Britain's Corruptocracy

The corruptocracy behind Britain’s claim to supreme democracy

Incompetent, mean-spirited, feckless, adulterous, ugly… are all feasible descriptions of our incumbent Tory Government, and almost certainly pertain to the Prime Minister. However, in perceiving the rottenest elements of our leadership, all of these descriptors miss the point: we live in a corruptocracy, and when the ship sinks we'll all go down.

The wrecking begins like this: riding into high office in the wake of HMS Brexit, members of the ‘Leave Government’ have relied on fable and historical mistruth. The United Kingdom, these faux-nationalists tell us, has a supreme claim to democracy. In this Genesis myth, Britain with its dark satanic mills ploughed forward into modernity, sprouting a new middle-class and an exploited understrata. Then, as the story goes, representation of the understrata became a necessity for stability – only we understood this of course, and hence our uniquely enfranchised political system. This ahistorical assertion that Britain ‘does democracy best because it’s the oldest’ is compounded by imperial claims, depicting democracy as our proudest export. Finally, grand ideas that we uphold principles of fair play, equality of political action, and freedom of speech are supported by references to an unbiased BBC, a competitive journalistic arena and incorruptible political institutions.

Contrast this narrative to conversations about populist, fake-news America or Cold War-esque invasive Russia, and our politics comes out looking like a Crufts’ prize poodle. However, this mythology creates complacency about the health of British democracy and conceals the poodle’s prize shite on the carpet, left in the front room of executive power.

The corruption behind the story is three-fold. The inherently cabalist nature of a Government that perceives itself as insurgent, means that loyalty and unity become the primary criterion for a leading role. Job selection is the prerogative of the Prime Minister, however, to appoint individuals who lack experience, aptitude, and then to support these individuals no matter what their mistakes, takes personal preference to the next level of nepotism and corruption.

Take the rise of government-role monopolist, Dido Harding. Harding’s credentials include not only a lucrative career as a business consultant, but a CEO position at TalkTalk when it received a record £400,000 fine for a massive data breach. She studied at Oxford with David Cameron, is married to the Conservative’s anti-corruption champion (!) and oversaw, in the track-and-trace system, one of the largest infrastructure failures in British history. And the sanction? This took the form of an appointment to interim chair of the National Institute for Health and Protection, of course. Although Baroness Harding has been described as ill-equipped and her appointment evidence of cronyism, you cannot fault her durability as a professional. ‘I did not apply for the role’ she has admitted: begging the question, was her expensive tenure as TalkTalk chairman that impressive, or is she merely the beneficiary of high privilege and profitable connections?

The extent to which skewed appointments damage the public interest is enormous. The decision to award a £122 million PPE contract to PPE Medpro is amongst the most questionable. Only having been established 44 days prior to the bid being tendered and boasting a shareholding of a mere £100, the firm – owned by Tory donor and associate of Baroness Mone – secured the contract. Similarly, the deal secured by Henry Mills (senior advisor to Department of Health) for Ayanda capital, worth £256 million, resulted in the dispatch of faulty PPE. And again, UK logistics company Uniserve, was awarded PPE contracts valued at £186 million – its owner is listed as a speaker for the influential pro-Brexit lobby group Prosperity UK. Compounding these individual cases was the release of a report by the National Audit Office, the government spending watchdog. The report concluded that suppliers with favourable political connections were directed to a ‘high priority channel’ for government contracts, increasing their chances of success by ten times. Caricatures of Conservatives as backslapping, pocket-lining, ‘looking out for a mate who was in their brother’s boarding house at school’ is too superficial an analysis to describe actions of this Government during the pandemic. The siphoning off of public money at direct expense of human life is clear corruption – and in its most malicious form.

A third product of Johnson’s parasitic existence as PM is the failure to hold ministers and officials to account. A precedent set by the previous Prime Minister, Theresa May, was the promotion of incompetence. The installation of Chris Grayling into the Department for Transport was amusingly punctuated by his awarding a £50 million channel crossing contract to a firm with no ferries. Johnson has riffed on this Tory tenet of bad governance and refuses to remove high ranking staff, even if they have broken the law. The resignation of Johnson’s advisor on ministerial code, following the suppression of the conclusions of an official report into Priti Patel’s bullying, indicates the legal carte blanche he affords his closest allies. This truth is epitomised in the failure to sack Dominic Cummings following his infamous holiday in Durham, seriously undermining government guidance on safety during the pandemic. The only redeeming element here is watching how the parasite cannibalises itself and any political capital it once had. As senior advisors fall by the wayside and any whiff of legal integrity dissipates, we can sit back and watch the bastards collapse, coughing and spluttering while Tory donors pocket millions flogging dodgy masks.

To call this Government merely incompetent implies an honest motivating backbone hosted by a weak, flabby torso. Instead, the Government suffers from moral scoliosis. This is a Government that has profited in the polls from concocted notions of British identity. Its members and alumni have co-opted a cause and ideology to shell out the institutions they falsely claim to revere. This corruption is of course inherently self-defeating, however when the Captain sinks the ship, we will all drown.

Words by Jamie Miller

Illustration by Andrew Craig

The Fallacy of Capitalist Innovation

Cereal, Marcuse, and debunking Hayek's theory of capitalist innovation

Having the choice between thousands of brands of cereal is not innovation. It is at most an imitation; just an endless series of almost identical cereal boxes. Rip-offs on rip-offs.

Cereal brands: contributing to one-dimensional society

Marcuse would argue here that mass production and distribution of cereal contribute to the “one-dimensionality” of society. Just like other corporations and agents under capitalism, mass production and distribution shape human needs and thoughts; they “claim the entire individual” (Marcuse, 1991, p. 10)[1]. Individuals develop an immediate identification with their society, and society as a whole. In Marcuse's words, identification with society is called mimesis, while the internalisation of mimesis in individuals within a technological society constitutes alienation in its extreme form. Alienation takes all forms everywhere, including cereal boxes in a supermarket, and constructs the one-dimensional society.

Hayek: the Kellogg’s stan

Yet, in Hayek’s view[2], this cereal shelf embodies progress and innovation at its finest. The plethora of cereal boxes laying here just before our consumerist eyes is almost too good to be true. This wonder is only possible under neo-liberalism, a system in which Hayek believes agents are free - meaning they are not coerced by anyone - and where progress can flourish driven by inequality. Inequality is apparently not a problem in the Hayekian world. In fact, it is even beneficial to progress, which Hayek defines as the adaption to new conditions and the gaining of greater knowledge. Indeed, the rich classes permit to progressively reduce the prices of the consumerist goods by their consumption of innovative and expensive cereal. Eventually, everyone will get to purchase a cereal box from a supermarket shelf. On the other hand, equalising is Hayek’s worst nightmare as it will hinder innovation and progress. Overall, Hayek thus argues that progress is driven first and foremost by the access to consumer goods. In other words, societal progress is driven by cereal brands.

‘Hayek as Tony the Tiger’ - Andrew Craig (2021)

How Hayek reinforces one-dimensional society

In Hayekian society, progress can only take the form of consumerist goods such as cereal boxes. Indeed, Hayek strongly opposes any form of state intervention except if the state must protect property, as he believes any other forms of state intervention would be a form of coercion. However, a tension arises in his theory: how could he stand against coercion but think that the masses are supposed to follow passively the way of life and consumption of the higher classes? In this case, people do not have a choice. The range of choice between thousands of cereal brands constitutes a mere illusion of freedom produced by firms and higher classes. For individuals this does not imply freedom but coercion because they are led to think they have these false needs for cereal; yet these needs are no product of their autonomy. Consumerist products indoctrinate and manipulate individuals by promoting a false consciousness as they spread around; they become a way of life, the one-dimensional society.

