who squats to keep it there. It
follows the act which is destined to make her marriageable; her
virginity is doomed to mechanical destruction.
The instruments, if any, which are used for the operation vary
according to locality. In the central areas (Aluridja, Wongapitcha,
Kukata), an ordinary stone-knife with resin haft is used. The Victoria
desert tribes employ cylindro-conical stones from six to eight inches
long, and from one and a half to two inches in diameter. Among the
tribes of the northern Kimberley districts of Western Australia no real
instrument is used at all, but the operator winds the index and middle
fingers of his right hand together with a long piece of fur-string; and
this device answers the same purpose as the above-named
instruments.
The tribes indulging in this practice admit that their action is
prompted by a desire to offer the girl’s pudicity to one of her spirit-
husbands. We might indeed look upon this rite as the equivalent of
sacrificing the jus primae noctis to a mythical or legendary tribal
relative who is supposed to be living in the astral form and who is
likely to come back to earth at any day.
 PLATE XXXII

An episode of the great fire ceremony, Kolaia tribe.

“Presently the music starts again, and the spirit known as ‘Ngardaddi’ is seen to be
stealthily creeping towards the fire, his body lying flat upon the ground and his legs
dragging behind.”
 CHAPTER XXVII
RELIGIOUS IDEAS

Religious instincts of aboriginal—Nature worship—Fire ceremony—Fire legends—

Mythical fire thief called “Ngardaddi”—Water legends and ceremonial—Sun
worship—Sun myths—The moon man—The mythical serpent—The kobong
and totem—The tjuringa—Tjuringa legend—Ancestor worship—“Knaninja” or
“Totem” deities—The significance of the tjuringa—Sacred tjuringa caves
—“Totemic” diet restrictions—Gradation of sacred ceremonial—Great emu
ceremony—The “Altjerringa”—The sacred yam or “Ladjia” ceremony—The
“Etominja” design—Sex worship—The phallus—Mythical origin of phallus—
Ideas concerning procreation—Grey hairs blackened artificially—A phallic
monolith known as “Knurriga Tjilba Purra”—Foetal elements or “Rattappa”—
The “Tjilba Purra” embodied in the headgear—“Waraka,” a phallic stone on
the Roper River—Similar Kukata legend—Phallic ceremonial on Cambridge
Gulf—Cylindro-conical stones of phallic significance—Matronal chasm of
Killalpaninna—“Arrolmolba,” a sacred stone possessing stimulating principles
—Phallic drawing of “Mongarrapungja”—Evil spirits—Disenchanted
enclosures—Aboriginal belief in Supreme Being—Etymology of His name—
The eternal home of all deities and spirit ancestors.

