In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election scholars across the country and internationally have worked to understand the drivers for the election outcomes. We have tried to foresee the potential consequences of a Republican party domination of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government for vulnerable populations, for the environment, and for the economy. And, we continue to grapple with the serious threats the president elect and his cabinet nominees pose to the freedom of the press, to citizen’s rights to free speech, and to the various protections that scholars receive through university systems of academic freedom and tenure. At most universities there have been teach-ins, learn-ins, and panels, as well as emergency meetings of departments, faculty action groups, student groups, and other concerned parties. What more can scholars do?

Since the election, one statement we have heard repeatedly from some academics, pundits, journalists, and bloggers who write about academic life, is that scholars need to somehow change what they are doing, and how they are doing it, in order to face this seemingly new political reality in the Unites States. While the latter part of this argument has been addressed by numerous scholars and activists who write and think about race, class, sexuality, and inequality more generally – with clear and compelling arguments about how this is not a “new” political reality for many but rather a kind of contemporary culmination and re-entrenchment of the structures of power and oppression that underpin the entirety of the national political project – the former part of the argument has been allowed to stand with little critique. Do we need to change what we do and not just how we do it? Not necessarily.

While we think that all of us–scholars, activists, journalists, and concerned citizens in general–can always do better work, we worry that by focusing on needing to change what we are doing and how we are doing it we lose sight of what we already do really well. We work to understand the world through research, teaching, writing, and reading. Along with this, we produce knowledge that allows others to understand the world and to work to change it. In addition to this, many of us are also activists whose political praxis is informed by our scholarly pursuits. We are not saying that new forms of thinking and working should not be welcomed. Instead we worry about the idea that scholars are doing it all wrong, and that this is somehow connected to the results of the last election. This suggestion is dangerous and fails to acknowledge the ways in which scholarship and scholarly practice underpins some of our ability to act, react, resist, and transform.

One key part of what all scholars do is read. Reading opens new scholarly connections and understandings for us almost every day. We know and understand the world, and we create new avenues for others to know and understand the world with reference to other people’s writings and insights. For many of us, since scholars tend to also be teachers, we also use what we read every day to help our students become clear and critical thinkers. Scholars read to research and to write and to teach.

With all of this in mind, we, with the help of Savage Minds and the journals American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Environment and Society are proposing a Read-In on January 20, 2017. We invite all anthropologists and others to come together to read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven in “Society Must Be Defended” which he delivered on March 17, 1976. This lecture strikes us as very good to think with at this present point: it demands we simultaneously consider the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics, and concepts of security, and race. In light of the current socio-political situation where the reaction to activism against persistent racism has been to more overtly perpetuate racism as political discourse, we need to remember and re-think the role of racism as central to, rather than incidental to, the political and economic activities of the state.

Here is how it will work: read lecture 11 between 10 AM and 10 PM Eastern Standard Time on 20 January (or, of course, read it before, and join in on the 20^th). If you do not own the book, or cannot get it at your local library, PDFs are available online. Read it alone, in groups, in classes, or anywhere. After reading it, discuss it in person or share your thoughts online: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, wherever you gather with friends and colleagues to learn and share ideas. We will use #ReadIn so that folks can find each other to converse and collaborate, and we have also created a Read In Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/170068806806067/

Please join us to read together, read out loud, read in public, and then use it to help us all begin to think about how to understand, help our students understand, and perhaps even to resist, the next four years.

Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University

JC Salyer is Term Professor of Practice, Barnard College

I hope his spirit rests a little better today.

It was a Wednesday when I read about the suicide. At 8:45 am on the morning of April 4 2012, 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas killed himself amidst a rush of morning commuters near a metro station in front of the Greek Parliament. I choked on tears when I finished the article.

I was probably surfing the Internet, perendinating as usual. I’d just returned from a research trip to Bulgaria, and had been unceremoniously rocket launched into the second half of my spring semester. On top of writing lectures, teaching, grading, and supervising my students, I had four composition books full of hand-written fieldnotes that needed to be transcribed. But I was restless and feeling depressed about the world of academic knowledge production.