Hayek's theory of capitalist innovation is not progress. His argument implies a society dominated by the higher classes and corporations which seek to perpetuate a repressive and capitalist norm in order to self-sustain. In that way, Hayek's theory of capitalist innovation is reproducing and reinforcing one-dimensional society by making more cereal brands, more cereal flavours, more cereal boxes and more replicas of one-dimensional thought. One-dimensional society is a self-preserving repressive society, as it strips individuals from their own critical thinking and coercively imposes upon them repressive needs. Marcuse writes that this imperative of one-dimensional society is “self-expanding and self-perpetuating in its own preestablished direction driven by the growing needs which it generates and, at the same time, contains” (Marcuse, 2002, p. 37)[3]. Marcuse invites us to call into question the perceived state of innovation and freedom under coercive advanced capitalism; to liberate ourselves and develop multi-dimensional thought.

Words by Anaelle Thoreau

Illustration by Andrew Craig

Refrences

 [1] Herbert Marcuse, 1991, One-Dimensional Man.

 [2] Friedrich A. von Hayek, 2011, The constitution of liberty: the definitive edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

 [3] Herbert Marcuse, 2002, One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, Routledge, London.

Redefining Space

A look at how the Covid-19 pandemic has redefined the way that we view the city

Spending most of lockdown inside, I began having vivid dreams, usually, or almost in all cases, featuring public spaces of a city. Never a defined city and never a familiar one too. While the urban landscapes haunting my night visions were never the same (a symptom, I suppose, of the mind coping with a deficit of supplied diversity), the cities were indistinguishable from each other, its surfaces always poured over with dark grey concrete, radiating cold and estrangement. I have been having these dreams almost every night and they mostly shared a common theme of getting lost in the nightmarish, inhospitable cities. Like in Borges’ ‘The Immortal,’ (2006) the structures permeating these landscapes never seemed designated for human use, or rather, where a grotesque play on the function of modern infrastructure: monumental concrete buildings with no windows, streets intentionally filled with water - but lacking aquatic transport, and many other of which my memory has slowly begun fading. Like in the story, the urban infrastructure seemed to be constructed for humans who have long abandoned the city as a space of lively use. 

I don’t think it would be far-fetched to say that these vivid images are but a nightmarish reflection of the universal experience of living in a modern metropolitan city. While for some the estrangement created by the urban space is daily swept under the cosy carpet of cute charity shops and hip cafés, the closure centres of culture and consumption during lockdown deprived us of an external influx of daily activities usually providing us with the feeling of illusory fulfilment. As Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities, ‘you believe you are enjoying [the city of] Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.’ (1997) Not being able to participate in what the city has to offer, we were thus left stranded with a void, slowly, but steadily, being filled by estrangement.

The pandemic has forced us to question seemingly established categories, one of them being that of time. Being left only with the interior of our dwellings and the city in its “bare” state, the temporal experience of our days has mutated into a formless void, feeding on the persistent monotony of our mundane endeavours. Looking closely, however, those whose everyday responsibilities moved online were not completely free from an external structure, still having to perform their work remotely or attend classes through zoom. The seeming collapse of usual temporal experience was, therefore, not so much a consequence of a lack of schedule, but rather of spatial homogeneity accompanying us through daily activities. In this sense, we can see how the experience of time is largely dependent on space, and, how a lack of diversity within this space fosters an undeniable feeling of confusion. 

While to a large extent this is can be attributed to the expanse of hours we were bound to our dwellings, the problem is further magnified by the nature of public space in the city, its increasing lack of diversity and loss of local identity. With restrictions in place, we are usually free to move around only in the areas we inhabit, decreasing the repertoire of daily escapades. This becomes a problem especially for most of those who live in the city centre, in which the urban landscape is dominated by generic apartment blocks and skyscrapers, with insufficient access to green spaces. 

While the debate on the right to the city and the harm inflicted on large segments of its population by regeneration projects is not new, the conditions imposed on our everyday existence by the unavoidable restrictions certainly more acutely emphasised the problem of how we design our urban landscape. Having spent the first lockdown in Elephant and Castle, the issue progressively became more tangible in my everyday experience. As for myself, I would say I belong to a group of people who are fascinated by the rapid transformations of the city. However, as is mostly the case, my fascination is not grounded in admiration, but in the magnetism of the unfamiliar. ‘The normal is now changing so rapidly, and daily life has become so unstable, we even feel nostalgia for the present,’ writes Jack Self about the accelerating changes of our everyday landscapes, which, I believe, are predominantly present in its urban dimension. Elephant and Castle serves as a prime example. 

Designated an Opportunity Area in the early 2000s, recognising its high potential for improving housing, commercial use, and transport, Elephant and Castle was placed under an intense process of regeneration, which, as is stated by the Southwark Council, ‘will deliver enormous benefits for the whole community.’ The council promises at least 1650 affordable homes, 6000 construction jobs, and more public spaces, including the largest new park in central London in 70 years. Moreover, the redevelopment project was included in the Clinton Climate Positive Development programme, framed as an example to be followed to engender prosperous, environmentally-safe urban development.

Despite the promises of local authorities and the international acclaim of the project, the reality looks bleaker. Green areas and public spaces are squeezed between the apartment blocks and, while they remain open, their use is designated for people who can afford moving into the new surrounding apartment buildings. These are built at the cost of destroying the local infrastructure and aimed at attracting new investors and wealthier segments of the society. Contrary to what Southwark Council claims, this is not beneficial to the whole community, but primarily to the accumulation of capital, to which urban real estate has become of central focus (Stein 2019). Rather than bringing the local community together, which is what public spaces in the city should be designed to perform, their “regeneration” further segregates the urban population. 

While all of us, to some extent, might have struggled through the experience of lockdown, such changes in the urban environment are one of the critical factors generating inequality within the universal experience. Dismantling the local infrastructure and thus depriving the local community of the spaces they have made their familiar habitat, constituting a part of their identity, fosters a feeling of displacement, further proliferated in cases when the economic situation forces the people to change their place of living, which results in mounting anxiety over what the future will bring. Moreover, in a macro-historic perspective, demolishing buildings causes severe environmental drawbacks, having further deteriorating effects on the places we inhabit: in the UK, the construction industry itself is responsible for generating 45% of all CO2 emissions (Wainwright 2020). 

What’s more, examined at from a micro-historic perspective, apart from the obvious damage arising as the effect of these development project, the event of deconstruction and construction itself likewise yields alienating consequences for the local community. As Francesco Sebregondi argues in his essay on the Elephant and Castle Heygate estate, housing over 3000 people before it has been demolished in 2014, such massive enterprises foster voids in the fabric of the city, extending throughout the development process: beginning with decanting the buildings and ending with its the construction of new complexes (2011). In case of the Heygate Estate, the process began in 2007 and is still ongoing, with the construction work on the new Elephant Park still taking place. 

These voids are a necessary by-product of urban production. As such, they form a ‘temporal exteriority’ (Sebregondi 2011) to the urban landscape, simultaneously being embedded in the process of its creation. This inherent contradiction laying at the heart of the urban production process yields two equally contradictory results. First of all, urban space meant to serve the community, deprives it of useable space, making the experience of the city alienating and claustrophobic, this feeling further intensified by the restrictions imposed during lockdown. The decanted buildings and construction sites become voids, exterior to the city and simultaneously internal to its development, depriving the public space of its function, just like in the landscapes of my dreams. Second of all, urban production progressively makes the city more homogeneous, while simultaneously proliferating the disparity between those who can afford a lifestyle promoted by regeneration projects and those who cannot. Moreover, it also proliferates the disparity between the people and their environment, as the spaces of their everyday life cease to be the embodiment of their identity. 

The countless issues experienced both in public and private lives weren't caused by the pandemic, but magnified by its emergence. The problem of alienating public spaces is one of them. The landscapes of our everyday existence are both shaped by us and shape our identities, embodying our everyday life. As such, the local environments should be shaped in a way that both preserves the local identity and allows for it to develop continuously with the incentive of its people, rather than by ruptures fostering urban voids. After all, as David Harvey claims, 'the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be.'(2008) If we want to let our environments help define our identity, rather than marginalize it, we must fight for urban spaces which will develop in a way that helps us feel fulfilled in our daily existence, instead of posing obstacles to its comfort. This won’t be possible without a radical change in the subjectivity which prioritizes capital accumulation over the wellbeing of the society as a whole. 

Words by Olga Lojewska

Illustration by Fortunato Depero (1930) - Sky Scrapers and Tunnels

References

Borges, J. (2006). The Immortal. In The Aleph. London: Penguin Books.

