Ethnography need not be a personal quest, and it amazes me that the myth of the lone ethnographer continues to be reproduced in so many departments of Anthropology, despite the abundance of counter-examples. Conducting joint fieldwork with colleagues in their home country can offer the best of both worlds, combing a depth of historical engagement with the outsider’s curiosity. Collaboration is not only between ethnographers, of course, and we have also had the privilege to encounter some exceptional projects that shed new light on ways of travelling.

This week saw the launch of a web-based resource on Pan-Inuit Trails that has been many years in the making, led by Michael Bravo at Cambridge University, Claudio Aporta at Dalhousie, and Fraser Taylor at Carleton. Bravo’s work on documenting Inuit routes and trails has, over many years, gradually revealed to the wider world the intimate knowledge of seasonal mobility that Inuit people have carried with them over the generations. The scale of the route is breathtaking, reaching from Alaska to Greenland, providing an important counterweight to heroic modernist discourses about the North West Passage.

Greenpeace campaign image savethearctic.org

These routes also offer a rather different discursive representation to those that conjure an exotic Arctic through naturalistic emblems and images that seem to extract human presence from the landscape.  Among environmentalists, as much as in governmental and corporate statements, the Arctic is portrayed as a terra nullius, ‘wasteland’ and ‘hostile’ to man, yet home to many natural species. The white of the ice continues to be identified with purity, and images of the polar ice cap now stand as a direct proxy for climate change.

Human presence is imputed through climate change created elsewhere, with the Arctic as innocent victim of humanity’s exploitation of resources. White animals – polar bears, arctic foxes, seals, owls, predominate in the campaigns by Greenpeace, for example, in a canny use of visual association. But fieldwork in the Arctic regions provides the material to counter clean-slate anti-human imagery and remind us that the Arctic is peopled and has long been so. Research on arctic questions is building. Arctic Domus based in Aberdeen documents how people and animals build sustainable communities around the circumpolar Arctic, and Mariann Lien will lead a residency at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo on Arctic Domestication in the era of the Anthropocene in 2015-16. So although significant funding is going into Arctic oil and gas research, the voices of people living in the far North will be heard.

If I can end this blog with a plug, it will be to look out for our conference next year in Denmark, New Narratives of the Postcolonial Arctic. If you’re at EASA this summer, do come and say hello at the ArcticEncounters panel, ‘Polar Mobilities: Resilience and transformations’ (panel 020). One of the ways we are keeping the project as open as we can is to blog our research activities and tweet our events #postarctic. So there are many ways to keep in touch and many kinds of encounters to experience whether you are near or far.

Our aim was to see what kind of tourism the Sami winter market offers, who would be there, what was on offer. While we saw plenty of archetypal tourist activities – such as cameras thrust in the faces of traditionally-clad reindeer herders – we also saw protest placards in shop windows and an exhibition about environmental protest against prospecting in reindeer herding areas. We have discussed this briefly in our Arctic Encounters blog, and we will be doing further fieldwork and writing more about it later, but the point in this blog is to note that tourism here is immediately thrust up against other industries in competition for resources. Reindeer herders can accommodate some kinds of tourism, but accommodating is not an option if mining is to expand, not only because open-cast mining takes away the land that reindeer graze on, but because the roads and other infrastructure that serve the mines take out many animals in accidents, as a herders’ representative explained during the conference. The repercussions may spread beyond a little local disruption.

In the 1980s, Norwegian plans to dam the Alta river for hydro-electric power sparked an uprising that eventually led to the founding of the Sami parliament, and an apology from the Norwegian king for the disgraceful treatment of the Sami by the Norwegian state over the centuries. In Sweden, the multiple-dams on the Lule river provide up to a fifth of Sweden’s electricity needs, and mining has been so extensive in Kiruna that the city will now be moved to safer ground.

