Such work can be challenging, personally and politically. Current development paradigms which fetishize market forces and the unfettered private sector as an engine for positive social transformation are laying the foundations that consolidate the entrenchment of  new kinds of inequalities on an  unprecedented scale.  At the same time, financial transfers from richer countries to poorer ones provide much needed subsidies for improved public provision of essential basic services. Understanding where policies have traction,  and for whom,  is a critical part of the contested politics of development practice, within and between development organizations.

The politics of development knowledge and what  is prioritised as  relevant at a particular time mean that  knowledge work in development not only has financial implications in potentially influencing the direction of agency support. It is explicitly and self consciously relational. The credibility and status of development knowledge generally depends more on the social and institutional relations which position the researcher and the knowledge product than the content of the knowledge itself.

The development sector has undergone substantial changes in the ten years since I first wrote   about   how  knowledge is done differently in anthropology and in development.   The increasing privatization of aid and the growth of subcontracting between development organizations affects the ways in which development knowledge is produced, as well as how it is used and valued.  A greater proportion of development knowledge than previously is now the commercial property of the organizations contracted to produce it and those for whom it is commissioned.

Undertaking commissioned research for a public agency is now likely to be mediated through an intermediary organization which has won a competitive tender, whether a think-tank, a university, a not for profit or a commercial company. Development has long been recognized as an industry. It is also a marketplace in which  diverse actors situate themselves in order to capture business at different scales.

Although many anthropologists continue to have a problematic relationship with development both as an industry and as a post colonial project, the precarity of the current academic  jobs market  or a personal commitment to  some, at least, of the aspirations of  progressive social change promoted by development actors  from social movements to   state wide  programs mean that perhaps a greater number of us will find ourselves working with, not merely on,  development interventions and organizations.  While this kind of rapid and responsive work can be very different from the practice of academic anthropology, it is my experience that core principles and skills foundational to my anthropological practice inform my approach to development knowledge work.

Anthropological holism, the recognition that everything is connected, is an essential counterfoil to the silo-ization orientation of policy work and the politics of relevance based on sectoral framing.  Second, anthropology takes as its starting point the insight popularised through STS scholars that all knowledge is situated. Third, emotions and relationships structure all social worlds, including policy worlds.  As David Mosse shows in his ethnography of a development project which transitioned rapidly from success to failure in the eyes of funders, generating attachment through affective relations plays an essential,  albeit under acknowledged role, in  sustaining policy  traction. Last,  but not least , are the practical skills we pick up through our  research on sources and our  dialogical engagement with people in the field.   The ability to use search tools to rapidly scour multiple databases, being able to read and take in large amounts of information quickly,  and knowing how to create rapport in an interview while asking the right questions are extremely important in this kind of work.

Not all of the practices we strive to become proficient in  while doing extended projects in anthropology are as transferable.  Working outside the academic sector means learning different ways of communicating knowledge through different styles of writing within shorter time-frames. It has made me more aware of how anthropological knowledge is produced, the specialized work which goes into its production and the economies of university enterprise which enable these long drawn out and labor intensive endeavors. It’s also made me far more conscious of the disciplinary practices we routinely use to  maintain the boundaries between anthropological and other kinds of knowledge and what are constituted as the professional capabilities necessary for its production.   Situating knowledge is an active process.  The social construction of  relevance and authority  is  not confined to the development universe.

Classification and world making are the core concerns of anthropology. In- groups and out- groups, borders and boundaries  are the frameworks of  social and political order.  Sorting Things Out, as Bowker and Star put it,  or the social practice of classification is essential for  understanding how all kinds of organisations function in the contemporary world. It  can also provide a platform from which to change them.

Gillian Tett, an anthropologist and Financial Times journalist, makes this claim forcefully in her recent book. The Silo Effect. Why Every Organisation Needs to Disrupt Itself to Survive explores what happens when institutions become too entrenched in their own worlds to be able to see what lies outside them. Closed, self referential networks where socially constructed truths prevail and established ways of doing things are never challenged amount to silos which stifle innovation, limit adaptiveness and lead to organisational failure.

The Silo Effect is a brilliant, thought provoking book which achieves two important things. It popularises anthropology for the real world and it shows how anthropology can offer applicable insights for changing it. The most significant changes, Tett asserts, come from how we see and organise the world. Confronting entrenched ways of seeing through silo busting and cultural translation offer significant benefits for companies, governments and individuals seeking to stay relevant in a world that is ever changing.

Anthropology,  with its insider-outsider perspective and its confronting of  social categorisations, offers  a  potential  instrument for doing this.  Companies can access the skills of anthropologists  by using them as consultants and by hiring graduates with some anthropological training.  But, Tett suggests,  anthropological  insights can also be accessed  more informally, without professionalization or disciplinary training.  If we perceive anthropology  not so much as a body of knowledge as a particular mindset which enables an insider-outsider perspective from which social truths no longer appear self evident,  anthropological ways of seeing can be adopted by  anyone with an interest in unpacking the ways in which their social universe is culturally constructed.

Embarking on an ethnographic journey isn’t essential for this, although Tett does emphasise the importance of situated analysis based on close engagement with people and places. Adopting six principles from anthropology provides a starting point for inculcating the kind of mindset which has the potential to challenge existing classification systems and the groupthink to which they give rise.

Deriving from a careful engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and other leading anthropologists  the  principles identified by Tett  comprise the basis of sound anthropological practice whether we are anthropologists undertaking fieldwork or managers trying to gain perspective on our siloed organsiations.  Principle number one is experiencing life on the ground.  Number two is  listening and observing with an open mind and adopting a holistic perspective.  The third principle, after Bourdieu, is paying attention to social silences, that is to `what goes without saying because it comes without saying’.  The fourth  principle is  being attentive to the divergences between what people say and what they actually do. The fifth is  adopting a comparative approach. Finally, the sixth principle is  celebrating the idea that there are many ways in which to live in the world.

The Silo Effect is a wonderful endorsement for anthropology as a perspective for critical engagement and analytical thinking which has the potential to promote challenges to established ways of doing things. But my personal and professional anthropological mindset suggests that there is something important missing from the six principles if they are to genuinely provide a tool for change within, and beyond, organisations.

