Book review: The Myth of the Great Depression

The Myth of the Great Depression
David Potts (2009)
Scribe Publications; 420 pages.
*****

Years ago, in a high school history class, I got one of those dread assignments to go out and interview a grandparent about WWII at home.  I bottled the attempt at asking, and I was even more loath to be dispatched out to an old folks' home to interview someone there.  But I knew well enough what the interview should include: make do and mend, growing food, news on the wireless, that sort of thing.  So I made the interview transcript up.  (And got an A.)

Having far more ethical scruples now, I would of course never fabricate an interview.  The point of the story is that I got away with it then because I knew the dominant imagery; I might not have had the conversation, but I knew already the narrative I was meant to take from it. 

This is common enough for WWII, and common, too, for the depression of the 30s.  I'll bet most of us could bang out a good bunch of depression images, despite it having happened eighty-odd years ago, and despite never having experienced it.  Shoes worn through, evictions, dole queues, suicides, desperation and despair.

These images have become so dominant, David Potts argues, that they have become a modern myth. 

This is not a dramatically revisionist account that argues that such things never happened and the depression was all sunshine and kittens.  Rather, it's a work of thorough historical craft, informed by around 2,000 interviews.  Potts is an Australian academic, and reading this is like reading a how-to manual for research practice.  Take this example: it is true that during the depression child "malnutrition was widespread and sometimes led to illness and even to death" (26).  Good evidence for the depression as a period of horrendous suffering?  Think again.  In comparison with the 20s, the depression figures are either equivalent or lower. 

This illustrates Potts' key point.  It's easy to pick out a shocking statistic or distressing photograph and claim it as representative.  It makes a compelling political narrative.  It sells papers.  But it doesn't account for typical experience.  In fact, when most of the interviewees referenced a horror story, it turned out to have come from the papers: it wasn't something that had been witnessed or experienced. 

Potts doesn't deny the realities of poverty.  He argues that the depression brought into the national spotlight working class poverty latent through the 20s; it wasn't symptomatic so much as it was being, finally, discussed. 

The blurb promises that the book will "help us reconsider what is most worthwhile in life."  There are plenty of books out there which do the job much more directly (Voluntary Simplicity, or any of The Idler publications, for example), but there is certainly an anti-materialist thread here.  This seems particularly relevant as, after another recession, 'make do and mend' is invoked once again. 

Potts, at pains to present himself as not a political partisan, recounts at one stage a student leaping up in his lecture, berating him for betraying the working class.  In contemporary Britain, a central component of Leftist politics is emphasising the suffering of the poor (this seems almost the current raison d'être of blogs like Left Foot Forward).  The dominance of depression images of suffering suggests that this is a successful strategy.  But maybe it isn't.  In Australia, the depression saw the election of right-wing governments, who held onto power, Potts suggests, because "people found they were doing well enough to want to protect what they had." (335)

Potts' analysis is based on the Australian context.  I have to admit that the depression in Britain is a bit of a blind spot for me.  Do you think his argument might be applicable to Britain, or do you think circumstances there were much different to Australia? 

 

What sort of anthropologist am I?

Writing yesterday's post about how people are gloriously bonkers got me thinking more about what sort of anthropologist I am (and want to be).

Those of you who regularly read this blog (and I adore all three of you) have probably worked out that I'm not exactly a science boffin.  I simply don't conceive of people (and human phenomena) as being ordered, measurable, or even predictable. 

And yet, what does this actually mean for me when I browse the buffet of approaches to the study of people?

I'm a historical anthropologist.  I believe that history is a pretty obvious territory for the study of people.  I'm an anthropologist of Britain.  I believe that Britain is a pretty obvious territory for the study of people. 

But what else am I?  When I study history, and when I study Britain, what are the ideas that I use, the stances I take? 

The truth is, I'm still working it out. 

Back in the days of graduate classes I relished theory and delighted in finding new ideas to shoehorn into relating to not-particularly-relevant things.  If I'd ended up a mediocre Melanesianist I probably wouldn't have departed very much from that great game. 

