Draft Neoliberalism and coloniality are two sides of the same coin In press Arantes, L, Eisch-Angus, K, Verhovsec, J, and Pöttler, B (Eds.). Curiosity and Commitment. Karl Franzens Universität verlag. Caroline Gatt Caroline.gatt@uni-graz.at I. From the 1990s anthropologists began to raise the alarm about the neoliberal direction universities had begun to take. For instance, Marilyn Strathern’s 2000 book Audit Culture gathered together essays that outlined and analyzed the increasing bureaucratization of academic work. In that volume, Chris Shore and Susan Wright (2000) give examples showing how anthropology departments in the UK were being required to standardize their practice. Various national educational policies required disciplines to model themselves on corporate organisations and to aim for internal homogeneity of practice and theory (ibid). Within the European Union this intensification of neoliberal policies shaping the university is attributed to the results of the Bologna process, as part of which in 1999 education ministers from twenty-nine countries signed the Bologna declaration. The Bologna process is mostly known for its aim and attempt to standardize tertiary education across EU member states, purportedly to facilitate the recognition of academic degrees. However, similar to the situation in the UK, the result has been a neoliberalization of universities. Anthropologists have been at the forefront of critiques of this shift. Examples include the ‘Reclaim the University’ movement which began in Aberdeen, and the efforts examined in this volume. As the contributions to this book attest, this process has further intensified in recent years across Europe (Potkonjak/Škrbić Alempijević, Wolf-Knuts). Even so, anthropologists find ways to critique any romanticization of universities ‘back then’ (Wolf-Knuts) or of ‘folklorism’ (Schönberger); they creatively subvert it through developing community-engaged research (Büyüksaraç), designing preferable community futures (Kalkreuter) or finding the possibilities that lie in developing research across university and broader publics (Barkhoff). And while these chapters zoom in on European contexts, their analyses have much wider relevance. This is because the process of neoliberalisation itself is a global process. It can be found throughout formal education and its beginnings coincide with the start of formalized education, much earlier than the turn of the 21st Century when anthropologists began taking note. In this essay I will outline the intimate relationship between capitalism and coloniality. Drawing on Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality scholars, I argue that critiques of current European higher education also need to recognize the inseparability of neoliberalism and coloniality. South African-based, Cameroonian historian, political theorist and public intellectual Achille Mbembe (2016: 39) notes how the intensification and spread of neoliberalism in universities is a trend that could be observed already at the beginning of the 20th Century in the US. There an educational commentator writing in 1918, a certain Thorstein Veblen, identified the business principles shaping the educational environment. Indeed, the late education philosopher Ken Robinson argued that the entire formalized school system, which became established in the second half of the 1800s was actually designed to create docile workers for the expanding industrial system. According to Robinson formal education was designed both in the image and the interests of industrialism, so that school education becomes a factory for manufacturing workers. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms accessed 9th Feb 2024 Of course, until the 1990s it may have seemed that universities were separate from primary and secondary schooling, especially in terms of faculty members who jealously guarded ‘academic freedom’. However, as we will see this separation and supposed freedom is overstated. Returning to Mbembe, he argues that the neoliberalization of universities is part of a global process. In this process, universities are key factors in “globalizing knowledge capitalism”, where, “[c]ontemporary changes in higher education are based on the deepening of functional linkages between higher education and knowledge capitalism at a time when capitalism has become thoroughly transnational and ruling classes worldwide have become partially denationalized” Mbembe (2016: 39). Mbembe goes on to describe neoliberalism as a new governing rationality, one in which everything is ‘economized’. This means that every sphere of activity is understood and treated as a market; humans become nothing more than market actors, and importantly every entity is governed as if it were a firm, including universities (Mbembe 2016: 40). It is important to note that even with the spread of globalized knowledge capitalism, and the neoliberal policies that shores it up, critical movements have also emerged around the world. An important example is the #FeesMustFall student-let movement that started in South Africa in 2015. The #FeesMustFall movement is crucial in this story. This movement grew out of the #RhodesMustFall movement, which called for the decolonisation of the university. These activists noted that in order for decolonising the university to become a reality, access to university education also needs to be democratised and uncoupled from profiteering interests. However, in the same way the history of the neoliberalization of universities can be traced to an earlier origin, so can the beginnings of this globalizing trend, which serves the interests of a specific elite. II. The modernity / coloniality / decoloniality (MCD) project is a scholarly movement arising in South and central