The Sabbatical Report: Fighting friends

A very frank exchange of views: Fighting friends and the making of a productive scholarly culture

 Malinowski is regarded as the father of social anthropology, and he rates among the great thinkers of the 20^th Century (all of whom had complicated Eastern European names).

Malinowski

He is not my research subject, but I cannot ignore him. He was the intellectual son of the Seligmans - they were his benefactors, his mentors, encouragers, and they enabled him to take the first professorial chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He needed a wage and they didn’t.

All relationships of beneficence are fraught:  that was the important lesson of colonialism. and it demonstrates how charity disempowers. Entitlement lives alongside resentment, the desire for independence, to do it alone, and an unwillingness to recognise that someone else – parental figures – are enablers. Anyway, Malinowski’s relationship with his doctoral supervisor Dr Charles Gabriel Seligman (known to everyone as Sligs)  and Brenda Seligman, the woman who had the big bank account, was uniquely angst driven. He lived in their house, eat at their table, and he could be their harshest critic.

Brenda Seligman

It is impossible to ignore the difficult relationship in my research.  Brenda Seligman is my subject, and she was deeply involved with her husband’s students, often writing to them and lunching with them, independent of her husband.  It seems, however, that Malinowski was a character who was at war with many people. He did not forgive. Brenda Seligman may have been pedantic, demanding and fussy, but other people ignored her foibles and saw only her gracious  generosity and hospitality.She was a passionate ethnographer.

The great curiousity of the Seligman-Malinowski relationship is the friendship lasted for life: they never ceased having vigorous intellectual discussions. Three hundred of the letters that passed between them over decades, remain in the archives. Some are terse, accusatory, defensive, but the debates were sustained and always fought to conclusion.  Some of the most important theoretical and practice issues developing in anthropology, were thrashed out.   

They Seligmans were at the centre of a cluster of colleagues – male and female - many were originally in supervisory relationships that continued when they were in the field to continue their life’s work or returned to teach. The professorial chairs in anthropology throughout the world were closely connected: Meyer Fortes was in Cambridge, E.E. Pritchard went to Oxford, and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was at Sydney for a while and worked at one point with Daisy Bates, later went to Birmingham. Their letters criss-crossed the world, copied and sent on. It was a small discipline, heroic and adventurous, and they were interested in each other’s work.

Seligman was a genial, humble and affable man, and his country home in Oxford was the venue for the hospitality that oiled so much of the anthropological network. Years after their important field work in the Sudan the Seligmans still travelled the world lunching with friends and buying antiquities that were left to the V&A and the British Museum. They kept their friends, and even ornery Malinowski did not slip the net. 

 

How does this collegial culture endure?

Sligs

Which brings me to the point. The culture of anthropology as a discipline is still intense and collegial. It is cohesive in its diversity and its controversies. At the LSE every Friday a traditional seminar is attended by post grads and academics. If you are late there is only room to sit on the floor of the Seligman library. The speakers are well prepared because it’s a hot session – a full hour of presentation and an hour of gruelling, no holds  barred, no offence taken, questions and debate. Post graduate and academic engagement is high and intense. Streams of social contact and discussion continue at other sites. particularly on Friday. They know the language, the in jokes, of the ancient theoretical wars with Cambridge.

Such intellectual and scholarly enclaves are rare in the early 21^st Century, mostly because of political correctness, complex victimologies, the fears and protectiveness of vulnerable egos. Scholarship is eroded by sensitivity and a lack of resilience. How did anthropology achieve this culture? How did this ancient school carve out sacred time to devote to thinking, reflection and scholarly development, the collegiality extending to the next generation?

I think the answer is in the word culture. A scholarly culture has developed in this small school in which the values of enquiry are more deeply entrenched than passing prejudices.  Trends destabilise academic work, and rob it of time, rob it of consistency and shared goals. Enduring work of intellectual merit is not created in think tanks of ill-informed conscripts.

In the last week I’ve heard people make odd remarks about this word culture such as the old furphy: “Australia hasn’t got much culture.” And: “Our executive is developing some ideas for a work culture that we will roll out to the organisation next year.”

History should not be confused with culture, and culture cannot be created like a commodity. However, without some shared history, it’s hard to develop culture. And where a good organisational culture does exist, it’s like gold because it is productive. The word culture explains itself from its various applications: it is an environment conducive to nurture and development. 

The enemies of productive scholarly culture are the same as those that interfere with culturing any kind of growth: haste, instability, the lack of time and space. I can add to this the lack of a will to separate the personal from the professional, and the damage done by fuelling competition between colleagues. 

 

Sustaining the micro cultures within the institution

I want to make just one more point. The scholarly enclave I have been observing is a micro culture – it has to exist within a bureaucratic institution that is like any other in its priorities. This gives me reason to hope. So often we feel powerless at the institutional level. We sometimes fail to see the power resident in the micro relationships, the shared histories, interests and ambitions that bubble away regardless of institutional trends and priorities. 

 I do not belong to this culture at the LSE because I am a commuter, and I don’t speak their language. But I do belong to a micro culture where my language, my work, strange as it may be, is understood – the unseen academy.  I think it is in the micro cultures that we find the power to nurture one another, endure and do good work.

 If I take anything away from my Sabbatical- apart from thousands of digital images to be analysed - it will be a greater commitment to my scholarly fellow travellers, and a determination to culture what we already share. It is the best legacy we can leave for the next generation.