Probably my existential mood made the news of the suicide afflict me so deeply. Mr. Christoulas had leaned his head against a cypress tree. It meant he considered the logistics before he pulled the trigger. He knew that his head might jerk away from the force of the bullet. The cypress tree provided the answer. I imagined him with one temple pressed against the bark and the other temple pressed beneath the barrel of the handgun. I could see his body crumpling to the ground in Syntagma Square, the blood from his head soaking into the spring grass still wet with the fresh morning dew. It would be Orthodox Easter soon. Despite the divine reference in his surname, there would be no resurrection for Mr. Christoulas.

Hearing the gunshot, stunned onlookers rushed to his body. A suicide note in his pocket read:

The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.

Mr. Christoulas was a patriot, and he coded his suicide note with the patriotic references he knew his countrymen would understand. The Tsolakoglou government referred to Georgios Tsolakoglou, the Greek prime minister who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. The Tsolakoglou government worked the Germans after they occupied Greece and cooperated with the eventual deportation of the Greek Jews to death camps in Poland. To modern Greeks, this comparison of the wartime collaborationist government with the then current Greek government headed by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, made a clear political statement. Prime Minister Papademos was once again collaborating with the Germans to destroy Greece and her people.

The suicide sparked a renewed groundswell of unrest in Athens. Within hours of his death, Greek citizens began placing flowers near the tree where he shot himself. They also left notes of condolence and of protest. “This is not suicide,” one note read, “This is murder by the state.” Another note read, “Austerity kills.” The tree quickly became a shrine. Thousands of Greek citizens came to visit the death site of the Eurozone crisis’s first self-acknowledged martyr.

Mr. Christoulas had been a pharmacist. He sold his pharmacy in 1994 when he retired. His neighbors said he was a cheerful man and he was an upstanding member of the local community. In recent months he’d grown increasingly angry. The Greek economic crisis had already been going on for two years, and he participated in the protests against the Greek government as they acquiesced to austerity measures imposed on them by the Germans and the EU, against the will of the Greek people.

The Eurozone teetered on the brink of collapse. To save it, the Greeks swallowed huge cuts in government salaries, pensions and health benefits while enduring higher taxes to balance their budget, a classic IMF cocktail for human suffering. This medicine was being forced down the Greeks’ throat so German and other creditors could justify the massive transfer of bailout funds to keep Greece from defaulting on its sovereign debt. Europe’s economic elites wanted to prevent a Greek default at all costs, believing that the world economy would collapse if Greece repudiated its debts and left the Eurozone. The suffering of pensioners like Mr. Christoulas was the cost of saving the global economy.

By April of 2012, observers were raising questions about how the Greek debt had been incurred. Growing international pressure called for an external audit committee to examine exactly where the money had gone. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal Europe found evidence that while the German government imposed austerity on the Greek people to cut government spending, German and French companies pressured Greek officials to authorize the purchase of billions of dollars worth of military hardware. German arms manufacturers lobbied their government to ensure that forced cuts in military spending were not included in the austerity cocktail. Even as payments to Greek pensioners like Mr. Christoulas were slashed by 25 percent, Greece signed a contract for two German submarines costing 1.8 billion euros.

Mr. Christoulas had done everything right. All he was asking for was the pension that he’d paid into for 35 years. He had medical problems, and the retired pharmacist could no longer afford his medication. His fear that he would end up dumpster diving for food was not hyperbole. I knew it was the reality of many retired people in nearby Bulgaria. Whenever I saw those dignified pensioners, in their clean pressed clothes, searching around with sticks in the trash, I became sick with anger. These people worked all of their lives. They’d paid into a system that they were told would take care of them in old age. History betrayed them.

The newspaper stories about Mr. Christoulas’s suicide continued for several days. I read them like an addict. The funeral service was held on Saturday, April 7, 2012. Hundreds of mourners came to pay tribute to Christoulas whose singular, desperate act might mobilize a nation. Greeks chanted the word “hero” as the memorial service proceeded. Christoulas’s 43-year-old daughter spoke to the crowd with a tinge of anger mixed in with her grief:

Father, you couldn’t put up with them killing freedom, democracy, dignity. You paid with your sacrifice. Now it’s our turn. Father … We are so many here today because – as the note of a young man said – ‘We are 11 million and our name is Resistance.”