After years of accommodating, and accepting the use of grazing lands as military rifle ranges, it seems possible now that resistance is growing. One reason is the crass exploitation exercised by the mining companies supported by central government in Stockholm. There are questions to be asked about why Sweden would want to give away its natural resources, barely taxing foreign companies to come into the North and take away minerals. And why, if environmental sustainability is given the highest priority in Swedish law, should limited-term extractive industries be prioritised over timeless reindeer herding? But there were also practices with extraordinarily colonial features that seem almost designed to spark revolt.

In Gallok/Kallak, protesters blockading a road to prevent iron-ore prospecting close to the Laponia World Heritage Site were smart enough to buy shares in the prospecting company, a British firm called Beowulf mining. At the shareholders meeting, they heard the CEO, Sinclair Poulton, state unashamedly that there was no need to worry about the responses of local people to prospecting. Showing a picture of a forested landscape, he asked ‘what local people?’ Their response was a website and a movement called ‘What local people?‘, featuring portraits of the many local people who felt ignored and disrespected by the mining project. Protests over the potential mines grew, garnering concerns about pollution of watercourses, noise and disturbance to wildlife, increased traffic, dangers to reindeer, and so forth. The situation is ongoing, and Britt and I will be returning to Gallok this summer for further fieldwork, and co-operating with Swedish researchers also following this episode with interest.

The focus on tourism in Arctic Encounters may look narrow, but looking carefully opens up a whole world of relations.  Across the North, tourism is both growing, and growing in diversity. The category Tourism disguises a complex array of different practices, from indigenous hospitality to corporate commercialism, bringing diverse challenges and tensions. Arctic Encounters has also been examining the rapid expansion of whale watching enterprises, barely regulated, often unsafe and potentially dangerous for the whales, as well as the watchers. Britt Kramvig and Berit Kristoffersen will be following the whales and their watchers further this year, and linking the expanding watching-industry with the changing habits of whales due to ocean disturbances induced by climate change.

In asking about travel/writing and the Arctic, we are addressing questions about indigenous rights, notions of land and property, corporate capitalism and extractive industries – including minerals as well as carboniferous fuels – and energy production more generally. In a final blog in this series, I will be linking the European Arctic across to the circumpolar Arctic, and touching on the representations that conjure the notion of Arctic worlds from elsewhere.

The Faroes are known for fishing and sheep – producing the wool that famously clothed the Sarah Lund character in Danish televisions ‘Killing’ series. Faroese wool is often mixed with Falklands wool, and there seems to be some kind of sub-polar logic to this coupling. Cruise tourists sailing from Scotland or Denmark also call in at Torshavn, capital of the Faroes, where a thousand visitors may call in for just 4 hours on their way further north to Iceland or across the North Atlantic. A hundred at a time are bussed across to tiny harbour villages like Gjógv to be served pancakes at the turf-roofed Gjáargaður guest house and admire the cosy Faroese knitted sweaters at the hotel’s minute boutique. With American tourists, there is the emotive question of whale-eating, although the wind-dried lamb raises less social awkwardness or political embarrassment. On these dramatic basaltic islands, tourists can have their minds truly blown, as one visiting Australian put it – words like ‘mindblowing’ and the phrase ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’ hang in the air waiting to be passed around from visitor to visitor. It truly is a spectacular landscape, one that is anticipated by dramatic images and tourism-promotion by-lines, newspapers accounts of the ‘lovely unspoilt islands’ (National Geographic Traveller’s ‘most appealing destination in the world’) or ‘the most curious place left on Earth’ (NY Times).

It took a long time for the Anthropology of Tourism to become mainstream (and in many teaching departments it remains on the fringes, if at all), probably because tourism has an uncomfortably close relationship with anthropology. Early anthropological accounts often strove earnestly to distinguish themselves from travel writing, to be scientific and universal rather than trivial and pleasurable. Perhaps this explains why so many anthropologists are excellent at making fascinating topics seem so tedious. But there are other dimensions to this relationship. Anthropologists often follow in the footsteps of other travellers, be they missionaries or colonists (especially in the early days), and anthropological reports can themselves be instrumental in opening up destinations for other travellers, particularly the more famous or sensational reports and films. A really popular ethnography can spark a desire for others to experience the same destination, as much as we may prefer not to acknowledge it. Jonathan Swift was well aware of the irony, pre-empting the ethnographic account in the style of adventurous travellers – Gulliver’s Travels should be required reading for History of Anthropology (alongside Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts, in my view).