Politics and power are absent from the list of principles yet they are foundational to the formation of social order in all its forms, and to the consolidation and destabilisation of silos. Indeed, the case studies which make up the book consistently highlight the political interests which sustained  specific organisational relations- whether in the Chicago police, the Bank of England or Sony Corporation- despite concerted  silo busting initiatives undertaken by   committed and analytical  insiders.

Tett’s examples clearly demonstrate that while seeing beyond silos can be represented as a strategic epistemological leap demolishing them is far more complicated. Deliberate efforts on the part of corporations such as Facebook to prevent the consolidation of silos within their hugely profitable organizations are innovative certainly,  but they are undertaken in order to enable a particular kind of profit oriented thinking.

Taking the political is a seventh principle from anthropology and making it prior to the others would enable the situated analysis of organisations and the internal and external power relations through which they are structured. It would also render explicit the why and what questions which are prompting the analysis and the situated position of the potential change agent/anthropologist/ observer.

I wonder if the understatement of the political in the book’s conclusion is itself partly an effect of its situation within its particular silo. A business oriented book which is directed at enabling practical change has to offer the reader some personal as well as institutional possibilities. Like other popular texts in the current business and management genre it is directed as much to individuals seeking to transform themselves as to those tasked with transforming their organisations.

Knausgaard presents a vivid picture of the world around him  as  it  is affected by, and affects, the  constantly evolving  interior world of his own perception and consciousness. The writing is phenomenological. It evocatively captures the materiality of  ordinary living through its various locations and artifacts, as well as the intensity of  the embodied feelings and sensations which make up life as it is lived.  The reader experiences what it was  like to grow up on an  island in Norway, to ride a bike aged thirteen on a summer evening and the click of  inserting  a cassette tape into a tape recorder in the 1980’s.

These evocations of   what   anthropologists would  recognize  as  ‘ordinary affect’  are profoundly moving. The  first book in the series deals with the emotional repercussions of the death of the author’s father, a violent alcoholic. The  most recent, published in English translation in 2016,  describes a visit to  his  elderly  grandfather in a city hospital.  While the interior orientation of these books and the emphasis on the narrow consciousness of the author seems at first sight to be in sharp contrast to the  exterior orientation of  an ethnographic approach,  it  generates astute insights into the wider cultural and social worlds which he inhabits. Reflecting on the organization of the hospital in which his grandfather is a cardiac patient, and by extension all hospitals, Knausgaard observes how the medical categorization of disease  as afflicting specific organs organizes social relations and the space within it.  The personal identity of his grandfather is rendered insignificant through this process of classification. `For hospitals all hearts are the same’.

I love reading  Knausgaard’s books  because such close accounts of every day life and relationships are  fascinating.  These  are, after all, the staple diet of  anthropology.  But  I think these books are good for anthropological thinking beyond this, prompting a  reflection on anthropological practice as comprising  both participation and representation.   Knausgaard’s books  offer a situated perspective on what it is to be a social actor in a specific time and place.   They  provide access to a position usually inaccessible to  an anthropologist.  They allow the reader to experience `being there’  as an observant participant, from the inside looking out,   and as a person who is  changed by these experiences.

Knausgaard  is not solely concerned  with  thinking about participation. He takes us one step further as he  explores  the difficulties of capturing this in writing.   Representation is explored practically through the  structuring of the texts  and as a  social practice. Knausgaard’s  life effort which he recounts in this series  is his struggle to become a writer. This struggle is not simply intellectual.  It entails getting the time and space to sit alone and write uninterrupted, managing the demands of   other work,  of partners and children and dealing with the  unsightly by products  literary production in the form of  wasted effort, rejections and negative reviews.

A key insight, over the five books so far published in English (there are six in all), is that good writing takes time. Time to actually do writing, time to develop the skills to write well and, importantly, time to develop a voice. Recommended summer reading.

This reader’s question raises several issues- about development, about witchcraft and about defining a research problem.   Responding to it provides an opportunity to practice demand driven anthropology- an underutilized potential of the blog format. As an anthropologist who works on development institutions, and on witchcraft in East Africa, this is my take on it.

Ideas about witches and violence directed against those who are thought to practice witchcraft , including women and children, remain socially significant in many countries in the world.  The negative social impacts of witchcraft make it a development issue in relation to human rights violations and its contribution to social exclusion. Moreover, representations of witchcraft in popular culture consistently situate what witches are alleged to do in direct contradiction of aspirations to achieve personal and national development.

Our reader asks whether the study of witchcraft is distinct from the kinds of research which would be relevant to development, and whether witchcraft and development are distinct domains of social practice which demand different sorts of analysis.   Should she aim to study witchcraft in the hope that it may have something to say about development or is there, as one professor working in development told her, `more useful work to be done around behavior change and water, sanitation and health than witchcraft’?

These questions are partly influenced by our reader’s current situation within development practice (she works in an NGO), hence the professor’s concern for prioritizing the understanding of behavior change that could prove useful for designing more effective interventions. But they are also informed by the ways that witchcraft has been addressed within contemporary anthropology as a field of symbolic practice.   The well known work of Jean and John Comaroff, for example, interprets witchcraft beliefs at least partially as a vehicle through which experiences of peripheralization, including global social relations, can be symbolically articulated (1999).

If witchcraft enables the articulation of an `occult economy’   it is at the same time materially grounded with effects in the real world (Moore & Sanders 2001). Witchcraft as a social institution frequently operates as a means through which human relations are restructured sustained by expanding economies of the occult comprising healers, unwitchers and diviners. It is often accompanied by violence.

The social inseparability of these two dimensions of witchcraft is the focus of ongoing ethnographic work by Isak Niehaus and Adam Ashforth. Both Niehaus and Ashforth have spent many years researching the everyday politics of witchcraft in South Africa. In the years immediately after the   ANC victory, witchcraft accusations, murder and expulsions were widespread in rural areas and townships as deadly weapons in local conflicts centered on political allegiance and access to resources.

