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Ed MorganUniversity of Toronto, Faculty of Law

Academic Culture in the Petri Dish

Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studiesin Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy

Marilyn Strathern, ed. (London: Routledge, 2000)

How does one review, audit, or assess a collection of essays about the reviewing,auditing, and assessing of a discipline whose task is to review, audit, and assesssubject matters that now include the process of review, audit, and assessment?Can the work even commence without a nod to those who may yet review thereviewer of the reviewer of the reviewer of the reviewer? You see the problem;the question is whether an analytic discipline like anthropology can movebeyond it.

Audit Cultures is perhaps the most self-reflective academic book that has everbeen, or that could possibly be, written. It provides not merely a series of schol-arly studies of the scholarly enterprise, but collects and creates a body of schol-arship about the ways in which scholars have created a body of scholarship overthe assessing and valuing of scholarship. This quest for academic self-knowledgestretches from Cris Shore and Susan Wright's identification of the emergent uni-versity culture of coercive accountability (57), to Peter Pels's analysis of theaudit as both a neo-liberal and denaturing means of constructing the anthropolo-gist's professional self (135), to Marilyn Strathern's conclusion that audit/policy/ethics, in their various and mobile cultural forms, make up a basic triad ofpractices in that world in which all of the authors exist and which we know ashigher education (279). It is an enlightening attempt by a thoughtful group ofauthors to open their trench coats, exposing those emergent appendages on thescholarly corpus that is increasingly responsible for making them what they are.

The news for anthropologists is both good and bad. On one hand, there is amplediscussion and evidence compiled about how the process of audit prompts a typeof Self-inspection sometimes lacking in a discipline consumed with understand-ing the Other. Indeed, this very volume is a high point for the mirror-gazing thathas been triggered by the institutional innovations that now permeate the acade-my. The pre-audit academic culture is recalled as if the field were full of so manynaive Marcel Griaules operating on their subject Ogotemmelis (Griaule 1965),unaware of their own skewing effect on their subject matters even as they inter-act with them and extract from them the most fanciful of European-influencedworld views. The healthy injection of professional and ethical self-evaluationand accountability cannot but be applauded as an improvement in the lot of thestudied and the studiers alike.1

Copyright © 2003, American Anthropological Association

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On the other hand, there is equally ample evidence that the audit process itselfhas become the new nemesis of truth in scholarship. Indeed, this very volumestands as much more of a critique than a cheer for the notion of audit; the titleitself suggests that far from being a non-intrusive means of assessment and eval-uation, the Audit Culture has taken on a life, and is a subject matter, of its own.In response to the demands of audit practices for ever more detailed information,ethnographers are portrayed as having gone from passive recorders to creativenarrators, leaving their prior incarnation as Griaule and becoming far more akinto Ogotemmeli passing on imaginative inventions that he and the other Dogonelders were convinced the European auditor wanted to hear.2 The unhealthyimposition of productivity quotients and efficiency measures cannot help but becriticized as artificially re-directing scholarly efforts and thereby underminingthe notion of an untouchable academic inquiry that is pursued for its own knowl-edge-acquisitive sake.3

How did the academic world in which anthropologists dwell arrive at this stateaffairs? Perhaps the most lucid explanation is contained in Vered Amit's accountof the violent confrontations, and their much reviewed aftermath, that took thelives of several members of the engineering faculty at Montreal's ConcordiaUniversity in 1992. Amit's contribution, entitled "The University as Panopticon:Moral Claims and Attacks on Academic Freedom" (215), provides a running nar-rative of the reduction in academic freedom that was attendant on these tragicevents. As Amit puts it, the violence was ultimately blamed, with much exag-geration but in a manner that seemed to resonate with a wide audience, on theuniversity's perceived "failure to hold academic faculty generally . . . account-able for their intellectual authorship, financial dealings and civility" (215). In theminds of those who studied and reported on the events, Concordia apparently hadmade the fatal error of attempting to resist the inevitable evolution of an envi-ronment in which all academic endeavor is subject to audit and control.

