London (anthropological thoughts)
I’ve been in London twice recently. These are a kind of mind-dump of vague anthropological thoughts.
Firstly having cons back from the plush tree lined street of South Kensington I find coming back to find Central Mancvnia is quite concrete, sterile & alienating (no wonder I’m going nuts all the time - there are no trees or parks - the city has actually just built a large new park at Mayfield near Piccadilly).
In my future anthropological writing technology and industrial society are big themes I want to explore. I want to write about how technology goes wrong and harms us, how technology has unintended consequences and how advanced, stratified, techno-industrial society may not be the best arrangement for humanity.
To reach into the past William Blake the English poet and artist/engraver was a strong critic of the apparent dehumanising effects of industrial society.
“I wander thro each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames doth flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”
London
My High School English teacher introduced me to William Blake by showing us a BBC documentary. It fascinated me to this day,
Blake wrote about the so called “Mind Forg’d Manacles” of social conventions and later in the 20th century the French sociologist and philosopher (who is much loved by anthropologists) Foucault wrote extensively about the seeming or actual ‘carceral’ nature of society with his concept of the panopticon (also written about by Bentham).
At my university anthropology course in the early oughts we studied a module called “Cultural Diversity in a Global Perspective”. This is essentially what anthropology is about. Looking at discrete cultures and understanding the different perspectives of people from different societies.
In a similar way poets often embody radically different world views to the mainstream there are different “world views” or perspectives embodied in different cultures. Often cultural ideas and notions are held so closely that we don’t see them, like the idea of “progress” in the west.
One cultural notion that has rampaged through the western world in the last 40 something years since Reagan and Thatcher is the concept of “audit cultures” which former Cambridge anthropologist , Marilyn Strathern wrote about extensively . Beginning in government departments it spread to business and the private sector. It is about financial discipline (discipline being a good Foucauldian concept) in government departments and organisations initially . A financial idea it gradually expands to general notions of accountability with business and the public sector. Linked to the ideas of right sizing (down sizing), cut backs and austerity. A freeze in public sector spending.
One of the problems with audit cultures is they are “reductive”. For example if you want to do “blue skies” research into an area it becomes impossible because in the grant application you have to pre-state what you are going to find in the terms of what is already known when actually you might be discovering something new that can’t be quantified.
The recent Biden administration in the US is seen as a departure partly from the neo-liberal orthodoxy of audit cultures and bsck to a world of industrial policy (common in the 1970s). The Green New Deal et al.
A final comment was about the interesting ideas of Tim Ingold anthropologist at the university of Aberdeen. He studied the general concept of “line making” which could encompass many things humans do, such as walking paths. At the time I left university in 2007 there was a “Campaign for Drawing”
.