Observing, Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's FieldworkAgencements

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British "everyday" life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of "mass" and "morale". These formed part of a broader scientific-administrative-bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and "things" in this and later periods.

Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

“…These groups have been subjected to directive forms of rule in which they too are denied-through similar logics to which their colonial counterparts were subject-the attributes deemed necessary for liberal subject-hood: the capacity to practice a responsibilized freedom. What these papers share, then, is a concern with the analytics of colonial governmentality which seeks to investigate the regimes of practices through which particular anthropological entities-"the dying Native" (Rowse 2014), the habits of "the masses" (Harrison 2014), or the secret/sacred tywerrenge (Batty 2014), for examples -emerge, stabilize and change as they work the interface between the governors and the governed. To draw out in more detail some of the key historical and theoretical coordinates that the papers engage, it is useful to consider the particular relationship between governmentality and anthropology in this period, and to elaborate on the concept of "anthropological assemblages" which implicitly or explicitly informs the approaches taken by each of the authors to their empirical material.…”

“…However, read collectively, the papers also constitute an attempt to disconnect arguments about "the practical history of anthropology" from the assumption that the relationship between anthropology and governmentality can only be identified under circumstances where there is a direct or identifiable impact on the administrative practices of the state. Of course there are a number of instances where this can be demonstrated (see Dibley 2014, for example), but arguments about governmentality have a broader orientation: that of the respects in which knowledge practices provide means of acting on populations and individuals on the part of experts whose relations to state administrative practices might take many forms-as parts of administrative bureaus, or as agents outside such bureaus whose activities nonetheless impinge on and effect in various ways the discourses and apparatuses which such bureaus employ in conceptualizing, organizing, and legitimizing their practices (see Bennett 2014;Harrison 2014). Tony Bennett's formulations on the role played by the post-Boasian concept of culture in providing a "working surface on the social" offer a useful example.…”

“…Indeed, anthropology's distinctive contribution to processes of governing has consisted precisely in the variability of the conduits it has organized for acting on populations. Boasian "culture" provides one strong example of this (Bennett 2014), but contributors to the special issue identify a number of other transactional realities which served to mediate relations of governmentality: "the dying native" (Rowse 2014), "native culture" (Dibley 2014), and "morale" (Harrison 2014) are all examples of entities that have emerged to work this interface.…”

“…This is substantially so in Batty's (2014) consideration of the ethnographic practices of a Lutheran mission, but it is also raised indirectly in Harrison's (2014) andMcCarthy's (2014) papers which share a concern with the ways in which forms of ethnographic expertise were folded into the practices of an emerging social welfare state. The point of connection here is Foucault's analysis of pastoral power, which he investigates as one of the modalities of power constitutive of his genealogy of governmentality.…”

“…Rather the techniques of pastoral power have become dispersed across other institutional forms, of which the practices of the welfare state have been a significant historical instance (Foucault 1981, 235). What the question of pastoral power opens in terms of the material discussed by contributors to this issue, then, are: first, the various ways in which ethnographic practices are implicated in its institutions-be it the mission (Batty 2014) or the health department (McCarthy 2014) or the Ministry of Information (Harrison 2014). Second, and relatedly, it points to the ways in which techniques of pastoral power come to cut across practices of both colonial and liberal government inasmuch as ethnographic knowledge has come to concern itself less with the limits of freedom and more with pastoral care of the colonized-particularly with regard to their hygiene and morality.…”