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible cities. London: Penguin Random House.

Self, J. (2018). Critique of Everyday Life. Real Review (7), pp.10-17.

Sebregondi, F. (2011). The Event of Void. Retrieved from http://heygatewashome.org/img/FSebregondi_EventOfTheVoid.pdf.

Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review (53). Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city.

Stein, S. (2019). Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. London: Verso.

Wainwright, O. (2020, January 13). The case for… never demolishing another building. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/13/the-case-for-never-demolishing-another-building.

If You Are Reading This, You Are Probably An Accessory to Murder…

How responsible are we for the actions of state governments?

Murder is regarded as one of the most serious offences that a person could commit against another, the violation of the inviolable, the permanent removal of another’s right to self-govern. Today we accept that people, corporations and even states are all capable of being murderers. When others do wrong, we are swift to take account, to call for justice, and to be enraged by the conditions which enabled such perpetrations. My contention with this general outlook is its propensity to ignore one’s own position in a wider causal chain that perpetuates systems of child poverty, rape and abuse, institutionalised racism and gender-based violence. The reality of this tendency, however, is a tough pill to swallow.

So the question to ask would be, “how connected are you to these events?”. To answer this, I turn to three different scenarios. The first scenario involves you shooting someone for no discernible reason. The second concerns you failing to prevent someone from pushing somebody else into oncoming traffic, when you have both the time and ability to do so. Lastly, let us consider the scenario of the British state failing to remove flammable cladding from a tower block, or failing to provide adequate mental health resources for people in need, or allowing disproportionate numbers of the young and black to die in custody.

The first two scenarios listed generally give cause for people to immediately concede direct responsibility and, therefore, the fullness of guilt regarding their actions. However, when it comes to the actions of the state, the opposite is true. After all, which standard subject of Her Majesty’s Government would claim responsibility for the actions of that same state? Now, whilst it would be easy to write a standard polemic on the collective behaviours of the state, it is that pre-modifying adjective of the “‘collective”’ that forms the thematic direction of this article.

Philip Abrams in 1988 defined the state as a “public reification”, acquiring an “overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice”. In other words, the state takes on the appearance of an actuality that is separate from social processes and human action. It is exactly this culturally permanent fixture that allows the status quo to perpetuate itself. After all, if we are causally removed from the actions of the state, then how can we affect its processes and actions? How are we responsible?

The state is both subjective and real; intersubjective. Even if we discount the importance of a single vote; voters, collective actors, voting processes, ads and lobbyists all converge on a singular event. Which is, fundamentally, to affect a desired outcome. Each collective group is, to some extent, reducible to individuals. The state is intersubjective, a collective imagination, intersecting with the real invisible actions of state workers and officials who all take part in individual and collective engagement with state processes. This two-fold process makes the state a dualistic phenomenon.

In other words, if we vote for the party that destroys the environment more than another, are we not in some way responsible for the destruction of the environment? If we do not inform ourselves about particular issues, educate ourselves, listen and approach the perspective with both scepticism and humanity, do we not continue to perpetuate the status quo? If, despite our personal circumstances, we do not vote, is our inaction not complicit with wider structures of power and oppression? If we do not raise our voice in protests - however it looks; a black square on the ‘gram, a fist in the streets, an open letter on the lap of a student- can we really be a citizen in any broad sense? Can we shirk our responsibility for the actions of the body politic? The vote for women was not won in silence, the Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Slave Trade Act of 1807 both dissolve in Trotsky’s dustbin without mass participation.

Rugged individualism and atomistic self-interested outlooks compounded on by neoliberal economics, only take us so far. When speculative property markets crash, we blame banks, bosses, and bungling idiots in suits. Not to take away from that sentiment at all, but at some point, we must look inward. If ritual acts, which both form the basis for orthodox “state-making” and reproduce the state as it exists, then why do we never begin with us.

After all, it is not hard to admit that people operate in interconnected causal chains. When Cain asks God in the biblical canon if he is his brother’s keeper, the answer is undeniably “yes”. How does the common citizen escape blame for the actions of their representatives? If we elect a person with racist views, and they implement policies that exacerbate racial difference in socio-economic, political and educational attainment, who is more to blame, the MP or us?

I have seen my immigrant mother - not a native or a native speaker - working hours long into the day on her own, managing others within bureaucracy, working on the weekend, covering the shifts of others, having to go above and beyond. And she votes on every election without fail; she embodies a principle; a principle of refusing to exist within a system where she cannot exercise her vote. So, when the state kills abroad, we allow it in action and inaction, speech and deed, because - like it or not - the state is not autonomous nor only abstract. It is tied to us all by visible threads which bind capital, attention, platform and support. A cracked reflection of society. What it does, we allow; what it does not, we accept; what it might do at some point in that causal chain, is up to us.

Causal chains connect us all through history, time and space spanning back centuries and millennia towards converging points, up even to the singular moment which gave rise to the universe. When we discuss blame however, whether because of socialisation, political climate or personal inclinations, we shy away from it when it places us in close proximity to negative events that transpire.

Words by Yisrael Joojo L. Arthur

Illustrations by Andrew Craig

Modernisation and Gender Performance Amongst the Santals

Navigating Gender Identity within Indigenous Communities in India

India is home to over 100 million indigenous people, composed of 255 officially recognised groups categorised under ‘scheduled tribe’ in the official census. A term rooted in British colonial rule, the ‘scheduled tribe’ categorisation is controversial today due to its exclusionary prerequisites and racist conception.

All of these indigenous groups (including the Gonds of central India, Bhils of Western India, and the Santals of Eastern India) face a common issue today - how to undergo the process of modernisation spreading through India whilst retaining their distinct cultural identities. Interestingly, when we apply this issue to gender, it becomes all the more pertinent. Early anthropological texts depicted Santals and other tribes as backwards and 'uncivilised', partly through the relative androgyny described. Santals lived (and still continue to live) an agrarian lifestyle, and although men and women often played quite separate roles, ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ as we know today were largely non-existent. 

Santals and other East Indian tribes are known not just for their relative androgyny but also for their gender egalitarianism. Women are able to own property and land, choose partners to marry, divorce without constraint, and never have to participate in the exchange of dowries (or bride prices). This is in stark contrast to the lack of self-determination seen amongst women of the majority Hindu communities, where dowry-related suicides are still widespread today. Santal women also work outside the house, most often in paddy fields, and therefore contribute to household finances leading to a degree of financial independence. This androgyny and egalitarianism were often used by colonialists to justify the supposed superiority of the Victorian British, whose relatively extreme performance of femininity was portrayed as a sign of civility.

Things are changing fast, however. With mobile phones becoming more and more accessible, Santals have developed a hugely popular cultural platform online - heavily influenced by the advent of the dominating Bollywood cinema industry. This has in turn been shaped by Western forces, that portray extreme gender binaries in depictions of gender performance and roles. Today, this platform is one way Santals are coping with modernisation - fusing traditional melodies and rhythms of the tumdak and tamak with modern instruments such as synthesisers and drums, and traditional dress such as panchi and gamcha with modern clothing including jeans and dresses. This is of course a natural process, and in many ways necessary for minority communities to survive in a globalising world. After all, all communities need to adapt and take advantage of changes shaping our world today. Even in terms of gender, this influence is liberating in some ways - a choice from a wider array of gendered performance can surely never be a negative influence - but when combined with the various processes of integration into Hindu society, some worrying patterns can be seen. 

For example, the 2009 Right to Education Act made education free and compulsory for all children; a huge step forward in empowering Santals. However, it also symbolises a broader movement of one-way integration - partially because formal education has offered no room for teaching indigenous values, and instead is seen as a way of lifting Santals out from their ‘backwards’ lifestyle - and has coincided with many Santal youth passing through education and aspiring to a middle-class Hindu lifestyle. There is a pattern of educated Santals moving away from villages into towns and cities, choosing to wear Hindu clothing and raising children with their first language as Bengali, the dominant Hindu language in West-Bengal. This has included a shift in attitudes towards women, with bride-prices becoming more frequent and relationships before marriage - along with divorce - becoming stigmatised. 

