Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Emma Crewe

It is impossible to do justice to the question of Jonathan Spencer’s influence on my research, in fact on my life. Not only do I have to face the impossibility of this task, but it is embarrassing if I force myself to be truthful. The truth is this: for over 30 years Jonathan has been a reference point on my intellectual compass that has oriented me, guided me and given me the courage to keep researching and writing in a particular way. That particular way—the Jonathan way in my imagination—is about trying hard to avoid clichés and to think for myself.  His work rings in my head like a bell every time I’m tempted to fall back on typologies or systems, or any approaches that strip out of politics everything that makes it exciting.

I first encountered Jonathan properly 30 years ago in 1992 as one of my PhD examiners. I set about answering Jonathan’s difficult questions about Bourdieu and Foucault but then the other examiner starting asking why I didn’t have any tables or matrices in my thesis. I could see Jonathan was getting restless. After various other alarming questions from the other guy, Jonathan starting defending my work and they got into an increasingly heated argument. Eventually Jonathan asked: “Are you even a real anthropologist?” What I hadn’t realized was that the other examiner was already angry because I had quoted him but removed the reference at the last hour, and failed to take his article out of my bibliography. I had to wait for what felt like an hour and a half in the corridor while they had a row. If it wasn’t for Jonathan, I’m sure I would have plentiful amendments inserting tables, typologies, and other dreary pseudo-science. Imagine if the other guy defended my thesis and Jonathan said it was rubbish. I do not think there is any possibility that I would have become academic.

This viva helped me realize you have to rely on your own judgement to form your own ideas, at least in part. At the same time, a wise person chooses their allies carefully and takes guidance from those way ahead of them. Jonathan is an incredible ally.

I still re-read what he has written regularly—his articles and his books, especially Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination (1997) and Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia (2007)—not only to help me think, but because I love the way he writes. In my next life, one day I want to be able to write with that theoretical complexity, without losing sight of the world, without unnecessary jargon and tedious detail, and in a language that pulls you in rather than drives you away. Jonathan weaves theory, biography and story-telling and has so much to tell us about startling emotions, rituals, performances, violence, and history in politics, getting straight to the point rather than shrouding it in obscurity or distracting us with tangents about classification. So, I try to mimic him; or, to be more precise, in my research one of my strategies is to learn from his theoretical strategies, the care with which he writes in a process of awe-inspiring wordcraft, and his loyalty to the hard empirical work of studying the world. I try to avoid blindly following his lines of argument, so I am inspired rather than bound, cult-like, by his ideas.

Jonathan may have no idea that his work and things he has told me over 30 years ring in my head. This sounds somewhat psychotic but honestly it is a nice ringing—it is comforting. When I’m writing, I sometimes ask myself—”What would Jonathan think?” He’s my boredom barometer which I access by trying to imagine his reaction.

I would like to thank him for giving me the license to use my imagination via the boredom barometer but also when I am trying to create narratives, biographies, and theoretical arguments about what is happening in the worlds I research. I might otherwise have thought it was not allowed. As an aside, all this makes me I wonder whether we should find ways to make an even more concerted effort to research the way relationships and influences develop in people’s thoughts as well as in their texts and encounters; don’t we privilege what is easier to observe, read, or hear?

Jonathan also introduced me to Dr Harini Amarasuriya (MP), whose thesis I examined, and the three of us had some conversations during Covid which really helped me get through the pandemic.

I’m glad I was asked to say something about the impact Jonathan has had on my research because this kind of ritual invites one to express thanks in a way that might be strange in a more ordinary interaction. I’m sorry to embarrass him in public with this tribute. But also, I’m not sorry. And that is perhaps his most profound impact on me—to appreciate that contradictions are part of what make us human. And they make research and even living so much more interesting.

Emma Crewe is a Research Professor and Co-Head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London; a Research Supervisor at the University of Hertfordshire; and Deputy Chair of the Study of Parliament Group. She has published ethnographies on the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and most recently the Anthropology of Parliaments. She is Director of the Global Research Network on Parliaments and People, co-ordinating a global coalition of researchers in Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji, India, the UK and the US (with an European Research Council Advanced Grant).

Works Cited

Spencer, Jonathan. 1997. “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(1):1-19.

—.  2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge, U.K.:  Cambridge University Press.