ABSTRACT
This chapter temporarily disembeds respondents from their everyday locations and places them within broader ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996: 36). Consequently it, somewhat artificially, pieces together traces of ideology within the group and makes connections between the views expressed and voices from without – that is, discourses of both transnational right-wing extremism and contemporary Russian politics. It suggests that the group of skinheads at the centre of this book can be described as committed to racist and/or neo-fascist views, but that the worldview they construct consists of a number of underlying philosophical principles and shared ideas while falling short of constituting a unified or coherent ideology.1 The dominant strand running through these shared ideas is a defensive white supremacism that draws openly on discourses of the global White Power movement. However, political narratives within the group also contain strong tropes of neoNazism (including extensive symbolic borrowing or reworking) and are rooted in a central palingenetic myth that lies at the core of fascism (Griffin 1991: 26). In an attempt not to lose sight completely of individual lives in the process of distilling and locating these ideological footprints, however, care is taken to reflect also on the degree of internal coherence, diversity of views and relative importance of ideology to individual respondents within the group. In addition, although the exploration of the embodied nature of political engagement is largely postponed until Chapter 6, the local and experiential – as opposed to transnational and textual – sources of ideological inspiration and motivation are, at least, noted here.