Nowadays I've not got Benjamin or Althusser or Durkheim or Lacan or even Saint Foucault under my pillow, guiding my thoughts.  Nowadays I am more excited by what Will (on a different post) called "a willingness to spin stories".  Stories like those in Extraordinary Anthropology (which I'll be talking about more in an upcoming post) are valuable not because they advance great big hulking theories, but because they show life in all its messiness and magic. 

So what sort of anthropologist am I?  Well, maybe there is something in James Clifford's recent description of 'the greater humanities'. (And if you're an academic sort who hasn't read that yet, go away and do it now.)  Interpretive.  Realist.  Historical.  Ethico-political.  Yeah, I can see myself fitting in there, not always perfectly, but comfortably.  

Wacky Britain

I was quite taken with Mil's conclusion that modern Britain is wacky. 

Of course, I thought, that's why I'm studying it! 

But where Mil laments Britain's wackiness - the politicking, the internal colonialism - I'm interested in celebrating quite a different wacky Britain. 

In my years as a young player in the study of people, the only solid conclusion I've ever reached is that people are bonkers.

And when I say people, I mean us.  Me.  You.  Bonkers, the glorious lot of us. 

There've been efforts afoot since the Enlightenment to bring people into regimental, predictable line.  What a load of tosh.  I mean, we've been chucking it for hundreds of thousands of years and we still can't work out what to do with our own rubbish; and let's not even start on sexuality.  We're rubbish recruits for any paradise of rationality. 

To some (and probably to some of those still suffering twisted knickers over the AAA's updated statement of purpose) this is A Bad Thing.  They measure and theorise and come up with all manner of grand plans. 

Well, it keeps them off the streets.

It's the innate bonkersness (a technical term; use it in your essays, students) of people that keeps me, as an anthropologist, captured and delighted.  It's what makes me celebrate our diversity, be fascinated by our cultural richness, and want to discover more about us and what we get up to. 

So keep on with your wacky selves, Britain. 

Hello, and we're back

Hello again!

Gosh, it's 2011, innit.

To think that ten years ago I'd chucked university in and gone to stack loo rolls at a supermarket in the very armpit of New Zealand … and now I'm sweltering in a Melbourne summer and doing a PhD on West Yorkshire.

I was going to write a sort of farewell 2010 post (just.like.everyone.else up in your RSS feeds), but I had to leave abruptly for my holiday at home. So I didn't.

I'm not even going to contemplate writing a 2011 predictions post because the rule of thumb seems to be that (unless they come from a C of E blogger and laced with either comedy or tragedy) they are up there with a trip to the dentist.

What I will tell you is that I have uncharacteristically made a new year's resolution. Certain folk have plenty to say about making resolutions achievable and sticking to them.  I figured I'd start small then work up to world domination and/or having Edith Turner to tea later in the decade. So here it is: before this year is out, I will have, for the first time in my life, sat and watched Xanadu.

(That sound starting in the back of your brain is a special gift from Australia: the breathless tones of Olivia Newton-John. It could get physical – physical! - at any moment.)

Now, for those of us who do it proper, today is the last day of Christmas. I'm a sucker for a good carol, and this is the last chance to belt one out. So let's have one, shall we, before normal service resumes again.

 

And the chorus said: no university for the poor

Stanley Fish (him of interpretive communities) has opined in the NY Times that:

the days when a working-class Brit or (in my case) an immigrant’s son can wander into the groves of academe and emerge a political theorist or a Miltonist will recede into history and legend.

(h/t Maggi Dawn)

This is apparently going to happen because tuition fees are on the up.  And evidently this requires that everyone who opposes the increase must now, like Fish, shout from the rooftops: NO MORE POOR PEOPLE AT UNIVERSITY

Michael Shilliday has a post in response to this refrain over at Slugger O'Toole.  He asks:

Is it really that the policy is regressive, discriminatory and inherently unfair? Or are we having an uninformed debate, lead by party political combatants seeking an easy poll pleaser playing on the fears of people they aren’t giving the whole story to?

