Critique of Anthropology

http://coa.sagepub.com

The New Internal Colonialism

Susan M. DiGiacomo
Critique of Anthropology 1997; 17; 91
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X9701700106
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/91

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Critique of Anthropology can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://coa.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations http://coa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/17/1/91

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

The New Internal Colonialism

Susan M. DiGiacomo

Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts

Abstract Anthropologys claims not only to special insight into systems of struc▪
tural inequality, but a special mandate to expose and condemn them, become
problematic in light of the disciplines studied inattention to the emergence of
a large and growing underclass of underemployed and marginal professionals
within its own ranks. Corporate outsourcing, downsizing and union-busting have
analogues in the exploitative hiring practices of the academy, where they are
mystified by appeals to departmental and institutional loyalty, and the need to
maintain course coverage and student enrollment figures. There is evidence that
serious attempts to bring this issue to the attention of the discipline at large are
unwelcome; two cases, one involving the author, are described and analyzed. It
is argued that a professional ethics worthy of the name cannot be limited to the
study and representation of ethnographic Others, but must be conceptualized
broadly enough to encompass our dealings with our colleagues.
▪ censorship ▪ discrimination ▪ elitism ▪ hiring practices ▪ professional
Keywords
ethics ▪reserve army of labor ▪ tenure

In the 11 years since I received my PhD in anthropology, Ive taught in as

many different institutions of higher learning. In 1994-5, I replaced a fulltime faculty member at a four-year liberal arts college where I earned a real
academic salary, and enjoyed benefits that were also real, if limited to the
term of my nine-month contract. My colleagues were welcoming and interested in my work, and the office staff were unusually considerate and
helpful. In short, I felt more real here than at most of the other places
where Ive held temporary positions.
At the end of the spring semester, the college gave a little reception for
faculty and staff involved in the effort to develop an urban studies curriculum. The students in my urban anthropology course had done a field
research project of which the office of community relations was aware, as
were members of the History and American Studies faculties whom I invited
to share their expertise and local knowledge with my class, but my name
was somehow omitted from the guest list. My graduate assistant, who
worked in the colleges community service program, casually mentioned
that he was on his way to the reception, assuming Id been invited, too.
Seeing my puzzled look, he reacted quickly, and gallantly offered to
accompany me there.
At the reception I met a stylish and urbane young woman faculty

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

92

member in the art history department who taught courses on architecture

and urbanism. Oh, yes, she had heard of my course. The interdisciplinary
urban studies program was off to a good start, and I might be called upon
to repeat my course in the future. The college would, she hoped, be able
to develop a closer relationship with the adjuncts.
Of course, she hadnt meant to be condescending, only encouraging,
and it would have been inappropriate for me to get angry. I recount this
tale of a moment of humiliation not for what it reveals about me, but for
what it reveals about how academics think now; specifically, some academics
who enjoy the relative security and permanence of tenured or tenure-track
positions. For the young art historian, the adjuncts constitute a naturally
occurring and morally unproblematic social category, its members available
to be called upon as institutional need dictates.
Anyone who enjoys even a passing acquaintance with Marxian theory and this accounts for a fair proportion of anthropologists - should have no
difficulty in recognizing social conditions strongly reminiscent of the early
years of the Industrial Revolution. The adjuncts are the reserve army of
(academic) labor, and institutions of higher education behave no differently towards this category of surplus labor power than do the capitalist
institutions of industrial society. But colleges and universities - and anthropologists as a profession - claim a higher moral standard than the market
considerations that motivate corporate life. Part of anthropologys moral
charter is a special responsibility toward the dispossessed and disenfranchised
but only, apparently, when they are ethnographic Others. Our
collective soul-searching over the question of whether anthropology is
inherently imperialist or racist has been uncoupled from legitimate concerns about structures of inequality and peripheralization within our own
institutions and profession.
Shortly after the urban studies reception, as I prepared to mark my
ballot for the annual elections of the American Anthropological Association, I read the candidates short bios and personal statements in the April
1995 issue of the Anthropology Newsletter. What caught my attention particularly were the statements of the candidates - all of them - for both slates of
the Committee on Ethics. If these eight statements can be understood as
being in some sense representative of the profession, then ethical issues
arise only in relation to studying and representing Others. I am not trying
to minimize the importance of bringing ethical considerations to bear on
questions of intellectual property rights, trafficking in antiquities, new and
intrusive technologies, biodiversity, or human (and animal) rights. But it is
worth noting that in only one of these statements is labor relations mentioned at all, and then only in connection with matters of concern to
archaeologists, which suggests that the candidate is thinking primarily of
the hiring practices through which local labor is contracted to do the heavy
...

