lorenz | antropologi.info

In Europe, more than two thirds of all academic anthropologists are living in precarity

Published on February 1, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, University / Academia

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather ressembles those of other underpaid workers like cleaners or delivery or Uber-drivers – especially since universities are no longer run like public institutions but as corporations with managers and PR departments that all compete for being "world leading".

A recently published survey among anthropologists in Europe provides us with neat but disturbing statistics. The survey was carried out online and before Corona, between 18 June 2018 and 22 July 2018.

"Anthropology in Europe is increasingly a precarious profession", we read in the 102 page survey among members of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), an initiative by the PrecAnthro Collective, whose members mobilised since 2016 to raise awareness about the challenges of developing an academic career in anthropology.

Increasing precarious employment conditions is a major issue here:

Much corridor talk at the 2014, 2016 and 2018 EASA conferences, and many informal chats during the online-only 2020 conference were neither about the latest ground-breaking study nor even about the latest careerbreaking scandals, but rather about the lack of career prospects, which ultimately prevents highly skilled scholars from conducting groundbreaking academic work

Permanent contracts are rare, at least until you get tenure as professor in the age of 50 or so if you are lucky. Short term contracts are the norm, instead, often shorter than six months, thus leaving anthropologists in a constant state of insecurity:

Among those who identified ‘employed in academia’ as their primary status, 44.3% had a permanent contract, and only 31.3% were on permanent and full-time contracts. This means that over two thirds of all academic anthropologists in Europe are in some form of precarious employment.

There are huge differences within Europe and – as expected from my site – Germany, one of the most inequal countries in Europe with growing poverty rates, comes out as one of the worst – or worst country to be. While 49.4% of the respoindents in the UK had permanent contracts, in Germany it was only 12.1%. The numbers for women are of course even worse than for men:

While men and women were equally represented among those on fixed-term contracts, women held a higher proportion of very short-term contracts, i.e. under six months. Women were also less likely to be in senior positions (29% of men versus 19% of women).

One consequence is that you constantly need to look for new employment opportunities. Especially early career researchers "spend an excessive amount of time at work applying for jobs". Half of all respondents spent more than one month a year applying for jobs. Less than 10% had not applied for a job in 2018.

Changing jobs means in many cases leaving your country, being constantly on the move:

Among those aged 31–35 years, only one third had not left their countries for work or education (excluding fieldwork), while a quarter had changed countries for work three or more times over the last five years.

In most countries, the salary is generally below avarage. Especially academics in East Central and South East Europe said their incomes "did not meet their needs", and that they were "unable to save or manage unexpected expenses". Among all respondents, only one in four anthropologists had money left at the end of the month.

Less than half of the respondents reported an ability to cover their living expenses solely with the wages from one full-time job. Over one fifth of EASA members also rely on parents and one tenth on family members to support them in making a living.

Temporary teaching fellows or instructors (that are growing in number) were the most vulnerable:

Of these, 68.8% said their income did not cover their needs, 80.7% had no money left at the end of the month, only 6.2% were ‘completely’ in a position to deal with an unexpected expense, and 53.1% were ‘not at all’ able to do so.

Generally, universities do not seem to be a nice place to work in, as also discrimination, harassment, unfair treatment seem to be widespread.

Very worrying: The interests of precarious anthropologists are not sufficiently represented in their academic context:

Precariously employed academics did not join unions because they felt that unions did not represent their interests as the unions were dominated by senior faculty or administrative staff. Insecurity regarding staying in academia or in the country of employment was another reason for not joining.

Membership in unions differs extremly, though. While in Scandinavia most academics are members (Denmark 96% and Finland 84%), the opposite is true for Germany (23%) or Poland and France (4% both).

The situations is probably even grimmer as the report is not representative for whole Europe. Most of the 809 EASA members who completed the questionnaire resided in the West and North of Europe – only 9.7% were residents of East Central and South East Europe.

Susana Narotzky from the University of Barcelona, Spain, sees this underrepresentation as a structural problem within the EASA. In her blog post A History of Precariousness in Spain in the FocaalBlog she writes:

In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought.
Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Exclusion by language is also a issue that Natalia Buier from the Central European University criticizes in her post What sample, whose voice, which Europe? at the FocaalBlog. "The reality of EASA is", she writes, "that for an association that calls itself European it is a surprisingly monolingual one."

Furthermore, middle-class respondents are overrepresented in the survey. The situation of anthropologists with working class background needs more attention.