An event I experienced during my childhood in West-Bengal highlights this issue. A group of teenage boys, with growing responsibility in their communities, reacted extremely to a relationship between a younger teenage girl from their village and a boy from a neighbouring community. As the relationship grew, the boys from the girl’s community decided it was unsafe and bringing dishonour to her family, and took direct action to hinder their relationship - by beating up the boy. Relationships like this used to be very open and accepted amongst Santals (and often still are), yet these boys, having received formal education, had adopted the mindset of local Hindu Bengalis - that relationships before marriage were wrong.

Better access to education, in many cases, has led to the embourgeoisement of some sections of indigenous society. However, instead of a greater financial income liberating women, as you would expect, the opposite seems to have occurred. Women have stopped working (outside the home that is - unpaid domestic labour is still carried out by women, of course). Again, this may be traced to integration into Hindu society, where women working is seen as a sign of financial hardship, in contrast to wealthier families where women often don’t work. The adoption of this symbolism is a clear step backwards for Santal women as it means they have less influence in the household and community and greater dependence on male relatives.

Santali communities have developed in many ways since British rule, not least through reduced material hardship. For example, malnutrition and child deaths are declining, and access to education and healthcare has improved. Santal women have of course benefitted from this, but they are facing unique challenges that the rest of Indian society has not seen. With more binary gender roles imposed upon them and reduced independence, Santal women will need to seriously assess the changes they are going through as part of modernisation and take leadership in articulating their lived experiences to better their lives for themselves.

Words by Ishani Milward-Bose

Defending the Right to Dissent

Responding to the UK Government’s Interventions in Education

In its latest attempt to control intellectual and academic autonomy, the UK government released guidance in September banning the use of educational materials that contain “extreme political stances.” Amongst them is a ban on the use of materials from groups that have “a publicly stated desire to abolish or overthrow democracy, capitalism, or to end free and fair elections.” Many organisations, teachers, and university lecturers throughout the country believe this guidance to be problematic, since it misrepresents important subjects such as critical race theory and also stunts critical thinking by disallowing analytical voices. This ban means that materials from many groups such as Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion are unusable in formal education, given that they explicitly link the perpetuation of racism and environmental degradation to capitalism. In other words, two of the most important contemporary movements against inequality - a movement fighting to end systemic racial oppression and a movement fighting to save our planet - are not allowed to be taught in their entirety in schools.

By placing democracy and capitalism together, the wording in the guidelines suggests a correlation between the two – that those who express anti-capitalist thought are also attempting to overthrow democracy. Which, let’s be clear, they are not. Capitalism and democracy are not one in the same. This linkage between the two is therefore misleading and potentially harmful in educational settings and beyond. Furthermore, anti-capitalism has been bundled up with guidance which bans the use of materials that endorse racism, anti-semitism, illegal activity, and opposition to free speech.

A growing group of over six hundred academic signatories have signed an open letter to the British government, which describes the guidelines as ‘part of a broader pattern of creeping authoritarianism, building on previous surveillance measures in the classroom, including Prevent. That it has been introduced in the guise of sex and relationship education guidelines is no accident. Section 28 reminds us how effective ‘family values’ moralism can be at limiting young people’s access to knowledge, with particularly detrimental effects for women, queer and trans students.

While the guidelines are specifically in reference to the teaching of relationships, sex, and health, what they represent is even more important. From a government supposedly committed to the guarantee of free speech, such guidance is a glaring attempt at censorship. Given the relationship between reproduction and capitalism and the role of feminised, often hidden forms of labour in maintaining the system, the significance of this censorship is more than it first appears. Comparisons of this latest intervention into school education have been made with 1950s McCarthyism which came to permeate every area of American life but began, in part, as an attack within the halls of institutes of learning and free thought.

It is difficult not to see such a decision on the part of the UK government as a preemptive move to stifle growing collective dissent. The guidance comes at a time of turmoil as protests ring out globally on issues of politics, racism, environmental degradation, and financial destabilisation. A growing collective consciousness is beginning to question whether our government really has our best interests at heart or whether its sole purpose is to push forward an economic agenda. As is clear from the guidance, it is the latter.

Similarly with the ban of “promoting divisive or victim narratives that are harmful to British society”, the government is attempting to control what students learn which has resulted only in the creation of an unaware populace. The purpose of education in a democracy should not be to promote a political agenda or rewrite history but to grant students the right to all angles of an issue so as to promote critical understanding. Surely the basis for democracy is an ability to question the government and the systems it promotes.

Alpa Shah, a professor of Anthropology at the LSE, was one of the many who have found the latest guidelines concerning: “The rise of authoritarian regimes around the world – whether in Hungary or India – has gone hand-in-hand with the severe curtailments of academic freedom at the heart of which is what is taught in schools and in universities. That we see such repression of educational freedom coming to our doorstep is deeply concerning for it threatens our ability to dissent which has to be at the heart of any democracy.”

Among the groups standing in opposition to the guidance are the National Education Union, the Coalition on Anti-Racist Educators, and the Black Educators Alliance. Now members of the LSE community can rally around their cries as educators and students have joined hands to form The Coalition for Educational Autonomy in response to the latest guidelines.

The group is composed of members from various walks of life, disciplines, and ideologies who have come together under a mutual understanding of the importance to protect the autonomy of academic thought. It is essential that we, the people, reserve the right to question and disagree with our government on issues of such importance as censorship – especially when it impacts the ability to perform dissent. The Coalition has organised a zoom event which will include speakers from Turkey, India, South Africa and the U.K. followed by an open discussion about next steps

You can read more about the U.K. school guidelines here. Should you be interested in joining The Coalition for Educational Autonomy please reach out to coforedautonomy@gmail.com. To participate in the zoom event please sign-up here.

Words by Maeve Pages

Artwork and photography by Andrew Craig

The “You Better Work” Ethic and the Spirit of Drag

The “You Better Work” Ethic and the Spirit of Drag

By Nadav Wall

2008 was a tumultuous year in the United States. The stock market bottomed out, unemployment soared, and banks too big to fail did exactly that. Amidst this crisis, a sense of hope for a more just future gained political momentum. Barack Obama dethroned Hillary Clinton as the predestined Democratic presidential nominee and same-sex marriage celebrated early victories in California and Connecticut. That summer, a reality tv competition quietly pitted nine drag queens against each other, sparking a cultural phenomenon that still reverberates in queer communities across the globe today. LOGO TV, a fledgling Viacom subsidiary targeted at LGBTQ audiences, greenlit the soon-to-be canonized program: RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show was a perfect blend of widening LGBTQ acceptance, a politics of hope, and the austere fiscal policies characteristic of the late aughts. The network recognized a financial opportunity in the relatively cheap labor of drag queens who could sing, dance, act, and sew, all while barking quips and throwing shade. The show’s parallel trajectory to the U.S. economic recession and subsequent shaky recovery was no coincidence. In frugal times, who better than a drag queen to milk a dollar for all its worth? 

The inaugural episode of the series challenged queens to create “drag [outfits] on a dime” made up of dollar-store items. In the years that have followed, that resourcefulness and economic prudence has been a recurring theme both on the show and in the hundreds of careers that have sprouted in its wake. The most successful queens have proven to be flexible entrepreneurial brands, hawking merchandise through nightclubs and theaters across international borders while producing an endless stream of social media content to satiate their fervent fanbases. The avenues to success in this industry, though queer in appearance, provide a compelling picture of the neoliberal virtues and capitalist logics anthropologists have identified that have proliferated in a post-recession landscape. Successful drag queens both on and off the show illustrate what Ilana Gershon calls “neoliberal agency”. They market themselves as “a bundle of traits and skills—improvable assets—that they own and manage as a business”. (Gershon 551). RuPaul embodies this tenacity and rewards contestants that follow his lead. He’s a singer, songwriter, actor, author, television and podcast host, model, producer, and now a (questionable) guru. While this entrepreneurial spirit is often satirized on the show, it’s been the winning formula for drag queens hoping to do well in the competition and have longevity in their careers.

