Tag Archives: anthropology

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO

One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian imperialism, we also see—so far in a clash of keyboards—a growing weaponization of scholarship. There are signs of growing censorship of those ideas that would not align neatly into friend-enemy dyads. In the fight against ‘misinformation’, diverging opinions are framed, often preventively, as problematic and even pejoratively as “pro-Kremlin.”

It is with this in mind that I revisit herein the campaign to amend the “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine”, published initially on 26 February 2022 and amended on 15 March 2022. The case reveals how not only mainstream media and big tech are changing what is permissible, but how militarism, securitisation, and warmongering is creeping into anthropologists’ language and analyses, at times insidiously as they usurp anti-hegemonic and decolonial positions to enhance their credibility. Where it will take us is hard to predict, but it might be worth looking into the amendments of the EASA statement to cast light on possible futures in social anthropology’s debates and in order to make a case for anthropology as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war discipline.

EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it

On the 26th of February 2022, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EASA executive committee (EASA EC) published a statement ‘EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine’. While in the context of atrocities its value is symbolic rather than practical, the EASA EC must be commended on the swiftness of their response and the clarity of their stance against the war and imperialism. The first two paragraphs of the statement are particularly strong:

The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) condemns the Russian government’s illegal and unprovokedmilitary invasion of Ukraine: an imperialist war that is leading to immeasurable suffering and losses for the Ukrainian people, whose dignity, well-being, and independence we wholeheartedly support.

As scholars we reject President Vladimir Putin’s distorted interpretations of Russian and Ukrainian history and the assault against and brutal denial of Ukraine’s sovereignty that they seek to justify. We see him as the main aggressor in the current situation that – as many anthropologists working in the post-socialist world have shown through their work – has its roots in both the Russian imperial ambitions and the NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory.

The last sentence has since been removed. The preamble to the new statement explains:

As the Ukraine war has worsened in all sorts of shocking ways, the Executive feels that our statement needs to be unequivocal in order to avoid ambiguity of any kind. A group of EASA members contacted us to say that there were some ambiguities in our initial statement and therefore we have amended it.

How did this change come about? On Friday, 11 March, almost two weeks after the statement had been published, a group of anthropologists from East Central Europe wrote an email to EASA EC demanding that what they saw as ‘controversial ideas’ in the statement be revoked. In the meantime, they also uploaded a petition to GoogleDocs and started gathering signatures. They explained in earlier versions of the petition that if EASA did not retract the wording by noon on Monday, 14th March, they would feel ‘morally obliged’ to go public with the petition. As EASA EC changed the wording, the petition was never widely circulated.

Image 1: Screenshot from “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine” (April 11, 2022; source: https://www.easaonline.org/publications/support/ukraine0222)

The style of the protest itself is quite stunning as it features moralistic-conservative language (‘controversial ideas’), forces the executive committee to decide over a weekend, and in many ways resembles wartime Realpolitik (the initiators speak of ‘kind appeals’ but set conditionalities and prepare to escalate further, justifying such their steps with reference to morality).  But it is the content of the protest that interests me here. As the authors of the petition explain:

While we fully agree that the war against Ukraine has roots in Russian imperial ambitions, we reject the suggestion that Russia’s armed aggression is caused by NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory. Such a statement would imply that sovereign countries of Eastern Europe do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves, justifying Russia’s colonialist and imperialist claims over countries in Eastern Europe. As anthropologists, we understand Ukraine’s defensive actions as resistance against the reactionary empire and recognize the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances. The sentence [this refers to the final sentence in the EASA EC statement quoted above; M.F.] also contains a deeply troubling ambiguity—referring to Putin as “main aggressor” implies that there are more aggressors in this war than Putin and Russia, assigning the blame for the war against Ukraine (even asymmetrically) to another party.

Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation

The “ambiguity” raised by the last point can be debated. On the other hand, most EASA members are not native speakers of English and thus there may always be ambiguity in written English statements from the organization. But I believe, it is clear from the statement condemning “Russian government’s illegal and unprovoked military invasion” in the opening sentence who is the aggressor.

It is, however, the arguments made in the first three sentences which are particularly striking. I ask the readers to take a look at the first two paragraphs of the original EASA statement quoted above again. How could a mention NATO’s role in the longer history preceding the invasion imply that sovereign countries do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves? What logical somersault was performed here? Does the protesters’ problem with EASA EC’s statement lie in the word “roots”? Do the protesters read this as equivalent to “the cause”?

It is certainly not a marginal position to argue that Putin’s actions are framed in geopolitical terms (where the key agents are the US and China) and that the West has not really tried to “inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements”. It is also not a marginal position to point out that NATO policies have made Russia’s invasion more likely. Moreover, pronouncements about Ukrainian membership in NATO (or in the European Union) had been merely symbolic. Even countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had never truly supported Ukraine’s membership until now (geopolitics, in other words), leaving it in a particularly vulnerable position. In no way, however, does acknowledging “the geopolitical confrontation between the US-led liberal “empire”, and the Russian imperialist project in East Europe” mean that Ukrainians are mere puppets without desires, hopes and agency, who should not freely express their will on which international alliances their country should enter, without a fear of becoming targets of military invasion.