digging.

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

93

Since the reserve army of labor - not only in the academy, but everywhere - is heavily feminized, we might expect the candidates for the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology to be especially sensitive
to this issue. Their statements show them to be deeply concerned - as they
should be - about sexual harassment, prejudice based on race or sexual
orientation, and the difficulties of balancing child care with professional
responsibilities. However, regarding hiring practices that create within
departments of anthropology a class of invisible, marginal, underemployed
and semi-affiliated professionals, the candidates statements are silent. Joan
Cassell (1995: 43) has recently argued that caste is a more appropriate
term than class, and I am inclined to agree with her.
The predicament of part-time faculty is hardly an isolated case. It is part
of a much larger social process that also includes corporate downsizing and
union-busting, trends that index the collapse of the post-Second World War
social contract (see Kapstein, 1996 for a detailed analysis of the current
crisis in the post-industrial economies of the world). In short, what were
once understood to be broadly shared concerns about social equity are now
being recast as individual problems, and the academy is no ivory tower insulated from these forces.
Graduate student teaching assistants at Yale University have been trying
to gain the right to bargain collectively with the administration since 1990,
when they found themselves suddenly faced with a significant reduction in
sources of funding and a new set of restrictive and punitive rules including
a provision that cut off library privileges, health benefits (for which, in any
case, graduate teaching assistants must pay, unlike other campus employees who work more than 20 hours per week), and the right to register for
credits after the sixth year. In December 1995, the Graduate Employees and
Students Association called for a grade strike. The response of a member
of the Yale history faculty, David Brion Davis (who teaches a course entitled
The Origins, Significance, and Abolition of New World Slavery), is typical:
I consider this action outrageous, irresponsible to the students ... and
totally disloyal (quoted in Eakin, 1996: 54). The appeal to institutional
loyalty and to the sacrosanct notion that teaching is inviolable serves to
mystify an exploitatively paternalistic system, just as departmental needs to
maintain course coverage and student enrollment figures are invoked not
only to justify the hiring of adjuncts on a per-course basis, but to obscure
the fact that the labor of fully qualified professionals is being valued at one
quarter of what their tenure-track colleagues are being paid for the same
number of teaching hours.
In March 1996, The New York Times devoted an ethnographically detailed
week-long series of articles to corporate lay-offs, which have been fetishized
as the tonic that will magically restore corporate health. Corporate employees whose colleagues have been deselected, displaced, discontinued,
Inonretained or severed experience something like survivor guilt and
(

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

94

rage at the arbitrary injustice of it all. Curiously, I sense no such anger in

the academy or in the professional associations to which I belong. The profession needs to recognize that ethics is also a matter of how we treat our
colleagues. The claim that anthropology not only achieves special insight
into systems of structural inequality, but has a special mandate to analyze
and expose them (and condemn them, to judge by several recent resolutions approved by the AAA membership) rings hollow indeed when
tenured faculty continue to accept what Donald Unger ( 1995: 117) has aptly
termed academic apartheid.
There are indications that serious attempts to bring this issue to the
attention of the discipline at large will be met with incomprehension and