Season 7 contestant Trixie Mattel — a country musician, makeup mogul, and comedian — on the cover of Autoharp Quarterly

“You better work!” has been the underlying political message of the show and a common refrain heard in gay nightclubs. Popularized by RuPaul in the 90’s and sung 20 years later by Britney Spears in her hit song “Work Bitch”, the phrase has soundtracked and celebrated the commodification of queer culture. Alumni of the show have found themselves in an overcrowded market, reciting protestant tropes of the privilege and desire to work, and expressing gratitude and professionalism in their career trajectories spanning from dive bars to Hollywood red carpets. For those who have managed to stay relevant in a sea of competing acts, success has been astronomical. Drag queens have gone from mimicking “executive realness” in ballrooms a la Paris is Burning (1990) to now giving sought-after management advice in Forbes Magazine. An article published in 2015 by that business magazine instructs readers to “build fan loyalty like RuPaul and America’s top drag queens”. Other industry publications have followed their lead. A queer house no longer just refers to fictive kinship, it is now something you can aspire to and read about in Architectural Digest and People, where prior contestants’ sleek cosmopolitan homes have been profiled. 

Season 9 contestant Sasha Velour (bottom right) pictured with her husband and dog in their Brooklyn apartment for People

Much like drag itself, this meritocratic work ethic and its lucrative rewards turn out to be an illusion. Behind the glitz and glam of drag stardom looms a precarious existence. While contestants are encouraged to take performative risks on Drag Race and expose their emotional vulnerabilities, the real risk-taking happens before they ever step on set. Queens have confessed to spending upwards of $30,000 on designer outfits in preparation for the show. To put this figure in perspective, the winning prize in 2008 was a paltry $10,000 (before taxes). Contestants are pressured to take out loans in order to meet the increasingly unattainable fashion standards the show’s audience expects. This is a radical departure from drag’s roots, which can be traced back to marginalized queer POC, often homeless, without disposable incomes or access to a creative class of designers and stylists. Unfortunately, many of the show’s contestants are eliminated early in the competition, left with designer wardrobes never to be seen on television and staggering financial debts to be repaid. 

“You are put through months and months of hell, wondering, do you have to quit your day job? Do you have to ask your parents for money? Do you have to get rid of your house? Just to get on the show and be eliminated first takes thousands and thousands of dollars and you leaving everything that ever made you comfortable behind.”

Although documentaries like Paris is Burning showed glimpses of the financial burdens of drag, the precarity those performers faced was deliberately divorced from their drag personas. Queens living in abject poverty without access to formal employment networks were celebrated for serving opulence and looking the part of an unobtainable lifestyle. However, this fantasy isn’t as seamlessly constructed by queens on Drag Race. Recent contestants have come under fire for actively self-producing themselves while filming. One popular method for making money after the show is selling t-shirts with catch-phrases that were either intentionally or unintentionally said on camera. This has resulted in strained efforts by queens to coin catch phrases before departing that can then be milked through an endless roll-out of merchandise and music videos. Some queens have even coordinated outfits and performances to reinforce these catch phrases and reduce their drag to a memorable slogan. Rather than preparing for the show with winning the crown in mind, queens now often focus their attention to a future t-shirt business to maximize profits in the small window of fame the show guarantees.

Season 10 contestant Monique Heart, pictured in a brown cow-inspired outfit, performing her song “Brown Cow Stunning” named after her popular “brown cow stunning” catch phrase. 

A triumph-over-adversity storyline and a memorable sound bite shift the commodification from performance abilities to the performance of identity, which has become a necessity to make a living for queens already in debt during filming. A sympathetic personality and a knack for presenting a well-crafted backstory turn out to be the most valuable skills in a drag queen’s toolbox. Contestants have revealed in tender moments that they are HIV-positive, homeless, disabled, and battle with addiction. Others have bravely talked about being abandoned by their parents, their experiences in and out of prison, and attending sexuality conversion camps at a young age against their will. Many have remarked that through drag, they found an unshakeable confidence and hope that they did not possess beforehand. This gives a new meaning to David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”. The dissolving work-life boundaries that these queens experience means that they can find surplus value in their own dispossession as marginalized queer people, so long as they have an arsenal of entertainment and marketing skills to to fold their disenfranchisement into. 

Although often lauded as revolutionary queer entertainment, Drag Race does not signal a distinctive rupture from the American dream. Familiar tropes of hard work pulling people from rags to riches are abundant on the show, though coated with a palatable queer glaze for an audience that has often been betrayed by American ideals. When debating whether to eliminate a floundering contestant this season who had unsuccessfully applied for the show 11 years in a row before finally being cast, RuPaul remarked that “it would be un-American to send her home so soon”. This nexus between neoliberal agency, queer livelihoods, and American values in the shadow of a paralyzing economic recession is arguably what makes the show such a successful phenomenon.

We’re seeing a similar nexus emerge in rising presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, built on his traditional American military values, vague economic policies that mirror the language of private enterprise, and an alleged queer sensibility. Drag Race might not be the source of hope it started out as, but the creative adaptation to austere constraints it showcases might provide useful clues for what’s to come. Its ebullient spirit — in contrast to a ceaseless commodification of labor and intimacy — relies on a balance of humor and empowerment often missing in most anthropological analyses of neoliberalism. Paying attention to this (however misleading) hope and its contingency on precarity could broaden our understandings of how LGBTQ acceptance has been articulated through capitalist logics that produce very few winners and continue to marginalize everyone else.

References

Gershon, Ilana. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology. 52.4 (2011): 537-555. Print.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Huba, Jackie. “Build Fan Loyalty Like RuPaul And America’s Top Drag Queens.” Forbes Magazine

Martin, Michael. “An Exclusive Look Inside Alyssa Edwards’s Glitzy, Glittery Glam Room.” Architectural Digest, 22 Jan. 2019

Price, Lydia. “Inside Drag Race Star Sasha Velour’s Eclectic & Enchanting Brooklyn Home, Where ‘Kitsch’ Meets ‘High-Class.’ ” PEOPLE.com, 4 Mar. 2019,

YouTube “Roscoe’s RPDR S11 Viewing Party with Scarlet Envy & Sharon Needles!” (5 Apr. 2019)

Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age

Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age

By Sean Chou

How do you invent a “homosexual”?

‘Coming-out’ is the Euro-American paradigm which frames how homosexual identity is constructed in the West. It usually involves the homosexual subject confiding in close friends and family, casting themselves as the ‘gay’ or ‘queer’. But with this revelation come the ambiguous logics of guilt and shame. These are challenging because – while the homosexual subject optimistically hopes to regain self- confidence and agency by revealing their sexuality – by participating in the ‘coming-out’, they confess the secret of their same-sex attraction. An act of ‘revelation’ is also an act of ‘confession’. The power of the ‘gay’ label becomes essentialized and fixed.

Something striking about the coming-out is the sexual binary. ‘Gayness’ assumes a counter-balancing ‘straightness’. The coming-out becomes a self-reinforcing control mechanism that classifies and regulates individuals and whose bodies they choose to desire and share with.

In ‘History of Sexuality Vol 1’ (1998), Michel Foucault contends the self-confession is a ‘ritual of discourse’ which produces sexuality as a ‘truth-effect’; it lends power to social forces which go on to ‘judge, order, forgive, console, reconcile’ (61-62). But how do we move forwards with this discussion and think more broadly about how sexuality is constructed, not within a specific Western, modern context, but in other cultures and societies?

This article will be made up of three parts. We will begin with a consideration of how the illusion of the public/private binary links with socioeconomic relations. This will feed into a discussion of queer desire in an age of globalisation. This will beg the question: Should theories of globalization have a keener focus on subjective agency, rather than favouring theories of mass flow?

In this article, I use the term ‘queer’ to indicate non-heterosexual, non- binary conforming gender and sexual identities. The point is not to homogenise these identities or ‘lump them together’, but to indicate the subversiveness, possibility and open-endedness of the queer experience, which leads beyond the necessity of being a card-carrying ‘this-or-that’. The ‘coming-out’ paradigm, contains the Western logic of the public/ private dichotomy, where public life should be kept separate from private sexual freedoms. The export of this essentializing paradigm to non-Western places can complicate pre-existing queer discourses. For example, the work Silviano Santiago (2002) discusses the coming-out in Brazil. In the 1960s and 1970s, the verb ‘assumir’ (which means the equivalent of ‘to come out’ in English) spread widely to describe the homosexual public identity the person would take on after coming out. Santiago argues this meant homosexuals had to act as ‘marginal to the social norm’ – which ruled out bisexuality as a possible, normalised sexual preference, and reinforced the secretive nature of being homosexual, hidden from family life (2002: 15).