It has often been written that the Australian aboriginal is without

religious ideas and without religious ceremonies. Such assertions
are grossly incorrect and by no means portray the psychological side
of the primitive man in its true light. He has, on the contrary, religious
institutions and obligations which verge on the basis of all modern
conceptions and recognition of divine supremacy. If we can class
Nature-worship, Ancestor-worship, and Sex-worship as the
beginnings of all religious teachings, then the Australian aboriginal
has certainly inherited by instinct and tradition a very solid foundation
from which we might trace the origin of many, if not most, of our most
sacred beliefs in Christianity. At the same time, it must not be
forgotten that it is really a difficult matter to distinguish clearly
between mythological beliefs and what we class as religion.
Religious thought has fluctuated with the advance of civilization and
science to such a degree that, even within the short space of time
covered by the more reliable records of our history, several
revolutionary modifications have come about. As time advances,
man becomes more sceptical and more exacting in his demand for
proofs, and in his despair over finding nothing tangible to worship, he
resorts to the recognition, by instinct or persuasion, of a God who is
a Spirit. But all the while, as this secular metamorphosis is
proceeding, he keeps his innermost feelings and faith alive by
appealing to his knowledge of the gospel or his belief in salvation, in
the manner it was presented to him by myth, by legend, or by the
Scriptures. His principal guide is his intellect; the less it is trained the
stronger his inherited conviction; the more scientific it becomes, the
greater his desire to probe the truth.
The modern man has so accustomed himself to an artificial
environment that he takes the so-called “elements” of Nature,
especially water and fire, in a strictly matter-of-fact sort of way. But
the primitive man, who realizes that his very existence is dependent
upon these factors, has learned to respect, preserve, and worship
them as legacies he imagines to have been left him by some of his
illustrious forbears who, he supposes, have gone to an unknown
realm where they live in peace and can only return temporarily to
their former haunts in the invisible form or through the medium of
some other object which is related to the individual in some
mysterious way.
The aboriginal looks upon fire as one of the great indispensible
quantities of his social existence; it is the element which dispels the
evil spirits from his camp; it is the means by which comfort and
friendship are made accessible to him; it is his universal companion.
More than this, it is the fire, with its warmth and its light, which draws
individuals, families, groups, and tribes together and through its
agency and influence that social concourse is established which lies
at the bottom of all conviviality, oracular discussion, and ceremony.
How well this sentiment agrees with the knowledge we possess of
the origin of civilization! Indeed the appreciation of fire together with
the knowledge of its preservation is perhaps the mightiest factor
responsible for making our species human. Once man learned to
nurse an original flame he found through accidental cause and kept
it constantly by his side, his progress became an established fact.
His crude camp-fire talks developed into discussions which he
further expanded by means of drawings on the walls of caves he
occupied. The free exchange of thought brought about by
congregation round the cheerful flame could not fail to incite the
intellect; and thus he ascended to the high road of civilization and
gathered the fruits of culture he now enjoys.
The Aluridja, Wongapitcha, and some of the north-western coastal
tribes believe that many years ago, a party of ancestral creatures,
more animal than human, came down from the sky through the
branches of tall gum-trees to confer with the spirits which roam about
at night and conceal themselves in inanimate objects during the day.
These monsters brought a fire-stick with them and when they
reached the earth, they lit a fire to cook some grubs which they had
taken from the bark of the trees during their descent. As they were
feasting, the spirits called them and they went with them to a cave
where the bones of the persons rested, originally occupied by the
spirits themselves. Whilst they were away, the fire which had been
left unguarded, decided to run into the bush and, being in a
mischievous mood, started an enormous blaze which burned down
much of the forest and the tall gum-trees as well. The spirit-
ancestors and the heavenly monsters beheld the disaster with
consternation and called upon the fire to come back. This it did. But
it so happened that some of the tribes’ fathers were hunting in the
area, and when they saw the fire, which was strange to them, they
snatched portion of it away and ran with it to their camp, where they
kept it and fed it with dry grass and sticks. The spirits and their
visitors were very angry and never left the fire out of their sight, lest it
might abscond again; they were compelled to live on earth for a very
long time until the trees grew up again to their lofty domain. The
hunters, on the other hand, zealously guarded their prize fearing that
it might run away from them. Even to the present day, this belief
exists among the older folks, and they always take great care that
the ground is cleared of inflammable matter to stop the fire from
bolting; to be on the safe side, they invariably carry or keep near to
them a fair-sized, glowing fire-stick.
 Among the Minning this legend is circulated in a slightly modified
form. Two ancestral spirits had their fires burning in the sky at points
represented by the pointers of the Southern Cross constellation,
when one day they decided to come down to the earth to hunt
opossum. They took their fires with them, but while engaged in the
chase they left them at their camp. When they had obtained a
sufficient number of opossums to make a good meal, they returned
to their camp, where they noticed six young men sitting around the
fires, who immediately made off, and, in doing so, each took a fire-
stick away with him. The spirits gave chase and re-captured five of
the thieves, but the sixth, who was named “Warrupu,” reached the
camp of his tribe and handed the fire-stick to his mother, “Wenoinn.”
The woman ran with it to the white sand hills about Eucla in which
she intended hiding it. But the spirits had noticed her and came
towards her from above with a spear. In her predicament, the woman
threw the fire-stick away, which immediately set the whole of the
country ablaze between Eucla and Israelite Bay. All the tribes were
thus enabled to seize some of the fire which they have carefully
watched over ever since.
 PLATE XXXIII

Ceremonial venesection, Arunndta tribe.