As the Concordia incident suggests, the process by which audit was first roman-ticized and then deified came to the university from two very different directions.In the first place, the push for innovation and economic competitiveness has led,especially in the case of publicly funded institutions, to a demand that societyreceive "a greater return on [its] investment" in the university and its scholarlyproduct (Advisory Council 1999:10). This focus on economic development, inturn, has led not only to ade facto increase in the commercialization of research,but to a measure of research excellence in which it is the rate of transfer ofknowledge from the public domain to private corporate interests that connotessuccess. In an era of fiscal stress, the ability to attract funds has itself become acommonplace performance measure, and market-oriented research initiativeshave replaced the independent inquiry agendas of researchers as the prime direc-tive of the utilitarian university. This corporatized encroachment on academicfreedom has been packaged in a way that is difficult for scholars to resist, as if it

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is only a reflection or particular application of the concept of responsible citi-zenship. As Amit puts it, "a subtext of compulsion and social obligation so oftenenters into demands that universities supply more research with commercialapplication" (221).

On the other side of the coin, some demands for social redemption through schol-arship have been generated internally by academics themselves. Taking anthro-pology as an example, it may be noted that critical anthropology, with its empha-sis on the relativism of ideas and texts and on identifying the situated nature ofall discourse, has held much sway in recent decades. The post-colonial critiqueof Eurocentrism, and a general approach to scholarship that sees scientific gen-eralization as reflecting social detachment and the cynical use of power(D'Andrade 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1995), has given rise to a series of demandswhich scholars are all but powerless to resist. Again, as Amit puts it, "the sceneis set for moral prescriptions that demand a decolonized anthropology 'orientedtowards social transformation and human liberation'" (223). The researcherwhose work eschews this role risks being labeled as part of the "ivory tower,"with all of its connotations of social and political irresponsibility.

The ironic confluence of neo-liberalism with critical theory is a powerful one.Further, when these internal demands'for audit are coupled with the pressure forcommercialization, the clarion call for the reform of academic research takes onmoral dimensions. In both causes for audit—the insistence that scholars pursuea market-oriented, wealth creating research agenda and the demand that aca-demics adopt a politically radical, liberationist stance—the amorality, if not out-right immorality of scholarship, is captured by the notion that scholars have his-torically been irresponsible in their pursuit of frivolous intellectual curiosities.Both lines of argument hold that academics must sculpt their agendas, and theiroutcomes, to serve morally specified ends. "Neo-liberal demands for commer-cially applicable research as a necessary return on public investments" have, inAmit's view, combined toxically with "attacks on academic independence [i]nthe name of distributive justice" in creating "institutional mechanisms for quitecrude doctrinaire surveillance and enforcement" (224).

If faculties have taken to audit, in the form of financial accountability as well asin its guise as thought control, like a hand to a glove, anthropology departmentshave taken to the new culture so naturally that it fits like a new layer of skin. Thereason for this, argues Vassos Argyrou in his chapter, "Self-accountability, Ethicsand the Problem of Meaning"(196), is that practitioners of this discipline haveover many years built into their methodologies a self-accountability that wasalready a deep-seated part of their academic culture when the externally imposedaudit controls began to be absorbed. A strict disciplinary regime administered bya newly appointed overseer is barely a novel experience for anyone accustomedto routine bouts of self-flagellation.

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Ethnologists and ethnographers,4 Argyrou asserts, have developed a form ofinternal audit to which adherence has become mandatory. The controls aredesigned to ensure that investigators exhibit unconditional moral responsibilitytoward their informants—that is, toward the Others on whom they focus atten-tion. After all, it is a fundamental moral precept in the ethnologists' pursuit ofknowledge that the non-Western Others they study are at the level of culturalvalue precisely the same as their own Western Selves. Indeed, if this moralitywere not the case, ethnology would not be a social science but rather would be asub-branch of the natural science of human evolution, as it was in the 19th cen-tury (Kuklick 1991:6). The discipline must hold itself accountable to a view ofthe Sameness of Others (in value if not in form), as this Sameness is "historical-ly and structurally one of ethnology's conditions of possibility" (Argyrou 200).

The moral mission of ethnography, then, is to redeem Others from previous gen-erations' perception of their inferiority. Argyrou identifies three strategies ofredemption employed by modern practitioners. First, ethnologists have trainedthemselves to locate institutions and behaviors in the Other that can be under-stood as manifestations of the Self—forms of "practical rationality" being per-haps the best examples.5 Second, modern ethnologists go to pains to locate theOther within the social practices of the western Self.6 Third, it is a self-imposedrequirement of ethnology to demonstrate that although Otherness has discernibleform, it lacks any substantive or meaningful content—any differences amongpeoples, in other words, are just more of the same (200).

