Feigning the market: Funding anthropology in England (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Impending changes to the funding of tertiary education in England (and, less directly, throughout the United Kingdom) pose particular challenges to small disciplines, like anthropology. From the perspective of students, potentially facing thirty years repaying educational debt, the new dispensation looks like ‘marketization’, with degrees conceived as private goods to be paid for at a rate that covers the costs of their provision. From the perspective of the universities, however, the same changes come with new layers of obligation, audit, assessment and regulation. The mismatch between students’ expectations and universities’ capacities is only likely to widen. These changes in undergraduate funding will take place concurrently with a reduction in all the other streams of government funding on which anthropology departments rely for the research of their staff and research students. Career paths in anthropology, involving progression through undergraduate and taught postgraduate studies, to postgraduate research and eventually a position in the academy, will become prohibitively expensive for all but a very few students. Departments of anthropology will be forced (by the logic of the new system and by their own universities) into exploiting their sources of comparative advantage; but the UK discipline as a whole will be the likely casualty of such behaviour if an already slender institutional presence is eroded further.     

Citations out of place (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Mary Douglas wrote that she derived the phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ from Lord Chesterfield, but the authorship of something close to this phrase was more likely Lord Palmerston's, and it arose in the context of policy concerns over urban sewage and rural fertilizer. The phrase was picked up immediately, made more abstract, and applied in a variety of contexts that drew together moral judgements with considerations of hygiene. Hence the phrase had a complex authorship and usage that had already prepared it for the uses to which Douglas would put it, and its history shows how the aphoristic formulation of a widely held notion can provoke thought by, in twenty‐first century terms, going viral.     

IMMORTALITY YET? Or,the permanence of Mary Douglas

There is no absolute measure for the lasting impact of work by anthropologists. However, the scholarship of Mary Douglas has achieved wide‐ranging interdisciplinary recognition. Here the author considers ways in which her work has impacted scholarship.