The thing is, as Shilliday points out, fees are on the up but they're not upfront.  They will be imposed after graduation.  I'm not saying this is perfect.  I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a good idea.  But I'm absolutely with Shilliday that the least helpful thing to be doing right now is going around announcing doom.  Higher fees may certainly put people off, but this effect can only be magnified by making it a media 'truth' that poor people won't go to university anymore. 

There is a rather reductive political tendency (ahem cough cough Labour party) to assume that lack of money is the sole factor in influencing what marginalised people are able to do.  Putting all the focus here misses out the mass of invisible barriers that serve to lock down things like access to university.  These are things like access to childcare, lack of assistance for mature students, and bureaucratic barriers like who can provide a reference.  There are fears of not fitting in, of not having the 'right' academic habits.  It isn't plain sailing once enrolled either: one of the biggest issues the equity advisers I knew battled was how to help students get their study done when their families neither understand nor sympathise. 

To give credit where it is due, many universities do acknowledge these issues and work to address them.  There are, for example, some fantastic learning support programmes out there.  And this is one reason why Fish's comment jars with me: elitism has decreased.  Rose-tinted glasses for the 'working-class Brit ... wander[ing] in the groves of academe' filter out a previous incarnation of the university system that was far more class-biased than it is now. 

Fees have probably trebled.  It's nothing to applaud.  It is something that now needs to be lived with and the agenda of those who supposedly care about disadvantaged students must turn towards supporting their participation rather than reiterating that they simply can't go.  Being poor in Britain is a constant process of being told that you can't.  Change doesn't happen by having more voices say it. 

Freaking out about a ghost story and autoethnography

I am writing a ghost story. 

It isn't a fictional story.  (Well, at least it isn't in that it's for a journal.)  But it is about me and an experience I had a couple of years ago now. 

I got lost in the woods (this was in West Yorks), and it got dark, and I fell over cobbles and tree roots, and I panicked.  I panicked not just because I was lost, but because every ghost story anyone in the area had ever told me (and people told lots) came flooding into my head.  I was absolutely terrified that, at any moment, a spectre would loom up ahead of me.  I really believed, right then, that it could happen. 

But it didn't and I made it home. 

So it isn't really a ghost story, because there isn't really a ghost.  There's just me, lost and panicking in the woods. 

I'm writing about it because I'm interested in the relationship between the supernatural, history and place.  It was that experience which made me think about how those pieces might be connected.  I'm also rather enamoured of the idea of a historical anthropology that looks at how people in the present experience the past, especially the past beyond memory.  (I will periodically talk about that on this blog because, in my PhD, it's What I Do.) 

Problem is, every time I open the file with the half-finished article in it, I bottle it.  Can't write.  Nothing to say.  (I'm in good company since Tracey's got nothing to say either!)

Although it's less about having nothing to say than being uncomfortable with the whole saying it bit. 

At our Ethnography Forum on Friday, we had a speaker on autoethnography (that is, using yourself and your experiences as data).  I get it, and I get that in this article I'm flirting with autoethnography.  And it gives me the jitters. 

It gives me the jitters because I've been trained to study other people, not to study myself.  It's OK to say how my background or attributes might impact on that study (as a woman I'm not likely to get to the heart of a men-only morris dancing group, for example) but not OK to actually be the study.  It seems my internal what-is-anthropology boundaries have been so well constructed (thanks ANTHRO 721 Method & Theory) that it's proving difficult to hop over them. 

I worry too about my 'right' to speak.  After all, I'm not from West Yorkshire, I'm from New Zealand.  Can I say that from my experience I learnt something about West Yorkshire?  Am I claiming more than I should? 

Lastly I have niggles about it only being one story.  I'm only one person; I'm not a pattern or a generalisation.  I'm used to the idea of talking to a bunch of people.  Talking to one - and myelf at that - can I say anything meaningful? 

