Festschrift for Jonathan Spencer

Insa Koch

I first encountered Jonathan Spencer’s work in my second year as an undergraduate student in Anthropology and Law at the London School of Economics. Having been made to read the “classics” of early and mid-twentieth century political anthropology, I remember the relief I felt when coming across Jonathan’s Malinowski lecture, published with the title: “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination” (Spencer 1997), in which he declared that political anthropology was the “subdiscipline that died of boredom” (5). Without wanting to be disrespectful towards the “classics” (or at least, so I believe), Jonathan articulated what I suspect many of us first encountering the field of political anthropology felt.

But Jonathan’s motivation in “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination” was not simply to reject the dominant canons in the field but to find a way forward. In it, he set out a map for “the study of post-colonial politics,” one that would abandon the “excess of certainty” that had marked previous scholarship by replacing it with an “anthropology of actually existing politics” and all the uncertainties that come with such an intellectual endeavor. Here, I would like to offer some reflections on how this call inspired me to analyze contemporary Britain as a case of post-colonial politics in and, perhaps also beyond, the way imagined by Jonathan. First, however, this necessitates a short explanation of my own research.

A Brief Excursion to a British Council Estate

After finishing my undergraduate degree at the LSE, I enrolled on a PhD programme at the University of Oxford (reading the “classics” had not deterred me from anthropology, it turned out!). Against the advice of my teachers at the time, I decided not to go to “a faraway place.” As a Korean German who was raised in Germany, I was fascinated by my host country’s own political turn. This was the mid-2000s and the New Labour government’s “tough on crime” policies were at their height, focused on Britain’s impoverished urban housing projects known as “council estates.” I wanted to understand how “law and order” policies, such as Anti-Social Behavior Orders (more commonly known as ASBOs) were enforced, experienced, and acted upon by individuals in these communities.

My research took me to a housing project in the south-east of England that I call Park End (Koch 2018), a place that was to become a second home. Like many other estates in the country, it was built in the post-war decades as housing for its Fordist working classes. Since the 1980s, however, the estate has been deeply affected by industrial decline, neoliberal dispossessions, and, since 2010, austerity politics and public sector cuts. From the very beginning, Park End was also home to migrants from the Caribbean, the so-called “Windrush generation”—named after the ship that transported some of the Caribbean workers to the U.K.—often facing bitter racism and discrimination in the country that had called for their labor. Today, there is also a large contingent of migrants from other countries, including Eastern Europe, who work in manufacturing and the retail sector (although the number of economically inactive people is also relatively high at nearly thirty per cent).

It was in this racially mixed, working-class neighborhood that I first arrived in 2009, initially as a volunteer at a local community centre that housed a credit union. Following an initial two-year period of fieldwork, during which I lived with various families and individuals, I have frequently returned for extended stays. Through my involvement in many community activities focused on the credit union and an informal advice centre, I grew close to a range of people on the estate, and soon enough, became privy to people’s views of what they called “the system” (state and state-like institutions). People talked to me about how they felt let down by the government, of how “the system” was failing them, of how much their community had suffered through decades of state neglect, and how, notwithstanding these affronts, they did their best, often against the odds, to keep going and to raise their children.

And yet, none of these narratives of struggle featured in the official representations, conveyed to me by outside professionals, the media, and politicians. On the contrary, I soon became used to the deeply pathologizing, often gendered and racially coded narratives that were imposed onto residents. Park End mothers found that their engagements with the benefit system marked them out as “welfare cheats” and “scroungers.”  Men were often called “anti-authority”: young men, especially those racialized as non-white, were demonized as “criminals” and “gang members” by the police, whereas older often white men on the estate had the outside reputation of being “vigilantes.”  Finally, when Brexit happened, Park End residents, the majority of whom had voted in favor of leaving the EU, were attacked as bigoted, ignorant and racist in the local media.

Towards an Anthropology of “Actually Existing Politics”

My early research on Park End generated a key question for me: how, under conditions of entrenched inequalities, dispossession, and racial capitalism, can we make sense of state-citizen relations? It seemed to me that two key paradigms characterized the main sociological and anthropological literature at the time: on the one hand, there were those who, inspired by the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu, saw people’s behavior through a lens of symbolic violence. Here, people’s views of, and relations to, actors more powerful than themselves were read through a lens of false consciousness, structural violence, and capital. Alternatively, Foucauldian approaches tended to make sense of individual’s relations in terms of internalized disciplinary control, often seeing this as a murky reworking of individualizing neoliberal logics.