To these three modern strategies must be added a fourth: postmodern discourse.Argyrou points out that postmodern ethnographers endeavor to support the con-cept of Sameness by questioning the very means that ethnographers employ toproduce and reproduce Otherness (201). The view of the Other is inevitably con-taminated by the presence, perceptions, or textualizations of the Self. In this way,social-scientific "fact" is exposed as fiction, and an academic discipline that themoderns only recently salvaged from the waste bin of pseudo-science is againreduced to an elaborate exercise in delusion (Clifford 1986). As Argyrou explainsit, if we can expose these fictions, and in the process demonstrate that Otherness"is nothing more than our imaginary creation, then we can also be fairly certainthat its contrary, Sameness, is true" (202).

Accordingly, the modern traditionalists and the postmodern deconstructionistsall practice a form of ethnography whose rationale lies in advancing principlesof humanism. Yet, if we are to take seriously the postmodernist critique, wewould necessarily concede that to posit Sameness is to distinguish the ethnolo-gist, as creator of the world of Sameness, from everyone else. There is, as Argy-rou puts it, a "threshold of consciousness, which Sameness cannot pass without[unintentionally] destroying itself (204).

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While the creators, or positors, claim to be in the same boat as all the Others, thiscan only be so if they have forgotten their initial act of creating, or positing, theworld in this way. The ontological circle is inescapable since, in Foucault'sterms, the subject (the human being as ethnologist) is trying desperately to beboth subject and object.7 When, for example, the ethnographer unearths the Selfin the Other by revealing witchcraft as a form of rational idiom, Sameness mayappear to be the rule; but, the ethnographer who knows the truth about witchcraftand the witchcraft practitioners who are oblivious to it cannot possibly be thesame.8 Sameness is posited, in other words, only by an act of Difference. For thisreason, the process of self-audit can never end.

In order to understand what conditions need to prevail for human Sameness to becomprehended, it is valuable to examine the field of religious belief. Here, ethno-graphers tell us, is where the gap is filled in between "things as they are andthings as they ought to be if our conceptions of right and wrong make sense"(Geertz 1973:106). In most cultures, religion is the medium used to counter sus-picions that the world, with all of its perceived injustices, is morally arbitrary andunjust. The same can be said of ethnology. The elusive concept of Sameness doesfor the ethnologist what religion does for the devout—it bridges the gap betweenthe sensory world's racism and ethnocentricity and the metaphysical world'snotion of what is right. Given this analogy to religious belief, it is interesting tospeculate as to what vantage point one would need for the world to truly appearas if it were populated by people, including ethnologists, who are all the Same.In a world of racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions, where would one have to bein order to fulfill the task of demonstrating that the world is in "reality" one ofunity? Where does one need to stand in order to conduct the discipline's ultimateaudit?

Taking the religion analogy to its logical conclusion, the self-audit of the ethnol-ogy profession is a form of playing God. In much the same way that people saythat death is the great equalizer, the view from infinity allows an accurate per-ception of, and then erases, the very ethnic and cultural differences that ethnolo-gists both study and deny. In order to comprehend the irrelevance of human dif-ference, one needs to imagine oneself to be in a position to make the ultimatecontrast between that which is human and that which is beyond human experi-ence. In order to accomplish this task, ethnologists must deify themselves so thatthey can see and be a part of it all and be apart from it all. "Sameness," explainsArgyrou, "is precisely how human differences appear from the point of view ofthe Infinite" (208). When ethnology steps over the threshold and stands in God'sshoes, the audit can be complete.

Ethnology can, and should, be brought to task whenever it reproduces the veryOtherness that it has vowed to deny. If it does not do so, then not only will theedifices of the discipline be undermined, but the moral foundations which thediscipline strives to confirm —the fundamentally humanistic principle of

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Sameness—will come loose from their moorings. In the words of one scholar,this prospect "raises the dim, back-of-the-mind suspicions that one may be adriftin an absurd world" (Geertz 1973:106). This suspicion is as inevitable as it iscontinuous, since ethnologists must adopt, and thereby reconfirm, the differenceof the Self each and every time they assess and pronounce the sameness of theOther. The self-accountability that has been built into the discipline is the meansby which its practitioners make sense of this world in which Otherness keepsresurfacing in the face of the conviction of Sameness.

