The Other Half of the Ass: A Manifesto for Anthropology in Neo-Illiberal Times

Abstract

I applaud Michael Scroggins and his recommendations. In common with many readers of this journal, I have spent years reading about neoliberalism; now Scroggins provides a practical road map to put this knowledge into practice. Monetizing student anxiety, making markets out of lecture halls, commodifying success, and working behind a corporate shell: These are all excellent and workable suggestions.

Scroggins errs in only two respects. First, he assumes that the primary modality of the present is neoliberalism. Second, he assumes that universities are concerned primarily with students. I unpack each of these errors in what follows. However, because these are interrelated issues, I unpack them together, like a single large piece of flat-packed furniture encased in multiple boxes. I argue, furthermore, that these issues are united by a single key (an Allen key or hex key, to force the simile onward into metaphor).

Scroggins argues that today's university is half-assed neoliberal, but if that is so, then what is the other half of the ass? By unpacking Scroggins's argument and reassembling it with the aforementioned Allen key, my response pieces together the other half of the ass and suggests that this half is, in fact, the half-ass we should whole-ass.

Scroggins defines neoliberalism as making markets and suggests that the best path for anthropology is to go all in with the neoliberal flow. A clue to how outdated this idea is can be found in Scroggins's own epigraphs: Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman, both fossils dug up from the previous century! It is true that—had anthropology adopted Thatcher's and Friedman's excellent suggestions back in their day—the discipline would be reaping the benefits now. But that boat has sailed. Neoliberalism is passé. No doubt Scroggins is right that neoliberalism never did go far enough in anthropology. But just as we grasp the depth of the opportunity, it is slipping away, replaced by a new paradigm. Attempting to whole-ass neoliberalism now is too little, too late.

First, consider the question of students. Scroggins notes that under neoliberalism, students are defined as consumers with outsized power over faculty. Yet this year alone, the United States canceled more than 6000 student visas. Closer to (my) home, in last year's federal election, Australian politicians competed with one another in promises to restrict the lucrative international student market (even though education regularly ranks among Australia's top export earners, the only one of our top four exports that does not rely primarily on digging up rocks or drilling big holes). Despite the economic value of international students and immigration more generally to the Australian economy, August 2025 saw anti-immigration rallies organized by neo-Nazis in all major cities. If neoliberalism views students as cash cows in a market, neoliberal universities would open their arms wide to paying students, right? But this is far from the facts as we see them on the ground.

If it were true, as Scroggins argues, that universities today pander to students as if they were clients in a competitive market where the university's sole goal is to identify how profit can be extracted from each, would Columbia University really have responded as it did to the pro-Palestine protests? The protesters were a captive market! University leadership could have marketed the right to print T-shirts of the event, selling them perhaps to students too timid to join the protests or to the ever-hungry tourist market. The university could have taken bids for the right to erect food stalls. Anthropology lecturers could have offered the protesters credit (for a small fee, of course). But is this what happened? No. Some of the students were even expelled! The facts are that the university recklessly, unforgivably squandered this golden economic opportunity.

If neoliberalism cannot explain the facts of the modern university, what can?

Columbia University called the police on its own, peacefully protesting students. Why? To restore order, of course. Not that the students were disorderly. To embody order, then. To show whose rule really rules on these grounds. Australian politicians use international students as political footballs. Why? To define and police borders between insiders and outsiders, to enhance in-group feeling via out-group animosity. Scroggins defines neoliberalism as, in part, about seeing “ourselves as isolated individuals inside those markets”: but individualism is not the main game in universities these days. Rather, the mood is in-group and out-group, us and them, and falling in order behind a leader.

Neoliberalism is yesterday's news. Neo-illiberalism is the order of the day. Neo-illiberalism is the other half of the ass. We no longer live in the era of free trade. Ours is the era of trade war. The time of creating markets is over: now is the time of marketing craters (bomb craters, that is!). We don't live in an Appadurai-style era of free-flowing “-scapes”: the metaphor for our day is the sea blockade preventing any escape. Margaret Thatcher is dead. Donald Trump is not. Markets no longer arbitrate value; leaders do. Now is the moment not of the individual but of group loyalties and strong leaders.

More than half of Scroggins's recommendations for monetization relate to students, almost as though the main purpose of universities were something to do with students. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that students are peripheral to the purpose of today's universities. Under neo-illiberalism, the central purpose of the university is to propagate the ideology and experience of neo-illiberalism itself.

Universities have always been in the business of creating people. As anthropologists, we must ask, What sort of people does the current student experience create? It creates graduates with broken morale, crippled imaginations, chronic anxiety (as Scroggins rightly notes), and, in time, citizens too busy to think freely. Shamed by debt and forced to work to survive, for most there is no alternative.