Violent practices justified by witchcraft were an important part of the local political system, supported by vested interests. Accusations of witchcraft were invoked to escalate disputes with serious social consequences (Niehaus 1993; Ashforth 2005). Those affected by witchcraft include those who believe they are bewitched and those who find themselves accused of witchcraft . The personal experiences of the affected in South Africa are sensitively examined by both authors (Niehaus 2012; Ashforth 2000). A new book by James Howard Smith  and Ngeti Mwadime explores related issues in Kenya (2014).

Certain social categories can find themselves liable to accusation and the violence or expulsion which follow.   Attacks on older women accused of witchcraft in Western Tanzania have attracted international media attention since the 1990s (Mesaki 2009). More recently in Tanzania people with albinism, particularly children, have been at risk of murder by practitioners of witchcraft who seek to use their body parts to make powerful medicines (Bryceson et al 2010).

It is evident from these examples that practices related to witchcraft are strongly rooted in the ideas that people hold about witches and their powers. The tenacity of these ideas is not simply explained by what ideas about witches mean. It is equally a product of what Mary Douglas called `entrenchment’ (1991: 726) ; that is the actions people take which sustain ideas about witchcraft and the practices through which it is realized institutionally. In Western Tanzania, as in South Africa (Ashforth 2005 ), diviners play a crucial role in diagnosing witchcraft as the cause of personal misfortune and in identifying alleged witches, responding to demand to resolve personal and political differences through severing relations (e.g. Green 2009).

While what is categorized as the `traditional’ healing sector promoted through the political valorization of African medicine provides support for the institutional foundation for the sustained presence of witchcraft across the continent (Langwick 2011; Ashforth 2005) , sub disciplinary boundaries within anthropology have generally worked against the problematization of the institution of witchcraft , both within medical anthropology and in relation to the wider political economy. Consideration of witchcraft primarily in terms of the ontological deflects from the interrogation of   the economics which sustains it and creates lucrative small business opportunities for the countless individuals who set themselves up as herbalists, diviners and healers.

Anthropological uncertainty about the situation of witchcraft feeds into ways in which various state authorities, colonial and post colonial, have approached it and inadvertently promoted it. If witchcraft is understood as essentially a matter of culture and belief it can potentially be attacked through education and political campaigns, while legal sanctions are directed against those who practice witchcraft and against those seeking to make them knowable.

It is clear from recent media reports in a number of countries that neither approach is working. Evangelical Christian churches proliferating on the continent readily assume responsibility for addressing perceived witchcraft threats within and beyond their congregations (Meyer 2004; Hasu 2012). Social media fuels the extension of transnational economies founded on the occult, dispersing witchcraft through the diaspora while offering a means for those afflicted to address it.

If the transnational appeal of healers and preachers such as the hugely popular TB Joshua in Nigeria are testament to the enduring salience of notions about witchcraft, they are also indicators of the consistent imbrication of witchcraft with innovation and social transformation. Witchcraft is not , despite systematic condemnation by the governments seeking to prohibit it, a traditional and static social institution. It is a continually evolving assemblage.

The institution of witchcraft, wherever it occurs, is not only wholly implicated in modernity (Geschiere 1997). Those engaged with witchcraft either as purchasers of its powers, such as the miners of Western Tanzania, or the diviners offering protection from it consistently seek to adapt the ways in which they do so; through new forms of protective practice, changes in how clients seeking protection are dealt with or the contexts in which certain medicines come to be viewed as efficacious (e.g Green & Mesaki 2005; Englund 2007). It is not witchcraft in the abstract but the practice of it which in many settings is perceived to be antithetical to modernization and moving forwards. Personal ambition may be thwarted by witches whose jealousy prevents a person from getting ahead. Witchcraft as is therefore consistently viewed by those affected by it as getting in the way of development (Smith 2008).

Governments tend to claim that witchcraft related practices and ideas are backward and anti- development, a political position certainly, but one which borrows its legitimation from certain kinds of anthropology. In constituting witchcraft as a matter of culture anthropologists and African states fail to acknowledge the ways in which it comes to be institutionally entrenched in various settings.   The study of witchcraft is inherently entangled with development as ideology and in terms of the interventions at social reform undertaken by successive African governments.

The study of witchcraft , in Africa and elsewhere, demands some kind of engagement with the politics of development in various institutional forms. It is also important. However much we contribute to understanding witchcraft, however meaningful it may be, witchcraft as an institution amounts to symbolic, structural and actual violence. It causes significant social harm. If anthropologists can help unpick its institutional tenacity we will have made a useful contribution.

References Cited

Ashforth, Adam. Madumo, a man bewitched. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Ashforth, Adam. Witchcraft, violence, and democracy in South Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bryceson, Deborah Fahy, Jesper Bosse Jønsson, and Richard Sherrington. “Miners’ magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 48, no. 03, (2010): 353-382.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony.” American ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279-303.

Douglas, Mary. “Witchcraft and leprosy: two strategies of exclusion.” Man (1991): 723-736.

Englund, Harri. “Witchcraft and the limits of mass mediation in Malawi.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 295-311.

Geschiere, Peter The Modernity of Witchcraft: politics and the occult in postcolonial Africa. University of Virginia Press, 1997.

Green, Maia, and Simeon Mesaki. “The birth of the “salon”: Poverty,“modernization,” and dealing with witchcraft in southern Tanzania.” American Ethnologist 32, no. 3 (2005): 371-388.

Green, Maia. “The social distribution of sanctioned harm.” Addison et al, Poverty Dynamics (2009): 309-327.

Hasu, Päivi. “Prosperity gospels and enchanted world views: Two responses to socio-economic transformation in Tanzanian Pentecostal Christianity.” Pentecostalism and Development: Churches, NGOs and Social Change in Africa 1 (2012): 67.

Langwick, Stacey Ann. Bodies, politics, and African healing: The matter of maladies in Tanzania. Indiana University Press, 2011.

Mesaki, Simeon. “The tragedy of ageing: Witch killings and poor governance among the Sukuma.” Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives. Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (2009): 72-90.

