Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class

Abstract

Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the postmodern turn of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has come to displace any working-class elements in what pass for mainstream left political parties. Reflexivity, and what I call vulgar Foucauldianism, while dressed up as activism, seem instead to represent above all the consciousness of this class. In its place, the essay proposes a politics combining support for social movements and a prefigurative politics in the academic sphere.