Teaching Social Anthropology 16 November 2006

The crisis of the universities

Universities seem to have been with us a long
time. The earliest of them are almost 1,000 years old. But the modern university
is very much a by-product of 20^th century society. A hundred years
ago, if the British middle classes wanted some higher education, they were more
likely to go to a theological seminary; and the universities themselves were
still very much tied up with the reproduction of established religion. The design
of the syllabuses we are now familiar with belongs to the period after the first
world war and universities only began mass enrolments after the second world
war. In many cases, the 1960s and 70s saw a considerable expansion of the role
of universities in national society, while the 1980s and 90s have been characterised
by a sense of crisis and decline. Each country has its own trajectory within
this general picture.

Nowhere can emulate the USA for the sheer quantity,
range and quality of its universities, nor for its unique mix of public and
private funding. Most Western European countries decided after 1945 that access
to higher education should be a democratic right. They have since had to cope
with mass numbers and the exigencies of state funding and control. In Britain,
a high quality university education was maintained for about 1 in 8 of the population,
until in the last decade the number of institutions labeled ‘university’ was
doubled and the proportion entering them was increased to around 1 in 3. State
control of this process has been expressed through a number of intrusive bureaucratic
measures; the university teachers struggle to maintain standards while being
under-funded and overwhelmed. It is no wonder that many of them are demoralised.

It is important to recognise how short-lived
modern universities are. Academics are among the most conservative people I
know. We typically demand a great deal of control over the reproduction of our
ideas, which we imagine to be based on timeless principles. This leads us to
cling to outmoded practices as if they were not radically undermined by developments
taking place right under our noses. Elsewhere (Hart 2001) I have tried to outline
the history of the 20^th century’s dominant social form, which I take
to be ‘state capitalism’, the attempt to manage markets and accumulation through
centralised national bureaucracies. The last quarter-century has seen a shift
to ‘virtual capitalism’, a condition where information services have overtaken
the place of material goods in the economy and the money circuit has become
increasingly detached from real production and exchange. This has been speeded
up by the convergence during the 1990s of telephones, television and computers
into a single digital technology of communications. World society has consequently
become more connected and unequal than ever before; and nation-states are losing
their grip over the social monopolies they exercised for less than a century.

This is the context for the highly contradictory
developments now transforming British universities and similar institutions
everywhere. Having once turned their backs on modern mass higher education,
the British universities are now enduring a paroxysm of dirigiste modernisation,
featuring some of the most atavistic forms of the 20^th century academic
division of labour, all of this administered with a passion for market rhetoric
and coercive bureaucracy which has become the hallmark of the ‘neo-liberal’
consensus. It is hard to resist the conclusion that we are witnessing the death
throes of an institution which failed to adapt. No doubt the names and the buildings
of many universities will persist in some form; but what goes on in them will
be unrecognisable within two or three decades.

British social anthropology’s relationship to
all this has been and remains anomalous. The leaders of the profession after
the second world war (Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, Firth, Forde,
Gluckman) formed a trade union (the Association of Social Anthropologists of
the U.K., later the Commonwealth) to which they admitted only their own PhDs,
after a vetting process. A decision was taken to keep social anthropology not
just out of the schools and other institutions of further education, but even
out of two-thirds of the universities licensed as such at the time. Social anthropology
was thus taught to undergraduate and graduate students exclusively in the top
15 or so universities. When several of the founders were approached by UNESCO
to take part in its 1950 survey of race, they declined on the grounds that they
did not want to be mixed up with anything that smacked of public controversy.
For these anthropologists were set on establishing their discipline as a social
science capable of meeting the needs of a national bureaucracy of which the
universities were now such an integral part. Links with archaeology and biological
anthropology were retained in only three social anthropology departments. More
often, these were associated with sociology, which itself enjoyed only a belated
expansion in Britain during the 1960s, after decades of having been held back
by a reactionary alliance of classicists, engineers and their ilk.

Once the links with folklore, ethnology, archaeology
and similar ‘amateur’ Victorian pursuits had been broken by Malinowski’s functionalist
revolution, social anthropology in Britain settled into being ‘the sociology
of primitive societies’ (Evans-Pritchard 1951). When sociology itself exploded
as an academic discipline in the 1960s, many of the founding chairs were occupied
by social anthropologists, since there were not enough experienced sociologists
to fill them. An uneasy truce has been observed between the two disciplines
in subsequent decades, but the distinctive position held by social anthropology
as a social science remains vulnerable and moot. Some take refuge in the notion
that we join the people as part of our research method (‘fieldwork’); others
maintain that we study the exotic parts of the world that the others cannot
reach. While this particular demarcation dispute is monitored anxiously, it
largely passes without comment that the experiment known as ‘social sciences’
is fast running out of credibility.