Meyer, Birgit. “Christianity in Africa: From African independent to Pentecostal-charismatic churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology (2004): 447-474.

Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. “Magical interpretations and material realities.” Magical interpretations, material realities: modernity, witchcraft and the occult in postcolonial Africa (2001): 552-566.

Niehaus, Isak A. “Witch-hunting and political legitimacy: continuity and change in Green Valley, Lebowa, 1930–91.” Africa 63, no. 04 (1993): 498-530.

Niehaus, Isak. Witchcraft and a life in the new South Africa. Vol. 43. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Smith, James H., and Ngeti Mwadime. Email from Ngeti: An Ethnography of Sorcery, Redemption, and Friendship in Global Africa. Univ of California Press, 2014.

Smith, James Howard. Bewitching development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal Kenya. University of Chicago Press, 2008.

The problem is  partly structural- the mismatch between numbers and posts on the one hand, and the impacts of selective shrinkage in the University sector on the other.  But demand is also a factor. People continue to study at graduate level because they are motivated by research as much as anything.  Doctoral study isn’t only about entry into  formal academic employment, in any discipline. And, while the casualization of higher education is a concerning trend, in the US and beyond, it’s not the only issue. It’s hard to imagine under what economic system there could ever be sufficient secure jobs in the university sector for those with higher degrees at a time when it seems that more people than ever are pursuing postgraduate research.

This doesn’t mean giving up and not trying to get a university post, if that’s what you really want. But it does entail a healthy dose of realism combined with the practical career building tips of the sort offered so eloquently by Karen Kelsky aka The Professorisin whose site I wholeheartedly recommend. Having been on the other side of the job process over the past year, as a search committee member and chair of a department, I’m going to offer a few of my own. The first is optimistic, if you are an anthropologist at least.

People with doctorates in anthropology and field based social research expertise can find a home in the cognate disciplines which routinely borrow from anthropological production. Anthropology is a sending discipline which exports people and ideas to allied subjects. Explore possibilities in disciplines such as sociology, development studies and cultural geography. Read their journals. Think about where you publish and where your work could claim a wider interest. Be open.

My second tip is be yourself, in terms of your priorities and what your research is about.   Increasing competition in the job market  coexists with the increasing homogenization of research topics and the standardization of the aesthetic of what counts as significant in terms of outputs and achievements. It’s hard to stand out.  Try. Your field site is unique. So is your research. Don’t smother it in off the peg theory.  (Hint: Not everything in the world today is explained by neoliberalism).

Third, don’t sacrifice productivity to busyness. Presenting at  a million conferences is not in actuality game-changing. What committees are looking for is evidence that  your papers will be converted into interesting and engaging published pieces.  Sure, do some conferences. But limit them. You don’t want to run out of time for getting that paper into press. A published piece goes on working for you long after it has appeared, establishing your reputation and getting your work known about by a far wider constituency than could ever fit into that conference hotel room.

Finally, make connections– between different areas in your own research,  with different  institutions and with different people. That’s how you’ll get to know about new opportunities which arise and it can prompt unanticipated synergies. It is these which yield the most creative possibilities for writing, teaching and thinking.

A recent book addresses this phenomenon as it applies to writing in the social sciences and,  by extension,  to anthropology.   Learn to Write Badly . How to Succeed in  the Social Sciences   by Michael Billig is not a ‘How To’ book.  Its  a  `How Not To’ book.  But, as the author makes plain, if you don’t write in the way which has become authoritative in your field, even if it entails writing badly, there could be consequences for your reputation if not your career.

Although Billig’s is a book about writing I think that the author’s claims work pretty well for communication in the social sciences more generally. It certainly made me think about how we as anthropologists in academia tend to speak to our audiences whether they are our students or our peers. The formal style of academic presentations in anthropology based on writing rather than on `findings’ prioritizes engagement with other writing over and above engagement with either our audience or our informants. This is quite different to communication in other fields,  within and outside academia. A how to book which you may find useful for engaging with these other fields is Carmine Gallo’s Talk like TED summarized neatly here by Sam Leith of the Financial Times .

Sure,  it’s a manual in self promotion (but lets not kid ourselves that academia is any different). But it also has lots of useful tips about connecting with the audience, making a few key points and giving them something to remember.  And I learned something wholly new, useful and unexpected. That if you press the B or W keys in powerpoint you can suspend the presentation so your audience is focusing on you not the slide until you are ready to show them the next one. Despite the acknowledged allure of  intellectual  posturing sometimes you just cant beat useful practicality.

The ASA holds annual conferences, some of which are in commonwealth countries.   This year’s conference was Edinburgh, a fabulous city as well as a pertinent choice given the forthcoming referendum which will determine whether or not Scotland remains part of the United Kingdom.  This nationalist moment informed the theme of the conference which was structured around the intellectual contributions of the Scottish enlightenment- to modern thought in general and to contemporary concerns in anthropology.

These big ideas were intended to be explored in some of the plenaries, depending on the contributors, many of whom did as academics will and explored their own big ideas. This wasn’t   a particular problem. As in any conference of this sort, themes are primarily ways of organising the order of events and putting people together.   And, this being anthropology, there was less orientation to coherence than to the presentation of highly individual points of view which we were presented with in abundance.

If anything, there was slightly too much on offer. I am not sure exactly how many delegates attended, maybe somewhere between five hundred and one thousand, but there were so many panels, almost eighty, over three full days that the audiences were often very small. On the plus side, this gave the event an intimate feeling, which was reinforced by the social buzz of the coffee breaks. In contrast to the social awkwardness induced by the overwhelming scale of the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings where delegates huddle over flat screens as they try to work out with whom to seek a connection this was a meeting which encouraged face to face interaction.   The setting, a University campus in a part of the city near to downtown, was suitably informal.

The content on offer was not very different from that presented at other social or cultural anthropology meetings elsewhere. There were, for example, panels on animal human relations, on issues of care and gender , on forms of modern knowledge, on utopias and on waiting. Ontology and neoliberalism as terms were invoked with an unsurprising regularity (I even managed to invoke them in my own presentation on religion and David Hume!) , as were emergent keywords struggling to become dominant as the next wave of fashionable theory.