University is a key step in creating people capable of spending their entire lives in a neo-illiberal environment. Even if student debts are never paid down and profit in that sense never realized, still, the goal of creating a certain kind of person is achieved. This underlines the fact that one of the primary roles of today's university is to create people who contribute to and work in neo-illiberal environments.

The first and most obvious means of thriving under neo-illiberalism is to find ways to dominate others. Only by dominating others can we avoid the sorry situation of being dominated ourselves. This should prove no problem for our discipline. Anthropologists have spent the past few decades identifying the myriad ways, however subtle, the discipline itself implicates us in power dynamics. Our very status as anthropologists defines us as wielders and perpetrators of power, oppression, and inequality. Some say even our gaze is capable of oppressing others! And don't get me started on the oppressive potentials in our key method, ethnographic fieldwork. Some even nicknamed anthropology the “handmaiden of imperialism.” It should be easy, with a small tweak here and there, to transform ourselves into the handmaiden of neo-illiberalism.

Now is the time to lean in to our much-touted ability to oppress others. We must leverage our power to join and serve those wielding power.

This requires converting theoretical power into actual power. We need to convert things like the power dynamics of fieldwork, the gaze, and complicity into the kinds of power respected under neo-illiberalism (things like money, means of violence, citizenship, “sovereignty”). The details of how to achieve this, of course, depend on the intersectionality of each anthropologist's personal characteristics, expertise, and field site. Here, again, our established track record in explicit reflexivity about our own intersectionality and resulting culpability in power dynamics should come in handy as we each reflect on our unique positionality as an opportunity to oppress and dominate others. Perhaps some of those “capillary” forms of power could be converted into true arteries?

For those still struggling to imagine how they could convert the theoretical power of the anthropologist into neo-illiberal power, a second strategy is available to basically anyone, no matter who you are or where you do your fieldwork: identify a leader who does hold power and ally yourself explicitly with them.

Again, this is illustrated by the plight of students. At present, the treatment of students and academic anthropologists is not so different. Both academics and students are disciplined by the university system. If we want to join those in power, we must ask, Who disciplines us? Who holds power over us? Vice chancellors in Australia earn more than the prime minister. When people speak of the “committee” in Australian universities, they mean the head of the committee, not the bulk of the committee members. When they say the “university,” they mean the vice chancellor and executive leadership, not rank-and-file academics. I say all this to make it clear that academics, like students, are the ruled, not the rulers, in the modern university. We have a common cause with students. And this is our weakness.

We must differentiate ourselves from the student body by asserting ourselves more clearly as loyal to our leaders. In this way, we can define ourselves as part of the in-group of the “university.” To date, this goal has been hampered by sentimental democratic ideals imagining the university as, ideally, a collective that proceeds through consultation and transparent decision-making. When we are not consulted or even respected, we feel alienated. In fact, the neo-illiberal university is not democratic at all: it is a defined group under a single leader. Success will come to anthropologists (as a group and individually) when we define ourselves as loyal to that leader. While we might not rise to the level of leadership per se, we will partake (however fleetingly) in the sense of being in the in-group and the satisfaction that comes with that, especially if we can recast students as the “other” against whom we in the in-group are organized.

I say “fleetingly” because the fact is that strong leaders are capricious by definition: As I penned this response, the Australian National University (ANU) had an anthropologist as vice chancellor, Genevieve Bell, and under her leadership, anthropologists faced retrenchments. But this is part of neo-illiberalism: Strong leaders can be cruel, should be cruel, and this is why they are followed. We must accept this if we are to survive in a neo-illiberal environment.

Under neo-illiberalism, the role of the university is clear: to create ideologies capable of upholding neo-illiberalism and to create citizens capable of living in neo-illiberal conditions. To serve our strong masters, then, a key contribution we can make is creating and sustaining neo-illiberal ideologies. Again, fortunately, anthropologists have a strong track record in supporting illiberal ideologies and creating illiberal subjects. The so-called father of the discipline, Bronisław Malinowski, pioneered the training of colonial officers for the benefit of the British Empire. Or to take a current-day example, the aforementioned former vice chancellor of ANU cut her anthropological teeth advising Intel and first came to ANU to champion “entrepreneurialism.” If Bronisław is the father of anthropology, perhaps we could call Genevieve its love child? At any rate, all through our discipline's family tree, we easily find relatives, near and far, who can inspire us to be more complicit with the power structures of the day. It is in our blood.

In truth, neoliberalism and neo-illiberalism are two distinct but inseparable cheeks of the same ass. Profit and domination, markets and deportation, monetization and student expulsion: the two sides of the ass might seem to be at odds, but in fact, they work together. But make no mistake: of these two, domination is the greater. Profit serves domination. As anthropologists, we must decide which half of the ass to serve. The logic of neo-illiberalism makes our choice clear: we must serve the more powerful of the two.

If we are going to whole-ass anything, we must whole-ass neo-illiberalism.