As part of an incoming class of scholars heading into a job market dominated by the increasingly corporatization of academia, which basically manhandle part-time and adjunct work to maximise their teaching on the dollar, I suppose it is good to reflect on my "contribution" to the field.
This question, while significantly vague and ambiguous enough to warrant one's own responses, could be answered in several ways but perhaps generalisable in two ways. The first is, I suppose, obsessed with the question of "impact" - something British academics know all too well about. This is a question about how one's work influences society, at various levels (local, national, international), and could involve questions about economics and questions of how does your work create "change." In many respects, this question forces a certain liberal agenda of "making a difference" in the world and fosters a weird "whtie saviour complex" as if people educated in the western world is going to go out in a missionary fashion and solve the world's problems. This kind of approach has been heavily criticized and various charities, NGOs have been limited in their success. In fact, some scholars have even argued that these organizations have actually done more damage than good in the areas they've sought to "impact."This places an undue pressure on academia and favours certain departments over others. At any rate, this would long turn into a critique of liberal romanticism structured by neoliberal economics. So, what is my "impact" in this line of thought? How does my work contribute to making an "impact" on the world?
The second way to interpret this question of contribution is to think in terms of the specific areas of one's discipline. For me, in answering this question I'll attempt to answer the above because I think they are interrelated. As I mentioned in the post 'on belief' within this series of 'countdown reflections', a strand of anthropological thought aims to get at the underlying structures of a society and/or culture. And in this capacity, I noted the significance of belief in relation to the consideration of social relations, networks, and broader social web that constructs the social structures by which we are not only intermingled between and amongst persons but in relation to institutions (laws, government, banks, hospitals, military etc. etc.). Within this context, I noted the significance of belief that emanates from and between these social relations and social structures. This fits within several of paradigms of thinking about anthropology - functionalist, structuralist, structural-functionalist, and more. However, because belief is poorly understood and the concept is flattened with regard to the evidence received - language, behaviour, etc. - the subtleties within and between persons, social relations, and social structures are often, in my view, overlooked. This does does an injustice to the complexities of persons and undermines our capacities for thought. This is, in some sense, cultural and conceptual violence to persons of various cultures by presuming a flat deterministic ontology. In this regard, understanding 'belief' in a more sophisticated fashion is necessary to understand the richer complexities of social structures.
This line of approach, for me, gets to an even more pressing social and cultural issue which relates to "impact" and my initial fascinations with religion - mentioned in an earlier post. The work I've done on belief, by exploring its various textures, makes a case for implicit biases and contributes another method - albeit related to many current projects - of investigating morality and ethics. This is an important area of research if we are to understand the structural and systemic prejudices, discriminations, and violences committed against persons of color, women, religious denominations, sexualities and working class persons. The implicit biases, as I argue in my thesis, are implicit beliefs. Those which people are not necessarily aware of but contribute to the reproduction of injustice, which construct a particular culture of power. This builds on Foucault's project to critique seemingly neutral institutions. For me, not only do we need to critique neutral, and not-so neutral, institutions (I would also include social movements here as well) but we must also understand their underlying cultures constituted by 'beliefs' that comprise the intersubjective space in social relations and structures that construct the neutral institutions. If these are not addressed properly, their recurrence is always possible if not inevitable. In other words, the impact by which this work aims to develop is to challenge and make evident the cultures of power that reproduce the structural inequities and further developing ways to address them (this is one of the reasons for focusing on the themes of 'crisis' and 'conversion' as points of investigation). Not only is this relevant to local and national contexts (in the issues mentioned above), but they are also relevant to what Keith Hart calls 'World Society' and what David Graeber refers to as a 'Planetary Bureaucracy'.
Thus far, scholars and activists have been very good at making connections in how social structures support one another to reproduce a culture of power that promotes discrimination, criminalization, and marginalization. This is evidenced by the work done on unveiling the systemic and structural biases established against persons of color - from media representations, police brutality, privatized profit driven prisons, the drug war, housing discrimination, immigration, medical, and judicial practices all of which are involved in complicit perpetuation of a biased network of structures; the civil machinery from slavery were not completely corrected/re-calibrated with civil rights. And because the underlying (residual) cultures of these practices are ill-exposed and under-investigated they continue to perpetuate themselves while we distractingly engage in rhetorical and discursive practices. Simply making the connections between institutions and their relationships are no longer sufficient. The implicit biases substantiating moral codes of justification and the cultures of practice/power must be understood and gutted.
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