In Spain a common experience is that of the grinding of working-class lives not only through exclusion, but also through inclusion into academic spaces.

And while the authors of the report seem to imply that working-class students are at risk of being increasingly underrepresented, there is at least one level at which we are likely to see an increase of the presence of working-class students: the doctoral level. (…). In a world of increasing exploitation, (…) the stability of a four-year PhD scholarship of roughly 1000 euros offers many of working-class background the possibility of more stability than most alternatives. (…)

Increased abilities but diminished resources do not change the fact that the professional machine will probably spit out the student of working-class background at the first opportunity: but that cut out point seems to be increasingly moving towards the post-doctoral phase, where the prolonged subsistence on no or below subsistence level income requires resources that are less likely accessible to colleagues of working-class background.

So, what to do? The recommendations in the report are written in diplomatic language and seem tame and weak.

Without touching the root of the problem, the commercialization of academia, little can be done as Don Kalb from the University of Bergen writes in his post Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t at Focaal:

Academia should not be run as McKinsey would like it. Our own discipline nowadays has really no other professional rationale than helping to produce democratic, intelligent, and progressive people and societies, not just “more stuff” – research articles, students, diplomas, scholars – against lowest cost. (…)

Outdated academic structures and hierarchies, as well as actively managed neoliberal ones (Netherlands, UK), will have to change if the continent wants to respond creatively and progressively to the massive transformations that are coming to us. Anthropologists should actively make that case and show that they must be part of the creative dynamism.

>> read the whole report

There is a growing amount of scholarship on academic precarity that I might come back to later. For now check precarity in The Anthropology Newspaper.

SEE ALSO EARLIER ON ANTROPOLOGI.INFO:

Protests at Yale: When Walmart’s management principles run an anthropology department

University reforms – a threat to anthropology?

Minority scholars treated as second class academics: Still a racial bias in anthropology

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather…

Globalisation and climate change in the High Arctic: Fieldwork in Svalbard, the fastest-heating place on earth

Published on January 27, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, ecology nature, globalisation

*Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr*

Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for one year: Too cold, too remote, too boring – these are conventional misconceptions.

But Northern Norway is nothing compared to the fieldsite that anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková has chosen: Svalbard, an island that is located two plane hours north of Tromsø in Northern Norway, halfway on the way to the North Pole. An island that consists 60% of ice, where the sun disappears for more than three months below the horizon and where you always have to be prepared to meet polar bears (and therefore carry a gun).

Nevertheless, after two years of fieldwork, anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková tells in an interesting interview with Radio Prague International: “It will be quite painful to leave” – and – this is about the need to de-exoticize – “It’s just an ordinary town very high up north”.

*Coal mining has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920 – until 2021 at least. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr*

Svalbard and its only town Longyearbyen with 2300 inhabitants (from 50 nations!) is popular among researchers. One reason is that it is a good place to study climate change. It is the fastest-heating place on earth. Since 1971 the average temperature has risen by 4 degrees in summer, and 7 in winter.

Climate change has for a long time been a topic not only for natural sciences, but also the social sciences,including anthropology. One of the first studies “Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions” by Susan Crate and Mark Nuttal was published already 12 years ago.

How do people cope? What changes have they observed? How does it affect their life and and their relation to the environment? These are some of the important questions to ask. As anthropologist, she explains, she is interested in peoples’ stories about these changes, Zdenka Sokolíčková explains in the interview.

We get more details about her findings in two conference presentations she uploaded on her Youtube channel.

One of the many good things with the global pandemic is that we get videos like these ones. Instead of standing in a boring conference room the researcher is taliking utside directly in her fieldsite, the buildings and mountains of her current home town Longyearbyen nicely visible in the background. Due to the pandemic the conference was held online only. (But as she explained

she would anyway not have travelled such long distances for environmental reasons).

As outsider one might be tempted to think that climate change also might be a good thing. This is only partly true, she explains. -20 instead of -35 degrees are easier to adapt to, but the problem are the more unstable weather conditions that have become more common. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice, it becomes more difficult to move around with snow scooters. Even in winter there are sometimes periods with rain or even strong rains. “Our worst nightmare is dark season with rain, you know no sun, rain, dark soil, nothing to do becasue you can’t go outside. This does something to you. You think this is not the place to be”, one of the inhabitants, who has been living there for a long time, told her. “Also when it rains and then frost comes back, the tundra gets hard and icy and that makes grazing for reindeers difficult”, the anthropologist adds. “Seing the starving animals coming to the town is heartbreaking.”