This is an anniversary year for the anthropology of tourism. In the 40 years since the workshop that brought us Hosts and Guests, we have learned a lot about tourism. We know that there are many people involved in tourism who are neither host nor guest. We know that tourism marketing is dominated by a certain kind of imagery, and that tourism itself involves moving bodies, human and nonhuman. We also know that tourism includes a large variety of texts and documents. If tourism is a way of ordering the world, then images and texts are among the tools that are employed for this task. Anthropology is starting to take documents seriously (Annelise Riles has helped here) but it is early days in many ways. Ethnographies of journalism will help us, as will ethnographies that go beyond analyses of marketing materials and delve into the world of destination management organisations.

At Arctic Encounters we are heading in this direction as well, and welcome examples or links to others working on these questions. In the Faroes this week we are tracking texts in the making. The airline and tourist board co-fund a third party marketing company to run press trips, sending out an invitation on travel journalists’ networks for an all-expenses paid trip from London to the Faroes for four days of walking and visiting. Journalists are chosen if they can offer a commission to publish that provides value for the tourism industry on the island. On this tour, there are half a dozen journalists and writers who will publish either with their own company or specialist hill walking publications, or news media travel sections. Their work is not so unlike that of the ethnographer – observing the trip, making notes about the places visited, and their impressions of the tour. Nor are they unlike tourists on a small group trip, getting to know one another over the days, creating joking relationships, sharing stories and snippets of information about their lives and their work.

These are writers who publish prolifically, some have several books published already, some producing guidebooks to several different countries, speaking several languages, and some publishing high quality illustrated coffee table books. In their thirties to their fifties, some also run their own businesses, guiding companies or publishing, or as sole traders, publishing in different countries. There is only one English-language guide to the Faroes, published by Bradt guides, and it is well used by these visitors, as are the guides and maps produced by the tourist office, so information is recirculated at this stage. This includes maps and ‘facts’ (physical geography, demography), brief historical accounts, and sumptuous images of wildlife (puffins feature), dramatic cliffs, and landscape shots of colourful houses clustered around natural harbours, with whitewashed churches, steeples peeking above the villages. These documents employ familiar tourist semiotics to open up possibilities for visitors, and gently instruct them why they are here and what they might want to see and do as an essential part of the ordering of the world that tourism does. This is participant observation, and part of the participation will be to write like a travel-writer. That is more difficult to observe, but a one-day workshop by travel writers and publishers under the Arctic Encounters banner was a good way for me to start trying to think like a travel writer and document the process.

Some campaigns have specifically set out to bring artists and journalists on polar cruises, to see the Arctic for themselves and communicate their impressions more widely back home. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand cruises like these as a form of tourism. In this context, Arctic Encounters sets out to compare travel writing and images of the Arctic with the practices of tourism in the region from the perspective of those directly engaged with it. But of course this begs at least two important question. The first is, what is the Arctic? There are, of course, various definitions, from geographic ones (above 66 degrees north, for example) to botanical ones (beyond the tree zone) and meteorological definitions (average summer daily temperatures under 10 degrees celsius). But there are also conflicting political definitions, such as the High North (an equally imprecise Norwegian concept); Arctic states are usually defined as those bordering the Arctic Ocean, yet many states now have Arctic policies, as does the EU. It’s worth remembering that unlike Antarctica, which is a large land mass, the Arctic is an ice-mass. Most of these definitions melt into the general mush of Arctic images and hyperbole that circulate around tourism. These tend to follow one or two well worn narratives, with polar exploration discourses on the one hand – the harsh frozen wilderness – and ecological discourses on the other – pristine environments, wild animals and (common to both) landscapes empty of human presence.