America that gained momentum in the 2000s. Key figures in the MCD project are Argentine-Mexican writer and philosopher, Enrique Dussel, the Peruvian Sociologist, Anibal Quijano, the Colombian Philosopher, Santiago Castro-Gomez, the UC Berkeley-based Sociologist, Ramon Grosfoguel, and the Rutgers University-based Philosopher, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Duke university-based scholars Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, and Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar. The MCD scholars argue that modernity needs to be understood in the same frame as coloniality, and not separately. Therefore, I extend this to argue that critiques of neoliberalism also need to attend to coloniality. In MCD analyses coloniality is distinct from colonialism, and decoloniality is distinct from decolonisation. While decolonisation was the political process of formerly colonised states gaining independence, decoloniality is an ongoing and plural process. Mignolo explains that while decolonisation, and the various schools of scholarship that analysed the process and aftermath, address the content of colonisation, decoloniality questions the very premises those contents assume. In other words, the MCD project explores the ontological / epistemological assumptions and power matrices that generate a colonial understanding and perception of the world. The MCD scholars highlight how Eurocentric histories tend to separate the development of modernity in Europe from colonialism, where colonialism is portrayed as an unfortunate secondary aspect of modernity (Mignolo 2018: 110). In this Eurocentric narrative, colonialism is not causally related to modernity (Shephard 2018: 3). Instead, the MCD project scholars highlight that the movement of resources, people, and ideas from North and South America towards Europe from 1492 onwards, needs to be recognized as essential elements in the development of modernity itself. “The flow of wealth, people, ideas, new exploitable plant and animal species were key drivers of European Modernity” (Shephard 2018: 4, emphasis added). Mignolo, for instance, writes that because of this modernity and coloniality cannot be disentangled, that coloniality was in fact a co-present factor in the development of modernity itself, and that consequently coloniality is the inescapable darker side of modernity. There are key differences between earlier post-colonial scholars such as Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, and Gayatri Spivak and the MCD project. While post-colonial scholars drew their critiques from the experience of French and British colonialism, MCD scholars shifted attention to earlier imperialism of Spain and Portugal. Basing their arguments on a different historical period, they target ideas of European exceptionalism. European exceptionalism states that ideas which are central to modernity, as well as modernity itself, were developed entirely and uniquely by Europeans in Europe. It is this European exceptionalism that legitimizes further modern/colonial narratives of Europe bringing ‘civilization’ to different peoples around the world. MCD scholars call for the acknowledgement that the knowledge and culture claimed to be uniquely European actually results from ongoing intellectual and cultural exchange with myriad others, and this undoes any claim to European superiority. Increasingly there are studies which show that advances in, for instance, modern pathology (Giraldo Herrera 2018), Science (Gruzinski 2013, Safier 2010) and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy (Metze 2011), grew from engagements with non-Europeans and learning the knowledges they developed. Another relevant narrative of European exceptionalism relates specifically to the University, which is claimed to be a unique European invention from the early Modern period (Goody 2006: 222). Goody, however, shows how universities thrived in ancient Greek and Roman empires, with schools in Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Beirut, Constantinople, and Gaza. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, although universities and schools of higher education vanished from Europe, philosophy continued to flourish in Athens and Alexandria, a city still extant in present day Egypt. In Alexandria the institution of the Museum ‘functioned as a university, with an accent on research’ (ibid: 227). Across the Muslim world the madrasa shares more similarities than differences with European universities. Although, many Eurocentric scholars discount madrasas as examples of universities developed beyond Europe because of their emphasis on theology, this was not different to most early European universities which also focused on religion. Furthermore, Goody notes how not all higher education happened in universities. “Institutes of higher education and learning had existed in the Ancient Near East at temple ‘research institutes’, in the Classical world, in ancient Persia, and virtually wherever higher literacy was installed. Like towns, universities were only European from a very narrow point of view, strongly tinged by teleology” (Jack Goody 2006: 229). A second difference between post-colonial and decolonial scholars is the latter’s emphasis on knowledge. Said (1978) already defines Orientalism as a systematic science that organizes Western imaginaries of the ‘Orient’ through repeated images and ideas in both academic and popular communications. However, the MCD scholars argue that they focus more precisely on the way knowledge is deployed in coloniality. They argue post-colonial scholars, such as Said, dwelled mostly on cultural representation. The MCD project instead centers attention on coloniality as an epistemic project. In other words, the