Also interesting: While of course not all inhabitants care for climate change, there is a widely shared notion of the inappropriateness oif human settlement. Living there is unsustainable and has a high ecological footprint – even after the end of coal mining was announced that has been the key industry at Svalbard ever since Norway won sovereignty over the archipelago in 1920. Tourism has become more important instead, which also has a huge negative environmental impact. The impact of the researchers themselves, no small number either, should also not be neglected.

I was surprised to see that Zdenka Sokolíčková is part of the research project Overheating. The three crises of globalisation at the University of Oslo where I took part as journalist. I interviewed several anthropologists who researched climate change. See “We still know too little about the human dimensions of climate change”.

SEE ALSO:

For more anthropology of climate change

“Seen from an anthropological view, humanity is at risk of extinction”

Researching in “non-prestigious areas” in the Artctic North – Robert Paine 1926-2010

Why Siberian nomads cope so well with climate change

Magdalene Fjord, Svalbard. Photo: Ashok Boghani, flickr

Most people can hardly imagine that it is possible to enjoy life up in Northern Norway, in Tromsø for example where I once stayed and studied at the northernmost university in the world for…

Nobody is normal: "The line between healthy and not healthy is drawn more by culture than by nature”

Published on January 27, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, culture traditions, medical anthropology / ethnobothany, Us and Them

Who is crazy? Who is normal? Describing somebody as “not normal” has serious implications for this person, can destroy her life. From an anthropological perspective, there is nothing called normal. What we have are endless ways to lead a more or less meaningful life. Principally, everybody is as crazy as everybody else. The distinction in normal or crazy is artifical – it has to do with culture, history and politics, and is therefore an interesting object of study.

In this sense, anthropologist [Roy Richard Grinker](https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/roy-richard-grinker) has written an important book that was just released: [Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393531640).

In this book he explores the roots of mental illness stigma around the world – and reveals how our prejudices and notions of mental illnesses and ‘normality’ reek of cultural biases that stop many from seeking help.

According to a very interesting [review by Claudia Wallis in Spectrum News](https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/book-review-nobodys-normal-chronicles-the-intertwined-history-of-mental-illness-and-stigma/), Grinker shares Sigmund Freud’s wish that mental illnesses would be viewed “like the common cold, something everyone gets from time to time,” and that people “might eventually feel no shame in seeking psychological care for their problems.”

So why do people in the so-called West, and [increasingly everywhere else as well](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2010/globalisation-of-mental-illness) view mental illnesses differently? And where does the stigma come from?

Grinker traces the stigma back to industrial revolution and capitalism in in late 17th-century Europe, Claudia Wallis writes:

>With industrialization, people with intellectual disabilities, schizophrenia and other serious brain conditions were moved out of their homes and into asylums, along with criminals, debtors and addicts — basically anyone viewed as incapable of being a productive and self-sufficient worker.

> Once institutionalized, people were sorted by their caretakers into categories: “idiotic” and “insane,” “probably curable” and “probably incurable,” and eventually more specific, medicalized terms. The words “normal” and “abnormal” were borrowed from mathematics and statistical averages.

> As new categories of sickness and perceived deviance were added — mania, melancholia, dementia, masturbation (an actual diagnosis!) — the number of people consigned to asylums exploded in England and the United States. “Experts were at a loss to explain the apparent epidemic created by illnesses they themselves had invented and were now counting,” Grinker wryly observes.

In an [interview with Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brainstorm/202101/how-the-stigma-mental-illness-has-evolved-over-time) Grinker provides more details:

> When capitalism took hold, we started to value individual autonomy and productivity for everybody. Before that, we didn’t hold a person responsible for all of their differences and all of their successes and failures

> In the U.S., the hero is the individual. People with disabilities aren’t necessarily always able to be independent. By the very nature of capitalism, the person who depends on others, who lives with others, or who isn’t an efficient worker is considered to be a failure.

As a contrast he provides an example from rural Namibia:

> A man I’ll call Tamzo, who lives in rural Namibia, has what we would call schizophrenia. He walks 20 kilometers to the village once a month to get antipsychotic medicine. The Western doctor there writes down his diagnosis as schizophrenia.