The social sciences, branches of applied impersonal
knowledge formed at the turn of the last century on a loose analogy with the
natural sciences, arose to meet the needs of middle classes released from commerce
to staff the national bureaucracies erected by state capitalism. They had a
corporate structure which organised teaching and learning as a rigid hierarchy
of specialisation. At one level, post-war social anthropology conformed to this
model and generations of students have been forced to endure turgid syllabuses
dominated by the positivist ghost of Radcliffe-Brown (1952). But, as most insiders
know, ours is also an anti-discipline which allows its individual practitioners
to embark on free-spirited intellectual journeys where we do anything we like
and call it social anthropology. There has long existed a tension between this
romantic quest of lone rangers and our obligation to reproduce a collective
discipline within the academy. Appealing to a small minority of students, we
have attracted our fair share of bright mavericks, as well as some looking for
an undemanding or ‘doss’ course. This is why I claim that social anthropology
has had an anomalous relationship to the 20^th century universities.
In its open-ended anarchy may lie the seeds of an adaptation to the world lying
beyond state capitalism.

Drackle’s paper, the only one considered in
this section from outside Britain, reminds us that teaching and learning anthropology
can draw on a counter-cultural discourse which flourished in the 1960s and 70s
and has its roots in a longer tradition of co-operative socialism and anarchism.
Her emphasis on an egalitarian alternative to hierarchy is well-taken. What
remains is to place such a call within some sort of historical analysis. Why
now? Mascarenhas-Keyes, drawing on more than a decade’s experience, some of
it spent working with Wright, addresses what has been seen by many, including
elements of the national bureaucracy, as an increasingly critical problem. Far
from being over-adapted to state capitalism, social anthropology is seen as
being insufficiently geared to its labour markets, being too academic, elitist
and withdrawn from the real world. In addressing what is needed to make anthropology
suitable training for professional practice, she has been forced to develop
innovative teaching methods. Wright’s own paper is based on an engagement with
British social anthropology’s need to escape from its former ivory tower that
is second to none. The word ‘reflection’ comes up a lot these days, since most
academics feel that they no longer have any time for it. Here Wright makes a
persuasive case for social anthropologists to study themselves and their working
environment in order to develop reflexive teaching and learning practices.

The last two papers considered here truly provide
battlefront reports from the crisis of the universities. Landres and Hough give
some indication of the sort of pressures being placed on university teachers
by the British government, resulting, among other things, in a drive to make
courses more ‘transparent’ and ‘accountable’, that is, more visible as a mountain
of paperwork. Their approach, based on an appeal to the fieldwork tradition,
conforms to the classical canons of social anthropology. It describes and analyses
the behaviour of collectivities, reported at first hand, but mostly devoid of
reference to individual experience or to personalities. Coleman and Simpson’s
account of teaching social anthropology in Stockton/Durham, however, makes a
sharper break with traditional methods. They have been trying to develop courses
aimed largely at a local, working-class and mature student body, quite unlike
the students for social anthropology in its post-war elitist heyday, who were
mobile, middle-class and adolescent with, until recently, good prospects of
jobs similar to those of their parents. Their approach is striking for its emphasis
on getting students to use anthropology to reflect on their own lives. The authors
are aware that this may be construed as amateur psychology, journalism or worse,
but they stick to their guns and the results are, to my mind, impressive. The
next section, dealing with various innovations in university teaching methods,
takes up this theme of individual subjectivity.

A Copernican revolution in anthropology?

Copernicus solved the problem of the movement
of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest,
instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement
for physics into metaphysics. In his preface to the second edition of The
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1998), he
writes, “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to
objects… (but what) if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?”
In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence
of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself and in
each of the judgments we have made. Which is to say that the world is inside
each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to bring them together as
individuals who share things in common with the rest of humanity.