A nudge and a push

Baarnsley's Michael Dugher has a very good post up at Labour Uncut about nudge theory.  The nudge, based on work in behavioural economics, has been a bit of a Cameron flirtation over the past year or so, and it's most recently popped up in Andrew Lansley's health white paper. 

Summing it up, Dugher writes:

The idea is that people can be enticed, instead of being coerced, into making better decisions.  It is, of course, total nonsense.

I'm definitely with him on the need, sometimes, for state intervention.  But the main thing I don't get about all of this nudging carry-on, is how it's supposed to work alongside current government plans. 

Let me explain.

The nudge, to use the term from the Thaler and Sunstein book which started it all, is based around "choice architecture".  This is quite a precise art of tinkering about with things to encourage people to make more 'rational' (economics apparently finally having discovered that people aren't) choices.  (Note that this buys entirely into the language of choice.)

A quick pop over to the nudge blog gives a few examples: smaller wheelie bins so that people put less rubbish in them; cellphones that beep at you to take them off the charger; opt-out health check-ups.  This stuff is on a minute scale, but it has to be: most of the choices a person has to make during an average week aren't huge.

And this is where I don't get it.  Choice architecture necessitates choice architects.  Plural: tinkering with minute choices is not broad brush-stroke stuff for one bloke in a Whitehall office.  So, who are these people going to be?  And, with the public sector and local government budgets being slashed, who is going to be paying them? 

It's all well and fine to say "we're going to nudge people", but unless parliamentarians and their spies support staff are going to be personally redesigning wheelie bins and laying down speed bumps the "we" who is going to be doing the nudging seems non-existent (as Kath & Kim would say) "at this late stoige". 

So what do you think to the nudge, then?

Margaret Hale meets Morris and Carpenter

This is the second post in a series of blogging the-conference-paper-I'm-not-giving.  For the background, you can read the first post here. 

In North and South, after resigning from the CofE priesthood, Mr Hale takes his family - Mrs Hale, Margaret and servant Dixon - to the growing industrial town of Milton-Northern.  Most commentators read this as Manchester, where, after all, Mrs Gaskell herself lived.  But it doesn't really matter; we're given all the information we need in the name: a mill town in the North.  (And this generic character makes it useful to me for my work on West Yorkshire.) 

Relocating to a grimy, sooty, smelly mill town after the pastoral delights of sweetly southern Helstone proves a shock, to say the least.  Margaret's contrast between idyllic Helstone and gloomy Milton is one of the book's central "North and South" contrasts.  Margaret looks at industrialism and believes that something has gone terribly wrong.  She laments the loss of the rural. 

Such feelings were certainly shared by many.  As British socialism developed over the proceeding half century, one strong strand of thought located the answers to its critique of industrial capitalism in (a certain reckoning of) the rural past. 

Two of the most (to me) fascinating figures in this were Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and William Morris (1834-1896). 

Earlier this year I finally read Sheila Rowbotham's superb biography of Carpenter (quite probably the first middle-aged British man to wear socks with sandals).  He was an amazing figure, not just in his sandals, but in his whole philosophy.  Briefly a CofE priest, Carpenter gave it up, chucked academic life in, and became a socialist and gay rights campaigner who (generally) practiced what he preached.  For a large chunk of his life lived on the rural outskirts of industrial Sheffield growing veg, skinny-dipping and that sort of thing. 

Famed for his Arts and Crafts designs, Morris also advocated a socialism that celebrated crafts over machines and, in his 1890 novel News From Nowhere, envisaged a post-revolutionary agrarianism.  (He kept his clothes on, though I'm not entirely sure where he stood on the socks-with-sandals question.)

In the 19th century, this 'rural past' position maintained a following within socialist circles.  By the 20th, its advocates would be dismissed as 'cranks'.  That's where I'll be heading, Margaret Hale still in tow, in my next post in this series.