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When history books about Brexit are written a key question asked will be ‘how did it happen?’ How did a country renowned for stable governments, pragmatism and diplomacy produce a chaotic outcome so harmful to its economic interests and international standing? This article examines the factors that produced Brexit by analysing its political and historical context, the main campaign groups and their communication strategies. Drawing on the work of Verdery (1999), Maskovsky and Bjork-James (2020) and other anthropologists, I suggest we need to look beyond conventional political science concepts and consider Brexit in terms of ‘enchantment’, ‘angry politics’ and ‘technopopulism’. I conclude that while Brexit provides a window for analysing fault lines in contemporary Britain, it also highlights problems in the EU, its austerity politics and democratic deficit.

Patron-clientelism and corruption were traditionally viewed as problems endemic to underdeveloped marginal countries with weak states, powerful self-serving elites, and widespread civic disengagement. However, recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in corruption scandals in the Global North, particularly its more developed banking and financial sectors. Paradoxically, this has occurred despite a massive expansion in auditing by international accountancy firms (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, EY) who often portray themselves as warriors of integrity, transparency, and ethical conduct. How are these trends connected? Drawing on anthropological studies of Mediterranean patron-clientelism, I illustrate how collusive relations between accountancy firms and their clients create ideal conditions for corruption to flourish. Finally, I ask how can these accountancy scandals help us rethink patron-clientelism in an age of “audit culture”?

This is one of the first anthropological studies of Europe post-1989. Fourteen authors examine the social, cultural and political implications of European integration with particular emphasis on changing European identities, concepts of citizenship and levels of participation. Their aim is to set an agenda for future research based on European identity as a new object of study. The book is divided into two parts. The first deals with major theoretical issues that have characterized the anthropological study of Europe and includes a discussion of the usefulness of the Mediterranean as a cultural area. The second section develops these themes further using different theoretical perspectives to explain complex issues such as nationalism, ethnic identities, and sectarian conflicts. Nine case studies cover a wide range of contemporary topics including Irish nationalism, identity and conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and gender, support and child care provision in Spain. This book aims to fill a gap in the literature on European integration and should be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as well as students of sociology, social anthropology, political science, communications and European studies.

The suggestion that ‘Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities’ is generally attributed to the renowned American cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. The integrated BSc Anthropology degree was developed in 2010 by Professors Ann Maclarnon and Garry Marvin, primarily as a response to the existing combined honours degrees in Social Anthropology and Biological Anthropology taught on different campuses. The fear was that without the rigours of a scientific approach, much of anthropology is reduced to journalism and travel writing. The merger builds on the strength of Biological Anthropology’s high RAE2008 results. It also took place in the context of the start of a new ‘A’ level qualification in Anthropology supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Ananta Giri uses anthropology and sociology disciplines as examples of contrived disciplinary territories within a modern academic division of labour.

In this Forum, we ask our contributors to reflect on the entanglements between economy and politics and how they contribute to the ongoing precaritisation in academia, how they shape individual researchers' biographies and how they influence academic research. But more importantly, beyond analysis, this Forum also invites its contributors to reflect on concrete interventions from their respective positions.

New calculative techniques of management and accountancy are having a transformative effect on organisations, individuals and society. These processes are often associated with contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but what exactly is driving the proliferation of these measurement systems and how is this change actually occurring? We address these questions by exploring the history of the Big 4 international accountancy firms and their role in spreading audit culture and the rationalities of financial accountancy. Since the 1990s, the expansion of their remit from traditional auditing to a growing emphasis on consultancy services has increasingly blurred the boundary between their public watchdog role and their commercial interests. Combined with the changing values, career trajectories and ‘habitus’ of audit company professionals, and the weaknesses of self-regulation, this has resulted in problems for ethics and corporate social responsibility. Using ethnographic examples, we examine the metamorphosis that occurs as accountants, originally trained in the disciplines of financial probity, become more entrepreneurially oriented when they ascend to senior positions as company managers and partners. If the calculative practices of accountancy are central to modern forms of audit, we argue they are also transforming accountancy firms themselves into evermore calculative and financialised entities. We conclude by showing how the post-1990s shift from auditing to advisory services leads these companies to tread an ever-finer line between entrepreneurship and fraud.