Santiago goes further to explain how the coming-out is wound up with class logics of exclusion and marginality, as it reinforces the divide between the bourgeois, property-owning class and poor neighbourhoods which do not have the bourgeois concept of ‘privacy’. Instead, Santiago explores how they revert to alternative social relations not based on a clash of norms (16). In one case, he describes a boy who stays in the tenement but dresses in drag at the carnival in the city, his activities supported by the washerwomen in the tenement who treat him like a person of the same sex. Santiago goes on to criticise coming- out as constructing ‘guilt’ in the homosexual subject (18). By aligning the homosexual person with behaviour perceived as gay, it reinforces them as socially ‘other’. Instead, Santiago argues it is more subversive to adopt subtler forms of queer subjectivity – to avoid perpetuating the same logics of exclusion imposed by homophobic opponents.

From this, it is evident sexuality interacts with social factors like class, and we should be aware of how it reinforces existing social inequalities and bourgeois ideological beliefs. We also observe how sexuality does not act solely on an individual level, but acts on a set of social relations, negotiating power dynamics and distribution of wealth.

But how do sexual politics impact the positionality of nationhood more generally?

In Cindy Patton’s case study of Taiwan, Patton discusses how, after 1993, gay men were allowed to serve in the military (2002). Patton argues this allowed Taiwan to position itself as modern, liberal and progressive, in contrast to neighbouring mainland China where homosexual activities were illegal at the time. He argues that the military policy harmed the existing gay rights movement in Taiwan because it ‘pre-empted liberation politics’ and gay men who did not serve in the military were now accused of being unpatriotic (2002: 195).

It is easy to make comparisons with the recent legalisation of gay marriage in Taiwan in May 2019. While it was a significant milestone for Taiwan as the first country in East Asia to pass equal marriage, we should not forget that the move helps Taiwan to position itself in an international context as a liberal, progressive country, amenable to Western freedoms and economic investment.

Patton argues that the public/private divide does not exist in Taiwan like in the US, where gay rights arose after decline in private, family structures (208). Instead of the civil rights ‘affectivity’ of a minority group, which borrowed strategies used to fight for civil rights for African-Americans in the 1960s, in Taiwan human rights – including gay rights – were ‘feminised’ because feminist movements saw gay people forming part of ‘dissent’ against family traditions like gender roles (206-7).

Liberal universalism assumes human rights are part of an inevitable, historical trajectory of progress and endow individual agents with innate dignity. Rather, as the example of Taiwan demonstrates, gay rights can be seen as part of a state’s nation-building project – and become complicit in hegemonic discourses of assimilation into normative constructs like citizenship and service to the state. Patton says at greater stake is the idea of the ‘Nation’ itself, and presumably its defence against forms of cultural identification like sexuality which transcend borders (202); the Nation has a greater prerogative to defend itself, and will ‘absorb’ social groups like gay people to achieve this.

Patton’s essay takes for granted the imposition of nation-state logics, seen as Western and modernising, as universal and inevitable, as part of a ‘performative homologism’ where nations fight over and leave no territories unclaimed (201). But the globalisation of queer discourses should not be seen as so uni-directional. Tom Boellstorff argues against the theory of globalisation as ‘flow’, arguing that it imposes Western queer terminology onto non-Western countries, and reinforces assumptions of Western cultural hegemony as inevitable (2003: 226).

Rather, he argues for his theory of ‘dubbing’ culture. Boellstorff observes ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ Indonesian subjectivities which he argues are separate from Western categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.

Instead, the concept of the ‘dub’ describes how there are two sets of cultural logics. Western queer subjectivities are communicated through mainstream media like TV shows, and Indonesian ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ subjectivities. These are national, rather than local or ethnic: in one case, a ‘gay’ man called Hasan first discovered ‘gay’ people through the TV broadcast of a gay demonstration in Indonesia (226-227).

But subjectivities cross between local, global and personal meanings invested into them. The term ‘dub’ encapsulates these contradictions, how terms cannot ultimately reconcile the meanings of sexual subjectivities into a closed totality, but are interpretative, intersubjective and endlessly played upon through multiple discourses.

To return to the coming-out, perhaps an alternative analogy should be used for how queer-ness is constructed. Queerness isn’t a ‘coming-out’ - the onus on queer people to come out interpolates and subordinates us to a social order we didn’t create. It perpetuates forms of domination and pre-existing inequalities.

But equally, the closet – the coming-out space – should be reclaimed if we can explore meaningful forms of resistance to heteronormativity. The closet is an inherently performative space, and suggests equally that heterosexuality is performed and ironically a ‘phase’ in many gay people’s lives before they come out as ‘gay’. This reveals the fluid, inherently unstable labels used for sexual identification. But also, how we can understand the public/private dichotomy as ideological, as it perpetuates bourgeois, property-owning logics of public subordination and private domination.

These broad theoretical postulations should not disguise how hetero- doxical thinking spreads unevenly in different cultural contexts. Rather, we should stay sensitive to how alternative, queer identities are constructed ‘on the ground’ – as a nation building project in Taiwan, or distinctly nation-bound categories in Indonesia which are parallel but do not blend with Western, totalising identities.

If we grasp the alterity, potentiality and becoming futurity of queerness, perhaps we learn everything in the world is a bit queer – and better for the diverse, opening subjectivities it promises.

References

Boellstorff, T. (2003). Dubbing culture: Indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and eth- nography in an already globalized world. American Ethnologist, 30(2), pp. 225-242.

Cruz, A. Manalansan, M. (2002). Introduction. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 1-10.

Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.

Patton, C. (2002). Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of “Alterity” in Emerging Democracies. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 195-219.

Santiago, S. (2002). The Wily Homosexual. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 13-20.

Why anthropologists should do journalism

Why anthropologists should do journalism

(but not necessarily become journalists)

By Karen Lerbech Pedersen

Ethnographic journalism. I was introduced to the term during my first week as an undergraduate student in Journalism Studies almost six years ago. As opposed to more traditional journalism, ethnographic journalism was all about getting under the skin of a given topic, we were told. Often narrative in form, its storytelling approach allowed for a more nuanced coverage. I was intrigued.

In the past few years, ethnographic journalism has been labelled a hybrid genre, having become a niche in Danish journalism. Today, when journalists conduct research spanning over a couple of weeks or months, they describe their work as ‘ethnographic journalism’. In fact, I was one of those journalists, proudly claiming that I took on “anthropological approaches in my journalistic work” in my university application.

Cut to the end of Lent term 2019. Now, having studied the intricacies and methodology of ethnography, I must admit that nothing in my work as a journalist could be classified as ‘ethnographic’ in nature. However, after my eye-opening time at the LSE, I believe anthropology – or more precisely anthropologists – have a great deal to offer to journalism.

I believe journalism and anthropology share some very fundamental approaches to the world; there is a curiosity and a drive to understand the what, how and why. Yet, where journalism by principle is rather positivistic, anthropology is hermeneutic. News criteria such as Proximity, Prominence, Timeliness, Oddity and Conflict drive journalists in their work, and though challenged in recent times, the principle of ‘objectivity’ seems to be an enduring one. Many anthropologists, on the other hand, seek questions and doubt, and allow interpretation. In more contemporary ethnography the anthropologist is not afraid of placing her- or himself within the context, acknowledging that there is no objective truth to be told.

It is true that journalism is now facing both challenges and new opportunities. Traditional medias are fighting to survive, and paradoxically enough, so are their younger, digital counterparts. As the media industry has become one, big globalised industry, potential readers, viewers and listeners can be found all over the world. What happens in Germany could be of interest to someone in Singapore. In a strange way, people across the globe end up consuming the same content, and reading the same stories.