expansionism characterized by imperialism/colonialism is at heart also a move to universalize European knowledge and ontology (Shepherd 2018: 4). III. In the historical encounter between the ‘West’ and others two things happen. First, ‘Westerners’ appropriated elements of local knowledge that were deemed useful to Western interests. Such appropriation most often obscured the source of this knowledge, and always included forms of editing to remove the radical aspects of such knowledge. In this editing, any aspects of such local knowledge that might have destabilized Western onto/epistemologies were excised. This continues today. Julie Cruickshank (2012), for instance describes one such project where glaciologists sought to include in their reports the ‘Traditional ecological knowledge’ of Indigenous inhabitants in the Yukon territory in north-western Canada. The climate scientists and glaciologists tasked with writing up scientific reports included Indigenous descriptions of glacier changes over the years. However, the reports completely omitted that in such Indigenous knowledge, the glacier is animate, that the behaviour of the glacier is contingent, and that glacial changes can only be understood in the light of the glacier’s sentience (Cruickshank 2012: 242). While the elements of ‘information’ that are compatible with Western knowledge systems were incorporated into the glaciologists’ reports, the ‘magic’ was left behind (Leach and Davis 2012: 214). In other words, “Western knowledge appropriates core elements of local knowledge, in the process reframing​ these elements and claiming them for its own” (Shepherd 2018: 5). Second, a crucial aspect in the encounters between Western knowledge, when it is framed as universal, and other ways of knowing, is the destruction of these very knowledge practices, or ‘epistemicide’ (Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2014). This is typically done through a process where non-European knowledge traditions and practices are defined as ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘belief’, in other words as forms of ‘non-knowledge’. “As such they become the object of study of the discipline of anthropology” (Shepherd 2018). Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) notes that this Western universalist knowledge is operationalized around sets of binaries, which he refers to as ‘abyssal thinking’. In this form of thinking, an ontological abyss divides different types of knowledge into two ontologically separate categories, and thus prevents things placed on opposite sides of the line from co-existing. For instance, reason is placed on one side of the abyss, and on the other side there is “the dark world of passions, intuitions, feelings, emotions, affections, beliefs, faiths, values, myths, and the world of the unsayable” (Santos 2014: 5). Other dichotomies include: subject vs. object, reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body, nature vs. culture, white vs. black, male vs. female, head vs. heart, present vs. past (Shepherd 2018: 6). These appropriations and dichotomies are the basis upon which most current academic disciplines are based. Another, third, characteristic of Western Science that follows this abyssal thinking – the rhetoric rather than the actual practices that go on in laboratories (Latour 2003) – is that knowledge can be abstracted from the ways of living through which it emerges. The dissociation of knowing from being treats the world as an object of knowledge ready to be grasped, an understanding that parallels the colonial/capitalist extractivism of resources. In fact, Anishabee and Haudenosaunee scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) critiques Donna Haraway’s use of the notions of the Coyote or the Trickster. On the one hand, Watts appreciates how Haraway’s feminist anti-essentialism works to undermine universalist depictions of knowledge. On the other hand, in the way Haraway uses concepts from localized knowledge, Watts notes that the Indigenous histories and protocols around such knowledge and stories are absent. In this, definitions of ‘knowledge’ remain dictated by Western principles and Indigenous stories become abstracted tools. Essentially what this does is “to erase the embodied, practiced, and legal-governance aspects of Indigenous ontologies as they are enacted by Indigenous actors” (Todd 2015: 17). Instead, proposals by Indigenous scholars suggest redefining knowledge as emplaced. Watts proposes a principle of ‘Indigenous Place-Thought’, in which knowledge is effectively relational and situated (cited in Todd 2016: 9). Conquergood (2002), although not an Indigenous scholar, similarly suggests that knowledge be redefined as located, engaged and in solidarity, rather than transcendent, abstracted, and separated off from daily life. In a similar vein, Hawaiian scholar Manulani Aluli-Meyer (2008, cited in Magnat 2020) argues that Hawaiian epistemology is relevant beyond the confines of the geography where it originates; that it has universal relevance. However, the conception of universality she works with is based on the notion of specificity: a place-specific understanding of universality (ibid). I understand this to mean that it is vital to acknowledge the specific emplaced source of different understandings of the world, so that such understandings do not get imposed on others. However, these understandings of the world can be relevant or put to work in other places too. This reminds me of what Joel Robbins (2010) calls ‘proposals for universals’, where ideas or practices emerging from specific localities and socialities can be proposed for wider application and relevance. In my understanding, this approach to ‘universality’ is processual and social: there is no assumption