A number of  strong papers foregrounded field findings presenting insights on observed social practice as it is being reconfigured in the face of rapid change.   Others foregrounded an analysis which preconfigured the interpretative framing of a story, generally including the anthropologist, as ethnographic insight. I left the conference having learned far more about my fellow anthropologists than I learned about the worlds which they had experienced first hand.

This isn’t a comment on this specific conference. Far from it. It’s a reflection on the current preoccupations of anthropology. Good anthropology should both reflect on itself and our own theory and on real social practice in the world. The whole point of ethnography and of spending an extended time in the field was to use observation of how people lived in the worlds they made as the building blocks of the theories which could to describe and explain them in different settings.

As a professional showcase of what social anthropology currently is and what social anthropologists think its important to talk about I enjoyed the conference enormously. Its appeal to those outside the discipline is less certain. As long as our concerns are driven fundamentally by the models and imaginaries of social theory   we will continue to have the kinds of conversations which characterise our conferences. These are fascinating and erudite for sure, but if we are really concerned with wider society should we be having them only with ourselves?

Ryan’s recent post on money and its flows and blocks  prompts me to post this, something I wrote a few weeks ago in response to a request from colleagues in Leiden for their  ICA magazine, which is published by study association Itiwana of the department of cultural anthropology and development. After my post on brands and the UK riots they thought I could write something about brands.   Being in Tanzania which is buzzing with money talk,  prompted in part by its new status as  a destination for mining and gas companies in the current  natural resource rush, I wrote instead about how development is being re-branded. 

The 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. Few  countries in Africa  are expected to meet the targets.  Income poverty, food insecurity, rising inequality and poor health remain problems for the most of the continent.  Despite shifts towards democratic politics in many countries, civil conflict and political instability  are  entrenched  in others as legacies of colonial state  building and post independence power struggles.  Such conflicts, as in Mali and  the Sudans,  are fueled by the rising value of  resources  associated with particular regions within a global market that is revaluing Africa as a potential source of minerals, gas and oil  and as a  high growth location with an expanding  middle class. 

Annual growth rates  for African economies have averaged six or seven percent for much of the decade.  The extent to which growth is a consequence of political stability and sound macroeconomic management is open to question. A more pressing explanation for the recent transformation in Africa’s economic fortune is the global increase in demand for its natural resources enabled by regimes of economic management  which are increasingly open to foreign investment and partnerships.

This   continental push to promote the commercialization of  what can be claimed as `natural’ resources within a context of on-going economic liberalization is legitimating an emerging discourse about the wealth of African nations and the urgent need for investment  as the magic bullet which can liberate this capital and create national prosperity. The regionalization agenda which fosters economic integration is aggressively promoted by governments and donors, along with initiatives aimed at strengthening property rights, enabling foreign direct investment and transforming communications infrastructure. 

China’s  new position as the potential economic savior of a continent   signals  fundamental  shifts in the political ordering of international development. The poverty discourse  central to the MDGs and,  arguably, to the constitution of countries in sub Saharan Africa as  fitting subjects of development  intervention is  increasingly contested, not only  by politicians and media commentators across the continent,  but by  an authoritative cadre of technical experts promoting market led development. Development is being re-imagined not as a consequence of social sector spending but as an effect of marketization.

States across the  continent are  seeking to present themselves as  entrepreneurial and investment friendly. Tanzania is no exception.  Like Uganda, it has practically shifted the orientation of its poverty reduction strategy towards economic growth. The government of President Jakaya Kikwete, now in its second term, is pursuing  a policy of Kilimo Kwanza,  farming first, seeking to marketize agriculture and to promote `a green revolution’ with the support of  major donors including the World Bank.  While  the country continues to rely on donor support for around thirty percent  of its national budget, rationales for intervention are  now situated within  a discursive package that is market led.  Donor funded workshops  buzz with talk of  value chains and market information.

The more conventional investments in the social infrastructure of schools and health facilities financed by the Tanzania Social Action Fund  have been superseded by  what are designed to be income generating investments for farmer groups to enhance their own livelihoods.  Phase Three of this program, shortly to be implemented, is structured around an assumed transformation from indigence to entrepreneurship, enabling self reliance through savings and micro finance as the poorest get, in a phrase equally at home in US discourses of welfare reform, `a hand up not a hand out’.

The aspirations of private sector advocates, within and outside government, increasingly  converge with  the policy positions of development partners as development is re-branded  globally to occupy a new market position.  In Tanzania, as elsewhere, financialization, as means and end,  plays a central role in this convergence.   International accounting firms fight for market share of development implementation within extended contracting chains that  conflate financial  and political accountability. Civil society organizations are brought into being to play specific roles in monitoring public expenditure, along with new organizational forms and participatory practices.   Public expenditure tracking,  known as PETS, has a  set of methods  into which civil society volunteers must be  enrolled through seminars and allowances. Techniques equally at home in the world of market research  comprising score cards  and surveys  come to have political clout as modalities through which dissatisfaction with government can be articulated.

Outside these transient relations held tenuously  in place through development funding streams, a range of private institutions  are seeking to establish the architecture through which the financialization of Tanzanian  social life is possible.  The limited reach of existing banking infrastructure and the Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies creates potential opportunities for  new kinds of  financial  institutions. These include  private financial institutions providing loans  to  formal sector workers,  specialist microfinance lenders such as Pride,  and the money transfer services provided by mobile telephone companies, of which the market leader is Vodacom’s Mpesa.  The proliferation of  formal and informal financial services, and those which straddle  this divide,  is staggering.

Savings and loan groups are rapidly proliferating in both urban and rural areas, notably those organized on the  Village Savings and Loan model  promoted by the NGO Care International. These groups consisting of around  thirty members are a fascinating  organizational form,  using strategies of ritualization and formalization to ensure regularity of savings and financial transparency in a group structure where all transactions  take place at weekly meetings and hence in public. Group members  buy weekly shares up to a limit  of five  intended to  ensure that large profits cannot be made and to  restrict  the exploitative potential of  the better off making money from lending to their poorer neighbors. Savers lend to members of the group at a rate of interest  designed to  increase the value of the savings share.

