Ethno S cripts ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR AKTUELLE ETHNOLOGISCHE STUDIEN Tradition, performance and identity politics in European festivals eISSN: 2199-7942 Jahrgang 20 Heft 1 I 2018 Matthäus Rest and Gertraud Seiser The Krampus in Austria A Case of Booming Identity Politics Ethnoscripts 2018 20 (1): 35-57 eISSN 2199-7942 Universität Hamburg Institut für Ethnologie Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (West) D-20146 Hamburg Tel.: 040 42838 4182 E-Mail: IfE@uni-hamburg.de http://www.ethnologie.uni-hamburg.de Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter einer Creative Commons Licence 4.0 International: Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen. Herausgeber: Abstract In Austria, the Krampus has recently witnessed an unprecedented boom. Since the early 2000s, the number of troupes and organized events has skyrocketed. Most of these can be termed ‘invented traditions’ in Hobsbawm’s sense, as there are only a handful of places with a history of the practice from before the mid- twentieth century. Despite the vast differences between regions, young men in all of them dress up in masks that invoke associations with the devil or demons, wear long fur suits and roam the streets scaring and attacking onlookers with the switches they carry. Investigating contemporary Krampus practices in rural Austria, we argue that they serve as important sources of identity making, at the centre of which are relations between men and women, as well as between ethnic Austrians and immigrants. Through an engagement with anthropological discussions on identity, our article will suggest that the recent Krampus boom is indicative of new forms of white identity politics in Europe. Acknowledgements Research for this article was conducted with three groups of MA students from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna between 2011 and 2016. We thank all of them for their ethnographic material, which has helped us make the arguments presented in this article. The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology has kindly provided inancial support. We are also grateful to Lit Verlag for permission to reprint pictures from our edited volume, Wild und Schön. Finally, we thank Ann Wand and one anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments and Julene Knox for her diligent copy-editing.