that one way of knowing is the correct one, to be imposed on others, but it can be argued that notions and practices from one place can be of much wider value. IV. The Eurocentric, colonial understanding of knowledge also produce forms of internal epistemicide, where ways of knowing that originate geographically in ‘Europe’ are also exiled to the non-knowledge side of the line. This is an example of Occidentalism, or at least of one of the ways in which Occidentalism is defined. When the ‘West’ subjects ‘others’ to the image of ‘Orientalism’ it simultaneously projects a mirror image of itself, equally fallacious (Santos 2014). In this definition of Occidentalism, Europe itself is flattened and homogenized, and differences literally papered over. Over the past 500 years, any way of knowing that didn’t fit the universalizing, logocentric, androcentric epistemology of this Occidentalism was also silenced (ibid). Santos gives three examples from European scholarly history to show how different ways of knowing have been excised from legitimized scholarly epistemologies. Santos discusses the following three people and their ideas as examples of ways of knowing that were deligitimized in mainstream European ‘scientific’ circles: Lucian of Samosata, Nicholas of Cusa, and Blaise Pascal. However, in my reading, the examples he gives are obscure and illegible. So, I offer a different, more accessible example: Goethean Science. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is nowadays most revered for his poetry, on par with Shakespeare in English literature, and Cervantes for the Spanish. Less known is that Goethe also developed a distinct empirical scientific approach. This example is especially interesting because Goethean Science is slowly growing in significance, especially in the sphere of ecology and sustainability, which indicates the possibility of wider societal and epistemological change. Goethe understood the human perceiver as inseparable from the phenomena they wanted to observe. He argued that nature permeates everything, including the human mind and imagination. Therefore, in order to study the world, Goethe proposed methods that were deeply participatory, that envisioned knowledge as a relational process between person and different aspects of the world (Holdrege 2005). This stands in stark contrast with Cartesian-Newtonian methods which presuppose a clear separation between observer and observed. Goethe‘s concept of science is one in which „not only the object of observation changes and moves but also the subject of observation“ (Wellmon 2010). Due to the fact that Goethean science explicitly challenges Cartesian-Newtonian epistemologies, and in its specifics challenges the dualities of subject/object, it is held in contempt by mainstream science (Ingold 2013). See Ingold 2023 for an analysis of Goethe’s critique of Newton’s optics. This exemplifies Santos’s argument that any way of knowing, whether originating in ‘Europe’ or elsewhere that does not fit with a specific universalizing, colonialist, extractivist epistemology is externalized (relegated to the other side of the abyss as non-knowledge) and so de-legitimized. V. Going forward, two principles can be drawn from this discussion. First, I have suggested that in order to address neoliberalism at the university it will be necessary to simultaneously address coloniality. This is because, as the MCD project and scholars such as Mbembe have shown, neoliberalism and coloniality are inextricably linked aspects of the contemporary capitalization and globalization of knowledge. In addition, although the relationship between neoliberalism and coloniality is elided in most Eurocentric narratives, coloniality nonetheless shapes the sorts of epistemic exclusion that characterizes universities anywhere, even in Europe. It is the coloniality of knowledge that maintains, for instance: the hierarchy of the natural sciences over the humanities; a situation where disciplines such as gender studies are dismissed as political projects rather than valid scholarship (Pereira 2017); and the myth of ‘objectivity’. Second, therefore, coloniality subjugates different ways of knowing across the world, even within the geographical and ideological area referred to as ‘Europe’. The elites that benefitted, and continue to benefit, from imperial and colonial domination, also benefitted from what is sometimes called ‘internal’ colonization. This takes many forms, whether it is the crushing of different languages in the process of nation-building (Magnat 2020), the silencing of gendered ways of knowing and, by means of the theory/practice divide, relegating countless knowledge practices to scholarly irrelevance, class divisions and so on and so forth. Considering its history, it might be the very fabric of the Eurocentric, globalized university which will need to be reformed. A fabric woven by twin threads: the notion of knowledge as universal, abstractable and free floating; and the notion of capital as a universal vessel for exchange value, and one that is, ideally, also abstractable and free flowing. Due to ongoing coloniality and racism, Jobson (2021) makes the case for letting anthropology burn. Having reflected on the deep involvement of the institution of the university with coloniality, neoliberalism and the subjugation of different ways of knowing, I wonder whether there is a case to let universities, as well as anthropology, burn and rebuild entirely new institutions from the ashes. Such renewed institutions could build on the decolonial relational and pluriversal imaginaries being developed by within and outwith universities around the world (Gatt et al 2024). But that needs to be a story for next time. 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