1. The median basilic vein is being slit. Note ligature above the biceps.

2. The blood which is spurting from the incision is being collected on a shield.

A similar tradition is perpetuated by the north-western tribes

referred to and affords the motive of one of the most earnest and
sacred fire-ceremonies known in Australia. The performance takes
place during the night. It is introduced by two men; the one
represents a mischievous spirit trying to steal back the sacred fire
which is being carefully guarded by a number of men impersonating
the ancestral tribesmen who originally discovered it; the other is a
warrior who has accidentally come upon the would-be thief and
overpowered him. The spirit crouches at the feet of the warrior,
sitting upon his heels, with his head drooping upon his chest and his
hands hanging loosely between his thighs. The warrior stands erect
behind his supposed captive, with his legs apart, and continues
striking the fellow with small bundles of brushwood, one of which he
holds in either hand. The beating is done regularly, both hands rising
simultaneously, high above the warrior’s head, and falling together
upon the spirit’s head.
Some two chains away, the tribal ancestors are grouped by the
fire-side and are chanting the following lines:

“Wai dang bunnai,

Inna dinna dulla ngai.”

The men sit in a row at the back of the fire, with their thighs asunder
and their legs bent in the knees; their chins are resting upon their
chests whilst they beat the backs of their heads with small bundles of
brushwood, keeping time with their song and with the performance of
the warrior.
When, after a while, the music ceases, the warrior is seen to be
lying asleep beside his captive. The ancestors become restless and
begin to move sideways, first in a body to the left and then to the
right; then they move backwards and forwards. This movement is
peculiarly weird since the performers do it by shuffling over the
ground in the sitting posture, with their arms held erect, but bent in
the elbow.
Presently the music starts again, and the spirit known as
“Ngardaddi” is seen to be stealthily creeping towards the fire, his
body lying flat upon the ground and his legs dragging behind. He
advances very slowly, turning his face towards the ground, in search
of the fire which escaped from heaven. He wears a tall head-dress
quite thirty-two inches long, which consists of a tightly fitting
hemispherical cap carrying a column in its centre, at the top of which
a bundle of split black-cockatoo feathers is attached. The feathers
are from the male bird’s tail, and the brilliant red patches in them are
representative of fire. The whole structure is made of paper-bark and
human hair-string, the outer surface being decorated with ochre,
pipeclay, charcoal, and vegetable-down. Vide Plate XXXII.
 All the time the men at the fire-side are beating time with their
hands and simultaneously turn their heads from side to side, to all
intents and purposes quite unconcerned about the Ngardaddi who is
gradually crawling near to them. This is done to entice the thief
nearer and lead him to believe that he is unobserved. All of a
sudden, however, when the spirit is about to touch the fire and is in
the act of snatching it from the tribesmen, one of the group on either
side of the fire throws a handful of dry grass upon the smouldering
heap. The flame responds immediately and casts a bright light all
around.
Alarm is raised by the tribesmen by clapping their hands together
violently. The spirit collapses and lies flat upon the ground at full
length. Two or three of the men nearest by seize some of the burning
grass and hit the prostrate figure over the head. The spirit jumps to
his feet and treads the ground as if endeavouring to make his
escape. Seeing this, the men at the fire rise quickly and treat their
victim most unmercifully with bundles of burning grass and twigs.
Eventually each of them seizes a fire-brand and digs the burning end
deeply into the spirit’s back and the unfortunate fellow eventually
decamps into the darkness amidst the bellowing whoops of his
victors.
The air is fouled for some distance around by the smell of the
burned skin, reminding one of the stench in a smithy when horses
are being shod. The back of the spirit-impersonator is naturally
severely scored by the cruel treatment it is subjected to, but the
fellow takes it all in good faith and without flinching.
The object of the ceremony is twofold. Firstly all members of the
community who are present, men, women, and children, are taught
to appreciate the value of fire, and secondly it is believed that the
exemplification of so harsh and drastic a treatment for attempted
theft will tend to make abortive any schemes of the evil spirits.
The Arunndta are quite convinced in their own minds that in the
days of their tribal fathers there was no water on the surface of the
ground they occupied; their ancestors in those times were compelled
to live on grass and succulent plants, no consideration being given to
the fact, as we have learned, that the vegetation derives its moisture