Groups operate on an annual cycle  after which accumulated interest is divided among members according the  value of their purchased shares.These  `care groups’ as they have come to be  known in some districts are  wildly popular because they allow people to borrow money at limited rates of interest,  particularly useful in helping meet big expenses such as  school fees, funeral contributions and hospital  costs.  They also provide a predictable return on savings, depending on the extent of borrowing  within the group.  An additional  weekly contribution functions as a kind of social insurance for group members who are paid a  sum of money should they fall sick or  lose a close family member.

These kinds of groups are heralded by promoters as  a locally available form of micro financial institution serving the previously excluded, a social institution for the promotion of fiscal responsibility and the discipline of saving not so much as an end in itself but as the precursor to enterprise.  Savings  groups thus conceived may indeed be foundational to a new culture of economic change. They  also enable  a range of distinct practices which support  radically different cultures of economic practice, cultures which  simultaneously promote and obstruct the aspirations of  Tanzania’s economic transformation.

In Ulanga district, Southern Tanzania,  where I have been doing some fieldwork, a  large number of `care groups’ have been established over the past two years,  with the majority now entering their second  savings and loans cycle. Despite the core organizational  template which specifies  numbers of members and the management structure, the  practice of groups varies widely, even within the same geographical area. In addition to variations in the value of shares purchased and the timing and duration of loans,  some groups insist on   compulsory  borrowing as well as saving as a  condition of membership as a means of increasing the value of savings for all the members of the group. Many groups also insist that members purchase  necessities like laundry soap  from the group at a price which is the same as or higher than market prices  in order to increase group profit and hence the value of the shares which are divided at the end of the cycle.

Borrowing is socially construed as an emergency response to hardship   but valued as the means of increasing savings.  In this enactment of savings and loans  the group itself is the enterprise and saving  framed as entrepreneurial activity which generates a return for individual members.  The income generating strategies of group members focus on  gathering  sufficient cash to  make savings, in actuality purchasing  regular shares,  because  this is likely to  accumulate more value than  alternative forms of enterprise, including agricultural investment. Participating in `care groups’, for  people with cash to make regular  contributions,  is fast  becoming a recognized means  of making money   make money. Consequently,  traders and  middle income people  in the villages close to the district capital   are joining multiple groups, allowing them to them to escape the  limitation on share purchase within a single group and to access the kinds of loan amounts which can  yield profitable returns.

That money generates money though such practices does not equate to  the kind of financialization envisaged by the architects of Tanzania’s new development order,  a world premised on depersonalized economic action within a market frame.   `Care groups’ in  performing the social relations through which money begets money, via shares invested by group members and the interest they pay on loans , permit individual profit so long as costs are shared to some extent by members of the group.  Organized around distrust rather than trust groups rely on  the visibility of transactions made in public  and  the simple technology of the specially constructed cash with three separate locks for which  separate keys are distributed among ordinary members.  Such practices  make explicit the social labor required to make money do savings work and the essential embedding of money within  social relations.  It is this embedding which accounts for the success of  mobile money services in much of Africa rather than mobile banking- what people are interested in  is the capacity to transfer money between situated persons not the potential of investing money in abstract institutions. 

Political emphasis on accountability dovetails with cultural preoccupations around relations and money , articulated as concerns with the illicit appropriation and consumption of public resources which are  highly personalized.   The organizational structure of `care groups’ taps into fundamental cultural concerns about groups and individuals, collective responsibility, equity and enrichment in ways that permit adaptation to support  core ideals.  As anthropology consistently demonstrates, values rather than value are foundational to understanding economic practice in any context.  This is not a matter of resistance to global capitalism or neo-liberal economics so much as an assertion of  what   values count.

The extent to which the scorched earth scenarios will actually unfold is uncertain. The mass expansion in higher education globally over the past decade, not just in the global north,  is after all a combined product of private and public spending.  What the sector is experiencing is, as Matt shows,  increasing differentiation.

The niche occupied by anthropology is changing. Some of this is cataclysmic, as departments shrink and others are faced with closure. But anthropology  and ethnography are struggling to find  new territories outside the academy and at different sites within it.  This is of course leading to debates about what `real’ anthropology is – that is the extent to which anthropological knowledge should stay as inaction research constituted from a position of criticism.

Such refrains may be  muffled  in the longer term by the roar of rising water over the sinking ship.  One  established  version of  what we think of as social anthropology evolved in the nineteen thirties and forties and  was distributed widely through the expansion of academic posts and departments in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

The objects of study have changed  radically since then, of course, but  the ways in which the knowledge categorised as anthropological is organised and obtained hardly at all.  At the same time, cognate disciplines, human geography for example,  claim to use ethnography as one among many methodological possibilities while also being open to more explicit modalities for the  co-production of  disciplinary knowledge, not only with colleagues within the discipline but actively with informants.

Something is lost as well as gained through such endeavours.  The paradigmatic ethnographic research experience  of working through interpretive frames of emergent understanding is  not only unique to  a particular way of doing anthropology. It  yields unique insights.  It is also ethically problematic.  Debating its limitations as well as potentialities  is urgent, as is the rethinking of new approaches to  ethnographic practice and to anthropology.  If,  as we reiterate endlessly to our readers and students, culture and social practice are constituted relationally, we should pay more heed to how the relations within which we are embedded are changing and to our possible role in effecting their transformation. As, Matt suggests, resistance is  a strategy but it is not the only one.   In the game like scenario he outlines, some communities carve out new spaces for themselves and adopt new weapons and strategies for survival.

Whether the game of academic survival is more analogous to Pokémon, with its public private partnerships providing health resources to the battling creatures  under the supervision of titled professors,   or to  the blood and thunder of World of Warcraft,  probably depends where one is situated.  In the UK, teetering on the brink of economic crisis amid huge cuts in public spending and a government imposed value for money  agenda through which all spending is assessed, the pressing issue is not  simply the marketization of higher education, but what level of  public investment can be justified.  In this climate, it is not surprising that disciplines like ours feel extremely vulnerable.