obfuscation, if not with outright contempt. According to its own statement

of mission, the Anthropology Newsletter, published monthly during the academic year and supported by the dues of all American Anthropological
Association members, claims to advance the discipline and foster the use
of anthropological knowledge in addressing human problems through,
among other things, discussions of issues of vital importance to the discipline. However, attempts to stimulate discussion in the pages of the Newsletter on the production of professional marginality within the discipline have
been attenuated or silenced by the editor and editorial board on two
occasions of which I have personal knowledge; there may be others.
Joan Cassells case (documented in Cassell, 1995) is most instructive,
suggesting as it does that privileged anthropologists, much like privileged
people everywhere, avoid scrutinizing too closely a system from which they
benefit. In 1992, the Anthropology Newsletter did, in fact, publish her essay
Confessions of a Marginal Anthropologist: Class and Caste in Anthropology, revealing that despite a long and productive scholarly career, she
had never had a paid job in anthropology, but - to the authors surprise on
seeing the published version of her manuscript- minus its subtitle, and with
Anthropologist changed to Woman. When she received some 58 letters
in response, all detailing experiences similar to or worse than her own,
Cassell devised a Questionnaire for Invisible or Marginal Anthropologists
that would, she was assured, be published in the special issue of the Newsletter prepared for the Associations annual meeting. Again, an unpleasant
surprise: not only was publication of the questionnaire delayed until after
the annual meeting, but its title was changed to AAA Survey of Underemployed and Unemployed Anthropologists, its subheadings altered, and
the entire document mendaciously presented as a response devised by the
American Anthropological Association to the resolution passed the previous year in support of
unemployed or underemployed anthropologists
(Cassell, 1995: 44).
My own case is of interest here as well. In June 1995, following my
experiences with the college urban studies reception and the roster of
candidates for office in the Association, I submitted to the Anthropology

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

95

Newsletter an earlier version of this essay, focusing on the connection

between professional ethics (a topic frequently explored in the pages of the
Newsletter through anonymous and/or hypothetical cases) and professional
hiring practices. By late August, I had not yet received so much as an
acknowledgement, so I telephoned the Newsletter editor. She suggested
cutting down my 2,000-word manuscript to letter-to-the-editor length (that
is, not more than 500 words) to give it greater impact. When I declined
to do so, I was told that the soonest publication date in the Commentary
section would be sometime in the spring. Fine, I said, Ill be happy to wait.
January came and went, and in early February I sent an email message
inquiring about my manuscript. After two weeks without a reply, I tried
again. After two more weeks of silence, I wrote to the editor by certified
mail, pointing out that it is, after all, in the nature of newsletters to publish
timely material in a timely fashion, and requesting a clear statement of her
intentions with respect to my manuscript. My answer came by email.
Attempting to shift editorial responsibility to me by suggesting that the
delay could have been avoided if I had cooperated with her recommendation to publish a much-abbreviated version of my commentary in letter
form, the editor went on to say that my manuscript was still in the active
category and would be considered for publication once an opening was
found. (The May 1996 issue - the last one of the year - was published, predictably, without my Commentary.) The implicit claim here is nothing less
than astonishing: that editors do not plan publications, but simply wait for
openings to be found. The honesty of a simple letter of rejection and
return of my manuscript would have been preferable to this clumsy attempt

passive censorship.
Taking up the matter with the president of the American Anthropological Association, to whom I sent copies of all the relevant correspondence, resulted only in a brief note stating agreement with the most recent
recommendations of the editor (indefinite waiting for my manuscript to
be considered) and thanking me, with breathtaking condescension, for
my interest in the American Anthropological Association and Anthropology
Nezusletter (which, I should point out, comes at the cost of $75 - soon to be
raised to $100 - per year in membership dues).
The 1993 Society for Applied Anthropology annual meetings included
a panel on Elitism and Discrimination within Anthropology. Hans Baer,
the co-organizer and chair, had become interested in the problem of elitism
within the discipline through his own experience of the stigmatizing effects
of earning a PhD at a non-elite institution (the University of Utah) and
teaching at another (the University of Arkansas), and Joan Cassells 1992
Commentary provided a catalyst for the panel. Noting the increasingly corporate-style structure of the American Anthropological Association, Baer
suggested (1995: 43) that it was time anthropologists conducted research
on our own associations, conferences, pecking orders, departments, and
at