Corruption narratives, like witchcraft accusations, offer a lens for analyzing social relations, economic interests, and hidden structures of power. Developing this theme, I examine discourses of corruption in the context of growing concerns about fraud prevention and anti-corruption in universities. Moving beyond critiques of university administrations as bureaucratic, self-serving entities whose interests are increasingly antithetical to the academic mission of the university, I ask, What is corruption in academia and how does this assumed problem relate to academic capitalism and the rise of audit culture? The empirical context for my study is the extraordinary increase in institutionalized fraud-prevention programs, particularly those offered by the “Big Four” accountancy firms. Taking as my case study the introduction of a whistle-blower hotline at one Australasian university, I examine the politics and interests behind such schemes. The increasing involvement of accountancy firms in nonauditing work, including anti-corruption services, illustrates how corruption narratives operate as market-making strategies. I examine how commercialization, risk management, and auditing proliferate anti-corruption initiatives and how audit firms collude in the risk and corruption that they claim to ameliorate. I conclude by assessing the implications for the anthropology of corruption of the growing penetration of universities by an increasingly commercially focused tax industry that, some argue, cannot even be trusted to regulate itself.

The spread of the rationality and techniques of financial accounting into new systems for measuring, ranking and auditing performance represents one of the most important and defining features of contemporary governance. Audit procedures are redefining accountability, transparency, and good governance and reshaping the way organisations and individuals have to operate. They also undermine professional autonomy and have unanticipated and dysfunctional consequences. Taking up the concept of ‘audit culture’ as an analytical framework, we examine the origins, spread and rationality driving these new financialized techniques of governance, not least through the work of the ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms, and trace their impact across a number of different fields, from administration and the military to business corporations and universities. Following Strathern’s observation that audit is ‘where the financial and the moral meet’ we ask, what new kinds of ‘ethics of accountability’ does audit produce? We build on the work of Mitchell (1999), Trouillot (2001) and Merry (2011) to identify five ways in which the techniques and logics of financial accountancy have notable ‘audit effects’. These are ‘domaining’, ‘classificatory’, ‘individualising and totalizing’, ‘governance’ and ‘perverse’ effects. We conclude by reflecting on the problems of audit culture and suggest ways to reclaim the professional values and democratic spaces that are being eroded by these new systems of governing by numbers.

In the context of rapid neoliberal reform, both anthropology as a discipline and the social and cultural phenomena it studies are undergoing profound changes. In this article we develop June Nash's concept of “peripheral vision” to show how peripheries, and the politics of “peripheralization”, can illuminate processes of neoliberalization and the implications that this has for anthropological knowledge production. We argue that anthropology is uniquely situated to examine the conceptual blind spots produced by capitalism. By recasting “peripheral vision” as an analytic concept and methodological tool, we show how cultivating our ethnographic sensibilities to identify and hone in on events and processes that lie beyond our immediate field of vision can provide a useful antidote to the seductive fantasies of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, we also suggest how this approach can help counter some of the increasing strictures on knowledge production and narrowing of the research imagination that neoliberal reforms impose.

Quantification and statistics have long served as instruments of governance and state power. However, in recent decades new systems of measurement and rankings have emerged that operate both beyond and below the nation‐state. Using contemporary examples, we explore how international measurements, rankings, risk management and audit are creating new forms of global governmentality. We ask, who – or what – is driving the spread of audit technologies and why have indicators and rankings become a populist project? How should we theorise the rise of measuring, ranking and auditing and their political effects? What are the impacts of these ever‐more pervasive systems on organisational behaviour and professional life?

‘Public diplomacy’ is a term increasingly used among policy makers and academics, yet its meaning is ambiguous and contested. Advocates proclaim it as a new approach to statecraft entailing a participatory approach of shared meaning‐making between politicians and the public markedly different from the elitist, Machiavellian inter‐governmental practices of traditional (‘Westphalian’) diplomacy. The European Union (EU) has embraced these ideals, proclaiming public diplomacy a cornerstone of European external relations policy. We examine these claims in the context of the EU's delegations to Australia and New Zealand. Using three ethnographic case studies, we highlight discrepancies between official discourses on public diplomacy and its practice. The participatory ideals of EU public diplomacy, we argue, are undermined by the EU's preoccupation with image and branding, public relations and marketing techniques, and continuing reliance on traditional ‘backstage’ methods of diplomacy. We conclude by outlining the implications of these paradoxes for both anthropological research and EU external relations.

