Underskog

Tid og sted: Eilert Sundt-forelesningen 2009: Michael Herzfeld 12. nov. 2009 14:15 – 16:00 , Eilert Sundt building, Auditorium 1
In the present age, national and municipal governments and even international organizations are all complicit in a comprehensive attempt to undermine independent thought and action. In the name of such supposedly benign concepts as democracy and egalitarianism, they cultivate a simplification of knowledge that protects them, in turn, from critical analysis in the public sphere. Within this process, universities risk becoming factories for the production of pre-packaged trivia in place of the critical assessment of knowledge, while the architectural spaces of social life are systematically disemboweled to accommodate the wealthy and the powerful while the masses are exiled and disaggregated so that they become increasingly unable to articulate, still less mount, any form of effective resistance. Most disturbing of all is the common ground uniting these processes. It is a systemic replacement of a practical ethic of accountability by the rhetoric of accounting.

Both the malaise and its potential cure have long genealogies. The malaise is rooted, not only in the pragmatic calculus that sustains the rite of confession in the Christian societies of Europe even at a time of growing disaffection from religion, but also in the long European tradition whereby the bureaucratic management of civic discourse – much like the moral systems of “traditional” societies – has increasingly disguised self-interested practices as “upholding the law.” Such practices, when they are revealed, are usually labeled “corruption” and attributed, by way of justification, to a besetting and irreversible human condition. Such casuistry creates the sense that complaisance with the designs of the powerful is the only possible course of action.

The cure lies in a rethinking of social anthropology’s role, and here too we can turn to genealogy in order to see how that might be achieved. The discipline has a long history of concern with questions of responsibility, from E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of accusation and blame among the Azande and J.K. Campbell’s analysis of Original Sin among the Sarakatsani to Marilyn Strathern’s articulation of “audit culture” in academic and administrative life today. Rooted in the deliberate inconveniences to the self of doing field research, this discipline is a “natural” source of speaking experiential truth to rhetorical power, and especially of resisting the false simplicity and equally false certainty that are the populist mantras of those who wield power to day – of those who would erect “knowledge centers” in place of universities, which they see as “inefficient” in satisfying production quotas and raising overheads; who seek to justify eviction (often conducted by universities!) as urban “improvement”; and who at the same time claim to be protecting “human subjects” with protocols that are clearly intended instead to shield the institutions themselves from legal accountability.

This lecture is thus a preliminary exploration of how a strongly sustained moral engagement by social anthropologists might counter such perversions of responsibility (often carried out in the name of economic or political rationality) and might thus save and reinforce that independent, critical space that we need today more than ever before.

Emneord: Eilert Sundt-forelesning