What follows is the text of the presentation I gave as part of the the Reclaiming Anthropology panel during the Anthropology in Aotearoa Symposium held at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on 11 May 2017.
I remember when anthropology first got under my skin
20 years ago now
BA, first year,
Student loan, didn’t care.
I asked my flatmate what I should study.
Endangered Cultures, she said
You’ll either love it or hate it.
She was right.
That course challenged us
to think about structures of power.
Colonialism
racism
gender and class inequalities
right here, at home, as well as out there.
We read John Bodley alongside Donna Awatere
(from her activist phase, not her Act Party days),
became politicised with Haunani-Kay Trask,
and got angry with Ranginui Walker.
Ethnocide, ecocide, genocide,
right here, on this land.
We learnt about the violence of progress and development.
Anthropology got under my skin.
It made me uncomfortable.
Anthropology made me look at this skin.
White skin.
Recognise its privilege
and think about what it means to live in a settler society
benefitting from ongoing processes of colonisation.
For my first anthropology research project
I delved into the insidious history and practice of colonisation
in Ireland, where my ancestors are from,
and Aotearoa, where some of them ended up.
I channeled my outrage into a song and an essay
2000 words, double spaced
in good English
Chicago referencing.
I got an A+.
Later, I learnt the name of the anthropology under my skin:
Anthropology for Liberation.
I eagerly followed Faye Harrison’s work, which asked
how can we decolonise anthropology?
How can anthropology work towards social justice
Emanicipation from racism, gender inequality, class disparaties, poverty, neocolonialism
Liberation of the oppressed and marginalised?
Adding Linda Tuhiwai Smith, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire to the mix,
I wrote to change the world.
2000 words,
double spaced,
Chicago referencing.
This was anthropology to be applied.
I tried to apply it when I was a high school music teacher
where it felt like I spent more time talking to teenage boys about
why it wasn’t okay to call each other faggot,
why it wasn’t okay to make fun of “horis,”
than how to play music.
I wondered what they learnt about ethnicity and race in their classes.
One small ethnographic study of Palmerston North schools later, I learnt that
in one school,
the school I worked at,
students were taught that there are four human races:
Caucasian, Mongolid, Negroid, and Australoid.
They did not learn that biological races don’t exist.
They did not talk about Franz Boas
or race as a social construct.
I wrote an essay calling bullshit
2000 words,
double spaced,
Chicago referencing.
I got an A+.
I gave it to the school.
They were polite
but they weren’t interested.
They weren’t the only ones not interested in my
anthropology for liberation.
Anthropology’s colonial heritage casts a long, cold shadow.
Studying the Other
as if they can be understood,
rendered knowable to the West.
I went to Papua New Guinea for my PhD without reading Margaret Mead
and ran straight into her legacy
in the 1980s ban on anthropologists doing research in Morobe Province,
still remembered,
and in the sharp questions from people I met
who wanted to critique her work.
I went to Tonga to do fieldwork for a report,
an anthropologist hired for her expertise on culture and development.
My first interview didn’t go well.
“So they’ve sent another palagi to tell me about my culture, have they?”
She asked
“What are you going to do with my knoweldge?”
We have been decolonising the arrogant assumptions that animate our practices for a quarter of a century or more;
– that anthropology can produce transformative knowledge
– that anthropology can bring about social change
We’re still working on it.
We need to keep working on it.
Anthropology is still under my skin 20 years later,
a tattoo that grows with me.
Post-PhD and after five years of adjunct work I practice my anthropology
at university,
full-time lecturer
student loan up to here.
Juggling managerial assessments of intellectual value
with teaching,
with service and academic care work,
in an increasingly neoliberal environment.
Last year I applied for promotion
over the bar,
from lecturer to lecturer.
I almost didn’t get it.
Excellent teaching and service, they said,
but not enough publications.
On track for a PBRF ranking of CNE.
Keep doing everything you’re doing, they said, and
write more.
Last year I applied to the Marsden early career fund
for a new research project
on how kid’s lives are transformed through music.
I almost didn’t get it.
“It is understood that the researcher has had two maternity leaves since defending the PhD,” wrote Reviewer 1.
“That would leave approximately three years for publications and other research-related outputs.”
As if I stopped parenting once I returned to work.
As if the work I was returning to wasn’t a series of fixed term,
discontinuous,
part-time,
often teaching-only contracts.
“The publication output of 3 peer-reviewed articles and 1 book chapter is at least half of what it should be,” wrote Reviewer 1.
As if quantity is what counts.
As if the entire scholarly merit of my new project,
being considered for an early career research grant,
should be measured by my publication record.
That independent,
critic-and-conscience-of-society tattoo parlour
that helped etch anthropology under my skin
is now a chain store in the knowledge economy.
Can neoliberalism and decolonisation coexist?
Can we decolonise anthropology
work on projects that genuinely move us further toward
an anthropology for liberation
and be publishing machines?
Can we decolonise anthropology
address issues of poverty, structural violence, discrimination
work in risky situations
in a risk-averse environment?
Can we decolonise anthropology
when our university proposes a policy on Academic Freedom
that would limit us to speaking only in our “field of expertise?”
Can we decolonise anthropology
provide opportunities for our students to work towards social justice,
to translate personal experiences into public concerns,
in classes of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people?
When our university wants to remove the cap on our courses,
increasing student numbers without increasing the number of staff?
Can we decolonise anthropology
show students that anthropological knowledge
can make a difference in the world
is necessary in this world
while meeting university measures for graduate employability?
Last year my colleagues asked me what I wanted to teach.
Decolonising anthropology, I said.
My new course, Anthropology for Liberation, starts next term.
I’ve been thinking about those essays we write,
that we ask our students to write;
2000 words,
double spaced,
in good English,
Chicago referencing style.
That referencing style
makes it easy to cite
peer reviewed academic sources.
That referencing style
does have guidelines for citing
non-peer reviewed sources
but you have to hunt for them.
I’ve been thinking about how I can make space
for different ways of learning, knowing, and being,
for recognising the shoulders of different giants.
What happens if I ask students to write an essay
informed by a politics of decolonisation
called “An indigenous view of Wellington”
that requires them to work with different forms of knowledge?
Knowledge that might not be easy to cite using
Chicago referencing style?
How you do reference a tattoo?
Maybe instead of asking
“how many references do I need?”
students will start questioning what counts as knowledge,
whose knowledge counts,
and where knowledge resides.
My new course has a hundred students already.
I’m looking forward to learning with them
and adding to the anthropology under my skin.
Lorena Gibson 