Of course, most Ukrainians have no time and patience for such debates now—their country has been brutally attacked and the fight against the Russian invaders is all that matters to them. In this sense, it is good that the EASA EC removed the final sentence of the statement to avoid a social media storm that would have followed with the publication of the petition and which would have detracted from the statement’s overall message.

But let’s be clear here: there was no ambiguity in the original statement. The ambiguity was created by the initiators of the protest. Unless, of course, for anthropologists it is inconceivable that one can support the independence and sovereignty of Ukrainian people while seeing Russian tsarism and NATO enlargement as shaping the context of the invasion. But there is a danger that knee-jerk ascriptions of culpability and contests over the moral high ground will weaken our capability to take a critical view of ourselves, and to understand how our activities contribute to fascism and militarism.

NATO in CEE

The choice presented by the protest initiators is straightforward: if the EASA EC statement mentioned NATO as an actor shaping geopolitical contexts, it would go against Ukraine’s right of self-determination. This, to me, is a whitewashing of NATO. It is striking that it comes from anthropologists who must know that the pro-NATO position was never unequivocally embraced by Ukrainians. This is why, Volodymyr Arthiuk explains, “a silent majority” elected Zelensky who “promised to end the war, to not press issues of identity and language.” And while for reasons of bare survival under occupation, support for NATO membership, or at least for a closer cooperation, increased among Ukrainians in comparison with the pre-war period, these views will continue to be in flux and are regionally specific. As regards Ukrainians’ political opinions, one must also wonder what it will be in the future, given how NATO has failed to come to their defence.

Equating NATO membership unproblematically with popular sovereignty, with “the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances”, is even more disingenuous coming from CEE scholars, as in most CEE countries there were no referendums about NATO membership—there was no popular decision. And while in Poland or the Baltic countries, the majorities would have probably been in favour, even Václav Havel was against the referendum in Czechia, since the opinion polls were far from conclusive. In Slovakia, another country that I know well, barely 50% supported membership in 2003 when the country joined the alliance. Continued ambivalence of these two countries to NATO can be seen, for instance, in demonstrations against the installation of tracking radar and kinetic missiles in Czechia. Although politicians argued these would protect from attacks by rogue states, such as Iran, the public overwhelmingly (68%) rejected them. In Slovakia, just prior to the invasion, more people blamed NATO than Russia for the escalation of the tensions along Ukraine’s borders.

The petition was initiated by eight anthropologists – seven Polish and one Slovak (see ‘Protest initiators’). The petition now claims to speak for an “international anthropological community”, whereas the EASA website speaks of an initiative by “EASA members” that stimulated the change. Since the petition with signatures was never publicised, I must suppose that the executive committee decided to change the wording of the statement following the email from the protest initiators. A predominantly CEE character of the initiative is further reflected in the online social life of the petition: most of the signatures come from Poland, Slovakia and Czechia. And while a public campaign was stopped short by the EASA EC changing its statement, any momentum for obtaining a critical mass for the protest would have emerged from within this region.

In this way, the narrative of the protest echoes important discussions about the position of Central and East European anthropologists within the discipline, in which many signatories of the protest letter have been taking part actively. However, consider the irony it leads to: a group of CEE anthropologists led by former members of EASA EC end up defending NATO against EASA, which they imply is a Western hegemonic institution misunderstanding the region (even if it is currently presided over by a Bulgarian). Such positioning undoubtedly added to the pressure on the EASA EC, since it suggested that EASA’s statement was denying sovereignty to Ukrainians and to peoples of other “sovereign countries of Eastern Europe”, legitimising Russia’s imperialist claims.

We must be wary of such east-Europeanising re-alignments in the context of the prevalent view of Ukraine in many CEE countries as a failed state between Central Europe and Russia; the racialisation of Ukrainians as cheap and thus exploitable, also sexual, labour, but ‘white’ (good migrants and even refugees!). Likewise, it is important to critically reflect on the grading of Europeanness in the CEE public sphere, where NATO and EU membership have been constructed as its unambivalent symbols.

It would also be misleading to say that all CEE anthropologists found EASA’s original statement to be “the dangerous distortion” that the protesters saw it to be. Many disagreed, or would have disagreed, if they had been aware of the protest, and if not with the content of the protest, then with its tone. Indeed, there was a lively discussion on the mailing list of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA), with voices pro and contra. In the end, only a few members signed the petition. Of course, some were probably waiting for EASA EC’s response, while others might have thought this whole thing ridiculous, since, as one member put it, and I paraphrase, “Ukrainians need guns, not statements.” In any case, it shows that the options presented by the protest initiators as clearcut were not wholeheartedly embraced by all.

