After a while of grizzling about wanting a swankier blog that I can Do More Stuff with, I finally went out and got one.

Click here to visit the new blog - britainologist.co.uk

Click here to subscribe to the new RSS feed

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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? 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

News just in thanks to Anthropology Matters:

Anthropology of Britain legend Nigel Rapport is giving a free talk at the British Museum on his recent book Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work. 

Thursday 20th of January, from 9.30am in the Centre for Anthropology.  Talk begins at 10am. 

If you get to go along, please do report back!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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.  

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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? 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

In the week the Home Office took a break from its usual work of charging like a wounded bull to tweet:

contribute your views to our consultation on how we can best reduce the number of students who come to the UK

(h/t to Anton Vowl)

As it turns out, I'm in an excellent position to give some advice on this.  I'm carrying out research on contemporary Britain; research it would make a lot of sense to do at a British university.  But I'm doing it at The University of Melbourne.  I am, in Home Office terms, a success story. 

Firstly, a few statistics.  In 2008/9 there were 368,970 non-UK students (this includes EU students) studying at UK universities.  Of these, 183,385 were postgraduates.

It's these postgrads (are you listening, Home Office?) that I'm going to focus on.

The postgraduate research and learning community, along with the academic community in general, is a mobile one.  Students and staff will move to follow supervision, interests, specialisations, funding, security, facilities and culture.  (It's these things, rather than proximity to what I'm studying, that make Melbourne a brilliant choice in my case.) 

If the Home Office wants to stop student movement, it's these things that it should look to.  The most effective policy for making sure overseas students don't want to study in the UK is simply to make UK universities unattractive internationally. 

Excellent work has already been done in slashing international scholarships.  Given the vitality of postgraduate research, making admissions dependent on who can pay rather than who has the smarts is a clever step towards reducing the UK's competitiveness. 

More good work is happening to reduce academic job security, and this can be hastened by increasing the move to managerialism.  If the most talented academic staff are driven elsewhere, this will in turn reduce the UK's competitiveness when it comes to supervision and specialisation. 

With the best staff and students instead working away in up-and-coming overseas universities, the UK's competitiveness when it comes to academic culture will be reduced dramatically. 

Those remaining students still mad enough to cling on by this stage should hopefully be cut adrift by attacks on facilties.  Close the libraries.  Get rid of the computers.  Cancel the journal subscriptions.  Kill the services while at it: health, counselling, chaplaincy, careers. 

By this stage, there will be a trickle-down effect to undergraduate students, many of whom will now stay in their home countries or travel to the new crop of big-name universities who will have by this stage leapfrogged UK instititions. 

And the best thing about this whole plan to reduce international competitiveness is that it will finally succeed in converting UK universities into simple sausage factories for future cubicle dwellers. 

Education schmeducation.  The neoliberal dream will have come true! 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

There's been a bit of an anthropological kerfuffle over the American Anthropological Assocation's (AAA) decision to remove a (rather retro) reference to science from it's 'Statement of Purpose'. 

I'm not an AAA member, and it's highly unlikely I ever will be, so I get to look on with bemusement. 

Over at Labour uncut, Kevin Meagher last week had a bash at drawing an analogy between the Lib Dems and the C of E.  Nah.  The Lib Dems are more likely the Methodists of politics. 

But I like this analogy lark, and I reckon anthropology is all a bit Anglican. 

Anthropology, in it's broadest sense, studies people.  About three seconds thought is all it should take to appreciate the nebulousness of this.  Study people?  Which?  Where?  How?  Doing what? 

So anthropology is a big disparate group of scholars affiliated to various universities, professional associations, interest groups and committees all united, however vaguely, by a shared interest in studying people.  (That, and wearing sturdy, comfortable footwear.) 

And like the regular throes of the similarly disparate Anglican Communion over scriptural interpretation, there are regular anthropological throes over how to interpret the idea of studying people. 

Structuralism!  Functionalism!  Structural-functionalism!  Clifford Geertz!  Writing Culture!  "We're not a science!"  "Yes we are!"  Sahlins vs Obeyesekere!  Spats in journals!  Spats in conferences!  Spats in tearooms! 

In anthropology, as in Anglicanism, things can descend to a bicker-a-thon pretty quickly.  Sometimes a good round of combat can help us understand more about who we are and what we want to do.  Other times it can be over something that's just daft as a brush. 

There can be splits, like that between the RAI and the ASA, and there are plenty of interest groups promoting everything from the anthropology of Britain to advocating for gay and lesbian anthropologists. 