If, as the Bible narrates in Genesis 1:27: "God created Mankind in His ownimage," then it must also be the case that ethnologists created the university intheirs. It is impossible to know at this point whether the academic audit is a cre-ation of the academics who dreamed it up, or whether academic pursuits them-selves are the creation of the processes of audit by which they are generated.According to Amit, the university has become the scholars' panopticon; but,according to Argyrou, it is the scholars who have come to occupy the omniscientposition in the universe. Anthropologists have taken to audit with moral zeal, andhave been consumed by it, because audit has come to be the all-consumingobjective, and moral foundation, of the discipline.

The entire Strathern volume illustrates a truism articulated by Argyrou in his con-clusion, that anthropologists "are as susceptible to the problem of meaning as anyof the people whose magico-religious systems they study and disenchant" (210).Of course, the same must be true of the book itself, whose critique will transformthe subject matter of its own critique, which will then be both the creator and theproduct of the critic. The process of audit, whether formal or informal, is shownto be capable of disenchanting the systems on which it is brought to bear, and fill-ing them with a new and equally vulnerable enchantment.

By placing cultures in the petri dish for scholarly examination, anthropologistssimultaneously de-nature the internal meaning of the cultures under investiga-tion—the Difference—and imbue them with the meaning that is natural to theirown stance—Sameness. Thus, one image to emerge from the book is of an end-less chain of perspectives, each one standing outside the other and examining andtransforming its meaning, only to have that meaning undermined at the nextstage of examination. The ethnologist understands the informant as the universi-ty auditor understands the academic investigator, and as the Strathern bookunderstands the university. In this reading, there is no conceivable end to thegrowth and replacement of perspectives.

Alternatively, this examination of cultures in the laboratory foregrounds humanSameness, which in turn emerges from a position of Difference adopted by schol-ars assuming a perspective impossible to achieve. (The perspective of Samenessis impossible to achieve because it requires the impossible task of distancingoneself from the world in which one exists.) This image would be one of an end-

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less loop, as each perspective circled back on itself, examining and transformingits own meaning, only to have that meaning undermined by the very position itadopts. In this way, the ethnologist undermines the informant as he undermineshimself, the university auditor undermines the academic investigator as it under-mines itself, and the Strathern book undermines the university as it underminesitself. Again, there is no conceivable end to the self-assertive and self-destructiveseries of perspectives.

What is perhaps most disturbing about the audit cultures described in this vol-ume is that they can mutate and grow even as the environment under the anthro-pological microscope devours itself. The question, as Marilyn Strathern sets outin her introduction, is "how to deal with challenges that are at once obstructive,destructive even, and vitalizing" (14). The situation in the academy, like the find-ings of this book itself, seems only to call for additional audit and review,although one must be wary of the tendency of audit to transform the "monitor-ing of quality" into the "monitoring of systems to monitor quality" (Pels 135).Audit has, as Strathern has put it elsewhere, "a life of its own that jeopardizes thelife it audits" (1997:305). Since, as demonstrated in this book, assessment isinevitably as important as the matter being assessed, the book is crucial to under-standing and preserving, or undermining and transforming, its own subject mat-ter. It therefore will be extremely valuable to both the assessed and the assessor,as well as the assessor's assessor, or the assessor's assessor's assessor.

Notes

1. For the most optimistic definition of audit and accountability in the volume,see Ananta Giri, "Audited Accountability and the Imperative ofResponsibility", who writes of audit that "It refers not only to being account-able for what one is expected to do or perform but to one's responsibilitybeyond legal minimalism, to the growth of oneself and the other and thuscontributing to the creation of dignified relationships in society" (173-174).

2. For an early but lingering critique of Griaule's work along these lines, seeGoody 1967.

3. For a strongly worded version of this criticism of the academic audit, seeThomas Fillitz, "Academia: Same Pressures, Same Conditions of Work?",who writes, "the outcome was an experience of an audit 'regime', in whichscholars, teachers and students felt they were marionettes in the iron grip ofpolitical and economic powers" (236).

4. Argyrou states specifically that, "Rather than the Anglo-Saxon term'anthropology', I follow my own earlier usage and from here onwardsemploy the term 'ethnology' in the Continental sense. I find 'anthropology'rather problematic" (197-198).

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5. Argyrou (210, n. 5) cites Obeyesekere 1992:205, n. 48.

6. Argyrou (210, n.6 ) cites Carrier 1995.

7. Argyrou (204) cites Foucault 1970.

8. Argyrou (205) cites Evans-Pritchard 1976 [ 1937].

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