The need for anti-militarism

Let’s be honest here. Rather than an argument about popular sovereignty, the initiators’ position is a pro-NATO one. It presents a false dichotomy: if one is against Putin, one cannot be against NATO. To be sure, I understand where this position comes from. The feeling among many people in CEE, including my parents, confirmed by the invasion, can be summarised in the following way: only NATO membership protects our countries from becoming prey to Russia’s tsarist ambitions; it is therefore only NATO that enables people in member states to be safe and, by extension, CEE anthropologists to pursue our careers.

Certainly, such an argument is counterfactual, as the world where CEE countries would not be NATO members would be a different world. Precisely because any line of argument about the absence of NATO membership must remain counterfactual it invokes both fears and desires, and in its operation must reproduce legitimising narratives. These are things anthropologists should be mindful of. The argument is also problematic as it separates NATO’s past interventions and invasions from its role as a defensive alliance through which smaller states can protect themselves against an imperialist next door. Violence elsewhere (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and with Turkey as a NATO members conducting a war against the Kurdish population within its borders and in Syria) and often against a threat of “tribal” or racialised “savagery” (Pierre 2013: 548) are treated in isolation from peace and European values at home. This compartmentalization is understandable in the context of Russian imperialist warfare, but it leads to simplistic listing of pros (NATO as a national-level ally against Russian colonialism) and cons (continued militarisation internationally; ‘humanitarian interventions’), which is a sophisticated approach to neither the history of imperialism nor to a critical anthropology of military alliances. As anthropologists, we must resist such a compartmentalization. Our discipline must be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war, even though it is always practised from a specific locale, such as CEE. We must reject simplistic Manichaeism, labour against provincialism, and reject seeing anthropologists as Putin’s apologists, just because they are critical of NATO and of their own countries’ role in it.

Furthermore, the above line of argument promises only war; it extends Russia as a threat into the past with only war and crisis on the horizon. One must wonder how such “truths” (constructed through the piling up of historical analogies, which are now in vogue) skew anthropological sensibility, especially in and about Central and Eastern Europe. Gregory Bateson (2000: 265), among others, showed how our truths, premises and habits of thought recursively reinforce our understanding of the world and of ourselves, which leads further to the petrification of these truths.  Against the real threat of securitisation in European anthropology, I suggest we promote an anti-war anthropology, a part of a broader anti-war movement. To break the militarist habit of thought we should become apprehensive of how militarism and militarisation shape research topics and field sites (Gusterson 2007).

We should also proceed as if we knew that the forever war (as a problematic, not static ontology) was the ground on which we stand and from which we speak as anthropologists. This task is more urgent now when countries are increasing their military spending or when some argue for the need to destroy Russia in a long-term war, with the suffering borne by Ukrainians. We might find inspiration in abolitionist anthropology and rethink European anthropology as a speculative analysis that not only critiques the existing order, but in a move of counter-war imagination, reimagines and—through collective practical effort—reinvents the possible, “past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it” (Shange 2019: 10).

Two final comments

The fact that Putin clearly broke international law and the Russian army has been committing war crimes should not make us blind to the fact that the war has been going on in Ukraine for eight years preceding the invasion. As anthropologists we must recognise the complexity of that situation. This does not make us Putin’s apologists. In fact, the real problem from the point of view of the discipline is the way European anthropology chooses which ‘events’ it notices: while we have had discussions on Brexit and COVID (e.g., dossiers in Social Anthropology and two series of articles on FocaalBlog), the war in eastern Ukraine—with 14,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021—was never the focus of critical discussion (e.g., no dossier or EASA-sponsored roundtable, not even by the protest initiators).

Turning to the internal politics of EASA, it is important to note that many members would want the association to function as a learned society that abstains from activism and politics. For them, EASA’s past activities related to HAU, precarity, and possibly also the open letters published by the current EASA EC signify an unwelcome ideological move to the left.  It is ultimately EASA members who will decide on this in the future elections. I, personally, am proud to be a part of an association that published such a strong anti-war statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organising biannual conferences, publishing a journal or facilitating various topical networks is not enough.

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the Romani diaspora across the Lusophone South Atlantic region.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2007. “Anthropology and militarism.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 36: 155-175.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. “Race in Africa today: a commentary.” Cultural Anthropology 28.3: 547-551.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Fotta, Martin. 2022. “Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO.” FocaalBlog, 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/14/martin-fotta-towards-anti-war-anthropology-on-easa-cee-and-nato/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Keir Martin: Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the boundaries of the text. In the text, we see many themes that were to be developed in more detail in later years, in other books such as Debt: The First 5 000 years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018)and his posthumous magnum opus, co-authored with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). All of the different overflowing themes share a common underlying thread, however; namely a desire to learn from and explore the multiplicity of alternatives to hierarchy and competition that are already in existence, often underneath our noses, rather than lay down a fixed template for resistance. Rather than trying to re-solve the Leninist question of What is to be done?, David continuously asked us to reflect upon the implications of What is being done?. It is in this regard that David’s anarchism and his anthropology most clearly complement each other. By slowing down and paying attention to the variety of ways in which people step outside and subvert hierarchy in order to live a life more worth living, anthropology might become the liberatory discipline par excellence – if only its practitioners were able to realise the potential power within their practice.