Despite important differences between the two perspectives, they shared a key trope:  both Bordieuan and Foucauldian approaches reduced people’s own sense of the “political” and their engagements with (or withdrawal from) it, to the workings of wider power dynamics. In this process, little space was left for capturing people’s own agency including the possibility of recognizing people’s views on, and engagements with, power as a form of alternative class consciousness. I decided to go back to the anthropology of politics, revisiting Jonathan’s Malinowski lecture. Upon rereading the article, as well as his monograph on the state (Spencer 2007), it seemed to me that Jonathan’s call for an “actually existing politics,” one which, endeavors “to gaze wide-eyed at whatever happened to be designated political in our own and other people’s lives” (1997, 15) was not only a forceful rebuttal of anthropological “classics” but a way of productively engaging with, and moving beyond, the limits in the sociological literature on class, politics, and power in the U.K.

In the book that I subsequently wrote about my first long-term fieldwork in Park End (Koch 2018), Jonathan’s call provided the inspiration for my analytical framing. The concept of “personalizing the state,” which I put forward in the book, seeks to capture how people bring their own understandings of personhood and care to their understanding of the state and state-like institutions. I show how this gives rise to distinct expressions of state-citizen relations, as people appropriate more powerful institutions, agents, and dominant frameworks in a variety of ways, sometimes by avoiding them, sometimes by utilizing them in the pursuit of their own relations and interests, and sometimes by replacing them with their own structures of informal governance. And I argue that much of what has been designated as “apathetic,” “corrupt” or “criminal” behavior can be reconstructed not as an expression of pathos but as examples of vernacular readings of, and engagements with, the state under conditions of sustained class fragmentation.

Pushing the Conversation with “Post-Colonialism and the Political Imagination”

Over the years, I have revisited Jonathan’s call for the study of a “post-colonial politics” on a number of occasions(e.g. Koch 2017). This has also given me the opportunity to think about fruitful ways in which we might want to extend Jonathan’s original call, considering disciplinary and political developments. For one, and perhaps most obviously, it seems to me that we need extend the call for a “post-colonial” politics to the post-colonial “metropole” itself. Jonathan himself suggests that his approach can be applied to politics anywhere; yet his article does not take this point to its logical conclusion. Colonial histories have always linked the metropole to the colonies, making Britain (as much as any other Euro-American site) key ethnographic sites for the study of post-colonial politics.

Second, it seems to me that we ought to extend Jonathan’s call beyond the narrow confines of anthropological debate. As mentioned, Jonathan’s grudge in the article relates to the “classics” of political anthropology, the ones that make you “die of boredom.” Yet, at a time when the language of “empirical research” is no longer confined to the narrow world of professional anthropology but has been appropriated by other academic disciplines, governments and technocrats, and business consultants, I believe that we have a real duty to communicate to broader audiences what the search for an “actually existing politics” can look like. In my own research, I have felt this duty when seeing how law enforcement invokes the language of “evidence-led” policing as a justificatory shorthand to claim that they are implementing value-neutral and “scientific” theories of policing.

Finally, pushing for the study of a post-colonial politics means to ask how the call for an “actually existing politics” involves our commitment not just to “observing” but to “doing” politics. From this perspective, the biggest problem with the anthropological classics is perhaps less that they are “boring”, as Jonathan said, suffering as they do from an “excess of certainty,” but that they wholeheartedly failed to acknowledge the political nature of their own work. At a time when calls for decolonization run strong, when it is ever more difficult to keep up any pretence that we do “neutral” research in light of the discipline’s fraught politics of representation, and when inequalities in the world are rampant, the quest for a postcolonial study of politics also raises the question of who gets to produce knowledge and with what effects.

In my own research, I have consciously blurred the boundary between doing ethnography and becoming involved as an advocate and activist. But more so, on many occasions, I also had to recognize when it is not my place to “speak,” whether that is because there are others much better placed to speak or because words can also produce much harm.  My hope then is that the study of post-colonial politics will never itself become guilty of the charge of “excessive certainty” that Jonathan directed toward his predecessors, instead finding ways of pluralizing debates, democratizing access to knowledge productions, and making political interventions based on our engagement with the lives of the people who feature in our writing.

Insa Koch is Professor of British Cultures at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. Trained as an anthropologist and a lawyer, she researches questions of class, inequality, the law, and race in Britain. She is currently writing a book for OUP on Britain’s discovery of “modern slavery” and drugs trafficking against the backdrop of unacknowledged legacies of empire and transatlantic slavery.

Works Cited

Koch, Insa 2017. “When Politicians Fail: Zombie Democracy and the Anthropology of Actually Existing Politics.” The Sociological Review 65(1):105–20.

Koch, Insa. 2018. Personalizing the State: Law, Politics and Social Welfare in Austerity Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Adia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.