Because of how all this to-ing and fro-ing looks to the casual observer, there are periodically fingers pointed by media pundits and sociologists.  Such rumours of demise and announcements of crisis are, in both cases, greatly exaggerated. 

And anyway, the science hardliners could always set up an Ordinariate. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I'm due to give a paper at the ASAANZ annual conference in Roto-Vegas, but, the finances haven't quite come together for me to be able to make it over there.  The paper's called "Margaret Hale, Industrialism, and the Ancestry of Cranks".  It exists in my head; it's about to exist in a series of blog posts.

Mrs Gaskell wasn't the most creative when it came to titles.  Mary Barton (1848) was about, well, Mary Barton.  And in 1854 she figured her new novel would also be named after it's heroine, Margaret Hale. 

The novel was a Pride and Prejudice for the industrial era.  Mr Darcy became the aloof Northern industrialist, John Thornton; and Elizabeth Bennett, dosed with a political conscience, became Margaret. 

Dickens, who did have the knack of a good title, was serialising the novel for his magazine Household Words.  'Margaret Hale' didn't exactly blow him away.  Rename it, he insisted. 

So Pride and Prejudice became Margaret Hale became North and South. 

Dave Russell has argued that how we think about the North of England today had set by about 1840.  That makes North and South an extraordinarily interesting study of the national divide. 

And I freakin' love Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Bennett I grew up with.  She was sharp as tacks, had a way with words.  And when, in my teens, a be-wigged Jennifer Ehle brought her to BBC life, she was set firmly as one of my heroes. 

But Margaret Hale does politics.  She's not afraid to have a go at Thornton over how he treats his workers.  She stands up for what she sees as fair, just and good.  She doesn't always get it right, but she throws herself into it.  (Yes, there's also a Beeb adaptation.)

Mrs G had taken a bit of a bashing for Mary Barton.  Many of her readers (and Manchester industrialist acquaintances) evidently found it pretty scathing.  So in North and South she set out to tell a story in which there could be redemption for the industrialist.  Not that industrialism gets off lightly, but, the book really engages with issues for which there are no easy answers.  Margaret Hale comes up against plenty of ethical and political dilemmas. 

David Harvey has an article about intellectual Marxists, workers' rights, car plants in Oxford and Raymond Williams (The link goes to the pdf.  Neat huh?) in which he argues that some of the issues academics are wont to weigh in on are actually best explored in fiction.  He's probably right. 

And if he is, then Margaret Hale is a useful companion for talking about industrial history, about the development of nineteenth-century socialism, and about the North/South divide.  Which is where she and I will be wandering over the next couple of posts. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Yes, I know, three posts in a single day ... but have you seen the rain out there?  I'm sitting tight, meddling with my blogroll, doing my online housekeeping.

I've been umm-ing and aaah-ing over whether posterous is the best platform for my blog.  I've started using twitter more to post links, and posterous just doesn't integrate it well.  Also, the posterous comments system is not the best: I'd like to be able to let good sorts like Tracey (who I know isn't about to use my comments to try and sell viagra) go through automatically, but I only get an all or nothing choice.  Soooo ... any comments or suggestions about blog hosting very welcome! 

In other housekeeping business, newly added to my blogroll are:

The debate: should Australians tip? (one of my fellow Melbourne PhDers, John Burgess)

Mil's rather brilliant blog 21stCenturyFix (British politics)

Revsimmy's A Tree in the Forest (C of E)

The Big Society Network blog (British politics)

The C of E news feed (yes, it is filed under C of E!)

Cranmer  (Is His Grace politics, is he C of E?  I went for politics)

Enemies of Reason (British politics)

FiLo - The Fieldwork in London Network (socsci)

Nick Pearce's blog over at the Institute for Public Policy Research (British politics)

Platform 10 (British politics)

Political Scrapbook (British politics)

Progress (British politics)

Spectator blogs (British politics)

Whew!  My British politics section now runneth over.  But, as always, I'm happy to take suggestions for blogs/news sources I might like to read. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Big Society is quickly becoming one of the key themes of this blog, which I didn't quite expect when I started it.  I have commented before that I have a general sympathy for the concept, but, as recent posts should have made clear, that doesn't mean I have any qualms about critiquing it. 

Since I've been following the Big Society, I've been excited to see a couple of emerging trends.  The first is the Labour response, for which we should be watching Jon Cruddas and Hazel Blears.  The second is the CofE response, and, following the general synod debate, there has been comment from Bishop Nick Baines and from theologian John Milbank which I'm hoping to address in a future post.  I think it's through these responses, which are simultaneously embracing and critical, that we're going to start seeing the Big Society terrain being really mapped out. 