Let me take one example from Fragments. On page 60, David discusses the Italian autonomist theory of “revolutionary exodus,” a theory itself inspired by a previous refusal of large numbers of young Italians to engage in wage-labour. David (Graeber 2004, 60) writes that, “[…] in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.” If this was true when David wrote Fragments back in 2004, how much more is it today, when the so-called Great Resignation poses the greatest threat to the return of business as usual in the aftermath of Covid-19.

Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music standing in front of a mountain, arms outstretched as she twirls happily. Meme text reads "This is me quitting my job."
Image 1: Viral internet meme conveying the happiness of resigning

A quick scan of headlines on National Public Radio in the US tells the story. “Business should be booming – if only there were enough workers for the job”, or “As the Pandemic recedes, millions of workers are saying I quit”. And why are they quitting? “I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time,” says Jonathan Caballero, a 27-year-old software engineer who previously commuted 45 minutes each way to work on a daily basis. NPR reports that now he “believes that work has to accommodate life.” Alyssa Casey, a researcher for the federal government states that, “I think the pandemic just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want.” And NPR reports of 42-year-old restaurant manager Jeremy Golembiewski and his decision to join the Great Resignation:

“In the months that followed, Golembiewski’s life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn’t have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family. ‘I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up when they come out and see the tree and all the presents that I spent six hours at night assembling and putting out,’ says Golembiewski, who got his first restaurant job at 16 as a dishwasher at the Big Boy chain in Michigan.”

Golembiewski apparently comes from humble origins, but even high-end executives are not immune from the humanising influence of the lockdown. Will Station, a vice-president at Boeing, is reported as becoming “emotional thinking about how much [of his children’s lives] he’s missed and how much he’s getting to experience now.” “I got to see my kids and see their world in a way that I’ve never experienced before,” he says. “It’s very special.” “Even with all the chaos, this has been a bonus year for me.”

NPR also reports in June that people quitting jobs in normal times would signal a healthy economy. But these are not “normal times”; the pandemic led to the worst recession in US history and still a record 4 million quit their jobs in April. The situation has continued in the months since. “The Great Resignation appears to be getting worse” complain Kylie Logan and Lance Lambert on the Fortune news website – who, for some reason, seem unhappy that thousands of working people such as Station and Golembiewski are discovering the joy of spending irreplaceable time with their growing children. In September, a new record of 4.4 million resignations were recorded.

The Great Resignation is one of those phenomena that shows most clearly the interconnection of aspects of life that are often kept conceptually separate. We see in the examples above not simply an individualistic “take this job and shove it” kind of mood, but also the ways in which the refusal of work seems to open the possibility for reimagining the possibilities of gendered relations of kinship and care, which anthropologists have long argued are intimately and unavoidably entwined with the world of paid employment. There was quite a bit of talk in last week’s seminar on Debt of the way in which David was sceptical of the kind of “great transformation” picture of the emergence of capitalist modernity that is an otherwise conventional framing for political economic anthropologists. And indeed, in Fragments (2004, 46), David is quite explicit about this scepticism, stating that,

 “[…] almost everyone agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, we became ‘modern’. And that once we did, we became a fundamentally different sort of creature than anything that had come before. But what if we kicked this whole apparatus away?”

It’s worth making the point however, that David’s argument was not, as he put it, “that nothing important has happened over the past 500 years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant.” It was rather that once we drop the assumption that this always has to be the starting framing of analysis, and once we decide to “at least entertain the notion that we aren’t quite so special as we like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.” Alternatives to what we think we are can potentially to be found in our present daily practice; not necessarily to be sought before the total transformation of the rise of capitalism or after the great transformation of the total revolution that is yet to come. David was concerned with the way in which the fetishisation of something called the “market” or the “economy” as separate from the rest of society prioritised particular relational obligations over others – not least the way in which life accommodates work not the other way round, as critiqued by Caballero. This is in many regards an eminently Polanyian critique of the rhetorical disembedding of the market economy from society and the consequent setting up of that market economy as society’s driving institution. And he was always keen to point out that in our daily practice market rationality relies upon – or is, in Polanyi’s (1944) terms, still embedded within – other moral perspectives and practices. Both David and Polanyi knew that any transformation that has occurred in recent centuries – great or otherwise – could never create an economy with the people left out, and that any attempt to do so was doomed to be nothing but a shallow liberal utopia.

Although the Great Resignation came as a surprise to many, one suspects it would not have come as a surprise to David, nor to Polanyi, who might well have seen it as an example of the famous “double movement” by which society, in this case in the shape of Golembiewski, Station, and millions more like them, protect themselves from a disembedded market morality and prioritise the reproduction of persons over the production of objects and economic value. For David it would have been further proof, if more were needed, that something radically different to what we think we are now has been within us and in front of us all along. We might well find radical differences before the great transformation, after the revolution or at the end of a tributary of the Amazon River, but we don’t necessarily have to. We’re as likely to find them in an Amazon distribution centre – if we know how to look. David was fascinated by the grand historical or reassuringly exotic ethnographic examples that have long been the stock in trade of anthropology– he wouldn’t have spent so long conducting fieldwork on magic in Madagascar or researching the role of wampum in early American colonial contacts if he wasn’t. But he also pointed out that assuming that these were the only potential points from which radical difference could be observed meant that we likely overlook them in other spaces.

