Traces 5: Universities in Translation: The Mental Labour of Globalization

The Accountologist: An Emerging Form of Anthropological Life in Mexican Universities

The Accountologist T R A C E S : 5 89 The accounToloGisT: an emerGinG Form oF anThroPoloGical liFe in mexican universiTies sTeFFan iGor ayora diaz Introduction: Colonial Mimicry and Emerging Forms of Life In this paper I look at the current transformations in a Mexican university from an anthropologist’s point of view. As an anthropologist, I explore and recognize the ways in which local transformations, practices, and discourses enact, intersect, and are conditioned by global processes. This is a complex process whereby global and local structures interact and provide the grounds for the production of new forms of being that, in effect, simultaneously mimic and challenge the hegemony of homogenizing forces. Universities show an overlapping of organizational forms and discursive formations. In the relationship between different formations we find competing visions of the University that bring about contending forms of subjection and subjectivity. Sometimes one formation dominates the others, sometimes they engage in tense negotiations marked by efforts to eliminate or change habits among workers — or by the active or silent resistance of academic workers toward perceived excessive forms of surveillance and subjection.Today’s public university, inYucatán, can be characterized as one in which the administrative management and accounting of workers’ actions is in the process of overriding research and academic work. It is a local transformation in the organization of the institution, which intersects with cultural forms and available forms of subjectivity, which Steffan Igor Ayora Diaz 90 T R A C E S : 5 is understandable only in the context of global changes. The context of these changes, as Michael M. J. Fischer suggests, is one where “traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work . . . life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained.” This is the space and time for “emergent forms of life,” “ungrounded ways of acting” that contain ethical dilemmas within themselves (Fischer 1999, 456). As I illustrate in this paper, the accountologist is one of these emergent forms of life.The academic intellectual is gradually being transformed into an academic worker whose accountability is no longer to the public but to the administration of the university, and his or her accountability is conceived of no longer as an ethical responsibility but as the clerical bookkeeping of one’s acts. This positioning can be understood as an ethical plateau; that is, in Fischer’s words, a space “in which multiple technologies interact; where ethics and politics cannot be reduced to two-person, zero-sum games; and where incommensurable frames of reference come into play, involving irrational passions and fundamental commitments, as well as rational calculations” (Fischer 2005, 56). Presently, the accountologist must negotiate between the demands of the academic discipline he or she belongs to, and the practices of an administrative habitus of self-discipline and self-vigilance. I illustrate: I moved back to Mexico in 1993. Once I arrived I found, in the two institutions where I successively worked in Chiapas, an explicit and imperious concern with “excellence.” Faculty were involved in the design of graduate programs expected to be competitive not only within Mexico but also in the international arena. We were required to publish, preferably in international (rather than Mexican) journals, and to be continuously active in research. I discovered that at both research centers individual faculty had to participate in two different accounting systems. Faculty were eligible for an in-house incentives program, but also had access to the National System of Researchers (SNI, Sistema Nacional de Investigadores) that kept another system of accounting. The latter, in addition to academic recognition, also granted a monthly monetary incentive to researchers. In my first job, at a regional research center, annual work incentives were awarded based on an evaluation conducted by the Director and his board. When I moved to a second research center I found a more formalized system of accounting for all academic activities. We had to file annual (and later bi-annual) reports of The Accountologist T R A C E S : 5 91 all our academic and administrative activities, attaching photocopies of letters written by the pertinent authorities certifying each of the activities reported. A committee evaluated our reports and certificates and assigned a number of points that were translated into a monthly bonus (Productivity Incentives). At Mexico’s CIESAS (Center for Anthropological Research and Higher Learning), our activities were measured in points that in turn were translatable into money...