At Manchester, we are exploring ways of addressing  the changed situation by actively engaging  it.   Instead of simply bemoaning neo-liberalisation, although we do that too, we  perceived it  as an opportunity. If neo-liberalisation has changed our universities and the kinds of students we attract, what could this mean for our discipline?   How could  we  generate demand and attract different kinds of students to our courses?    One experimental answer was to offer a different kind of course aimed at a different kind of student.

Our first year course in business anthropology is designed  to be accessible and relevant for  undergraduate students taking degrees in business and finance disciplines.  It attracted several hundred students in its first year of delivery, students who would not normally have selected an anthropology option.   Trying to think in market terms enabled us to situate ourselves differently but it also placed us in a  relation of competition with other departments from whom potential students were drawn.  Responding to markets may in practice mean shifting the burden of vulnerability.  We as a formerly protected species are being  forced out of the reserve. Is there an alternative to this world of Prey into Hunter?  What other options might we  have as anthropologists working in and outside the academy to  restructure this particular conjuncture?

The film is partly the tragic story of the chimpanzee, Nim, brought up as a human baby in a New York brownstone, breast fed by his `foster mother’ and taught sign language by a succession of young, mostly female, research assistants.

As Nim matures into adult chimphood his massive strength and capacity to bite mean that he can no longer be contained in a human environment without posing considerable risk to the research team. He is returned to the primate facility where he was born, a brutal environment where electric cattle prods are used to control the animals, who are eventually sold on to a medical research laboratory. Campaigning by one of his previous carers and the intervention of a lawyer prepared to extend arguments about human rights to animals raised as human leads to Nim’s eventual rescue and he ends his days in an animal sanctuary where he is ultimately reunited with some of the other chimps from the laboratory.

Nim’s problematic behaviour as he grows up is oriented toward his quest for dominance, the natural behaviour of an adult male chimpanzee. Nim’s carers and the research staff assigned to work with him have to become adept at displaying dominance in the right way or risk serious injury.Dominance matters in other ways not restricted to the social universe of chimpanzees. The film presents a visual snapshot of the hierarchies of power and domination which structured academic life in the 1970s through the relationships between the lead scientist and his junior, mostly female, assistants. The assistants undertake the bulk of the day to day work of experimentation and hand on care for the chimpanzee. The professor does, disseminates and takes credit for the `science’, at one point totally altering his own interpretation of the significance of the experiment. In his view, which differed from that of the people who spent their daily lives interacting with the animal, the inability of chimpanzees to structure sentences grammatically was conclusive proof that they lacked the capacity for language.

Of course, the professor’s narrow definition of language as opposed to a wider concept of communication and the divergences of interpretation are of considerable interest, not least in demonstrating the ways in which the framing of a research object determines the scope of what can be considered findings within a particular scientific paradigm, the kind of narrow cause and effect paradigm we face on our forays into Grantlandia’s uncertain territory. But what struck me about this film was its insight into laboratory life in another era, and the ways in which some things change and some things become institutionalized to the point of being foundational.

The institutionalization of ethical review and changes in the legal framework about experiments on animals in many countries mean that what happened to Nim hopefully could not happen again so easily. I am less certain about the imbalance of power between lead scientists and staff, between seniors and juniors. While the gender dimensions of exploitation exposed in the film may be less prevalent today there is no doubt that current mechanisms for funding and employment in Universities in the UK and the US work to promote the silverback and embed this kind of structural hierarchy.

The move towards funding modalities of large projects modeled on the natural sciences system raises questions for anthropologists who have worked as individual scholars, contributing to team endeavors certainly, but not seeking to produce data on which a lead scientist’ can pronounce. In such situations how do we manage the balance between individual contribution andscientific case’? What are the lines of authorship and ownership between the project leader who holds the funding and researcher in the field? To what extent are conventions of multiple authorship coming in to anthropology as these funding relations alter the social organization of our work? Given the climate in Grantlandia is the future for more of us, especially postdocs, jobbing support to other, often interdisciplinary, projects?

Commentators agree that what is different about this disorder is the rapid transition from a localised political protest at the shooting by police of a young man in Tottenham, an area made famous for politically motivated riots in the 1980s, to what seems to be a new phenomenon, at least in the UK, of spontaneous urban looting which is at present largely confined to retail areas. I am not in a position to comment on who is involved in the rioting or how this differs from previous incidences of organized disorder, political or otherwise, here or elsewhere. As the journalist Zoe Williams remarks in today’s Guardian newspaper, this is the kind of situation you don’t go out and look at. Levels of violence were quite high. Moreover, events can be followed on twitter, blogs, newsfeeds and other social media, a means of participating from a distance and for some an invitation to action.

Not all of this action was negative. Social media groups have apparently organised clean ups in London and Manchester. Electronic traces of these events will doubtless sustain an entire generation of social analysts for years to come as they strive to recreate the reasons for this apparently mass outbreak of smash and grab. Another change, another way of doing ethnography. Some things however remain the same and one of them is the potential of insightful ethnographic analysis to inform and shed light on social practice.

I have just read Orvar Lofgren and Robert Willim’s Magic, Culture and the New Economy. The book is a series of snapshots of new economy practices taken during the 1990s at the height of the uber boom built on brand, affect and image. Although the examples in the book deal with typical new economy enterprises such as hip hotels and lifestyle spas and the marketisation of self realisation through career coaching, all point to the importance of emotion in constructing value, the significance of affect as driver and product of the new economic order and the gap or perhaps uncertainty in terms of what value is actually based on.

The young people involved in the smashing and grabbing in Manchester last night are widely condemned as lacking core values of respect and decency. Newspapers and members of the public – on the Greater Manchester Police Facebook pages for example- remark that this is not a political protest but a descent into criminality. It is evidently something of both. Indeed, attempts to categorize these phenomena within certain fields will constitute a site of contestation for a long time to come. Lofgren’s and Willim’s book highlights the dramatic inequalities on which the new economy is founded and the circulation of branding as value where value can be socially sustained- the magic of making something out of nothing to which the book’s title alludes. Manchester’s looters focused on high value electronics where these were available and branded goods, particularly clothing. In taking without paying they were demonstrating disrespect certainly, but were they also refusing to accept the magic of the brand?