In fact what unites these is the very concept of the Arctic as a region. The term does something similar to terms like ‘Africa’ or ‘Asia’, in suggesting a unifying theme, whereas it is largely the term and the idea of a continent that offers unity to an otherwise bewildering diversity. The label ‘Arctic’ has recently been seized upon in all sorts of contexts, and has become a convenient vehicle for political manoeuvring (and from here on, please assume these labels are appearing in scare quotes). Suddenly the northernmost university in Norway acquired the name ‘the Arctic University of Norway‘. The point is not that the merger between the University of Tromsø and Finnmark college meant that a new name had to be found, but that the name chosen emphasises the idea of the Arctic as a meaningful place, reinforcing the sense that the label has significance, and, of course,  tying the university strategically to increasing political interest in the region.

A recent exhibition, simply called ‘Arctic‘ (or Arktis in Danish) at Louisiana contemporary art museum in Denmark reminded visitors of the dominant images that made the Arctic make sense for Europeans and Americans. Displaying images of the sublime in ice-floes, and objects and images from polar expeditions alongside scientific reports on ice-cores and glacial melting, the exhibition focused largely on how the Arctic was seen from the South. Unfortunately, in doing so, it appeared uncritically to reproduce these visions of the Arctic-as-Frozen-Waste and explorers’ playground (see Lars Jensen‘s comments). Half way through the exhibition, a small collection of antique Inuit objects and a screening of Nanook of the North seemed the only acknowledgement that the region we call Arctic is far from the polar waste of this southern and scientific imagination. As Marionne Cronin explained at our recent conference, if you look closely enough at the material supplies taken by some of the famous explorers on their polar adventures, the presence of indigenous peoples shines through since they provided much of the clothing and supplies the exploration parties required. Yet you have to dig deep to find them, since so much work has gone in to making them appear invisible in so many kinds of media.

The newly renamed Arctic University of Norway offers us a clue that the contemporary Arctic is inhabited in a most Modern way, but the idea that indigenous people have inhabited the High North for a very long time, and continue to do so, is frequently disregarded in the persistent reproduction of ideas about empty space and apparently endless images of sunlit icebergs. Uninhabited space has long provided the legitimacy for colonial expansion, and it continues to serve that purpose today. Some participants at the Postcolonial Arctic conference argued that, in fact, the Arctic continues to be a colonial project, whether we call it postcolonial or neo-colonial.

The second big question is what do we mean by tourism? But that will be for another blogpost.

It’s not a joke – the Arctic seems to be everywhere at the moment, and it’s mainly because it is getting warmer. None of us really agree what the Arctic is or where – or whether – it has limits, few of us go there, and only a small number of states border the Arctic seas. That doesn’t seem to stop commentators using images of the Arctic to serve their particular interests, often with little regard or even acknowledgement of those who actually live in the Arctic regions. Nor does it dissuade states around the world from developing Arctic policies or seeing the Arctic as a potential resource for their own development goals. These are the themes that inform a recently-established international European project on Arctic Encounters that sets out to confront the idea of a post-colonial Arctic, through the comparison between Arctic imageries and lives in the region. 

Fresh from three days of workshops and discussions about what it might mean to talk about a ‘postcolonial Arctic’ (#postarctic), I want to draw out some of the themes and memes that characterise debate about Arctic regions, and the European High North in particular. I do this from a couple of perspectives that feed in from my own particular interests and find fruition in the Arctic question: tourism and energy. Those provide a fortuitous combination, since the two main sources of Arctic anxieties revolve around tourism imaginaries and what are sometimes called oil imaginaries but actually extend into a range of extractive industries (e.g. oilscapes ).

Global environmental activists have been increasingly effective in protesting against fossil and nuclear fuel extraction, and current action, such as Greenpeace’s campaign to defend Bear Island, have been effective in drawing global media attention to the issues. The alternatives to fossil and nuclear fuels include renewable resources such as wind, wave, solar and hydro, of which hydro is currently the established technology that is most easily scaled for mass provision. So bearing in mind that hydro-electric power is the cleanest, most responsive and by far the most renewable source of electricity generation available to us, and considering the urgency of reducing carbon emissions, it would seem perverse to find people protesting against hydro-electric power production, as much as against wind farms, another renewable source that provokes vociferous protest at various sites (particularly in the UK).