David felt that the most common use of anthropology by radicals and anarchists, the vision of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer paradise, was of limited value. “I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that human beings never really lived in the Garden of Eden,” he argues in Fragments, again presaging the more fully worked out and demonstrated argument underpinning The Dawn of Everything. Examples from different times and places are not necessarily to be used as examples or templates of “anarchist societies” to contrast what David calls “imaginary totalities” to our own. Whatever new forms of sociality you and I and Station and Golembiewski and the rest of us will build, it is unlikely to look much like !Kung San or the Baining. Such romantic appropriations are vulnerable to a number of entirely reasonable conservative objections. So, in order to give up hierarchy, we have to give up antibiotics, central heating and clean water too? The alternative that you have to offer Station and Golembiewski is that they establish an imaginary totality called an “anarchist society” that goes endlessly wandering across the Orange County in search of nuts and berries? If this is the only or the main use that radicals and anarchists can make of the anthropological record, then doesn’t it implicitly accept or at the very least strengthen the teleology that The Dawn of Everything sets out to weaken – namely that even if our past might have been a Rousseauian paradise rather than a Hobbesian nightmare – that social complexity and technology by their very definition require ever more complex and technologically developed forms of monitoring, control, discipline, hierarchy and oppression? Instead, if, as David suggests in Fragments, we “knock down the walls’ in our thought that separate complex from simple (or the West from the Rest) than this “can allow us to see this history as a resource in much more interesting ways.”

So, when David introduces the example of the Italian autonomists’ “engaged withdrawal” mentioned earlier, he does it immediately after a discussion of Kasja Eckholm’s analysis of the Kongo monarchy as an empty shell that people simply withdrew from. What relevance might this historical practice have for today, David asks? Taking the walls of separation between Italian modernity and Kongolese non-modernity as our assumed starting point means that we almost inevitably find ourselves finding the essential radical difference that we assume they must express. But knocking down the conceptual walls enables us to see the shared desire for greater freedom and the reproduction of valued human relations that they embody. Throughout Fragments, David uses such examples, but in a manner designed to stress the ways in which they might, to some extent at least, express such a common shared desire. Differences exist – differences of perspective, power, and privilege. For an anarchist like David, this almost went without saying. But they are differences that come in and out of being in shifting contexts, not the expression of ahistorical essentialised cultural difference that could only ever be understood by a small coterie of scholars who would be able to see over the wall that separates West from Rest. They are often the differences that emerge within and from oneself, such as the shift in perspective when men such as those mentioned above see their children and their own lives in a different light and attempt to withdraw from the obligations that seek to nullify that new perspective. And if we can’t see how radical and important that is, this is simply because so many of us have naturalised and now fail to even notice the bizarre character of capitalist cosmology. It’s a cosmology that insists that we must believe in the existence of a mysterious cosmic invisible hand that will distribute goods in a fair and efficient manner to us – at least if we worship it properly by (among other things) sacrificing our children to it, in the form of giving up so much precious life-enriching time with them in order to appease its demands, as made manifest in “the labour market.” It’s a cosmology as wild and fascinating as anything else we find in the ethnographic record. And David would point out that the rejection of it that we see today is therefore a potentially profound and revolutionary one, but one that is far less likely to be “taken seriously” in some corners of a discipline still wedded to what Arjun Appadurai famously referred to as “sightings of the savage” as its default mode of intellectual or political critique.

I should note in passing that David would not have been too pleased with me for wheeling out Appadurai in defence of his position. It is fair to say that David was not a great fan. Two weeks ago, Chris Gregory mentioned having initially thought that David was something of a “bullshit artist.” I can confirm the truth of this account. The first time I met David was at a conference in Cambridge about 10 years ago – Chris, David and I were billeted together at a college some distance from the other participants and so spent quite a bit of time together. Chris would complain to me after breakfast that it was bad enough having to listen to the man bullshit endlessly at the conference, but having to endure it first thing in the morning before he’d even woken up properly was another thing altogether. And then when Chris was out of the room, David started talking to me about how thrilled he was to be spending time with the author of Gifts and Commodities (1982), one of his favourite books,and how misguided and intellectually dishonest he felt that Appadurai’s critique of it in The Social Life of Things (1986)had been. It was a slightly awkward situation to manage, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that Chris had come round a few years later. David was on occasion a difficult man to converse with – especially over breakfast – but I knew that the quality and ambition of David’s work would prove irresistible to Chris in the long run.