This was a metaphorical call to arms, but I wondered what would happen. What would come of this very public suicide, so well planned as the last political act of a man at his wit’s end? Would his death mean something? Or was he just another forgotten victim of a global economic system that perennially values bankers’ profits over human lives?

Mr. Dimitris Christoulas wasn’t buried on Saturday, April 7, 2012. He wanted to be cremated. The Greek Orthodox Christian tradition doesn’t allow for cremation. Even worse, the Greek Orthodox priests who officiate at burials would have refused to bury Mr. Christoulas because he was a suicide. The Church condemns those that take their own lives. Instead, his coffin was bourn away at the end of the ceremony, and sent north to Bulgaria, the country with the highest suicide rate in Europe.

The Bulgarians would cremate him. Perhaps a Bulgarian Orthodox priest would even bless his soul despite the suicide. God would have to see that this one was different. Surely, He could make an exception. Somewhere in Bulgaria, I imagined the smoke from Christoulas’s pyre seeping out into the early spring air. Perhaps a few of his ashes would fall like dandelion seeds into the fertile soils of popular discontent in the Balkans. Perhaps Dimitris Christoulas would have a kind of resurrection after all.

This semester I’m teaching Political Anthropology, or ANTH 417 here at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. This is an upper level course designed for juniors and seniors, and there’s a special track in the class (bonus readings!) for honors students and graduate students who want to take the class.

I’ve always tried to keep this class relevant for students while still staying within my areas of competence. In 2008 I shifted it towards the financial crisis and the anthropology of finance. In 2010 I shifted it to address the Gulf Oil Spill. This time around I’m keeping the focus on petroleum disasters but incorporating new readings from the mining industry since that’s what I’m increasingly focused on.

“Political anthropology” is a difficult subfield to teach. Like all subfields, it got institutionalized as a Thing in the decades after World War II. A few subdisciplines like Medical and Ecological anthropology managed to firmly entrench themselves while others, like economic anthropology, continue to exist in some form but lack coherence today (it turns out there aren’t obviously things called ‘the economy’ and ‘politics’ to study). Political anthropology in particular suffered because in the mid-seventies anthropologists decided everything was political and ‘actual’ political conflict — like, who was going to be the next chief or mayor — moved out of the spotlight.

In my class I do still teach some classics of political anthropology, like selections from F.G. Bailey’s Stratagems and Spoils, but my focus in the class is really on ethnography: Reading and discussing whole books in a discussion-based class. This year, we’re reading three books. In order, they are Antonia Juhasz’s Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill, Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism: The Relationship Between Corporations and Their Critics, and Michael Cepek’s A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofán Environmental Politics. 

My class has what’s known as an ‘E’ focus here at Mānoa — all students at Mānoa must take one class with an ‘ethical’ focus and my class fulfills that requirement. This means that in between the monographs we do readings on the concept of ‘responsibility’. The goal of the course is to see how a social-scientific account of the causal mechanisms surrounding disasters in the mining and petroleum industry articulates with moral and ethical approaches to responsibility and blame. In the class I ask questions such as: Who is responsible for industrial disasters? How do bureaucratic organizations diffuse blame and prevent it from sticking to individuals? What sort of responsibility do consumers have for the actions of companies whose products consumers purchase?

As a result I put a series of reading in between the monographs: a philosophy textbook on free will and compatibilism to raise to get students to think about the implications of the fact that we are all caused by external forces, political-philosophical approaches to responsibility (this semester, Iris Young), and other works. The ‘interstitial readings’ also include ‘where are they now pieces’ to keep up with, for instance, current litigation against BP. I also try, whenever possible, to have authors Skype in to talk with students.