In the Arctic context, it’s worth remembering that the most important Sami uprising in the Norwegian North was prompted by the construction of a mammoth hydro-electric dam that flooded hundreds of kilometres of crucially important herding grounds, land that embodied shared histories, kinships and ancient sacred sites. The Alta uprising is echoed in protests around the world that are ongoing today. Current crises include a proposal to dam the Omo river in Ethiopia that will rob the Mursi of their lands, a disputed mega-dam in Myanmar  (see BBC reports), indigenous protests against a dam in the Amazon basin, and protests against a hydro project in British Columbia.

Of course the apparent conflict between carbon reduction and indigenous rights is merely the visible evidence of a much more fundamental global problem that can be crudely characterised (or perhaps caricatured) as a conflict between the technological-focus and capital-driven engines of modernity and the desire to live at the human scale in tune with nature. But rather than each position being the problem here, it is the idea of opposition that is so entrenched at governmental and corporate levels that can make the problem seem intractable. We are faced with a classic set of cognitive dissonances (or ‘denials’) that we are struggling to escape: we all know that carbon emissions must drop dramatically if we are to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, yet most people still want to drive their cars or fly around to international conferences (guilty as charged!). We know that only a fraction of the carbon that is currently traded on global markets can be used, yet trillions of dollars of share capital is invested in the potential of these resources – and many of us have pensions invested in these very funds. Current action on ‘divestment‘ is starting to respond to this particular issue, with notable initiatives from universities including Stanford and Oxford.

How is this all connected to the Arctic? Firstly, as sea ice melts and navigable shipping routes begin to open up, new fields of oil and gas are being explored for extraction and states and corporations are manoeuvring to claim ownership and rights to extract resources in what has been called (and disputed) a ‘scramble for the Arctic’ (Sale and Potapov 2010). But secondly, tensions are heightened because the Arctic has provided imagery that sustains the idea of a ‘pristine wilderness’, borrowing and reinforcing imagery from now mythologised Antarctic expeditions and scientific hyperbole about polar nature. In this, the colonial tropes of unconquered land figure deeply, and serve to reproduce the notion of an Arctic region ‘untouched by man’. For indigenous inhabitants, this is not only annoying; it has deeply disturbing consequences, which are being increasingly vociferously documented.

For anthropologists, the ‘indigenous question’ is not the only one we should write about. It should, however, be always in our minds in our research on the workings of extractive industries, the means that states use to create the space for policies and legislation about rights or ownership, the imagery and discourses that tourism companies use to attract clients and customers, or the question of how tourism activities are or should be regulated and by whom.

Subsequent blogs over the next couple of weeks will draw out some of these themes, and I hope you’ll enjoy the journey and contribute with comments and responses along the way.

The Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, described the island of Utøya as the summer paradise of his youth, and the place where he became political engaged. Spending the summer on an island or in the mountains is definitively a Norwegian thing to do, and it is indicative of the state of political life in Norway that the Labour party was able to attract several hundred young members to a summer camp, something that British Labour party officials could barely dream of. The island is owned by the Labour party’s youth organisation, AUF, and has since 1950 held summer camps for young party members. Stoltenberg was leader of the youth organisation from 1985-89, like several Labour leaders before him, and was due to address the summer camp the day after the shootings. He is reported to have been writing his speech when the bomb went off outside his offices in central Oslo. He has since been widely praised for his stoicism, his appeals for people to care for each other, and his defiance against attacks on the open social democracy that the Labour party stands for.

Many of my friends and colleagues who know that I have worked in Norway over more than a decade have asked me whether I know anyone who has been killed. My answer has been that I am not aware of anyone I know having been directly involved, but that in such a small country, with such extensive social networks, I expect to hear before long of someone I know having been affected. All of my Norwegian colleagues will be affected, at least indirectly, because elements of the warped logic of the perpetrator of these crimes is well known to them. It appears, from news reports about the perpetrator’s engagement in online discussions, that he participated in racist conspiracy debates[1], that are extreme versions of the kind of everyday racism that Norwegian anthropologists have critiqued and discussed for many years. Marianne Gullestad wrote, held public lectures, and engaged in public debates for many years to try to dispel casual racist ideas that linked into nationalist ideologies[2], and Thomas Hylland Eriksen has worked no less relentlessly to counter myths about a homogeneous Norwegian nation[3].

