Call for Papers on Fools and Foolery for the November 2025 issue of IPA

The idea of this call is to explore the temporal dynamics of Fools and Foolery, its rhetoric and grammar, its meaning and substance, its goal and target, and how to read current history beyond the eyes of fools. The intention is to link anthropology with social-theoretical and political perspectives.

We are calling for papers with a maximum length of 9000 words, formatted according to the IPA guidelines. Every submission will be peer reviewed.

We invite submissions which analyse how and why the fool appeared as a major actor in history, how this is related to the history of the occult, and how both managed to exert a fundamental effect on the rise and then the functioning of the modern world. The idea is to study the connections between contemporary political society and the so-called secular magical tradition, and the techniques of the real-world operation of the fools. Papers should explore some basic questions about the methods the fools use, their essence and the scope of their activity, in the context of modernity. This is oriented to understanding themes like totalitarianism, contemporary hyper-modernity, the links between modern thinking and obscure and distant historical processes, and the extent to which past or contemporary political leaders exert influence by demonstrating foolish patterns.

The fool may be characterised as the empty vessel of the void, who owns nothing, as he is a non-entity; one without properties, without valuable attributes, rightful characteristics, or qualities, without the distinctive feature of belonging to a concrete space and time. Fools are active in plotting in every possible way and means against civility, trying to rob it, out of jealousy, of the joyful, productive virtues of which he himself was deprived, whether due to accident or by choice. Protected from the harm and risk of existence due to his folly, he slips into the realm of the unreal absurd. This produces a millenarian zeal for the future. Fools feed on the vibratory delirium of their victims, produced through transformed substances. There seems to be a core question of how foolery became normalised over history.

The deadline for submissions is the end of August 2025.

The IPA editors and editorial board

4^th August, 2025

Article image: "The Stańczyk", painting by Polish artist Jan Matejko (self portrait, oil on canvas, 1862, full title: "Stańczyk during a ball at Queen Bona's court after the loss of Smolensk", source: Wikimedia).

CfP International Political Anthropology special issue: Decoding the Post-Truth Society

The recent popularity of the term ‘post-truth’ captures something of our problematic relationship to a sense of shared reality in a 21^st-century society dominated by digital echo-chambers, fractured politics and contested forms of expertise. Everywhere in contemporary societies we find the symptoms of an epistemological crisis. There is the sheer scale of information and its constant churning, far beyond the capacity of anyone to meaningfully integrate, and the cognitive rewiring and impacts on information processing styles that result. Exacerbating this, there is the dissolution of the frameworks which provided a shared intellectual horizon for most educated people in western societies until the late twentieth century: not merely the ideologies or ‘grand narratives’ of Marxism, socialism or liberal progressivism, but literary canons, shared national histories, and the rudiments of a common Christian heritage. Nor does science any longer provide the certainties which religion or ideology proffered in the past: on the contrary, a profound replication crisis afflicts many fields of scientific research, with findings published in even top peer-reviewed journals proving impossible to replicate by subsequent researchers. Neither can we expect enlightenment from a Habermasian public sphere in which educated citizens engage in rational debate to achieve consensus about the common good. Instead, online culture sees the proliferation of echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ which generate increasingly separate and radically opposed informational sub-cultures. Finally, there is the generalised scepticism with which much of the population regard the narratives and ‘facts’ offered by political and corporate leaders, journalists, scientists, and ‘experts’ of all kinds. Never have we had access to more information, yet never have we been less certain of anything; never have we had more facilities to engage in commentary and analysis, yet never has there been less real debate.

Paradoxically, therefore, our ‘knowledge society’ is simultaneously a ‘post-truth society’. This can be defined as a situation in which the excess of information over our ability to process it, and a radical distrust of social institutions responsible for filtering and interpreting that information such as the media or politics, leads to an increasing abandonment of the ideal of objective truth, and its replacement by a reliance on emotion and personal narratives. ‘Truth’ is no longer defined by its consonance with a reality which seems to have retreated beyond reach, but as the personal truth of the individual or whatever simply ‘feels right’. For those concerned with influencing public opinion, the corollary is that control of the narrative is more important than any concern with objective reality or ‘facts.’

The winter 2022 edition of International Political Anthropology will be a special issue dedicated to the concept of a ‘post truth society.’ Do we inhabit a post truth society? If so, what does this mean? How and why has the ability of society to establish a shared truth diminished? What are the implications for politics, culture and society? What, if anything, can be done about it?

The journal invites submissions on any aspect of the ‘post-truth’ society, as well as general papers related to the field of political anthropology. Submissions should be emailed to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 15^th November 2022.