In Praise of Amateurs

ABSTRACT

The amateur studies a subject for the love of it, as a way of life. This article tracks the changing relationship between amateur scholarship and professionalism, in light of the author’s experience over five decades. It shows how the capture of professionalism by corporate and managerial interests has brought it into tension with the principles of amateur study, and how this tension has played out specifically in anthropology. Here, the amateur commitment to day-to-day knowing, enshrined in the discipline’s signature approach of participant observation, is compromised by its professional rebranding as ethnography. The approach nevertheless sets an example for other walks of study that share with anthropology the urge to wander along with that which captures their attention. Today’s professionalised regimes of research leave little room for wandering. Abjuring the straitjacket of corporate professionalism, however, opens the way for an amateur scholarship that is both practically activist and potentially transformative.

KEYWORDS:

• Amateurism
• discipline
• expertise
• participant observation
• professionalism
• scholarship

Acknowledgements

This paper began as an eponymous lecture, presented at the University of Aberdeen on December 6th, 2018, to mark the occasion of my retirement. I would like to thank all my colleagues and students in the Department of Anthropology for honouring me in this way. As much of the content of that lecture has since been published elsewhere, I have rewritten the current version almost in its entirety, but have retained the title.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This was the workshop Solid Fluids: New Approaches to Materials and Meaning, held at the University of Aberdeen, August 27 to 29, 2018. The workshop was convened by Cristian Simonetti and myself, and funded by the British Academy under its International Partnership and Mobility Programme.

2 The speaker was Sasha Engelmann. I am happy to acknowledge her contribution.

3 I was in conversation with the sociologist Gordon Marshall. Though I do not recall the exact date, it must have been in the early noughties.

4 The lecture is available for listening at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxqz0 (accessed August 27, 2020). The whole series was subsequently published as a book (Said 1994).

5 The full text of the manifesto can be accessed at https://reclaimingouruniversity.wordpress.com/. For further discussion, see Ingold (2020).

6 This is the subject of a considerable literature, and I am grateful to Roger Nascimento for helping me find my way around it. Besides works by Brint and Freidson, referenced below, key sources include Abbott (1988), Evetts (2003) and Larson (1977).

7 This model owes its classic and perhaps most conservative formulation to Talcott Parsons, who saw the professions as providing a counterbalance to bureaucratic organisations, resting on principles of collegiality and cooperation rather than hierarchical management (Parsons 1939).

8 A few years after I moved to Aberdeen, Eagleton was invited to present a lecture there and I went along to listen. University academics, he told his packed audience, are not intellectuals like himself but mere technicians. I recall having been outraged by the sheer arrogance of his remark, and by the timorousness with which it was received.

9 For the sake of balance, I have alternated here and in what follows between masculine and feminine pronouns. I make no claim to the gender specificity of intellectuals or amateurs.

10 Arendt (2006: 193). Hannah Arendt’s essay, ‘The crisis of education’, was first published in 1954.

11 The first resumé is often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. In a letter addressed to the Regent of Milan, dated 1482, da Vinci wrote of the many accomplishments he could bring to the Duke’s service, mostly in the field of military technology. See http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/leonardo-da-vincis-handwritten-resume-1482.html, accessed 26th August 2020.

12 For American cultural anthropology, see Stocking (1968) and Darnell (2001); for British social anthropology, see Kuper (1996) and Urry (1993).

13 Exemplary references include, on humans and animals, Ingold (1980, 1988, 2013), on perception and skill, Ingold (2000), on the weather-world, Ingold (2011), and on the life of lines, Ingold (2007, 2015).

14 In a recent work, Tobias Rees (2018) has argued for precisely this.

15 As I have described elsewhere, my father’s mycology profoundly affected the development of my own anthropological interests (Ingold 2018b: 215–16).

16 Another word for such a connoisseur might be ‘linealogist’. I have indeed described myself as such (Ingold 2015: 54).

17 Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary Institutions, Careers, Education and Applications, London: British Academy, 2016, page 9. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/213/crossing-paths.pdf, accessed 29th August 2020.

18 REF 2019/01 Guidance on Submissions, January 2019, page 90 Annex C§2, available at https://www.ref.ac.uk/media/1092/ref-2019_01-guidance-on-submissions.pdf. I have experienced the REF on both sides of the fence: in the preparation of submissions for my own Department, and – in 2001 – as a member of the assessment panel for Anthropology. I found the entire exercise to be fraudulent. Not only is its claim to deliver objective judgements of quality, backed by unanimous consensus of the panel, belied by the fact that no output is read by more than two panel members whose views may be widely divergent; it also systematically rewards academic self-interest at the expense of collegiality, while pretending otherwise.

19 REF Guidance on Submissions, page 90, footnote 20.

20 I have further discussed the meaning of research elsewhere (Ingold 2018c: 71–4).

21 The record is held by a paper on the Higgs boson, published in Physical Review Letters in 2015. The paper had 5,154 co-authors, listed on 24 of the paper’s 33 pages. See https://www.improbable.com/2015/05/16/divide-and-concur-a-physics-paper-with-5154-authors/, accessed 29th August 2020.

22 These quotations are all drawn from the SHAPE website, https://thisisshape.org.uk/, accessed 30th August 2020.