The three articles published in this Forum section were all finalists for the Graduate Student Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (SAE), which met at the American Anthropological Association’s 2013 meeting in Chicago. While they deal with different parts of Europe (Bulgaria and Romania and Spain, respectively), what unites them is a shared interest in issues of loss, social memory, identity, agency and death, and, in particular, the way people experience temporality and change (see Connerton 1989; Forty and Küchler 1991). The authors brilliantly capture the mood of uncertainty and anxiety facing Europeans in a period of unprecedented uncertainty, insecurity and austerity. What they also show is how Europe’s poor and marginalised are both shaped by and, in turn, try to shape or subvert the national and European policy regimes to which they are subjected.

The growth of ‘third mission’ activities aimed at commercialising universities and creating more entrepreneurial academics is a global phenomenon yet has received scant attention from anthropologists. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that examines the rise of university commercialisation in New Zealand, a country that pioneered many of the reforms associated with neoliberalism. Exploring different sites and spaces of university commercialisation we ask: what impact is commercialisation having on the meaning and mission of the university? Who are the new academic entrepreneurs of the neoliberal university? What does ‘entrepreneurship’ mean in a public university context? Finally, we analyse the challenges and contradictions this is creating for the public university.

Cris Shore is one of the few anthropologists who have been studying “the makings of politics” and has put forward creative bridges connecting anthropology, political science, organisational studies and sociology. Shore is currently Chair of Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), after lecturing at the Goldsmiths College, University of ­London (UK), between 1990 and 2003. Shore’s works include titles such as Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (edited with Susan Wright, Routledge, 1997) and the recent Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (edited with Susan Wright and Davide Pero, Berghahn, 2010), focusing on the cultural uses and meanings of politics in different social contexts, or Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (edited with Dieter Haller, Pluto, 2005). But Europe’s inter-nationalist project has been a strong presence in Shore’s work since The Anthropology of Europe: Identities and Boundaries in Conflict was published in 1994 (edited with Victoria Goddard and Josep Llobera, Berg). Research on European integration policies, namely through the project “Constructing European Identity: EU Civil Servants and Cultural Policy”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), led him to conduct fieldwork in different offices of the European Union’s institutions in Brussels from 1995 to 1997, giving rise to Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge, 2000) and European Union and the Politics of Culture (Bruges Group, 2001). Further research interests include the debates about the meaning of ‘European government’, institutional reforms and UE’s role as a global actor. Along with Marilyn Strathern, Susan Wright and others, Cris Shore was one of the first researchers to approach a most original topic in anthropological studies in the 1990s: audit cultures. Guest editor of a special issue of Anthropology in Action on “Universities and the politics of accountability” (with Don ­Brenneis and Susan Wright, 2005), Shore has done research on university reforms and the economy of knowledge, using ethnographic methods to study the new labour and knowledge production regimes at universities, as well as the notions of person and subjectivity involved in them. General anthropological themes such as the discipline’s methodological and epistemological distinctive features were explored by Shore in works like Anthropology and Cultural Studies (edited with Stephen Nugent, Pluto, 1997) or The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World (edited with Akbar Ahmed, Athlone Press, 1995). Cris Shore is currently engaged in an ethnographic study of universities in New Zealand. This is part of a wider international collaborative project between The University of Auckland, Aarhus University (Denmark), and Bristol University (UK) entitled “University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanization”, which is funded by an EU Marie-Curie IRSES grant and the New Zealand Ministry of Research Science and Technology.

As the rational choice model of “policy” proliferates in “policy studies, ” the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of “policy” as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists’ empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of “state” and “private, ”“local” or “national” and “global, ”“macro” and “micro, ”“top down” and “bottom up, ” and “centralized” and “decentralized” not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.

