Abstract
What are the specificities of an anthropological reflection on politics in democratic contexts? With this question in mind, we aim to present the existing debate and propose relevant new avenues for research on democracy, emphasizing some recent arenas of dispute. These arenas pose challenges both for democracy itself and for researchers who are dedicated to the subject. Thus, we address the allegedly democratizing character of new media as a form of expression and self-organization and the subsequent digitization of politics; the growing dissemination of “fake news” and the difficulties of communication and the production of political truth in a context permeated by conspiracy theories; transformations in the understanding of populism as a political expression; finally, this volume also grapples with the presence of religious people in contemporary Brazilian politics, which obliges researchers to pay more attention to the moral dynamics and processes of formation of ethical-political subjectivities of the population.
Keywords:
democracy; new media; conspiracy theories; populism