In following years, David would occasionally ask us rhetorically, “Why do they always refer to me as ‘the anarchist anthropologist,’ why not refer to Appadurai as ‘the neoliberal anthropologist’?” It’s just as accurate but doesn’t get constantly attached to his name as a pejorative in the same way. Of course, David knew that he was being slightly disingenuous here – Appadurai hadn’t authored a book entitled Fragments of a Neoliberal Anthropology, so whether or not David was correct to label him as such, it’s not surprising that such a label was less easily attached to him than it was to David. But the underlying point that David was making – that his own scholarship was endlessly and subtly sneered at and undermined by repeatedly introducing him as such, even when it wasn’t necessarily relevant – was valid and important to make. And it was typical of David that rather than shy away from the association with anarchist theory – that he knew would be used to belittle him and his work – he instead chose to take the prejudice on head first, early in his career, before he had the security of tenure.

Image 2: Book cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments is a book that I found a little frustrating on first read. I found the way in which it jumped from point to point and back again a little – well – fragmentary. Much as I am sure that David was aware that there was a certain contradiction in the author of a book entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, complaining that people referred to him as “the anarchist anthropologist,” I was aware that I was kind of missing the point in my frustration at the fragmentary nature of a book with the same title. I felt myself to be in a similar position to the kind of American tourist one occasionally overhears in Copenhagen, loudly complaining that the statue of the Little Mermaid is kind of small. On second reading, however, it went a lot better. As with a conversation with David in real life, one simply had to allow oneself to go with the flow – and if one did, it was a conversational experience like no other. Like Chris, I felt David to be a little much on first meeting – particularly before I’d managed to get to the coffee machine. But in later years, as I got to know him better, I looked forward to those wonderful rambling conversations that went from Ray Davies, through Lukacs on to Rodney Dangerfield and then back home via a detour to discuss 18th century Madagascan pirates.

I think David’s intellectual range sometimes irritated those who envied it and wanted to pull him back into the narrow arid scripture scholarship of the intellectual silos that they had settled for and claimed as their little empires of dirt. The kinds of people who write things in peer-review such as “I can’t believe that the author of this paper on value seems totally unaware of Malinowski’s seminal footnote on Trobriand yam exchange from 1937.” I suspect that what upset these kinds of people most about David was that they knew he probably was aware of the precious little nuggets of knowledge that they had devoted their lives to curating; it was just that – as he always did – he had chosen to go his own way and make his own connections. And in many regards, that was David’s greatest gift to the academy. This is a profession in which success is often driven by networks, nepotism and ass-kissing more than the alleged liberal values of free thought and intellectual inquiry. And in such an environment, David stood out by his consistent refusal to do anything but his own thing.

I’m sure it made him a frustrating colleague at times. But as we all know the category of “good colleague’ is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it means the person who turns their marking in on time and I would not be surprised to hear from colleagues that sometimes David’s contempt for what he might view as the “bullshit” parts of his job left others picking up the pieces. But let us also remember that all too often “being a good colleague’ means being the person who turns a blind eye to bad behaviour and abuse on the part of senior or powerful colleagues out of loyalty to the institution. After years in this profession, my skin tends to crawl when I hear senior colleagues praise the virtues of collegiality– my first instinct is to wonder whose body are we burying or whose mouth are we taping up today? I remain immensely grateful to David for consistently prioritising being a good person over being a good colleague – in this regard at least – and I still, on occasion, miss him very much. His free and sometimes disrespectful spirit is precisely what a profession that all too often demands deference to status, rather than engagement and fresh ideas, needs. And with Fragments we have something that keeps some of that spirit alive – irreverent, bursting with ideas, and most of all principled – whether we all agree with all those principles or not. There’s a spirit of freedom in this short book that senior academics often tell us that we need to squeeze out of ourselves as the price of admission. The greatest gift that David gave us with Fragments is the enduring proof that we don’t have to listen to them.

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

Appadurai, A. 1986. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. 2021. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Gregory, C. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Cite as: Martin, Keir. 2022. “Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 13 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/13/keir-martin-great-resignations-and-bad-colleagues-reflections-on-an-anarchist-anthropology/

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Remembering Leith Mullings (1945 – 2020)

Image 1: Leith Mullings Official Website; an invaluable repository for Black feminist anticapitalist anthropology (Screenshot from page; http://leithmullings.com, 17 Feb 2021)

Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist

Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York

Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those of us who were lucky enough to have worked and collaborated with her.  For many of us, Leith’s death, which happened on December 13, 2020, is still almost too much to bear.  It would have been hard to accept under normal circumstances, but to have it happen so unexpectedly – and in the context of the Trump insurrection and the extended COVID emergency, when so many of us are already feeling so much vulnerability, grief, fear, isolation, and uncertainty – makes it feel terrible in a way that, at the very least, reveals the deep inadequacies of standard academic grieving rituals.  And yet, here I go.

Leith was a leading figure of the Black Left who established a pathbreaking form of anthropological praxis that was deeply aligned with the struggle for the worldwide emancipation of Black people.  Her praxis was rooted in Black feminism, in the centering of African American working class women’s lives in broader theorizing about political economy, kinship, representation, and resistance, and in emphasizing the importance of social movements involving people of the African diaspora in struggles for justice and equality.  The influence of her work is especially remarkable given the reactionary status quo in anthropology of the last three decades, which, let’s face it, has a very poor track record of providing institutional and intellectual space to Black women scholars.  Fortunately, Leith, her allies, and her students worked over many decades to legitimate Black feminist materialist approaches in a discipline that to this day remains reluctant to give them the attention they deserve.