Many other anthropologists have written both scholarly and popular articles on similar lines, attacking racist and nationalist views. The brutal evidence that people still believe in myths about Nordic purity can only cause dismay and exasperation. In a country where Social Anthropology is one of the more popular subjects for study at university, and where anthropologists retain a high media profile, the persistence of racist ideologies and acts and their resistance to rational argument raise difficult questions. Public anthropology is based on the idea that public debate is a form of enlightenment, that we can collectively crush racist ideas by demonstrating their falsity. While the horrific crimes committed by Breivik are the exceptional work of a disturbed personality, small scale racist attacks are not uncommon, and the violent ideas behind them are coming closer to the mainstream as European and American politics move further to the Right.

Norway is also a country where nationalism is a key idiom of expression. Independent for only just over a century, the work of nation-building is ever-present. And although the mode of nationalism is increasingly celebratory and inclusive, it is strikingly dominant. Norwegian flags are hoisted at holiday cottages, embroidered onto bags and clothes and waved incessantly at nation-day celebrations, and discussions about what makes good Norwegians and Norwegians good are hard to avoid. Signe Howell has written about the dominance of national discourse in kinship, and vice versa, through the way that foreign babies are transformed into part of the broader national family, and Thomas Hylland Eriksen has written about the use of the Norwegian flag and costumes. Responses to the tragedy this weekend have included the massed flying of flags, using flag symbols as facebook identifiers, and so forth. Central public figures responded immediately in national-terms, including politicians, journalists, artists, royalty and other commentators. In the face of an attack made explicitly on the nation-state, the response has been to reclaim the nation’s symbols. That such a violent event is interpreted through a dominant idiom is not surprising, even while the details of the violence are utterly shocking. The tying together of national symbols with talk of love reinforces a sense of moral good associated with the Norwegian nation, and reappropriates the nation from racist nationalism. But in this endless tussle between a nation of care and an exclusive people, it seems that racism is the shadow-concept[4] of nationalism. Nationalism is alive and well, and racism continues to creep along in its underbelly.

Use and abuse of anthropology is not new. A big hurdle for me in approaching Das Kapital was the opening discourse about the natural state of man based on the old armchair anthropologies and missionary reports. Conservatives argue that people have become too dependent on welfare and should be encouraged to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves, the implicit assumption being that good old fashioned villages had a place for everyone, and everyone looked after each other. It’s an odd mix of old-Tory (rich man in his castle, poor man in his cottage) and neo-liberal (welfare makes you lazy), but it is buoyed up by long trails of romantic sociology which saw villages having authentic social relations and cities as anonymous. That we haven’t moved so far beyond this is evident in the need to do something called ‘urban anthropology’. But you find housing and housing-planning in both rural and urban areas, in bureaucratic and ad hoc systems, and in formal and informal contexts, and in permanent and temporary use (including holidays and tourism). Which takes me back to the beginning – in that housing for poor tenants is not a separate field. Governments have been quick to bail out the banks who frittered away money on poor property investments (etc. etc.), but remarkably less keen to bail out the poor people who can no longer afford to pay their house loans or rents. There’s a category distinction at large that is being hidden, a connection being ignored, with pretty grim consequences.

We talk a lot about public anthropology these days, and one of the things we discuss is how to reach audiences beyond anthropologists. Visual methods have been key to these debates, and at the EASA conference, our panel on public anthropology included several inspiring papers on photography, film and museum displays, as well as anthropological consultancies and campaigns. It’s no coincidence that advances have come first online, where it’s become so much easier (ie. cheaper) to use audio-visual materials or mixed media. In this we’re ahead of the regulatory game, which evaluates academic performance through stuff you can touch. But despite it all, we still like to do other things, even if we know they’ll not bring us any institutional advancement (and probably the opposite). Doing research on concepts of well-being at home or outdoors poses a paradox. Doing that research is increasingly likely to endanger our own well-being, as universities increasingly try to squeeze more juice out of academics.

