An anthropologist in parallel structure
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2458
The essay examines the parallels between Molé Liston’s studies on labor and precarity in Italy and the United States’ anthropology job market. Probing the way economic shift reshaped the field of anthropology of Europe in the late 2000s, the piece explores how the neoliberalization of the American academy increased the value in studying the hardships and daily lives of non-western populations in Europe.
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2239-625X
2458
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Noelle Molé Liston
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An anthropologist in parallel structure
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
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Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016-08-13
2016-08-06
2016-08-13
71-74
1
Noelle Molé Liston
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2458
71
New York University, United States
2239-625X
1
en
74
An anthropologist in parallel structure
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                                                       2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90




                                                                                                      FORUM




Student-led demonstration, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, February 4, 2015. Overpass Light Brigade, Joe Brusky
photographer. Source: overpasslightbrigade.org/love-light-for-uw-fight-the-cuts/.



Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Cris SHORE & Susan WRIGHT, Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, Sarah GREEN, Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA
& Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ, Tracey HEATHERINGTON, Dimitris DALAKOGLOU, Noelle MOLÉ
LISTON, Susana NAROTZKY, Jaro STACUL, Meredith WELCH-DEVINE, Jon P. MITCHELL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2437
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                 71




An anthropologist in parallel structure
Noelle MOLÉ LISTON
New York University


ABSTRACT: The essay examines the parallels between Molé Liston’s studies on labor and precarity in
Italy and the United States’ anthropology job market. Probing the way economic shift reshaped the
field of anthropology of Europe in the late 2000s, the piece explores how the neoliberalization of
the American academy increased the value in studying the hardships and daily lives of non-western
populations in Europe.



   Anthropologists often wonder how the kind of research they pursue reflects their
own deeper and, predictably, their culturally and historically particular anxieties and
aspirations. When, back in 2003, I began studying psychological workplace harassment
in Italy, known as mobbing (il mobbing), I often attributed my fascination with corpo-
rate culture to my deep desire to remain external to it. I would joke that the cubicles,
computers, glass tables, and half-hearted picture-frame-and-mug adorned workstations
were just as exotic as the highly exoticized subjects of classic anthropology: fishing
boats and huts, shell currencies, coming-of-age rituals, and tribal leaders. I would also
grinningly add that I wished to remain just as much as an outsider to modern office life
as earlier anthropologists were to small-scale tribal societies. But, of course, the joke
was a simplification, perhaps even a fantasy. Just as early 20 th century anthropologists
were embedded in the same imperial capitalist economics that made non-western
others appear foreign, so too was I, an aspiring American academic, embedded in the
same neoliberal economic transformation and precarity that I had argued underpinned
the rise of mobbing in Italy. In fact, as graduate student examining the growing number
of semi-permanent contracts, I was myself indexed as a member of Italy’s precariously
employed and regularly offered what one offered to sympathetic collaborators in Italy at
the time: promises of semi-permanent contracts.
   As part of an academic writing workshop at Rutgers University, a fellowship I held
as I completed my dissertation, a colleague recommended I apply for a position at the
Princeton Writing Program. She, much like my kind collaborators in Italy, engaged in
this increasingly commonplace trade in semi-permanent contracts. And the information
alone was an extremely valuable part of this new currency, especially as multi-year
post-doctoral positions for anthropology were rare and far more desirable than one-year
or adjunct positions. The five-year position at Princeton University appeared ideal: full-
time Lecturers teach two 12-student courses per semester. The writing seminar would


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72                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


be designed by the instructor, shaped by one’s academic interests, infused with a rigo-
rous writing curriculum, and handsomely scaffolded through faculty development. I
taught seminars such as Health and Illness in Cultural Context and Culture and the Body
so my courses provided an intellectually and professionally satisfying way to introduce
undergraduates to anthropology.
    I began at Princeton in 2007 and, soon, the Great Recession of 2008 would domina-
te discourse surrounding open academic positions in anthropology. At the time, I was
polishing my argument that mobbing became a way social actors navigated a massive
economic and occupational structural shift in Italy: the new mobbing industry of cli-
nics, diagnoses, and programs harnessed public attention to something more tangible
and localized than Italy’s vast and diffuse neoliberal transformation (Molé 2012). Du-
ring the global recession, I noticed that my colleagues and mentors rarely spoke of the
American academy’s structural transformation. Instead many, especially admired elders
in the field, imagined the anthropology tenure-track job market as only temporarily sty-
mied and still overwhelmingly merit-based. Over the years I accumulated my own job
market scars, I found this narrative increasingly problematic and erroneous. The myth
of temporary scarcity has been a resistant neoliberal trope, especially when tenure lines
have been replaced with non-tenure and semi-permanent or part-time positions,
amounting to upwards of a 40 percent loss in full-time and tenure track positions (Ken-
dzior 2014). While I wrote my manuscript on mobbing, I argued that mobbing emer-
ged, in part, because of a two-tier workplace, split between lifelong workers, who held
airtight protected contracts, and precarious workers, who held an array of newly legali-
zed semi-permanent contracts. In the field of anthropology in the late 2000s, a similar
split became increasingly pronounced between tenured and tenure-aspiring academics.
With it we saw a steep ratcheting up of academic credentials one needed to jump tiers
and theories verging on the conspiratorial on how to do so. By 2009, I found myself ha-
phazardly valued by top-ranked anthropology departments, simultaneously planning
campus visits and going entirely unnoticed, and that was with a book contract and seve-
ral journal publications.
    I also witnessed a very particular kind of anthropological baggage re-emerge: as
neoliberalism reshaped the qualities of tenure-track anthropologists, we saw a renewed
valuation of research on non-western people and places. Anthropology of Europe had
blossomed slowly in the 1980s, became a serious subfield in the 1990s, but by the
2000s, I would argue, anthropology has experienced a reinvigoration of orientalism.
    . The valued work became less about Europeans than about those who could be in-
dexed as “others” in Europe, and Europe was almost never the desired geographic re-
gion for new positions. In the United States, one could argue that anthropologists spe-
cializing in Europe never enjoyed top visibility and desirability in the discipline. But
this trend was more nuanced. We might see it as the continuation of early exotification
in the anthropology of Europe in which scholars replicated studies of non-western