from outside sources. But it happened one day, when their
forefathers were out hunting, that they met with a number of strange-
looking men who were sitting around a pool of pure water from which
they were drinking. At the sight of the men, the strangers fled,
leaving the water behind. The hunters gave chase but all except one
disappeared and he made for a cave in the hills. The hunters closed
the mouth of the cave with a big stone and went back to the pool of
water to quench their thirst, but when they reached the spot, the
water had turned into a massive, round stone. The men made back
to the cave and removed the obstruction, but imagine their surprise
when they found the cave empty. Upon making a careful search,
however, they discovered a long cylindrical stick which had some
peculiar markings on it. They took the stick and walked once more
towards the petrified pool, and, lo, they beheld the stranger they
were looking for walking in the sky. When he saw the stick in the
hands of the hunters, he took the form of a cloud, and as he bent his
body towards the stick, his long matted hair fell forwards and from it
water poured upon the earth beneath. The hunters drank freely of
the precious fluid and when they looked skywards again the
cloudman had vanished.
From that day onwards the Arunndta medicine men (“Nangarri”)
have kept that spot sacred and taboo to the women and children;
they call the big stone “Imbodna” which means “the hailstone.” The
man who fled to the cave and then escaped from the hunters as a
vapour they call “Nangali,” the name for a cloud. The tribe has never
since been without water because Nangali left his magic wand in the
hands of their ancient sorcerers and whenever the country was
suffering from drought they could call upon him to appear in the sky
and bring forth rain.
Nangali is one of a group of celestial beings who have been
termed “Atoakwatje,” that is Water-Men; they are now looked upon
as Demigods who control all terrestrial supplies of water from their
abode in the clouds. The Atoakwatje are believed to have certain
mysterious connections with some of the tribal sorcerers who in a
sense parade on earth as their disciples and attend to the rain-
making ceremonies through which they are able to commune with
each other.
When the people are in need of water, the rain-makers assemble
around the Imbodna and one or two of them produce the sacred
stick, known to the Arunndta as “kwatje-purra,” literally meaning “the
reproductive organ of water,” and to the Aluridja as “kapi-wiyinna.”
Nowadays these sticks, which strictly speaking are of phallic
significance, are flat and more like a tjuringa in shape, and have a
number of peculiar markings on them. For a time the stick is laid
beside the great water-stone, and the sorcerers kneel while they
chant with a barely audible voice. They rise to their feet and the most
influential individual who is decorated with stripes of yellow
vegetable-down and wears a dog-tail tassel on his belt, lifts the stick
towards the sky and continues mumbling. The other members kneel
again and all present chat together. The man who is standing poises
the stick horizontally between his hands and rocks it one way, then
another; and this performance is frequently repeated.
When at length the principal performer sits down, the other men
leave the spot and run in a single file towards the camp, loudly crying
“kurreke ta ta” in imitation of the call of the spur-winged plover.
In the evening a general corroboree is indulged in; and all grown-
up persons, male and female, are allowed to join in. Several refrains
are forthcoming which are connected with ordinary rain or water
festivals. The principal rainmaker does not attend but joins the camp
again during the night. It appears that in the interim he has visited
the sacred cave, in company of one or two of his brother-sorcerers,
to hide the magic stick and preserve it for future use. Any
representative of the Atoakwatje group inherits the power to fashion
and use the rain-stick, but it is imperative that he learns the art under
the direction of a senior and duly qualified nangarri.
A ceremony directly connected with sun-worship belongs to the
old Arunndta people and is known as “Ilpalinja.” When the weather
has been and continues to be unpleasantly cold, and the mating
season of birds and animals has on that account been long delayed,
the men construct a large colored design upon the selected
ceremonial ground. Radiating from a point upon a cleared space,
many lines are drawn with red and white vegetable-down to
represent the rays of the sun; and these are intersected at different
distances from the central point by a number of concentric circles
which represent the fathers of the tribe. The centre of the design is
occupied by a stick which is supposed to incorporate some mystical
and sacred sun-creature known as “Knaninja Arrerreka.” The same
Ilpalinja-design is occasionally carved as the crest of the Knaninja
upon a sun-tjuringa. Vide Fig. 6.

Fig. 6. Sacred sun-design of the “Ilpalinja” ceremony (× 1/20).