The 19th and 20th centuries, in identifying
society with the nation-state, constitute a counter-revolution against Kant’s
Copernican revolution launched by Hegel, whose Philosophy of Right (1967) contains the programmes of all three founding fathers of modern
social theory rolled into one. This counter-revolution was only truly consummated
after the first world war. The result was a separation of the personal from
the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. This is
the split which the decline of state capitalism in the face of the digital revolution
is allowing us to reverse. And the nine papers considered in this section provide
ample evidence of how teachers of anthropology are responding to the challenge.
A good portion of them address the possibilities inherent in the new technologies
of the digital revolution as it unfolds: de Theije and Brouwer, Engelbrecht
and Husmann, Pink, and Zeitlin. But the rest are concerned with exposing individuals
and groups to new contexts of experience and performance: Bouquet (museums),
Edgar (imagework), Ramnarine (world music), Russell (study tours) and Tescari
(drama). And this is where Kantian subjectivity is especially relevant.

One of the principal arguments of my recent
book, Money in an Unequal World (Hart
2001), is that the cheapening of the cost of information transfers as a result
of the digital revolution makes it possible for much more information about
individuals to enter into transactions at distance that were until recently
largely impersonal. This repersonalisation of the economy has its counterpart
in many aspects of contemporary social life, not just in the forms of money
and exchange. It involves a new idea of the person, one which is based on digital
abstractions as much as on the emergence of more concrete forms of individuality.
The customised interactions that most academics now have with amazon.com and
similar suppliers of books reflect this trend, at the same time personal and
remote. Clearly one consequence of the use of new technologies in teaching is
that learning can now be much more individualised; and this in itself poses
a threat to the traditions of the academic guilds. Here is one source of a renewed
emphasis on subjectivity.

At the same time, the last two decades has seen
a revival of interest in objects. As Bouquet points out, museums are enjoying
a renaissance, spurred on in no small part by use of the new information technologies.
The history and sociology of science has borrowed extensively from social anthropology’s
ethnographic methods. And with this has come a focus, in the work of Latour
and Callon (eg. Latour 1993), on objects as well as the practices of ordinary
actors and their networks. The work of ethno-archaeologists has fed into social
anthropology as a greater prominence given these days to material culture (Miller
1998). Films and television are becoming indispensable to teaching at all levels
of the educational system; and with this development of audio-visual techniques
comes a much more sophisticated scrutiny of the role of the different senses
in communication. All of this adds up to a radical revision of conventional
attitudes to subject-object relations, grounds indeed for us to reconsider the
positivist dogmas on which so much of modern university disciplines are based,
including social anthropology’s paradigm of scientific ethnography (Grimshaw
and Hart 1995).

It has long been obvious to me that learning
anthropology would be impossible if we were not, each of us, human beings in
the first place. A further development reflected in these papers is an increased
focus on performance (music, drama etc) and with it on the human agency of individuals
and groups. Anthropologists who once could rely on public ignorance as support
for their exotic tales must now cope with mass travel; and, as Russell shows,
they are organising tours of their own.
We have to consider seriously what our expertise can offer that is not
delivered more effectively through novels and films, journalism or tourism.
We live in a time of mass communications and mobility where both the rhetoric
and the reality of markets encourage individuals to choose the means of their
enlightenment. It would be surprising if trends in the teaching of anthropology
did not reflect all this. Perhaps the most surprising of all the innovative
papers on show in this volume is Edgar’s probing of the relationship between
the conscious and unconscious minds through exercises in visual imagination.
I can just imagine the reaction of Disgusted (Cheltenham) to that. But it is
so refreshing to see today’s anthropologists pushing back the boundaries of
anthropological education in this way.

It is only a decade since the end of the Cold
War and the social consequences of this event are just beginning to filter through.
One feature of the post-war universities has been the rise to a position of
dominance of research as a means of evaluating the status of institutions and
their individual members. This was led by state and corporate funding of armaments-related
research in the period of the Cold War. The social sciences, without the same
funding or prestige, followed suit. Social anthropology was no different. Teaching
was marginalised to the point of professional insignificance. The papers of
this volume show that some anthropologists are interested in teaching again,
not just as a way of improving the service they give to their students, but
as part of their own intellectual development. I would suggest that the trend
is already moving against corporate funding of large academic research enterprises;
and that the universities are entering a period in which they will attract a
new public interested in self-learning or die. The humanities in general and
anthropology in particular are well-placed to take advantage of such a trend.
All is not lost. But our methods will have to change significantly and Kant’s
Copernican revolution is one beacon lighting the way.

References