Paper Short Abstract:

The paper explores the ongoing administrative and institutional efforts to move anthropological practice outside the auspices of the discipline, by focussing on the impact of audit culture on teaching and practicing anthropology in a post-socialist space, namely Latvia.

Paper Abstract:

The paper explores ongoing efforts to move anthropological practice outside the auspices of the discipline, by focussing on the impact of audit culture on teaching and practicing anthropology in a post-socialist space, namely Latvia. We argue that managerial culture is squeezing out European fundamental basic rights such as academic freedom. Anthropology is a particular victim here due to its broad range of interest, its transgressing of traditional disciplinary boundaries, its deep empiricism, and in the case of postsocialist areas that it “imports” concepts, ideas and material seen as both foreign and thus dangerous. Based on the adventures of anthropology (as discipline and as academics) in the administrative field we show how selected statistical sources, ratings, and modelling based upon the natural sciences combined with local scholarly traditions and relationships allow for the enacting and practicing of a neo-conservative and neoliberal policy, restricting academic freedom and the silencing of anthropology’s voice within the academic realm. This results in an increasing move to push socio-cultural anthropology in Latvia outside a ‘named’ anthropology, potentially obliterating its boundaries rendering it without identity. Demonstrating both administrative and institutional lack of sensitivity to the discipline’s autonomy, we show how this brings long-term insecurity and concerns for the future in terms of independent scholarly endeavour. Despite this trend, we show how determined efforts to regain certain lost autonomy through acts of polite and targeted resistance/engagement can have positive outcomes, even if it is then not long until the next episode requiring ‘firefighting’ appears on the scene.