Today’s Americans live in politically and socially constructed citadels, impenetrable to the categorically-defined other. As such, it is more crucial than ever that case studies that defy this paradigm are anthropologically studied for application elsewhere. In this paper, through an examination of the 2025 mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York, we reconsider the nature of polarisation and the role of ethnographic processes in political mobilisation. Rather than treating polarisation as a stable condition of opposed camps, we conceptualise it as a dynamic process through which divisions are continuously produced, charged, and potentially reoriented. Mamdani’s political campaign is analysed as a situated attempt, wherein ethnographic methods are applied to campaigning strategies, to ameliorate polarisation by refusing both moralised binaries and imposed alignments, instead assembling heterogeneous constituencies around shared material demands and ethical commitments. In this, we invoke Shah’s work on ethnography as a form of revolutionary praxis, creating a pluriversal campaign that does not seek to erase difference, manufacture consensus, or subordinate multiple worlds—of labor, migration, religion, and care—to a singular political horizon, but to instead them hold together. Following Graeber, we argue that such practices constitute forms of political knowledge that expand what is imaginable and doable in polarized contexts. The paper asks what anthropology can learn from these experiments, and how, as scholars and citizens, we might contribute to imagining and enacting political realities that are less antagonistic yet attentive to real differences, opening space for generative possibilities amid a world marked by deepening division.

Authors:
Elizabeth Chen, The College of Staten Island, United States
Jeremy Patrick Ahearn, Global Communities, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Elizabeth Chen is a college assistant at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, assisting Professor Vandana Chaudhry in the Social Work department. Her research interests include political economies, informality, and affect.

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