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

96

mythology, as well as on the colleges and universities within which many,

but by no means all, of us work. Estellie Smith, who never minces words,
did not hesitate to identify (1995: 53) the essence of the problem: core and
periphery in anthropology, a clear allusion to Michael Hechters by-now
classic work, Internal Colonialism ( 975). Why, she asks ( 1995: 54), do we
appear incapable of addressing the issue [of the existence and persistence
of an academic underclass] given that this seems to be a prohlem in applied
anthropology, not unlike those we say we have the expertise to address?
Laura Nader, responding to the participants, saw fit to suggest that professional marginalization might be a blessing in disguise because anthropologists who have no place in academia, by force or by choice [are we to
believe that it doesnt matter which?], are actively engaged with phenomena that they cannot treat as spectacle or performance or sum up as discourse (Nader, 1995: 53). From her highly privileged position as a tenured
professor in one of the premier departments of anthropology, she is, in
effect, using her marginal colleagues as a stick with which to beat those of
her privileged colleagues - Geertz, Marcus and Fisher, anyone who uses
words like subaltern or cites Foucault and other European intellectuals
- whose ethnographic style she dislikes enough to condemn as mere trendiness or, what is worse, mystification and forms of intimidation and flight
from the concrete life of the people they purport to study (Nader,
1995: 53). This approach trivializes entirely reasonable questions concerning the invidious distinction between theoretical and applied work as a
mechanism for the creation of intellectual elites (Singer, 1995: 46).
The response of another member of the audience

to

this

same

SfAA

panel was particularly telling: I dont understand why you all sit here and
whine. Why dont you just go out and get a job? (quoted in Johnston,
1995: 48). If that doesnt sound familiar, perhaps youre not paying sufficient attention to the rhetoric emanating from Capitol Hill lately. Just say
no to teenage pregnancy; just get off welfare and find a job; just stay on
your side of the border where you belong and dont expect hardworking
American taxpayers to feed, house, clothe, educate and heal you.
I would prefer to believe that anthropologists are not really Republican
wolves dressed up in multiculturalist sheeps clothing. The problem of
unequal relations of power within our discipline in particular, and within
the academy in general, is as compelling and as refractory as it is in some
ethnographic elsewhere, and equally in need of serious ethical scrutiny
and analysis.

References
Baer, Hans A. (1995) Commentary: Elitism and Discrimination Within Anthro-

pology, Practicing Anthropology 17(1-2): 42-3.

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008

97

Cassell, Joan (1992) Confessions of a Marginal Woman: Caste and Class in Anthro33(3): 32, 21.
pology, Anthropology Newsletter
Cassell, Joan (1995) Caste and Class in Anthropology, Practicing Anthropology
17(1-2): 43-4.
Eakin, Emily (1996) Walking the Line, Lingua Franca March-April: 52-60.
Hechter, Michael (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
Development, 1536-1966. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Johnston, Barbara (1995) Notes and Reflections on Life in the Margins, Practicing
Anthropology 17(1-2): 46-8.
Kapstein, Ethan B. (1996) Workers and the World Economy, Foreign Affairs
May-June: 16-37.
Nader, Laura (1995) Grumblings about Elitism in Anthropology, Practicing Anthropology 17(1-2): 52-3.
Singer, Merrill (1995) Reflections on Elitism in American Anthropology, Practicing Anthropology 17 (1-2): 44-6.
Smith, M. Estellie (1995) Core and Periphery in Anthropology, Practicing Anthro17(1-2): 53-5.
pology
Unger, Donald N.S. (1995) Academic Apartheid: The Predicament of Part-time
Faculty, Thought and Action 11(1): 117-20.
Susan M. DiGiacomo is an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology,
of Massachusetts. She has conducted research in Catalonia (Spain) on
nationalism and language planning, and on cancer epidemiology and cancer treatment ; and in the United States on the long-term experience of cancer survivors.
Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
MA 01003, USA. [email:susan@anthro.umass.edu]
▪

University

Downloaded from http://coa.sagepub.com by Marc Morell on November 18, 2008