Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Jonathan Spencer

I start with a true story. Thirty years ago, the invitation to deliver the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the LSE seemed to me something of a big deal. After all, Edmund Leach’s first lecture in the series had set a very high bar for impact, as had subsequent lectures by Tambiah, Bloch, Asad, and Parry. It was also a somewhat intimidating prospect. I had attended enough of these events to get the sense that half the fun was to invite some younger anthropologist on the rise, and then sit back and prepare to pick holes in whatever he or she had to offer. Looking out nervously from the stage of the Old Lecture Theatre at the LSE in 1995, I couldn’t get myself to see beyond the inimitable figure of Raymond Firth, sitting dead centre at the front. As the lecture progressed, and no one got up and walked out, I started to relax a little, so much so that I thought I would brave a theatrical pause to take a sip of water. A misjudgement: my hands were shaking, water spilled over the typescript of my lecture, and I watched in horror as the ink-jet characters of my carefully crafted text started to blur and run into one another.

Reading the contributions to this collection, many supposedly inspired by the text I watched drip down the page in 1995, has something of the same dream-like quality. Did I really say that? Did I mean it? It would be absurd not to feel a little pleased by the quality and warmth of the contributions. If one of my points in 1995 was to complain about the lack of interest, or perhaps worse, lack of imagination, that anthropologists had brought to the study of the political in recent years, the contributors to this collection between them have long since consigned that generalization to the dustbin of disciplinary history. I have often thought that the point of teaching in a university is not to create a cohort of faithful followers, eager to do the things you have done yourself, but rather to help create the circumstances which allow a new cohort to do things you couldn’t imagine yourself doing. To take a few examples, I have not studied working-class politics on an English housing estate (though I did once leaflet that estate for the Labour Party), I did not spend months and years studying MPs in their unnatural environment, nor have I tracked the activities of criminal politicians across South Asia, or analyzed the failings of well-meaning peace initiatives in Colombia (and Sri Lanka). Most important of all, I was never brave enough to take my engagement with the political out into the world of actually existing politics as a serious participant: as I write, Harini Amarasuriya’s NPP coalition looks tremblingly close to a real prospect of power in Sri Lanka.

All of the examples cited—Koch, Crewe, Michelutti, Burnyeat, Amarasuriya—have been participants in a set of conversations that now stretch across decades. I first met Kelly as an outstanding undergraduate in a really outstanding cohort in the late 1990s. Harriss and Borneman have done their best to keep me on my toes for decades. I was so excited by Banerjee’s PhD thesis that I used it as an example in my 1995 lecture of what a more imaginative approach to politics might mean: her piece picks up that thread and takes it further and deeper. Chatterjee is a far more recent interlocutor but his capacity for acute reading promises years of thoughtful argument ahead.[1]

My title is , of course, quite literally a steal—from a riposte by the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (1974) to a polemical challenge by E.P. Thompson (1973) in the early 1970s. It is also, as I hope is obvious, tongue in cheek. Correct views are the property only of those who worship the certain, whether that certainty is prefaced by the words “Foucault has argued,” or “my ethnography has shown.” Treating all claims to certainty with suspicion is an argument from that occasion in 1995 that I would still hold to. For that reason I haven’t taken the opportunity to respond point-by-point to my critics and commentators here. Instead I take their contributions as promissory tokens for long conversations still to come.

I do, however, hold to one correct view. My anthropological career has only been possible because of the generosity of the people I lived and worked with in 1980s Sri Lanka. Throughout the years that have followed, I have been sustained by other acts of generosity—the generosity of the people who have shared their worlds with me as an anthropologist, from the low-income settlements of Colombo to the bureaucrat dungeons of British higher education (and many places in between), the generations of students who have constantly delighted and surprised me, the colleagues who have read my half-baked drafts and wearily listened to my recycled jokes, and of course, my family. Generosity is the glue that has held it all together. To those who organized this symposium and the event that preceded it with such skill and care (especially Toby Kelly and Kate Htun), to those who participated, to anyone who has read this far—I can only say thank you.

Jonathan Spencer is an anthropologist, and recovering academic, who has worked in Sri Lanka for over 40 years. Before he joined the University of Edinburgh in 1990, he taught at LSE and Sussex, and before that studied at Edinburgh, Chicago and Oxford.”

Works Cited

Kolakowski, L. 1974. “My Correct Views on Everything.” Socialist Register 11: 1-20.

Thompson, E. P. 1973. “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski.” Socialist Register 10: 1-100.

Notes

[1] Four other friends – Chulani Kodikara, Yael Navaro, Sharika Thiranagama, and Chris Fuller – also offered characteristically warm, and characteristically challenging, contributions at the original event on which this collection is based.