We are way into the winter term in all public universities in France. I am currently on a research sabbatical at the University Paris-Nanterre where I also teach a course on the Introduction to Legal Anthropology.
Half an hour before my lecture is about to start, one student already sits prepared with their laptop in the hallway. I open the door to the lecture room to allow them to sit more comfortably. But it is as freezing in the room as it is in the hallway. There is no heating in the building. I wonder how many of my students might come today given the heavy rainfall …
Ten minutes before my lecture, I check my emails. I see that several students have written to me already. Only one calls in sick, all others are stuck in the outbound RER A train from central Paris to Nanterre. There has been an incident, the students explained: “We are all stuck”. Another one shares a screenshot of the offical traffic announcement and an additional photograph: an official attestation that there has been a disruption. The document carries the title “Attestation de pertubation”
The date and time is neatly printed and I contemplate how fast and effective not being fast and effective can be. I suggest to the student later to use this textual artefact as an entry point to an essay my students are supposed to write at the end of the term on the everyday life of the law.
It is 10.30h and I decide to see who might have shown up despite the rain falling and the train being late. The room is half full already and within the next 20 minutes the rest trickle in. We are almost at full capacity and I am seriously impressed.
It is on the same day that I learn that in France there is no longer an obligation to attend classes in presence if your personal circumstances do not allow you to do so. Students may study long distance at all universities in France for health-related reasons or because they have to work. At the end of my course I will have to grade essays of students whom I will have never seen in person and who will not have attended a single lecture of mine on campus.
I wonder: what kind of anthropologists are we releasing into the world if the only encounter many students have with the discipline is via self-study ? No dialogue with teachers, no spending time with classmates, no campus experience. Not only that the state keeps on moving the universities beyond the bande pĂ©ripherique into suburbia, by allowing students to study long-distance, it reduces the campus to mere sites of administration. In the name of “flexibility”, students work towards their grades, but are being deprived of what Bell Hooks has called “the most radical space of possibility in the academy”: the classroom.
Universities are easier to manage if fewer people are around. One might be tempted to reframe long-distance studies as “needs-centred”. Paris already suffered from high living costs before the Covid-19 lockdowns struck. After 2021, many never moved back to the city, but remained in their home towns far away. At times, the campus feels deserted – a striking difference to 2018 and 2019 when I last spent some time in Paris on fellowships.
The students who do attend my seminar, always listen attentively and eagerly write down what I am presenting on my slides. I have split the seminar into two parts: the first is a lecture, the second was intended as an interactive space for discussing the weekly reading and give them the possibility to ask questions – in French or English. However, only very few attend the second part of the seminar. I now understand that this is the case because very few have read the text. I was warned by other lecturers that this is indeed the case: “Students do not read texts.” When I inquired why, the answer was always because they are overworked – from having to take too many courses and from having to work in order to finance their studies …
But anthropology is not a subject that can be taught only. It needs to be ingested until it has become part of oneself. Students need to anthropologize themselves throughout their studies in order to be able to later claim “I am an anthropologist” and mean themselves instead of a mere profession. Anthropology needs to become an integral part of one’s own humaneness, ideally, before one can collaborate with others and analyse what one has learned from them in an ethical manner. But the discipline is increasingly expected to be taught in ways that ensure it remains outside of our students’ individual experience.
Our most important task is therefore to get students back into the classroom while at the same time opening that very classroom up to the world. Rather than transmitting a particular kind of ‘knowledge’, we should be transmitting that anthropology provides a multitude of ways of seeing and conceptualizing humanity as such. While taking our students and their current experiences seriously, our task is also to de-self-center their existing worldview and help them get unstuck. We do not need more ‘attestations des pertubations‘, we need ‘pertubations des attestions‘!”
judith beyer 