I have written here before about the problem of witchcraft, the way in which anthropology has construed this as primarily an intellectual problem, as a problem of interpretation. Partially escaping the closed circuits of anthropological approaches to the phenomenon is enabling me to embark on some different thinking in relation to witchcraft, different at least in terms of my own approaches to it. I gave a paper last week looking at witchcraft as an instance of moral re-categorization- so far so usual. But by comparing the social effects of this reordering of obligations and households with social policies in nineteenth century Britain and France a clear parallel emerges in relation to transformations in the kinds and content of social relations which go into making up, literally, modern economies. So witchcraft appears (or is made to appear) not so much as a critique of capitalist reordering, as a modality for its achievement.

My freedom to think outside the box comes by making my boxes bigger, and situating them in different stacks of other kinds of boxes. Interestingly, this expansionary capacity is what anthropology seemed to have once effected for other disciplines, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically, at the very time when anthropology was at its most insular and when its representation of the Other was most totalising. Perhaps this was because it seemed to offer such solid alternative propositions of different cultural worlds. In the current context of course these multiple worlds are invoked within and outside anthropology. Given the increasing singularity of anthropology today it may be that its only outside of it that we can get different takes on how these may be perceived and apprehended.

A presentation by Kathleen Reedy on popular conspiracy theories in Syria got me thinking. It emerged from the discussion that in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory. They do the same things. And whether or not we categorize something as conspiracy theory or not is a matter of the politics of to what we are willing to accord credibility. This insight brings me back to neo-liberalism, or rather, to anthropological takes on it. We are very keen to accord neo-liberallism conspiratorial power to wholly re-form multiple world orders in its own image; indeed, the opening speech at the conference made this explicit claim.

The conference itself was partly informed brought into being in response to an American conspiracy. Strangely, this self conscious rejection of such hegemonic ordering does not seem to lead to radically divergent anthropologies.. The preoccupations of papers seem on a par with the range of offerings at a triple A meeting. Is this a victory for hegemony and evidence of the neo-liberal reach, creating, as Hardt and Negri might have it, the possibility for the replication globally of the same few core institutional forms? Or is it simply the reality that we comprise the same scholarly community within and outside Europe, that the boundary is not so much between European anthropology and the US axis but elsewhere, perhaps imposed by the de facto alliance of European and North American influenced anthropological forms? Which leads to another question: whether the apparent uniformity of the product and preoccupations of anthropology now are an indication of a crisis of the anthropological imagination, on both sides of the Atlantic?

This week, after my holiday reading, I am struggling to make a presentation for a workshop session at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference to be held in Bristol in the UK next week. This is a new event for me. Although not a mega conferencer, I have tended to go to the AAA meetings. AAA, whatever its shortfalls, is inclusive and open to all anthropologists, whatever and wherever their fields. I was somewhat disconcerted to see that the EASA states that it exists for anthropologists working on or trained in Europe. Why the limitation? Is there anything unique about being trained in Europe? Is there a European tradition of anthropology which renders the inclusion of others trained elsewhere inappropriate? What is included in `Europe’? Does Euro America count? Other places influenced by Europe? Or rather where are boundaries drawn between kinds of relations which are categorised as somehow pertaining to Europe?

I wonder how systematically these boundaries are policed and enforced. I also wonder what the purpose is, especially since the logic of a place based anthropology community has been largely trascended by the combination of cheap air travel and the internet. Personally, I would like to see more inclusive and open organisations which confront and discourage boundaries , whether these are regional, disciplinary or whatever. I think we see the kind of synergy and innovation that results from this kind of openness in the ways that anthropology is changing and in the kinds of things which we now study. As a person qualified in Europe, I will go to the conference and presumably find out more about their regionally exclusive rationale. I will do my presentation and make my limited contribution to face to face community building. After that I hope to have more time to get on with the virtual sort.

Reassembling the Social is one of those books written against in order to work out what it is for. In this instance, its directed against sociologists, whom Latour divides into two types: sociologists of the social and those who claim to practice critical sociology. Latour argues that both kinds of sociology and their practitioners do not conform to what might be the expectations of scientific approaches to the study of society. This is because they rely on pre-existing notions of what the social is and does to account for what people do and why they do it. The idea of society in such accounts fails to explain the very thing which is the object of study. As a consequence the motivations of social actors are always silenced and ignored. The silenncing of social actors is paradoxical for what claims to be a science of the social which ought to be able to demonstrate how things happen or rather how happenings are made. The making is the social process which is both material and symbolic. There is then no break between material culture and cultural material. The object of study includes objects, the subject object divide is collapsed and the sociology of the social superseded by a sociology of association, that is the relations through which actors achieve agency to effect happening.

Latour says much more than this of course in this complicated text, some of which reiterates previous insights and ideas. He makes pertinent points about the sociology of the social’s preoccupation with context and place, hence the eternal return conceptually to the analytical split level of the global and the local. I will try and think more about this when I get around to reading Friction as an `ethnography of global connections’. But in the meantime I think that Latour’s arguments about place are worth exploring for the way they jog ones’ perspective and decentre comfort zones about where we are and what we are claiming to describe when we set out to describe other places. Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place. Placeness is brought to a situation through framing, and only part of this situation is localised.

There is some truth in this way of thinking. As write this I am in what I had on first contact thought of as a post Augean non place, not Manchester although I am sure that others consider it so, but a holiday island in the Mediterranean, the kind of island so subjected to the onslaughts of package tourism and the internationalization of consumption that it seems to no longer have any real identity or sense of location. Among the Irish pubs, the West African street traders selling carved elephants, the Mexican, Chinese and Indian themed restaurants , the International Herald Tribune on the newsstands and the televisions broadcasting UK news and sport, you have to actively look for faint signs of some other more original identity. Latour’s account makes me reconsider my position. If place is frame rather than context then what I am witnessing is a framing of wider traces, some place.