A remarkable aspect of Leith’s anthropology is the specific and subtle ways that she imparted antiracist political sensibilities into it.  For Leith, as for many other scholars, racism, sexism, and capitalism were co-constitutive of overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation, violence, subordination, and discrimination.  What made Leith’s work unique was her insistence on the power of antiracist activism and organizing to interrupt, unsettle, and contest the system’s hierarchies and inequalities.  In her long-term ethnographic study of African American women’s health in Harlem, for example, she and her co-author Alaka Wali consider race, class and gender not as attributes of low-income women of color who suffer from ill health.  Rather, they see race, class and gender more dynamically, as a set of interconnected relationalities that shape health outcomes in complex ways.  In her famous elaboration of Sojourner Syndrome, the survival strategy of resilience adopted by African American women to support their families and communities, Leith emphasizes not just the resilience that living under the yoke of multiplicative oppressions requires of them and how this stresses them out, but also the importance of Black community struggles for autonomy, power and control.  Along similar lines, in her work on racisms in the Americas, and on Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, Leith showed how new movements build on Black freedom struggles from the past to contest the co-production of racism and capitalism. In a Left intellectual context in which identity politics is frequently disparaged and class universalism reigns, Leith’s was an essential and powerful voice whose work demonstrated the significance of transnational antiracist activism and organizing: what she called “racialization from below.” Across more than 40 years of intellectual work, she provided irrefutable evidence that intersectional struggles have connected targets and effects.  Let us hope that others who are committed to justice and equality pay attention to this important lesson.

Decades after prominent scholars called for decolonizing anthropology, US anthropology still attracts too few Black, Indigenous and Latinx students. In the wake of the Black insurgent activism of last year, abolitionist theories and methods are slowly gaining traction but are not nearly as widespread as they should be.  The task of emancipating critical historical ethnographic scholarship from anthropology’s imperial and white supremacist present remains an enormous challenge.  A new generation of US-based Black anthropologists are influenced by Afropessimist arguments about antiblack world building and the exclusion of Black people from the category of the human. They are looking for ways to incorporate class into their analyses.  This effort is not helped along by a Left anthropology that only gives lip service to race and gender in its anticapitalist critique. Fortunately, there is Leith’s work. Her illumination of Black women’s experience of work, kinship, and community life, her attention to overlapping systems of oppression, exploitation and discrimination, and her pioneering approach to the study of social movements serve as inspiration to all scholars who are searching for a way to move past the tired old race vs. class. vs. gender argument, who wish to take capitalism, racism and sexism seriously, and who seek to reconcile these differences in a unified emancipatory framework.

For Leith Mullings

Don Robotham, City University of New York

I first met Leith Mullings as a doctoral student in the anthropology department of the University of Chicago in 1967. Based on our common background and interests, we quickly became friends—part of a group of progressive students on the eve of the Martin Luther King assassination and the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. Those were tumultuous years, formative for both of us. Later, she joined me for fieldwork in Ghana and remained close friends thereafter.

Leith was a remarkable person who was able somehow to manage the feat of successfully raising two wonderful children, political activism, developing her large body of scholarship, rising to the top of her profession while being a major interlocutor for her partner’s intellectual work and those of her colleagues and friends. She was deeply committed to the Black struggle first and foremost and always put this in a larger context of the struggle against racism and all forms of oppression of all peoples worldwide.

Her experience of 1968 and after made her a political economist and she never wavered from that position or methodology. The principal focus of her work was racial oppression as it interacted with class oppression, gender and health, with the emphasis decidedly on the first. From her earliest work on mental health issues in Accra, Ghana, through her book on reproductive health in Harlem to her most recent project on racial oppression of indigenous and African-descended peoples in Latin America, it was the issue of the material basis of racial oppression on which her work was focused. This broad experience and sweep led Leith to the view that racial oppression was by no means a local or national phenomenon of the United States of America but one with deep historical global roots. Thus, over time she was led naturally towards the intersectionality concept as a fundamental tool for understanding oppression and, what was critical for her, laying the basis for a politics of transformation.

We had many debates on the many challenges which this approach raised, principally around how much weight to give to class, as distinct from race and gender, and indeed, whether it was possible or fruitful to make such distinctions. She would generally hold to the race end and I to the class end with gender falling in-between in terms of analytical priority. Leith well understood that adopting the intersectionality concept did not quite resolve the issue but sharpened it: how and why these forces ‘intersected’ and which, if any, was analytically or politically prior remained to be answered, theoretically and empirically via fieldwork. Thus, our debates raged before and through our current political crisis prior to the 2020 US Presidential election.