Anyway, what I want to do in this post is talk a bit more about why, as an anthropologist of Britain, I'm interested in the Big Society. 

In a recent-ish post over at Savage Minds, Chris Kelty gave as his 2nd rule for anthropology bloggers:

Blog about anthropology.  Most of our anthropology brethren break this rule, and blog primarily about what’s in the news.  But who needs an anthropology blog to do that?  If it’s about what’s in the news, but also about what anthropology has to say: much better.

Well, the Big Society is in the news ... and I think anthropology has a lot to say about it. 

My research is around issues of tradition, heritage, nostalgia and rural communities.  I'm chasing the suspicion that the past is back as a viable political narrative.  I think that the Big Society is part of that.  I might be wrong (and proving yourself wrong is a big part of research), but that's where I'm coming from at the moment. 

More generally, there are a lot of questions that "we" (e.g. social scientists, theologians, lefties, progressives, radicals, thinkers and dreamers) should be, and are, asking.  Questions like:

• Who and/or what does the Big Society exclude?
• Will the Big Society replace public sector employment?
• How might the Big Society shape the future? 

I see value in asking these, and many other, questions for two reasons.  Firstly, it's by asking these questions that the Big Society agenda will be wrested from the badlands of Tory re-branding.  Secondly, it's by asking these questions that we can understand a lot more about Britain today ... and where it might be heading in the next decade. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I thought I'd include here a couple of conferences I've come across lately that might be of interest to people working on Britain or around some of the issues discussed on this blog:

The York Deviancy Conference

"Critical Perspectives on Crime, Deviance, Disorder and Social Harm"

The University of York, 29th of June - 1st July 2011

Sites of Citizenship

"interdisciplinary scholarship illuminating the ways in which the ‘spatial turn’ towards site-specific research is informing discussions of citizenship in the arts and humanities"

King's College London, 10th of June 2011

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

A new year began yesterday: the first Sunday of Advent marks the beginning of the liturgical year.  Time and the liturgical year go together in interesting ways, not least because in 52 weeks of 'normal' time the church attempts to pack in the events of a lifetime.  It's actually less than that because the space between Christmas (birth) and Easter (death and resurrection) is only about 4 months.  Easter as well sees a slipping into Hebrew time; and the Northern hemisphere seasonal time inherent in the liturgy plays oddly down in the Southern hemisphere. 

The liturgical year is kind of like temporal boggle.  And it rinses and repeats every year. 

Over lunch I was reading Shirley Williams' autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves.  It's early days yet in the narrative and I was mostly reading about Anthony Eden and the Suez crisis.  But I was quite struck at how many similar political issues there were in the 50s/60s as there are now; the welfare state high among them.  And a central motif for the Labour party then, as now, was the idea of 'listening' to the people.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose. 

Time, or at least how it is conceptualised and understood, is anthropological.  In doing research on 'tradition', I'm often reminded of just how different (and, indeed, multiple) the ways in which we live with time are from the simple ticking of watches and crossing off of dates. 

In Time Maps, Eviatar Zerubavel took on the rather ambitious task of reducing/interpreting many different temporal conceptualisations into graphs.  There are zig-zags and circles and striving arrows, wobbles and collapses.  How we actually think about time, this demonstrates, is not always in alignment with modern emphases on progress and newness. 

It's something I often find quite odd about the value that is placed on the word 'progressive', because many of the things it gets attached to, from politics to Christianity, don't really relate so much to progress' striving arrow.  They're zig-zags and circles and wobbles. 

I've been doing some work for a conference paper on the temporal orientations of early Socialism, and some of those ideas will be appearing on this blog soon-ish. 

Now I'm running out of time to finish this little introductory musing!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Following on from my last post about boundaries and the Big Society, both Mil and Tracey have got some questions which make the whole thing curiouser and curiouser.  (I'm talking about this here at about the same time as the cogs in me 'ead are ticking over, so I hope that I am not about to hideously misrepresent either of them!)

Mil has a great post up about the possibility that the Big Society is designed for exclusion.  It's well worth a read, and not only because he mentions my post in it (thanks chap!).  He rightly asks that, if the Big Society is exclusionary, what are the reasons behind who is in or out?  It's a question Tracey, in her comment to my post, reorients slightly:

"It's not just the 'who', but what aspects of human life/ action can be included." (my emphasis)

In an earlier post, Mil had brought up the spectre of the classic Tory old boys' network, arguing that we can see this in the re-(financial)elitisation (my ridiculous made-up word, not his) of the universities. 