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                            73


areas of interest: ritual and magic, patriarchal lineage, kinship, pastoral practice and
land cultivation. We might also wonder whether this shift was in tandem with what Joel
Robbins (2013) has famously called the “suffering slot” problem, that is, replacing our
discipline’s fixation with the non-western “exotic” other with the suffering other and the
humanitarian gaze. It follows that it became more academically desirable to study
trafficking and immigration of non-European subjects to and within Europe, than it was
to study, say, the plight of underemployed Italians. I can attest, at least anecdotally, that
many tenure-line success stories and prominent book contracts followed this trend. I
have also had mentors, themselves experts in the field of anthropology of Europe, sug-
gest that my only job survival strategy would be to shift my research focus from Italians
to foreign nationals living – or, preferably, struggling – in Italy. But why would the cor -
poratization of the university reshape the anthropology of Europe in this way?
    As a discipline, we take seriously that the hegemonic notion of “the market” shapes
the production of knowledge. What we might call the imagined currency of research
topics – especially since aspiring young academics regularly speculated on the wants of
the anthropology market – is its understudied feature.
     As new PhDs became embedded within precarious and ever-tightening labor struc-
tures, many of them refashioned their own research “brands” accordingly. The discipli-
ne also seems to stubbornly validate and laud fieldwork that is difficult, physically or
psychologically. While Robbins’ suffering slot theory implies emotionally taxing labor
by the ethnographer, we are also seeing the imperial relics in the self-aggrandizing he-
roism of challenging non-western and non-urban fieldwork, which also tends to be hi-
storically masculinized. Indeed the common jokes when I discussed my research in Ita-
ly were either mock curiosity, “Italians actually work?” or the highly sarcastic: “Field-
work in Italy must have been really tough”. Both reveal this persistent privileging of
bodily or mentally taxing fieldwork, which would not only imply non-European fieldsi-
tes or harsh-living sites within Europe, but also count them as more rigorous, more va-
lid, and somehow more authentically ethnographic. We might also link this shift to-
wards the new realities of austerity in academe as departments seek to populate intro-
ductory courses with traditional anthropological topics and geographic areas.
    Along these lines, the act of staying in writing programs, and as a full-time non-
tenure track faculty member, has allowed me an unforeseen advantage in intellectual
self-determination. I began as a Senior Lecturer at the New York University’s Exposi-
tory Writing Program in 2012 after my five-year position at Princeton ended and I was
tiring of near-misses pursuing tenure stream positions. Structurally speaking, conti-
nuing contract full-time faculty members, as we are called, are judged less on research
than on teaching for promotion and reappointment. With the relief of having a conti-
nuing full-time academic position, I was able to make decisions about my research wi-
thout trying to position my scholarship to fit some kind of imagined market desirability
for anthropology. In the past four years I have developed a project on scientific skepti-
cism in the context of theatrical and mediatized politics in Italy. I am interested in how

                                             2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
74                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


the Berlusconian age of partial and fabricated truths shape how Italians trust and distru-
st scientific knowledge. To what extent do social actors embrace science when, cultural-
ly speaking, truths seem more fabricated than factual? The project covers Italian scien-
tific activists who protest magic and superstition and the famous “trial against science”
(processo alla scienza) in L’Aquila, which held Risk Commission members accountable
for earthquake victims’ deaths after they issued public safety reassurances. In the futu-
re, we might begin to more deliberately track how anthropological research diverges
along the two tiers within the anthropology of Europe. We certainly won’t see all unde-
remployed anthropologists conduct off-hot-topic work because the allure of the suppo-
sedly meritocratic tenure line remains strong, and, of course, some projects already fit
the trends without recourse to disciplinary “market” demands.
    My research continues to investigate the question of how large-scale structural chan-
ge and knowledge shapes embodied experience and belief. In another sense, I am still
investigating precarity; only in this case it is a kind of massive epistemological precari-
ty, which shapes who we trust and how we gauge our everyday and future decisions. If
the neoliberal academy’s ethos is precarity, and uncertainty its trade, then my research
and occupational life continue on parallel tracks.

REFERENCES

Kendzior, Sarah, 2014, The Job Market Recovery That Never Came, The Chronicle of Higher
      Education: Vitae, September 26.
Molé, Noelle, 2012, Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well-being and the Workpla-
      ce, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Robbins, Joel, 2013, Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good, Journ-
      al of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, 3: 447-462.




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