> But at home he is thought to be the victim of a curse that somebody placed on their village that settled randomly on Tamzo. In his family and his village, as long as he is not hearing voices, he’s not considered at all to be sick. Whereas in the clinic, it’s “once labeled, always labeled.”

The anthropologist does not deny the existence of mental illnessess, Virginia Hughes writes in her [review in the New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/books/review/nobodys-normal-mental-illness-roy-richard-grinker.html). But for the past few centuries, Western doctors have been fixated on distinguishing normal from abnormal. And those bright demarcations have made it easier to stigmatize people.

Grinker does not believe that a focus on the precise genes and biological mechanisms behind brain conditions such as autism and schizophrenia will reduce stigma. Neuroscientists hoped this would make mental illness more equivalent to for example heart disease:

> Grinker disagrees. He notes that in some parts of the world a genetic basis becomes even more stigmatizing, as it casts doubt on bloodlines. And he believes that mental illness can never be entirely reduced to biology. As with hypertension, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolemia, obesity and many other conditions, the line between healthy and not healthy is constructed, or, as he puts it, “drawn more by culture than by nature.”

[>> review in Spectrum News](https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/book-review-nobodys-normal-chronicles-the-intertwined-history-of-mental-illness-and-stigma/)

[>> review in New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/books/review/nobodys-normal-mental-illness-roy-richard-grinker.html)

[>> interview in Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brainstorm/202101/how-the-stigma-mental-illness-has-evolved-over-time)

Check also [his website](https://royrichardgrinker.com/), his texts in [Psychology Today](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/nobodys-normal) with titles as [The Racist Origins of the Modern Concept of “Schizophrenia”](https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/nobodys-normal/202008/the-racist-origins-the-modern-concept-schizophrenia) and his Ted Talk:

Nobody's Normal: Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness | Roy Grinker | TEDxFoggyBottom

Reading about his book, I remember a useful concept that the Norwegian researcher [Ivar Morken](https://www.uv.uio.no/isp/english/people/aca/ivarm/index.html) introduced – in Norwegian he called it [“normalitetssentrisme”](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/nyheter/2006/snakk_om_normalitetssentrisme) – in English it might be normalcentrism. He thinks it would be fruitful to talk about nornalcentrism in a similar way as we talk about [ethnocentrism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism).

Mental illness and normalcentrism has been topic before, therefore:

SEE ALSO:

[The globalisation of the Western conception of mental illness](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2010/globalisation-of-mental-illness)

[Ethnography about Deaf People: It is insufficient to understand deaf people as disabled. Most deaf people are proud of their culture](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2006/new_ethnography_the_deaf_people_a_forgot)

[Medicine as power: “Creates new categories of sick people”](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2006/medicine_as_power_creates_new_categories)

[Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/for-a-new-anthropology-of-psychiatry)

[The Anthropology of Suicide](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/the-anthropology-of-suicide-world-suicide-prevention-day)

Who is crazy? Who is normal? Describing somebody as "not normal" has serious implications for this person, can destroy her life. From an anthropological perspective, there is nothing called normal. What we have are endless ways to lead…

Nettet blir stadig mindre – færre oppdateringer om antropologi i mediene på norsk

Published on January 21, 2021 by lorenz Posted in antropologi allment, sosialantropologi i Norge, Sverige og Danmark

Takket være vinterens lockdown i Tyskland (der jeg har bodd siden 2017) har jeg begynt igjen å blogge om antropologi i mediene. Det var mye interessant jeg fant bare ved å sjekke Google Nyhetssøk – men bare på engelsk, det ble åtte nye saker de siste to ukene, se her på [www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/).

Spennende treff i nyhetssøket både på nordiske språk og på tysk ledet meg nesten utelukkende til login-bokser. Bortkastet tid, med andre ord! Trenden jeg skrev om for to år siden har forsterket seg: De allerfleste nordiske nyhetsnettsteder har forsvunnet fra det åpnet nettet, se [I 2019 er blogging ikke like lett som i 2004](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/nyheter/2019/2019-2004-blogging).

Det blir altså ikke mye aktivitet på nor(di)sk, men mer på engelsk. Det blir ikke helt slutt på nordisk, håper jeg. For det finnes jo fortsatt (noen få) nye vitenskaplige publikasjoner på nordisk, og de fleste av dem er jo open access. Regelen min har (hittil) alltid vært at tekster på norsk får omtale på norsk. Vi får se hvordan det går framover, jeg holder på å teste mulighetene og håper at jeg slipper å begynne igjen med min underbetalte frilansvirksomhet som tysklærer…

Call for research: How does digital surveillance change society?

Published on January 19, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, politics, technology, Us and Them

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or [when we switch on our robot vacuum](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-irobot-data-privacy.html) to clean the mess in our flat, we are tracked and analyzed by thousands of companies that would like to sell us something – be it a product or a message ([here you can check trackers in mobile apps](https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/)).

What does this constant surveillance do to us? Is it a threat as activists claim? And can something be done about it? What is the culture, ethos and worldview within these increasingly powerful corporations Google, Facebook and Microsoft that are developing these technologies of surveillance?

In the [recent issue of the journal Anthropology Now](https://anthronow.com/press-watch/what-to-do-with-surveillance-capitalism), anthropologist [Jennifer Huberman](https://cas.umkc.edu/directory/Huberman-Jennifer/) suggests several new areas of research for anthropologists.

New economic developments require detailed ethnographies!

In her article she reviews probably one of the most important recent books: [The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism) – of of those few books that, as she writes, “forces one to radically question the way the world works”:

> Surveillance Capitalism is both an analysis and critique. Zuboff’s main argument is that surveillance capitalism poses an existential threat to democracy and human nature as it subordinates people to ever more pervasive forms of social control and “instrumentarian power.”

> Zuboff does a masterful job laying bare the hidden laws of motion that structure the workings of surveillance capitalism. She has opened our eyes to what many of us perhaps already intuited but didn’t have a technical language to describe.

But her book is a general study, from a bird’s eye view, based on interviews and analyzing documents and texts. What we need now, she writes, are “detailed ethnographic accounts of the way that surveillance capitalism is lived, felt, experienced and, we hope, even resisted by those it seeks to dominate”.

This includes also studies of corporate culture in the Silicon Valley:

> What kind of ethos permeates institutions such as Singularity University or the MIT Media Lab, where according to Zuboff “some of surveillance capitalism’s most valuable capabilities and applications, from data mining to wearable technologies, were invented” (206)?

> To pursue such questions is not just to push the envelope of ethnographic curiosities. It is also to align oneself with a valuable theoretical perspective. For as anthropologists have long demonstrated, the (re)production of power, whether it be elite power or labor power, is very much a matter of culture.

> Even though the machinations of surveillance capitalism seem to suggest a world where people are increasingly subordinated to the workings of algorithms, computer science and big data, at the end of the day, as Zuboff herself emphasizes, what allows surveillance capitalism to achieve such dominance in society is not the technology per se but rather the people who decide toward what ends it should be used.

[>> continue reading her article in Anthropology Now: What to Do with Surveillance Capitalism?](https://anthronow.com/press-watch/what-to-do-with-surveillance-capitalism)

I suppose, she thinks of studies as the one I wrote about two weeks ago:

[Pregnancy and baby apps, smart home devices: Anthropologist shows how surveillance capitalism targets children](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2021/surveillance-capitalism-targets-children)

Personally, I would find following questions also interesting to study:

Why do people continue using products that are spying on them? What keeps people from using privacy friendly alternatives? Jitsi instead of Zoom for example? Linux instead of Windows? Signal instead of Whatsapp? Libre Office instead of Microsoft Word?

The problem with many privacy-friendly alternatives, in my experience, is that they tend to be viewed as “geeky” and not very user-friendly. Here it would be intersting to look at the process of software development itself and the relations between developers and users: [Design anthropology](https://www.mattartz.me/what-is-design-anthropology/) has made lots of products more user-friendly

**SEE ALSO:**

[Anthropologist examines influence of robots in Japan](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/anthropologist_examines_influence_of_rob)

[“Anthropological customer research has become popular for a good reason”](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2004/anthropological_customer_research_has_be)

[Why the head of IT should be an anthropologist](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2008/why_the_head_of_it_should_be_an_anthropo)

[Dissertation – Why kids embrace Facebook and MySpace](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/dissertation_why_kids_embrace_facebook_a)

[Online – New book on the cultural significance of Free Software](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2008/online_new_book_on_the_cultural_signific)

[Why were they doing this work just to give it away for free? Thesis on Ubuntu Linux hackers](https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2007/why_were_they_doing_this_work_just_to_gi)

Not only when we are reading the news, but also when we are on Zoom-conferences, sending messages with Whatsapp, playing silly games on our mobile or when we switch on our robot vacuum to clean the mess in our…