In such precarious times, it seems as if dichotomies have faced some kind of a revival (perhaps they never really left), and it’s more or less impossible to read the news without being met with oppositions; pro or against Brexit, feminism or misogyny, believing or not believing in climate change, pro-vaccine or anti-vaxxer. The list goes on. The sparks of conflict are ever-present, with everyone yelling at each other from their respective sides of the cliff.

This brings me to why I believe anthropologists should do journalism, but not necessarily become journalists. Journalism today confines the author to journalistic norms and practices. An anthropological journalism has the means to go against the stream, and although anthropology is subject to the same critiques as any other discipline, I believe there is much to be gained from combining the two fields. This is why I will leave the big critiques of anthropology aside for now. Anthropologists engage with issues in-depth, inferring larger structures at play from observing day-to-day lives. They question what they observe, analysing the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do. Anthropologists question power relations. They see the nuances of human life. They question the dichotomies. Imagine a journalism which did just that.

To circle back to the idea of ‘ethnographic journalism’, which has followed me since my undergraduate studies-- while I still don’t know about ethnographic journalism, I firmly believe in anthropological journalism. I believe it should be encouraged and pursued because it has the ability to challenge the status quo, especially when it comes to journalism – and perhaps even within anthropology as well.

The question now is where to find the columns.

Heartbeat

Heartbeat

Anonymous Entry

I’ve always been scared by the beating of the heart. Never in my childhood was I tempted to pick up a stethoscope, toy or real, to eavesdrop on that thumping that is the indisputable proof of human life. I resisted taking my own pulse, even when instructed to do so in middle school health class, hated the throbbing of my arm compressed by a blood-pressure cuff. It is folk knowledge that children are soothed by the beating heart of their parents, the soundtrack to which the infant develops in the safety of the womb. But the heartbeat of my parents, and later my boyfriends or partners, failed to bring me comfort but instead repulsed me and caused me to shift myself away from that drumming, disconcertingly both regular and irregular. I trained my mind to focus on the person - their warmth of their embrace, the familiarity of their features - rather than this foreign, fleshy organ pulsating inside of them. Only now have I stopped to delve more deeply into this discomfort, my aversion to this most sensual and physical proof of life.

Now I think that perhaps all my life my heart was communicating to me through its beating, repeating a message I chose to ignore. It was telling me ‘you are alive but just as fragile as the parts that compose you’. I didn’t listen to this voice not because I didn’t want to listen to it, but because I was terrified to hear it jump or skip or stop altogether. I was afraid to admit the power of matter over mind, the contingency of me. As I pursued proof of life outside myself, the feeling of being alive became the rush of achievement, the burning lungs and aching limbs of a body in motion, always pushing harder and further and faster – onwards and upwards. And because I ignored the voice of my heart and its message, I didn’t notice when it grew weaker and weaker, reduced to a whisper. I ignored my heartbeat until I couldn’t anymore.

That moment came in a doctor’s office in April, a setting non-descript in its sterility and florescence. The doctor’s words percolated slowly through the filters of my consciousness; my heartrate was dangerously low, and I was suffering from ‘malnutrition.’ I was alone, sitting on the crinkly paper of the patient’s chair. In the half-hour before seeing the doctor, I had been asked by the nurses to undress and lie still as wires were attached to my chest and upper body in a pattern that seemed to me to be random, to stand on a scale which was read from a handheld device that I couldn’t see. A little machine was clipped onto my finger that showed numbers I didn’t know the meaning of, and a blood- pressure cuff was wrapped around my arm, pumped to squeeze like a boa constrictor strangling its prey. I felt the throbbing of my arm as the sleeve released, and it reminded me of my heartbeat. I wished the pulsing to stop, and it did. A nurse dressed in dark blue entered all this collected data – all these facts from which I felt so disconnected – into a chunky IBM laptop on the desk next to the patient’s chair, angled away from me, of course.

None of this, not even the echocardiogram (the name for the test with the wires, only learned later) was particularly alarming to me. I had been to the doctor’s many times over the past years for various check- ups and minor maladies; I went through the motions and did what I was told. I had always been good at that. I made small talk while my body was checked and tested, knowing that the nurses were more interested in the numbers on those screens than the content of our conversation. They did their jobs and I tried to make it easier, tried to be the perfect patient. I was confident in my ability to pass these tests; I always had before. I was an athlete, ate healthily, stayed away from drugs and alcohol (mostly). I had nothing to hide and gained an assured boost from the doctor’s approval when my vitals came back strong, my weight always on the lower end of healthy. I was an athlete throughout high school and my body reflected that. I played soccer and ran and ate until I was satisfied. The doctor’s office was somewhere where I could succeed without even trying. But this time I had not succeeded or even passed. I had failed, specifically my heart - that beating inside my chest that I always preferred not to acknowledge – had failed.

It took wires stuck to my body and the words of a stony-faced physician for me to hear and to slowly begin to understand that my heart had not failed me. My body was not now a failure, when previously it had been a success, a source of pride, a vehicle of athletic accomplishment. I was just beginning to comprehend that I was a person of flesh and blood, that the persona I enacted in my daily life – my life of school, sports, social life – was intertwined with this physical body, these organs, this heart. That day, so unexpectedly and unprecedently, my body spoke, and my mind was forced to follow. And from that day forward I began to realise the harmfulness and plain inaccuracy of this distinction, mind and matter.

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Two months after that first appointment, I’m in a place where I never expected that I would be. The physical space is familiar; the lavender walls painted years ago at my sister’s choosing, the simple light-wood bed and dresser, the tall windows facing out across our front lawn and the tall trees that line it. This particular intersection of time and place, however, this moment – me at twenty-one living in the room across from my parents’, writing something decidedly non-academic, at the desk where my sister had drawn her childhood artworks – is something new entirely.

When people survive an accident that could have claimed their lives or reach a goal against the odds, there is a moment – at least in the literary recounts – of self-assessment in which this survivor, this champion, make sure that they still have all their fingers and toes, that they have not lost some vital part of themselves in the process of evading or pursuing. I have done nothing to warrant a glorious account of what preceded this moment of checking that all my limbs are still intact. I have not escaped a warzone or natural disaster, have not climbed the highest peaks or run the longest distance; yet here I am, for the first time, checking – or rather discerning – that I am a complete person, that in the past years and months of my life I have not lost, have not been deprived - or deprived myself - of anything that I need to keep breathing and moving forward.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from having an eating disorder, it’s that we are not who we say we are. We are not students or athletes or academics or artists or philosophers or economists. We are what is left when all these names are stripped away, when all titles, occupations, possessions, and means of measurement are removed. When I had to let go of all these things during treatment, when I had to give up my academics and my athletics, I experienced the terrifying feeling of being no one, having nothing that distinguished me from the other billions of human beings in this world with hearts beating in their chests and lungs that breathe. I felt empty and fragile, like the hollow shell of the person I once was.

But I went on a journey, one that required the initial soul-wrenching process of letting go the things that once defined me, and I realised that this emptiness was itself an illusion.
We are all full people. These organs that pump the blood through our veins and oxygen through our airways are real. We are not reduced to them when we lose the markers that have guided our paths of growth and development. They allow us to take in the world, to be part of something big and beautiful just by being.

As an anthropology student, I have been taught to value cultural nuance above all else, to examine each person, each event, each practice and custom as relative to its (social) context. In the yet-inconclusive debate of ‘nature vs. nurture,’ anthropologists have, with their many verbose ethnographies, certainly added much weight to the ‘nurture’ side of the scale. Especially hefty have been those concerned with the topic of agency, illustrating the individual – even the person subjected to the most confining aspects of neo-liberalism/imperialism, gendered violence and discrimination, deprivation, etc. – as an agent. Speaking entirely from my own experience, it seems much less accurate to picture people – ourselves or our ‘interlocutors’ – as birds beating our wings in smaller and smaller cages. Rather, I now see myself and those around me as sieves through which the substance of life flows. Our bodies – our hearts, our lungs, our fingers, and toes, our senses – let the world in. If we treat our skin like armour, the substance of life will flow around us rather than through us, and, like a boulder amidst a flowing river, we become stationary, slowly being eroded away by the movement of all that surrounds us. We are unable to enjoy the feeling of being swept along, unable to see beyond the next bend.

