Gewone mensen. Populisme en het discours van verdringing in Amsterdam Nieuw West

The social analysis of European populism lacks ethnographic attention to agency and to the symbolic meaning of populist constructions in people’s everyday lives. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis, starting with an understanding of populism as a perspective on the world: frames or schemas for perceiving, interpreting and classifying society. The paper focuses on the perspectives of ‘autochthonous’ (native, white) residents in a socially and ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Amsterdam New West. I show how plans for the demolition and restructuring of the neighbourhood opened up the symbolic space for the articulation of a discourse of displacement in which people construed and articulated a ‘self-understanding’ in antagonistic relations with ‘others’: elites and sometimes (post)migrants. The analysis of this local discourse of displacement offers insight into the crisis of representation and voice in a postfordist society, and therefore into the deeper structures of Dutch populism.