Because there is an advanced track to the course there are a series of bonus readings that I assign to ambitious students. Much of the basic course readings come from non-anthropologists (Young, Appiah) or journalists like Juhasz, who write better ethnography than anthropologists do. The advanced reading tends to take students more into specialist readings, such as reading Jackall’s Moral Mazes on bureaucracy at the same time that we read about the Gulf Oil Spill. Mostly, these readings are my time to play a bit and assign more recent articles, or else read some of the theoretical work that informs the thought of Juhasz, Kirsch, or Cepek.

A good class has to be a learning experience for both the teacher and students. It has to show students the problem that professors are passionate about — and haven’t solved yet. At the same time, it has to convey what we do know and what our answers are so far. We have an obligation to teach subjects that are in the public interest, and to show students that focusing on them is interesting. I don’t think that I’ll ever be satisfied with my political anthropology syllabus, but I am happy every time I get a chance to teach the course.

What do you hope Allegra can do that other websites out there can’t or haven’t done? Is it something to do with being a ‘virtual lab’? Or are you focusing on legal anthropology in a unique way? Or…?

Apart from ‘Savage Minds’, there are very few academic blogs that have reached the level of visibility that we aim for with Allegra. Anthropologists, especially in Europe, have been slow to catch up with new technologies and when they have, they haven’t used them as fully as they could.  What we want to do with Allegra is to become a platform for experimenting with content and form: hence the idea of the ‘laboratory’. Because the medium of a blog allows us a certain level of immediacy, it is a great instrument for creating conversations. It is also a fabulous way to share one’s writing experience with others.

As we write this answer, for instance, we are playing with the notion of authorship: behind the screen, four hands and two brains are typing and formulating ideas…this is one example of experiments that Allegra would like to develop in order to also challenge the narcissism that is often plaguing the academia.

I’m struck by the beauty of your website, but to be honest at times I have a little trouble finding my way around in it…. the section labeled ‘stuff’ is the blog? Is that the main feature of the site? Maybe you could just tell me a little bit more about how the site is structured and what its main features are?

Thank you for appreciating our aesthetic effort! Making the website look good has been important to us form the start – mainstream academic forms tend to be dry and exclude people who are not acquainted with the discipline. And since we genuinely love anthropology, we are committed to making it accessible to a wider audience. After all, why should we ‘look ugly’ when what we have to say – that is collectively, as a discipline – is actually ‘sexy’ and relevant to people outside the scholarly world who share an interest in understanding the world and the complex ways in which it functions? Thus this is one of the ‘Allegra mottos’: if we wish to have real societal relevance, we need to find ways to make our ideas attractive!

As for the structure of the website, we have to confess that we are not totally convinced by its current efficacy either. Yet its shortcomings are a testament to its operational logic: Allegra really is an ‘organic’ entity that develops over time. What it is today is far more ambitious and exciting than the ideas that initially set it in motion! So, yes, it has grown out of its original design.

We have attempted to clarify Allegra’s categories in the ‘About’ section. And you are right: ‘Stuff’ is the site of the main blog. We called this section ‘stuff’ because we did not want to restrict ourselves to any particular type of content – and also because it sort of summarizes the general ethos of Allegra: it’s done both ‘dead seriously’ and ‘tongue-in-cheek’. For the time being, ‘Stuff’ has featured fieldnotes, interviews, petitions, general observations and what we have called ‘(Slow) Food for Thought’, i.e. ideas that are not yet fully mature, but that we want to share in the aim of creating conversations. One example is our recent initiative to explore ‘boredom’ .

Overall both ‘Stuff’ and Allegra in general are about experiments with different creative ways to fill the ‘Dead Space’ (our own fancy slogan for which we are contemplating securing copyright!) that exists between ongoing scholarly discussions today, and the eventual scholarly publications that, due to the slow pace of things, will appear in a cool year or two. We feel that there are infinite ways in which we can collectively showcase ongoing work, as well as find fresh entry points into already finished projects. A good example of this is  the ‘Allegra Virtual Museum of Obscure Fieldwork Artefacts’ (AVMoFA) What does AVMoFA exhibit? …Well ‘stuff’ that anthropologists collect on their fieldsites but which are not necessarily ‘exotic’ in the traditional anthropological sense. So far, we have in our collection a UN calendar, a rock, a court case, a hair spray bottle, a plush toy and a leaflet. The purpose of this initiative is both to question assumptions about what anthropological research looks like as well as to highlight some troubling underlying notions about museums in general. We are excited to expand our collection – so send us your artefacts at stuff@allegralaboratory.net!