I think this pursuit of Tory vested interests is very much a part of the picture.  That tells us a bit about inclusion.  Not everything, but a bit.  

In her comment, Tracey points out that:

"The 'dangerous' classes result in a lot of work and movement of money to keep people like me in a job"

Maybe this tells us another little bit about why some people/aspects have to be 'out'.  (And I'm hoping that Tracey will come along and put the reference to Bauman on the 'dangerous classes' in the comments.)  We know (thanks, Karl) that the structure of a capitalist economy requires that some people lose (although, of course, when I say "we know", we make a good fist of carrying on as though we don't).  But, Tracey is I think suggesting that something similar has to happen to maintain (what I'm going to call right now) an economy of benevolence like the Big Society. 

Which, to come back to Mil's point, seems to suggest that designing for exclusion must be integral to it. 

I'm conscious that I haven't done Tracey's "what" as well as "who" point justice, but it probably sits very well with Mil's question about the evidence for exclusion.  I've suggested in my comment to his post that if we accept the design for exclusion thesis, then a good place to be evidence hunting might be in the moments where we're being reassured/reminded of the Coalition's "best intentions".  The fragments to be pulled out here will likely help with those "what" and "who" questions. 

I'm sure I will be batting some of these ideas around more later on, but, in the meantime, what do you reckon? 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

I went yesterday to Tracey's PhD confirmation seminar.  She's working in Port Melbourne (a Melbourne suburb) and her big question is "should we call it a community?"

It's a really good question and the 'should', as she discussed, opens up all sorts of questions like: who has the ability to call it a community? 

This got me thinking a lot about the Big Society.  It often seems to me that what Big Society advocates use as examples are things that I would consider small-scale community action.  Should we call it a community, then?  And, what if we call it community? 

Tracey, in her response to a question, mentioned Anthony Cohen's The Symbolic Construction of Community.  Cohen is an absolutely vital anthropologist of Britain and his community theorising is deeply linked to analysis from British fieldwork.  

(Bear with me, this is the bit when it gets more interesting!)

Cohen says, it should be obvious from the book title, that communities are symbolically constructed and, also, bounded.  Symbols are used to unite.  Symbols are also used to exclude. 

So if we call the Big Society community, this raises a very big question about symbolic boundaries.  Who is excluded from the Big Society and how does this happen? 

I don't know about you, but the first thought that jumps out at me is about the IDS welfare reforms.  'Big Society' might be the OED word of the year but I'm increasingly convinced that we cannot understand the Conservative articulation of it unless we read it together with 'workshy'.  So it might be missing the point to press for more examples of what the Big Society is, or isn't.  It might be more worthwhile to ask who it is, or isn't. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The Big Society is a funny old thing.  An absolute cornerstone of the Conservative rebranding, it is also something that, by definition, belongs to everyone (in a very different way to the "we're all in this together ... just some of us are richer than yeouwww" sloganeering). 

This week, the CofE General Synod will be debating the Big Society.  I haven't yet read their discussion paper, though I will be following the debate with interest because I suspect that this will be one of the Big Society's big tests.  As one of the largest volunteer-mobilisers in the country, the CofE could in some sense be seen as a model for the Big Society (and we've seen suggestions of this in the Tory courting of Church favour, e.g. Baroness Warsi's address to the bishops).  So, how will what emerges as the Church's understanding compare to what we know so far of the Tory articulation?  Whose Big Society is it anyway?

We have, of course, other rumblings of Big Society discontent over with the Labour party.  It turned out to be Tessa Jowell getting stuck into a bit of constituency gardening that got a few pairs of red knickers all a-twisted.  In response, Jessica Asato asked "is social action 'unLabour?'", but I couldn't help but wonder whether the question also has to do with who can occupy the Big Society agenda.  Is Tessa Jowell gardening just a bit too Big Society?  Should the Labour response be to articulate their own version or would this be allowing the Tories to frame the debate?  As Nick Pearce puts it, "Will Labour embrace small 'c' conservatism or left communitarianism?"  When Paul Richards suggests that Labour be "seen to be changing things in your neighbourhood, from painting the walls to fixing your bike", might this be a clearer description of the Big Society than the Tories have so far offered?  Whose Big Society is it anyway?

It's been twenty years since the demise of Margaret Thatcher, after a 'harrying of the North' that in many ways illustrated the capacity of marginalised communities to band together; a very different community to the idyllic rurality of the 'new squirearchy' that might undergird David Cameron's Big Society experience.  Whose Big Society is it anyway? 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »