It’s upsetting that the quantification of academic life proceeds under the rhetorics of ‘quality assurance’, ‘accountability’ or *shudder* ‘performance maximisation’, but only seems to contribute to the disenchantment of staff and students alike. Indeed: how often can one be truly innovative or radical? How much more likely are we to become double-agents to the disciplines we value: outwardly wearing the guises of originality and strong claims, while forcing ourselves into practices of repetition and reproduction?

Too often are attempts to resist being cornered by neoliberal management reincorporated into new mechanisms for governing academics. Through my own research on the career orientations of Australian academics, I’ve noticed that younger staff members (within the first decade of their career) seem to – more often than not – embrace ‘performance management’ regimes as tools to assess their self-worth and assist in their career planning. There is little sense of ‘resisting’ neoliberal management here: the key is how to ‘game’ the system to achieve the best personal outcome (i.e. publish early and often, align research interests with ‘sexy’ topics, network! network! network!). There’s an attitude of positivity which precludes any attempt to resist, since resistance is career suicide and hence equated with cynicism. Have you experienced similar sentiments?

Thanks for posting this! I’m often the borders between political economy and higher education/research. I haven’t come across the post on “academonomics” before – good read. 🙂

What this meant to me, as an anthropologist, was that many of the cultures we have studied were not, generally, admired for being self-sufficient. Rather, they were deplored for being poor, having ‘low life expectancy’, being illiterate, practicing ani- mist beliefs, polygamy, female circumcision, or in- fanticide. I suppose there were even a few sincere people who worried about them because they stand no chance of contributing to our understanding of astrophysics.

Worse than all the soft causes which draw nega- tive attention on the world stage, however, is the terrible indictment of them within the world of economic development: they were not efficient at producing commodities for world markets. Nor were they rapidly becoming driven by any desire for western consumer goods and even agricultural innovations. In one village, there were people who recalled the first time they had ever seen a donkey cart, and the first bicycles and radios owned in the village were still perceived as a recent event. The acquisition of sim- ple ploughs was very recent indeed, to the point that I found many of these still sitting unused some five years after they had arrived….

…..As I learned more, I became convinced that the Green Revolution may have begun as a sincere ef- fort to improve food supplies, but it had also become a tool of globalization, and of commercial interests. Ultimately, these appeared to be aiming at complete control over food production, on this planet, through creating a world-wide dependence on fertilizers, pes- ticides, and herbicides made from gas and oil. How paranoid it might sound to say all this out loud! I was deeply shaken by this. Had I been mistaken? Was everything I had learned and studied of no real im- portance in the process of understanding and help- ing to improve lives in the poorer countries of the world?

….I did discuss this with one of them, Dr Willem Stoop, an agronomist, and the two of us wrote a paper together that alluded to the damage done to Sahel ecosystems by the increasingly destructive cultivation practices that were occurring there. I wanted no part of ‘development’ that created conditions under which the cultural ecology and economy of the world’s diverse cultures would be forced into conformity within a ‘global village’, part and parcel of the global ‘marketplace’.

…..Why could the future not have hunter-gatherers? Why could the future not have mobile pastoralists? Why was the beautifully orchestrated system of slash and burn horticulture doomed to be thrown in the wastebasket of history? All of these economies had coexisted with substantial wildlife and plenty of forest for thousands of years. Were subsistence economies not better for the web of life on the planet than the hypertrophy of the military industrial complex and ‘modern’ agriculture?

…..As I looked back on my experiences in the West African Sahel and the Kalahari, I was more and more apprehensive about the fate of the hunter-gatherers, of the pastoral Fulani, and of the various subsistence farming peoples I had come to know. There seemed to be forces at work around the world that made the destruction of their original economies inevitable. The rise of huge multinational corporations, and the process of globalization seem to be overwhelming forces that would sweep us all into a future maelstrom of endless shopping…

…. I never did believe that one economic system could be considered more ‘pro- gressive’ than another. There is no scientific support for such a conclusion…
….Moreover, I had never really been comfortable with evolutionary schema that lined up all the economies in order of the ‘stage’ of cultural evolution they repre- sented. It was too much like the pre-Darwinian taxonomies that portrayed the human species as the highest and most ‘advanced’ of all species, as though this were the whole point of the Creation. Such ideas have long been abandoned within the sciences utilizing the evolutionary paradigm, such as biology, palaeontology, physical anthropology and archaeology.

Like all species alive today, all cultures are equally in continuous adaptation to their resource base and opportunities. Calling a culture primitive or modern is a convenient but highly misleading description, as it is too intimate with a way of thinking about cultural evolution that places the industrialized system into the ‘most evolved’ position. I think this is completely false. I found however that it was very hard to interest my socio/cultural colleagues in discussing cultural evolutionary theory; in fact, people no longer seemed to be doing cultural ecology, let alone doing cultural ecology with a view to understanding mechanisms of cultural evolution. The scientific study of cultural evolution had become unfashionable.
Sadly, I realized that much of the earlier progress towards a science of culture was being swept away under a tidal wave of new intellectual fads like Post-Modernism ….there was scant interest in revisiting ideas about cultural evolution to reconvene and reconsider its real path within any given culture.

William Catton, a sociologist, had published a book while I was in Africa. I found this book to be closer to my interests than most of what was being written in the field of social and cultural anthropology during this period. In reading this book, called Over- shoot: the Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, I began to despair over what I saw as the inevitable fate of humanity. This book reinforced what I had learned during my experience with ‘development’. This impression was only deepened by the other alarming trends of the last two decades: the exponential growth of human populations, loss of both land and sea species with habitat destruction and over-harvesting, the fears about climate change, and the general feeling of dismay at the culture of consumerism and competitive materialism that seemed to be taking over the world.”

Meanwhile, my colleagues seemed to be worried about things that seemed to me to be relatively trivial. We need to return to a holistic and balanced study of the human story, with time depth and cross cultural comparisons used to arrive at an understanding of human nature, within the full scope of our biological evolutionary trajectory. But this is not, it seems, a story most of the world wants to hear.