AT You have worked extensively on EU-related issues. Tell us about your research and principal findings in this area. CS: My first fieldwork in the EU in 1992 explored the European Community's evolving 'cultural policy'. The principal finding was that European policy-makers were actively engaged in inventing new symbols for 'Europeanness' through the ingenious use of EC-funded 'cultural actions'. Although typically denied, this instrumental use of cultural policy as a tool to promote the EU's integrationist agenda bore striking parallels with the strategies and techniques used by national elites in the formation of European nation-states during the 19th century. Marc Ab6l1s (2000) has shrewdly observed that the EU suffers from a paucity of rituals and symbols when compared to Europe's nation-states. However, this lack of symbols underlies a more fundamental problem: the EU's chronic lack of cultural legitimacy and popular consent. Despite enormous advances towards economic and legal integration, there is still little tangible sense of belonging or shared identity among the putative citizens of Europe. I concluded that EU attempts to forge a European identity were primarily motivated by its search for legitimacy and its need to create a European people (or 'demos') without which the EU's political system will continue to be perceived as fundamentally undemocratic. My later research focused on EU civil servants and the 'organizational culture' of the European Commission. My guiding question was whether the EU had succeeded in creating within its own institutional heartlands the kind of 'European identity' and culture espoused in its literature. A secondary aim was to test the hypothesis that once appointed, EU civil servants would undergo a cognitive change and become progressively more 'Europeanist' in their allegiance. As I discovered during fieldwork, the local idiom for this process was the French term engrenage (meaning 'gearing' or 'enmeshing'). I found that national officials had indeed melded traditions to create a uniquely complex institution a veritable 'culture of compromise' as Ab6l6s, Bellier and McDonald have variously portrayed it (Ab6l1s et al. 1993, Ab6l1s & Bellier 1996, McDonald 1996). Just as Jean Monnet predicted, the Commission's institutional structure has functioned as a laboratory for the formation of a new type of European identity and subjectivity. However, I also discovered a more negative dimension to this. Those very qualities that were once encouraged and esteemed in EU officers (Euro-idealism, political connections, flexibility, entrepreneurialism, distance from national public, elitism, sense of 61an etc.) had also given rise to what insiders termed the Commission's 'parallel system of administration', a system based on 'pragmatic codes' with little respect for due process. The consequences of this were clearly evident in the 1999 Committee of Independent Experts' report into allegations of nepotism, fraud and mismanagement in the Commission. These findings invite us to rethink the concept of 'supranationalism' and view integration from a class and materialist perspective. What we are witnessing in the Commission is the transformation of a category into a group with its own self-interests and political identity. The implications of an increasingly unaccountable Brussels-based transnational elite that is transforming itself from a 'class in itself to a class for itself' raises fundamental questions about the future of democracy, citizenship and governance in Europe. MA: From 1989 to 1992, I did field research on the European Parliament. I think this was the first ever anthropological study of the EU, which at that time was still known as the European Community. I undertook the study of a European institution because, as a political anthropologist, I was interested in how politics is conducted at a transnational level. How does it work in this kind of multi

Drawing on a diverse, comparative ethnographic literature, this new volume examines the intimate spaces and cultural practices of those elites who occupy positions of power and authority across a variety of different settings. Using ethnographic case studies from a wide range of geographical areas, including Mexico, Peru, Amazonia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Europe, North America and Africa, the contributors explore the inner worlds of meaning and practice that define and sustain elite identities. They also provide insights into the cultural mechanisms that maintain elite status, and into the complex ways that elite groups relate to, and are embedded within, wider social and historical processes.

La profession d'anthropologue depend particulierement des universites ; or ces institutions, dans tout le monde industrialise, ont subi des re-ajustements majeurs pendant les deux dernieres decennies. L'introduction de mecanismes pour mesurer la performance educative, la qualite de la recherche et l'efficacite institutionnelle a ete centrale a ces reformes. Prenant l'education superieure en Grande Bretagne comme etude de cas, cet article analyse l'histoire et les consequences des efforts du gouvernement pour promouvoir une culture d'audits dans les universites. Il retrace l'origine de l'idee d'audit depuis ses associations originales avec la comptabilite financiere et son expansion dans d'autres domaines, particulierement l'education. Ces nouvelles technologies d'audit sont typiquement definies en termes de qualite, de responsabilite fiscale et d'octroi de droits, comme si elles etaient vraiment emancipatoires et douees du pouvoir de realisation. Nous critiquons ces presomptions en illustrant certains effets negatifs que les pratiques d'audit tels que les Exercices d'Evaluation de Recherche et les Evaluations de Qualite d'Enseignement ont eu sur l'education superieure. Nous suggerons que ces pratiques signalent une nouvelle forme d'intervention gouvernementale coercive et autoritaire. La conclusion de cet article considere les reponses que les anthropologues peuvent donner aux aspects les plus pernicieux de cet agenda inspire du Nouveau Liberalisme, par la pratique d'une reflection politique.

En Grande-Bretagne, un rapport revele une image publique de l'anthropologie plutot negative. Les stereotypes de l'anthropologue excentrique, en rapport avec le colonialisme, demeurent. Ces images ne sont pas seulement dues aux medias mais aussi aux anthropologues eux-memes. Afin d'ameliorer cette perception, les anthropologues se doivent d'elargir leur lectorat, un enseignement pre-universitaire pourrait etre donne, et l'anthropologie popularisee. Une telle demarche permettrait aux etudiants de trouver des emplois en dehors de l'universite et d'affirmer leur identite d'anthropologues au lieu de cacher leur formation