A most impressive function might occasionally be witnessed on

the north coast, which is associated with the setting sun; it is known
to at least two tribes, the one living on the upper reaches of the
Victoria River and the other on the western shores of Carpentaria
Gulf, including some of the islands. It is usually performed in
conjunction with demonstrations calling upon a fabulous being which
lives in the sky to fecundate certain species of plants and animals
necessary for their daily life. The Carpentaria tribes, moreover, keep
their sacred poles, akin to the tjuringas of central Australia, not in
caves but in special huts which they construct upon chosen spots
absolutely taboo to the general public. These slabs of wood are up to
five feet long and are covered with peculiar carvings and markings;
they are of the two sexes. Ordinarily they are kept “asleep” by laying
them on the floor of the hut side by side, and covering them with
sand. When the hour of the ceremony arrives, they are brought out
by the “Sun-Men” and stuck in the ground in the full light of the
sinking sun. Just as the orb is about to touch the horizon, the tenders
of the sacred implements kneel, with their faces turned towards the
sun and, lifting their hands, bend their bodies to the ground much
after the fashion of an Eastern salaam. We have before us a true
form of worship recognizing the supreme powers of the sun, but
aimed primarily at calling upon a demigod or Deity in supplication for
making a needed article of diet, animal or vegetable, fruitful or
prolific.
Mythologically the sun is regarded as a female having human form
and a fiery exterior, who walks daily across the firmament and
returns at night to rest at her sacred haunts on earth. Some of the
central tribes, like the Aluridja, split the sun’s identity into an
indefinite number of such women, a different one of which makes the
journey every day.
The moon on the other hand is thought to be a man who originally
inhabited the earth but was one day chased off it by a gigantic dog
the Aluridja call “Tutrarre.” The man jumped into space and walked
among the clouds until he reached the earth again. His long walk
had made him so hungry and thin that he ravenously ate a great
number of opossums which he found in the trees at night. In
consequence he swelled out, and became fat and round. Then it was
his bad fortune to fall in with the dog again, and this time his obesity
prevented his escape. The dog tore him to pieces and swallowed
him, bone and all. But it so happened that one of his arm-bones flew
from the dog’s jaws and found its way to the sky. There it floated
from east to west as a luminous sickle and gradually swelled until it
was perfectly round. The dog stood looking up at the bone and
howled in anger, but the moon-man reappeared in the sky and
converted the dog into stone.
 The Kakatu natives believe in a moon-man who lives in the sky
and controls the clouds. On a certain day, very long ago, this man
was seen by the ancestors of the tribe. It happened thus: Just about
dusk, a cloud was observed descending from the sky which came to
rest upon the summit of a hill; it was glowing red. A big man, a
woman, and two girls stepped upon the earth, and the man took a
fire-stick from the cloud which then became black and ascended
again. It was the moon-man and his family. The party walked down
on to the plain and camped, the old man making a fire with his torch
whereby his feminine escort could warm themselves. The moon-man
left, taking a new fire-stick with him. In a deep, green water-hole
lived a monstrous snake whose colour was much like that of the
slime which covered the surface of the water. A lengthy and secret
interview took place between the moon-man and the snake on the
bank of the lagoon, and the snake produced many tubers of water-
lily, and mussels also, for the moon-man to eat. Then the two heard
a rustling noise. The snake exclaimed: “What is that? Who dares
approach our trysting place?” The moon-man snatched a fire-brand
and held it high in the air; this made it light as day. The moon-man’s
daughters could be seen creeping towards the men to hear the
secret discussion! With a curse upon his mouth, the angry father
hurled the fire-stick at his deceitful daughters. The stick struck the
ground and sent a shower of sparks over the girls. In an instant
everything became dark as night, but every now and again there
came from the spot the girls had last been seen at long-drawn
growls; from the same spot flashes of light shot forth and illumined
the clouds. The snake and the moon-man had disappeared, but the
daughters remained just where they had last been seen, for they had
been turned to stone and had assumed the rigid form of a dog
whose head was directed skywards as if to rebuke the moon-man for
the curse he had brought upon them. For a long time the clouds
remained dark; then the moon-man re-appeared among them and
cast a mournful beam upon the canine image of his daughters. From
then till now he has continued to appear periodically in the sky, and
his repentant daughters gaze at him; but at times, when the sky is
covered with heavy black clouds, the daughters become angry and
growl aloud. At these times, too, bright flashes dart from their eyes