The other sections of the website (People, Events, Publications, Spaces) are much more straightforward, even though we strive to experiment with form here too. ‘Events’ features reports on conferences and exhibitions, calls for papers and applications. We try to collect and classify this useful information by city (http://allegralaboratory.net/london-calling/) or country (http://allegralaboratory.net/canada-calling-posts-papers/). ‘Publications’ is the home of book reviews, reading lists, bibliographies, classic texts can be found. In all honesty this remains the section of Allegra that is still very much in the process of gathering momentum (but for which grand plans exist), and we hope to be much more active with this section in the time to come. ‘Spaces’ is a more ‘static’ list of blogs, journals, publishers, and academic networks, as is also ‘People’, which is essentially a database of scholars working in the field of legal anthropology or socio-legal studies more broadly.

Who contributes to the site? 

Allegra is both a collaboration of a broader group of contributors (listed in the ‘About’ section) as well as the ‘labor of love’ of its two active moderators, Julie Billaud and Miia Halme-Tuomisaari. Because our initial idea was to trigger discussions within our small academic sub-discipline (legal anthropology), most of our contributors are legal anthropologists or academics involved in socio-legal studies. However, our interests have broadened over time and we now include contributions from other anthropologists too. What all these people have in common is an interest in the features that give the modern social world its unique shape. What we look for in the future is an ever broadening list of contributors (so do send us your contributions…)

How do you find time to write for Allegra when you are balancing other work (I’m always interested in hearing new suggestions for accomplishing this!)?

From the start, it has been very clear to us that Allegra should not be an extra burden but rather a space where we publish pieces, likely in somewhat revised or ‘jazzed up’ versions, that are in the process of being written for other ventures (namely: academic journals and books). That said, We don’t want Allegre to be a site where new primary academic texts make their first – and exclusionary – appearances. Consequently we ask none of our contributors for exclusive publishing rights. Everything on this website can be recycled (as long as authors are properly referenced) and used for other contexts. What matters is the circulation of ideas – and with our Facebook site and Twitter, we are doing our best to facilitate this!

Thus writing for Allegra is also about learning of more interactive way of producing knowledge, by making oneself both vulnerable to comments and critiques as well as open to borrowings and to the cross-fertilization of ideas. And after all, as scholars writing is OUR work anyway!

Yet, another side of finding time borders on passion: we find time, because this is something we really want to do – or even more specifically, because we write of things that we have to write about!

What sort of future work do you plan to do on the site? Where do you want to be a year from now?

We have big plans for Allegra: we are currently planning the 2.0 version of the website. It would be premature to say more at this stage, but we hope that the new website will be easier to navigate.

One of our key goals is to become a resource site for interviews with prominent anthropologists. Recently, we published an interview with Laura Nader  and another one with Tim Ingold  and we want to publish many more in the future! All contributions are welcome! (And for all junior/aspiring scholars: asking for an interview is actually a great way to get in touch with scholars whose work we find inspiring. So let’s not be shy!)

We also aim to produce videos of important talks and conferences. Stay tuned for our first videos, very soon!

Finally, we want Allegra to be part of conversations around the future of academic publishing by providing practical insights into creative ways of writing and disseminating knowledge.

In short, we believe that Allegra should be more than a simple website and could easily become a network of like-minded academic nomads who desperately need a space to continue their work. With the current transformations of the academia , and the precarious state in which young scholars have been left, it has become urgent to find alternative ways to connect and talk to each other and the broader world!

A group of Allegrians will meet in Tallin in August 2014 for the bi-annual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropology and run a panel on ‘boredom’ (which we hope won’t be boring!) which will explore some of the themes that we have discussed online.  Allegra is not only a virtual space: it is a very physical and lively space too!