Paper Short Abstract:

Investigating how British civil servants in the European Commission navigated their political identities and emotions during the 2016 UK Referendum, this article explores new insights which the study of expatriates living permanently abroad can produce for the anthropology of Britain.

Paper Abstract:

The 2016 Brexit referendum marked a political juncture for the crisis of legitimacy in liberal democracies, one characterised by increasing distrust and disenchantment among citizens with democratic institutions (Krastev and Holmes 2017). Among the rippling effects still being absorbed and made sense of is a political dichotomy between globalist and nationalist identities that has begun to eclipse traditional socioeconomic cleavages between ‘right’ and ‘left’. As ethnography becomes ubiquitous in other modes of research beyond disciplinary borders, leading scholars are giving voice to a felt ambient anxiety that social anthropology is losing its public voice (Ingold 2014). This article reflects on fieldwork experiences among the last British civil servants working in the European Commission before and after the plebiscite. A theory of ‘feeling states’, referring both to the emotional conditions of powerful regimes as well as the affective capacities they mobilize and evoke, is developed to understand how they navigated their political identities and emotions. Confronting the question of whether anthropology should seek to change the world or to merely understand it, I consider how the answer to this dilemma changes contextually in anthropological encounters among so-called ‘elite’ informants. The ‘changing versus understanding’ dichotomy, while useful as a framework for epistemological debates in the philosophy of science, presents a false dilemma in a discipline where new knowledge is not discovered out in the world but is relationally constructed. I conclude by outlining particular ways that the study of expatriates living permanently abroad can produce new insights for the anthropology of Britain.