¹Another book ‘like this’ was Banerjee and Miller’s ‘The Sari’.

In the neoliberal state of the 2000s, (and already before then), the Director of Housing is less accessible, but even if the tenants’ representative were able to arrange a meeting, the Director could not implement any agreement, since housing services are subcontracted or outsourced through at least one further organisation, over whom they have no immediate control, contracts having been agreed and set for a period of time, sometimes years. The most she could do is sympathise and pass on a request to someone else. In this way, the state no longer appears to be a monolithic framework with an internal logic. Today, the state is more likely to appear to be a mess of fragmented organisations, with little personhood, little coherence and even less sensitivity.  So what does housing tell us about our ideas about the state? It certainly means that we can rethink the question of ownership. While the classical arguments over the rights of persons over their home assumed that ownership gave security, for many tenants, public housing offered – until now – security too, not least because it came with guarantees. Resistance to the privatisation of council housing was strongest among tenant groups, so much so that the Blair government had to offer utterly biased terms to force people to ‘vote’ to leave council ownership (ie, leave the council and get investment for refurbishment and maintenance, or stay and get nothing). As unusual as it is to see governments trying to rid themselves of power, there are questions to be asked about the consequences of governments also ridding themselves of ownership. Does it make the state appear heartless, literally with the heart removed, or metaphorically as lacking in feeling? In practice, in the housing estates, as elsewhere, there was a strong feeling that the state failed to care for residents. A failure to care led to the relinquishing of ownership, but they went hand in hand. You don’t bother to hold on to things you don’t care about. Perhaps owning did, indeed, give the state personhood. So where will it find its personhood without ownership?

The story we do know goes (bearing in mind I’m being incredibly brief here) that the crisis was fuelled by unsustainable lending by banks to poor people who couldn’t pay back their debts. Whipped round the financial markets with a few clever recalculations and repackaging, bad debts escalated, and eventually the hot air deflated and banks collapsed. But there was another shuffle going on in the background. In Britain, the major part of the economy that was not about the City (of London, i.e. financial markets) was about the construction industry¹. As manufacturing collapsed, governments saw construction as a replacement sector – it produces stuff and keeps people employed.

The expansion really took off in the 1990s², when government statisticians reckoned that the number of households was increasing even if the population was falling³. With people marrying later, an increase in the number of students, and more widows and widowers living longer there were more one-person households who apparently needed (or wanted?) small flats. And lo, small flats there came. An urban regeneration based on posh – read overpriced – flats in city centres around the country took off. The cities looked more lively, old buildings were ripped down and new oversized blocks of flats appeared (oversized in height to make more money out of each plot). But after a while it became clear that most of them were empty. Some cities, like Leeds, had up to 70% vacancy rates. Yet the prices didn’t come down. What was happening was not that unfortunate landlords couldn’t find tenants, but that investors were buying property to put on their portfolio, as an asset that automatically increased in value from year to year along with the housing market. They never intended anyone to live in them. Clever stuff. So the financial crisis I was expecting was the one where investors decided they needed to realise their assets and sell their flats. Finding the market flooded, the value of the property crashes and they’re all left with empty assets and cities with empty flats. The other crash intervened, but this one is still there waiting to happen. You don’t have to be an anthropologist to see this (and the issue of vacancy and investment were spotted by property analysts). What anthropology can do is tie together the central statistics, the activities of investors, and the local politics of house-building on the ground.

The housing market’s been an odd beast for many years, yet anthropologists have mostly ignored it. Much more glamorous the bear pits of the City, yet  in my view, the the ins and outs of housing can be just as odd and fascinating. The numericization of social issues drives the whole process, and leads to the kinds of unexpected consequences that anthropologists love to recount. We end up with thousands of empty houses, and more thousands of people who are homeless – either with no place of their own, or no place at all. But because the houses have been built to make a profit, and not to house people who need them, we cannot put the two together. In other words, the problem of housing is not about buildings. It’s about money, class, geography and ethnicity and other usual suspects. The problem for anthropology is that we need to look at the bigger picture, and not only tell stories about the people in the houses. We need to accept that stories about our own politicians and policies can also be anthropology.

