Peacock’s empirical case is that of the German Max Planck Society, a scientific research organization which comprises more than eighty separate institutes, which are further subdivided into research departments headed by directors. Interestingly, the administrative and technical staff tend to have permanent positions, while the scientists themselves have term contracts and are thus precarious. (Such a labor structure contrasts with the situation at many “neoliberalized” universities, where administrative and service workers are commonly precarious, temporary or outsourced.) Peacock’s study thus focuses on precarity among the scientists, who serve, she remarks, “‘at the pleasure of’ the director” (98). Peacock argues basically that these scientists’ precarity has to be understood not merely as a result of neoliberal economics but as a product of a longstanding German cultural logic of academic “kingship,” which creates a relationship of non-stigmatized and even “potentially desirable” dependence between ruler and ruled (99).

As Peacock usefully documents, this system of cultural values has changed over time. The Max Planck’s keywords are no longer a former era’s “kingship” or “patriotic supremacy,” but “the more contemporarily acceptable values of autonomy and excellence” (101). Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Louis Dumont, Peacock insists that academic dependence always fits into a larger system of cultural values. (No doubt, this retro gesture towards classical anthropological theory is partly why her paper found a home in Hau, whose editors advocate this sort of return to classical anthropology.) Adopting the structuralist view that culture is organized by logical oppositions, Peacock proposes that “dependence” for the subordinated scientists is the cultural corollary of the “autonomy and excellence” embodied by their directors. Institutional autonomy for the top and precarious dependence for the bottom — it has a painfully familiar logic, does it not?

The more richly ethnographic section of the paper shows how a series of three male scientists negotiated their dependent relationships with their director. Peacock particularly emphasizes the force of personal relationships in career outcomes (in a section that echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s observations in Homo Academicus about professors’ power to control their disciples’ time). From this she draws some unexpectedly political conclusions:

“If a position of precarity in the form of temporary employment is equivalent to a social condition of hierarchical dependence, then it can no longer be an epiphenomenon of impersonal neoliberal forces. In fact, it would suggest that the framing hitherto, of precarity as somehow impersonal works in practice to exculpate the specific actors driving its distribution across the world” (113).

In other words, when we talk about “precarity” as a sort of epochal force or “wave” sweeping across the neoliberal academy, this may absolve prominent academics for their own personal involvement in managing and fostering precarious work. “It’s the way things are these days,” one pictures a department chair saying as they hire or fire yet another contract worker. Peacock’s paper thus has the great merit of reminding us of the personalized nature of precarious employment. It reminds us that academic precarity is not coextensive with neoliberalism, since precarious academic work and “kingly” clientelism long predate the post-70s neoliberal moment. And it emphasizes that precarity is not only a moment of abject inferiority, but also a sphere of agency and strategic opportunity — at least for some.

A few questions do come to mind for Peacock, building on the intriguing critical commentaries already published alongside her paper. Given that economic precarity is a highly stratified space, how much is her theory of precarity shaped by her focus on what we might call precarious elites? Surely precarity has a different cultural valence for relatively prestigious mid-career scientists than it does for, say, a temporary secretarial worker in a campus call center. Secondly, what is at stake for Peacock in maintaining a realm of “culture and social relations” as something separate from what she calls “economistic thinking” or “sociological categories”? From the North American perspective these distinctions seem increasingly hard to maintain, but I wondered if disciplinary categories may have different valences in Peacock’s UK context, given the heritage of British social anthropology. Finally, is it altogether fair to see the existing literature on precarity as being so one-sidedly sociologistic or economistic? Or is there something more to be said about the work that treats precarity as a matter of affective flows and existential vulnerabilities? Peacock’s finding that dependence can be desirable would seem, in this light, to raise questions as much existential (or psychoanalytic) as ethnographic in nature.

Neha Vora published an interesting paper last year in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, “Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf States,” which looks at globalized higher education in the Persian Gulf. Framed within a postcolonial theory context, Vora sets out to examine what becomes of “universal” ideas about higher education in the Gulf Arab States, emphasizing that many of these universals obscure their own cultural origins as they spread outside the West through overseas campuses sponsored by Western elite universities. Vora’s paper is thus fundamentally skeptical of critiques of globalized higher education that obscure their own cultural origins, and one of her paper’s great merits is to underline the nationalist limits of higher education scholarship in much of the Global North, particularly in imperial/post-imperial societies. British critiques of higher education are usually deeply focused on Britain; French research on higher education generally focuses on France; and as Vora emphasizes, U.S. research on higher education is largely blind to non-American points of view. Vora cites a convincing example of an American scholar who dismisses an American academic collaboration in Doha “having never been there, seen the universities, nor spoken with the students herself.”

Naturally, Vora’s rejoinder is that we should actually do ethnographic research in the Gulf States, and ascertain what happens to supposedly universal academic values in the process. In the United Arab Emirates, she finds, the implantation of American university campuses has an unexpected benefit for UAE’s foreign residents: it allows younger foreigners to stay in the country to attend college, whereas otherwise their residency would become tenuous (if not impossible) once they enter adulthood. American universities offer new opportunities to foreign residents, in this context, because the UAE’s public universities are only open to citizens (—an intriguing departure in itself from the cosmopolitan European ideal of welcoming foreign students to public universities). The American branch campuses in the UAE, on the other hand, maintained no criteria of nationality in admissinos, and drew on their American academic values in seeking to create “egalitarian spaces” of cultural mixing. Yet ironically, in Vora’s assessment, the egalitarian ideals partly served to magnify the UAE’s racist realities:

However, it was the academy that highlighted for South Asian youth their difference from other groups, for it was in this space that they experienced direct racism and practices of self-entitlement from their peers, often for the first time. My interlocutors told me that what they found most difficult was the behavior of Emirati and other Gulf Arab nationals. In our conversations, they spoke of incidents in which locals (the common term for Gulf citizens) would cut in front of them in the cafeteria line, would expect them to share their notes and even their homework, and would speak in Arabic during mixed Arab/non-Arab social gatherings in ways that made them feel excluded. Ironically, then, it was the supposedly egalitarian platform of the university, and not the segregated environment of their childhoods, that showed South Asian youth the realities of social hierarchies in the UAE. (26)

In a second case study in Qatar, Vora further suggests that “mainstream U.S. feminism” would be unable to account for Qatari women’s critiques of sexism and gender inequalities in their country. Vora observes that while Qatari women citizens demand better state welfare provisions for themselves, they remain silent about the social exclusion of the “noncitizen majority” which makes the Qatari welfare state possible. Vora thus finds that:

The concepts of equality, democracy, and freedom, when applied from a Western academic perspective, fail to account for the particularities through which Qatari women were deploying these terms. In fact, celebrating their grievances against the state and their male compatriots as moments of feminist liberation makes us complicit in the alienation of noncitizen groups and in the power and labor hierarchies within which they live their daily lives. (31)

One might note here that mainstream American feminism has been criticized for its own racial complicities in the American context as well. Thus, universalizing ideals like “equality” are problematic even in their contexts of origin. But as Vora powerfully emphasizes, in debates over transnationalizing U.S. education, often it is the foreign branch campuses that get accused of corrupting academic values, which in turn reveals underlying ethnocentric “assumptions that home university spaces are somehow free from inequality, injustice, colonial forms of power, or profit motivation” (32). Vora reminds us that this sort of splitting is intellectually indefensible, as is the underlying image of the West-as-source-of-academic-values. As Vora concludes, rather than thinking of globalized higher education as “emanating from one place” (that is, “the West”), we do better to study the global university as a “network” in which universal values are constantly getting renegotiated.