Writing Anthropology

Writing Anthropology

By Sofia Lesur Kastelein

Often, when reading for a seminar, I will spend fifteen minutes staring at the same sentence. I’ll rearrange sections of it in my head, in the hope that they might make more sense, or open a new tab to check whether a word means something other than what I think it means. Sometimes, this goes on for paragraphs. Sometimes it is the whole article. (I never get close to the point of whole books.) This usually happens when there is a lot of technical language, or a dense use of complicated words, or references to Deleuze. Conversations with friends reassure me I’m not alone in this. It then becomes easy to wonder, how many people are there who understand the reading in question? If a class-full of MSc students, most with an undergraduate degree in the social sciences, are stumped, do you need a PhD to get it? And, if the number of people who can understand a text is so small, why write?

Starting with my frustrations about understanding some anthropological writing, I was curious to hear from anthropologists about how they write, who they write for, and why they write. I approached some people in the department asking to chat about how they think about these kinds of issues. The following is a little of what I learnt from these informal conversations.

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A common thread, when speaking to people about writing, is that their style changes distinctly depending on whether the intended audience is broad or specifically academic. For anthropologists employed at a university, publishing in peer-reviewed journals or with academic publishing houses is an unavoidable, if not central, part of the job. For some, it is primarily a way to contribute to knowledge about a region or theoretical debates among colleagues, contributions which may eventually change the way people think, speak and act about the world. However, there can also be a sense of institutionally-imposed obligation to this.

The “Research Excellence Framework” – a way for the UK government to audit universities and determine whether resources are being spent in a way it deems worthwhile – has certain publishing requirements for academics. Roughly every seven years, they are expected to put out “2.5” pieces based on their own research in well-respected publications. These pressures don’t seem too strong in the LSE Anthropology Department. Most people write more than the requirement in that period, so can choose the best four in terms of publications. There is also a stance among staff that anthropology doesn’t work that way, and that it is important to publish in journals that are regionally relevant but maybe less prestigious. However, there is still pressure from the university to look at where and how much someone is publishing when deciding on a new hire or promotion, which can create a greater sense of necessity or constraint for early-career academics.

When writing for other people within the academy, the writing-style is likely to resemble other texts by the same publication which, in part, may come from the editor’s expectations. This writing tends to be more dense – longer paragraphs, longer sentences, more specialised vocabulary unfamiliar to many – with more references to theories, authors and so forth which assume prior knowledge. Sometimes, using “plain English” and avoiding technical language can really detract from analytical precision and theoretical sophistication. However, often, it seems being widely accessible beyond other academics is not a primary, or even secondary, concern for people when writing for academic publications. As a consequence, no wonder a particular form of dense and self-referential style of writing is widespread.

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“If you could write in any way you liked – with money, institutional standing, etc. being no object – who would you write for and how would you write?” When I asked this question, no one said their ideal audience would be readers of academic journals. Responses all expressed a desire to reach a broader audience, a desire which was encouragingly reflected in the practices of those I spoke to.

Mathijs Pelkmans shared that he writes for “people who want to understand the world” by reading. He explained that this was connected to a desire to tell stories – something anthropologists are well-placed to do – and that these stories can also be theoretical. Practically, this translates into structuring a text in a way that people become gripped by the unfolding of the narrative, such as by starting with something puzzling or controversial that will draw people in and make them think. Then comes the argument and “beautiful illustrations” which might allow the reader to relive the experience at some level. Afterwards, perhaps, he’ll complicate it, as he also writes to push the limits of the audience, to encourage them to think about the world in ways they had not before.

Besides structure, Mathijs expressed that clarity is also crucial for reaching a broader audience. Most people are not prepared to devote hours to reading so, unless anthropologists are willing to shorten what they have to say, they need to write extremely well. Sadly, a desire to reach a broader audience is not always enough. Writing well is a skill and writers can be limited by their own abilities when trying to explain complicated concepts in a straightforward way. Clear writing, although easy to read, can be incredibly difficult to produce.

Insa Koch, meanwhile, told me about how the broader audience of her articles for the LSE Policy and Politics blog results in different writing. The content and framing is somewhat different, with an emphasis on more poignant, shorter critiques and interventions, links to concrete, “relevant issues”, and more practical suggestions for action. This might require making more direct claims with fewer qualifications, and not being afraid to be a little polemic. Style-wise, this also means shorter paragraphs, less jargon and fewer references.

Speaking to Andrea Pia, he brought up how the conversation about writing for a broader public isn’t just an issue of writing clearly, but also one of access to the writing itself. Most journals are private and charge enormous subscriptions fees to access their articles, which some universities – often in the Global South – and most individuals without institutional access cannot afford. Similarly, books from academic presses tend to be extortionate. As a result, there can be a sense anthropologists from the Global North are “vamipirising” on communities in the Global South – who may not get any access or benefit from the work they helped produce – for the advancement of academic careers. One way Andrea works to overcome this obstacle to reaching a wider audience is through co-founding and co-editing the Made in China Journal which is “Open Access”, meaning it has a publication model which aims to make research available free of cost and without other barriers. (This year, Andrea is running a course on “Public Anthropology” which I sorely wish I were able to take.)

Another issue that came up in conversations was that, to reach a broader public, you need to go beyond just writing. Of course, anthropology has a long tradition of ethnographic film-making and photography, while public-lectures and podcast cameos are not unusual. However, alternatives to writing are not limited to these. Andrea’s The Long Day of Young Peng is a particularly exciting example. The Long Day is an “interactive digital ethnography”, something like a videogame, based on his fieldwork in Lingshui village, Beijing Municipality. Similarly, the beautiful comic adaptation of Alpa Shah’s article “Ethnography? Participant observation as a potentially revolutionary praxis” decorates some of the walls in our department and illustrates (very literally) another way of communicating anthropology to broader audiences. Some of anthropology’s constitutive questions – of translation, representation and understanding across difference – are reinvigorated by this experimentation with form and medium.

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Just as the way in which someone writes is not separate from the question of who they write for, these cannot be separated from the matter of why they write in the first place. And, given that not all anthropologists chose to prioritise writing, really, the question underpinning all this is a much broader one: “why anthropology?”. The reasons that motivate us to engage with anthropology will determine who we want our own work within the discipline to reach and, as a consequence, what form we want it to take.

I avoided asking this last question directly, although I care about the answers profoundly. Precisely because there is so much at stake on it, addressing it publically felt daunting. Instead, as the vast majority of anthropological work I have been asked to engage with as a student has been academic texts, I tried to ground the discussions in the idea and act of writing.

However, talking about writing style without thinking about the point of writing feels shallow and depoliticised. The issues lurking in the background, unaddressed, are huge. There’s learning for the sake of learning, anthropologists’ troubled relationship to policy-makers (with echoes of cooperation with colonial officials) and the ethics of top- down decision-making, debates about anthropologists and advocacy, the production of work which is of use to the people it is about... The list goes on, the dilemmas are complicated and the discussions, with reason, are often heated.

As critiques of postmodernism in anthropology point out, debates around representation and writing are important, but far from the sole – or even the major – issue in anthropology. The contribution to these debates which most inspires me is the feminist one: “precisely because feminists move beyond texts to confront the world, they can provide concrete reasons in specific contexts for the superiority of their accounts” (Mascia-Lees 1989, 28).

Nonetheless, texts have been an ever-present part of my experience as a student of the discipline. I thus sought out conversations on writing, in which I learnt about people’s different styles and what determines them, about platforms for writing, and about alternatives to it. I conclude with the hope that our decisions surrounding such kinds of topics can be grounded in our personal stances on why we think anthropology is worthwhile, and not overly shaped by institutional constraints. To slightly adapt a comment made by Andrea during our conversation: “imagine what you lose if you don’t write the way you want to write.”

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I thank Insa Koch, Mathijs Pelkmans and Andrea Pia for the time and thoughts they shared with me.

References

Mascia-Lees, Frances, Patricia Sharpe and Colleen Ballerino Cohen (1989). “The Post- modernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective.” Signs 15: 7–33.