Leith gave as good as she got, indeed usually one came out on the losing end. She was deeply grounded in both the classics of political economy and a wide range of anthropological research. It was impossible to impress her with theoretical acrobatics. Her combination of academic knowledge and practical political experience made her a formidable interlocutor and scholar. Her devotion to her students and her conscientiousness in the exercise of her doctoral supervision duties was something to behold. Few could compete with her in the quality of the voluminous comments and stylistic guidance provided. While always sympathetic, she insisted that high standards of scholarship be maintained especially when a thesis was addressing radical experiences, as many were. Her scholarly integrity was impeccable and unchallenged, and she enjoyed the wide respect of many who strongly disagreed with her theoretical and political positions.

Leith Mullings was very much a product of the 1960s and 1970s. Like many of us, she was deeply influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, the Anti-Vietnam War struggle and especially 1968. She has added to that tradition of intellectual and political struggle in a lasting way, always insisting that oppression had a material foundation, the analysis and transformation of which should be the focus of our work and life. We have lost a wonderful, kind, human being, scholar and activist, when we can least afford to.

The editorial boards of Focaal and FocaalBlog join our colleagues and friends in remembering the life and work of Leith Mullings; a scholar and activist who has shaped our scholarship and politics.

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?

Indeed, I have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness, compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever, in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and most importantly, show endless gratitude.

When, after almost seven years of working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’ support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job – despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would ever want to hire a troublemaker? 

I was also reluctant to contribute to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment. Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?

Academic labour relations are the perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?

Furthermore, I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do; they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing, networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs, and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly points out, this is often a false promise.

And here is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion, with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!

Yet, I decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight. This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time, prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents, grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is, trapped in a precarious limbo.

Many young precarious workers are international migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives. 

Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in political, economic and organisational anthropology.  

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large collaborative projects.

As a report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First, the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate. In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Second, what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an ‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand, contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5) propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.

Third, context and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students, Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty. The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s (Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019, Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then, was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads) or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.

In the 1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university, a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty, together with access to decision making committees in the university and other democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought to obtain a well-paid labor contract and to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor Numerario, subjecting all professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and, implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts– was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure  (Carreras 2004).

Today, the privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement, organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the seventies. Why is that?

Local patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects, have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded their international networks.

As a result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate, they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not now? What needs to be done?

As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Bibliography

Carreras, J. 2004. Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23

Castillo, J.J. 1982. Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País, 12 de abril 1982

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Moreno, I. 2019. Interview with Prof. Isidoro Moreno, Anthropologist, Universidad de Sevilla. 20 March, 2019. http://tv.us.es/el-movimiento-de-los-pnn-y-la-democratizacion-de-la-universidad-y-el-pais/

Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16

Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.

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Vlad Schüler-Costa: Academic precarity and the false coin of our own dreams

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A specter haunted EASA2018—the specter of precarity. Like a “frightful hobgoblin” (that, one could argue, is a more suitable, if inaccurate, translation of Marx’s Gespenst), it appeared in some instances as an explicit, publicly acknowledged political program (on some panels and the ending plenary) and, at other times, stashed away in the interstitches of the conference program (on #HOWtalk and #PrecAnthro lunchtime discussions, or the myriad of corridor chats that could be overheard during the conference).

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Bruce Kapferer: The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology

Hau is a phenomenon. It burst on the scene of the relatively small academic scholarly world of anthropology capturing scholars from around the globe into its spirit. Hau rapidly established itself as a premier journal in the discipline with an increasing defining role for anthropology. It was becoming a power in the field legitimating reputations and concerned with building them. Perhaps most surprising (but less so on reflection) was the speed of its ascent within the academic community largely through the efforts of its inspiration, the founding editor whose journey describes a kind of Rake’s Progress (or threatens to do so). The ambiguities and hesitancies in defense and attack, reported injuries, moral ire that are surrounding the characterization of his alleged behavior refracts critical features of Hau’s rise and not least the complicity, intentional or otherwise, of those who aided and abetted the rise of Hau (David Graeber’s public confession being an egregious example). The whole sad story (in some ways reflecting the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline) manifests the sociopolitical crisis affecting global realities that has particular effect and expression in the plight of Hau. The progress of Hau embodies a critical moment perhaps a turning point in the history of the discipline that is not reducible to the responsibility of the editor (although he might be described as anthropology’s Trump), regardless of the fact that so much blame seems to be piling up around his feet (see also Kalb, Murphy, and Neveling on Focaalblog).

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Fiona Murphy: When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy

Something smells of bullshit. It has for a long time. Caught in the spectacular entanglements of the neoliberal university, academic work is being actively “bullshitized.” Audit cultures, the intensification of administrative duties, the politics of intellectual egos and academic “assholery,” hierarchical academic freedoms, an exploitative publishing industry, and an increase in zero-hour contracts means the precariat of academia are subject to the combination of some very particular horrors. So, something does indeed smell of bullshit. It will, no doubt, linger long in the gloaming of too many precarious academic careers. These inequalities and exploitative practices are the buttresses upon which some contemporary successful academic careers are built, at the expense of others, gadflies turned horses. The key to the ivory tower has been hidden away—with only academic “elites” and senior university management remaining inside—all others must wade knee-deep through work-practice bullshit, deprived of labor dignity, equality, and solidarity.

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