¹Margaret Thatcher was notoriously close to the owner of the MacAlpine construction corporation – later Lord MacAlpine. It was rumoured she and her ministers owned substantial shares in construction companies.

² Bear with me here, John, I know there were booms before, but let’s just look at the last time round for now…

³For a somewhat fuller explanation, see Murdoch and Abram 2002: ‘Rationalities of Planning’.

There are more than moderately interesting things happening in Britain today. We have a new government with radical and fairly exotic ideas, and much for anthropologists to get their teeth into. One area that’s been occupying me for some time is the more florid statements of certain people who are now Ministers on the value of social housing. Recent pronouncements have included suggestions from the Prime Minister that people should not be allowed to live in the same house all their lives, it ‘stunts ambition and means that people end up staying on estates for life’¹. He’s referring here to council estates, not country estates where, presumably, living all your life at your country seat is not a sign of lack of ‘aspiration’.

Just a few lines of background first: in Britain, many low-cost homes were, for nearly a century, built, owned and managed by local government organisations that we call councils, hence ‘Council Housing’. A simple strategy to ensure that the poorest people had somewhere decent to live. Not free housing, but secure housing available at relatively low rents, with a carefully regulated landlord (the council) and clear rules and policies. It worked pretty well for at least half a century, yet the middle classes tended to look down on it and stigmatise council tenants as dangerous and reckless. Under Thatcher that reached a zenith (or nadir depending on your point of view), and she began to dismantle the free and fair system, a process continued under New Labour with the wholescale demolition of rundown estates of housing, and the transfer of publicly owned housing to autonomous institutions, such as Housing Associations and the wonderfully named ‘Arms Length Management Organisations’ (immediately known as ALMOs). So far, so factual.

What’s particularly fascinating, for me at least, is the kind of mystical agency that some ministers invest in housing. One particularly prominent minister, former leader of the Conservative Party and now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, one Iain Duncan Smith, seems to have wholly adopted Levi-Strauss’s suggestion that houses have personhood. The key feature that gives houses this agency is not the house itself, but its ownership: ‘People with assets are more positive, more constructive, more likely to do the right thing’². Now, forgive me, but this strikes me as rather radical. It says that our relationship to material objects transforms us as persons, but only if we own them ourselves. There is more depth to this than any neo-liberal rant about small government or reducing red tape – those are merely processual details. This, on the contrary, is a fairly radical moral belief.

It was slightly more elaborated in a statement by Duncan Smith’s ‘think tank’:

‘The ownership of an asset encourages a series of behavioural changes. Those who own are more likely to protect their assets, to protect their position of ownership and to engage in constructive behaviours that enable their assets to be protected and enlarged: behaviours that benefit themselves, their families and the community at large’³.

So this house, in a relationship of ownership, becomes the agent not only for the behaviour of its occupants while in the house, but for the wider social arena. It goes well beyond the former New Labour government’s unimaginative observation that people who rent have no property to pass on to their children. For the new Tories, the relationship of ownership is that which creates a fully socialised person, and the most fully socialised is the one who owns the most substantial property, a home. Sadly, the other side of this curious belief is the spectre of council tenants being told to move to private housing if they no longer need income support (ie welfare), and a renewed wave of stigmatisation and prejudice against council tenants. But I, for one, think that the beliefs on ownership are themselves worthy of some anthropological analysis⁴ in the hope that this might give more strength to those who campaign on behalf of people who do not own private houses.

Next blog post – on the financial crisis that didn’t happen…

¹Widely reported, including in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1300011/Council-houses-longer-life.html

²Ian Duncan smith interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, 2/12/08

³Centre for Social Justice 2008 (press release)

⁴For more on this, my book ‘Culture and Planning’ should be out next year.