Class consciousness

Dear readers, I haven't written for a bit because I've been wanting to save you from overly-twee narratives of walking through Grantchester yet again, or being won over by poached pears. But what I've just experienced, while largely to do with food, will hardly be twee, so it seems fit to share. Tonight I went to high table for the first time and I have to say that this marks the first proper instance of culture shock I've experienced since I've arrived. As those of you who are British or have spent time in Britain (whether actually or imaginatively) will probably know, high table is a time-honored academic institution at Oxbridge where the fellows of the college, dressed in robes, sit at a collection of tables in front of the dining hoi polloi, which is to say the students. Upon entering, you await a phrase (in Latin) to sit down; then you are served a variety of relatively fancy foods that require a wide range of cutlery to eat. As the lovely and generous gentleman sitting across from me said -- a historian of science and the saving grace of the meal -- you really have to view the experience from the point of view of an anthropologist. This seemed to me to be code for at least two things: 1) use the forks I'm using! and 2) yes, we know that this is a bit silly and perhaps seems antiquated, but it's been a tradition for longer than anyone can remember and we kind of enjoy it. What was stunning to me was the visual display of tradition and authority: we proceed in, we proceed out, we say bits in Latin, which we've been doing since the thirteenth century, but we have contemporary conversation: we talk about whatever crosses the conversational screen -- Mike Davis, Freud, Woody Allen movies, Monty Python, parents, academia, Richard Posner, nicorette patches. It's not as if the conversation is limited to the kings of England and the sorts of port one likes to consume after dinner -- the conversation operates as any lively, self-respecting dinner conversation would, and is in no way anti-democratic -- but everything that surrounds the conversation, including the way that you're served, exudes privilege and custom. Perhaps even more rarefied than high table itself is the wine you consume afterwards: you retire to another room and a similarly long, rectangular table where there are posh cheeses with flags in them that report their denomination, as well as wines in crystal flasks that are hooked together, three in a train, and wheel around the table. As my conversation partner was telling me -- and bless him for talking to me -- smoking used to be permitted until recently. The winds of change: they're blowing strong!

It was counterintuitive, in a way, to hear this gentleman tell me that he objected to a presentation he'd just seen on The Order of Things which entirely neglected its historical (which is to say provoking or polemical, pre-'68) aspects while we were eating in a setting that was so pre-'68 in certain regards. How is it, that in a moment of economic crisis, in a nation where academics are worse paid and less respected than in the states, there is this kind of ceremony which constructs the very privilege it needs to delight in? If you manufacture your distinction and get tipsy on three kinds of wine on Tuesday night, what's happening, what's happened? I'm no marxist, that's for sure, but I was astonished by the fact that this seemed like business as usual. Indeed, Cambridge and Oxford have been around for longer than the states have even existed, and I'm sure there are all sorts of events with gowns and fancy wines behind closed doors at American institutions, but this is part of the fabric of the everyday life of college fellows; it's not a particularly special occasion. And perhaps academics are often guilty of saying one thing and living another -- Adorno railed against decadence but sat delicately in his swimsuit and loved his luxuries; Homi Bhabha goes on tour proclaming that theory can end (or if not end, make sense of) genocide, but spends his spare time sitting on the boards of advertising corporations rather than volunteering for the TRC -- hypocrisy's not new to the field. Perhaps the lesson here is that seeing elitism in a slightly different costume or setting can put you on the lookout for it on the home front; can make you think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Don't get me wrong: I love fancy dinners. But if the academy is indeed dedicated to critical inquiry, it needn't require being served by a silent staff dressed in bowties to do so. Perhaps I get tradition totally wrong; that may well be the case. But my anthropology, when it wasn't focussed on forks and glasses, was attentive to the various forms of discomfort I felt, and what they might have meant.