At The Zoo

Tl;dr: massively over-interpreting a throwaway comment and extending a metaphor way beyond any reasonable point…

Should our primary goal as ancient historians be to rescue our field, perhaps by trying to shake off the embarrassing legacies of ‘Classics’ and then infiltrating history departments, or should we be aiming to blow it up altogether? This question, which has been circulating social media (for ‘professional ancient historians interested in this sort of navel-gazing’ values of social media) for a few years, cropped up in the round table discussion I organised at the European Social Science History Conference in Leiden this week on ‘Ancient History and Global History’, which brought together the differing perspectives of Eivind Heldaas Seland (author of A Global History of the Ancient World), Jo Crawley Quinn (author of How The World Made The West) and Miko Flohr (offering as ever thought-provoking ideas from the intersection of archaeology, ancient history and decolonisation). My role, having got all three of them into the same place with a set of vague talking points, was to draw a few strained analogies between periodisation and my attempts at structuring discussion and to lob in the occasional provocation.

The comment which I’m taking much too seriously came right at the end, when I attempted to goad the panelists into considering what institutional changes might be required to support a genuinely global ancient history. I don’t want to blow up up the discipline, remarked Jo, but rather the whole faculty; replacing the disciplinarily-siloed zoo with a safari park.

Hmm. Two equally artificial environments, that at least in theory both seek to balance the welfare of the animals (academics) with the pleasure of the paying public (research funders, government, students). From the perspective of the inmates, the safari park does offer a lot more space to roam around, a greater illusion of freedom and self-determination. On the other hand, both the conditions and public expectations clearly favour charismatic mega-fauna, the big beasts who can inspire awe and excitement even when viewed from a distance, proudly bestriding extensive intellectual territory. It’s less obviously good for the small nocturnal rodents of the academic world; we thrive in a smaller, more restricted environment, and would be entirely invisible in a safari park – if we’d find a place in it at all – whereas the zoo can level the playing field (how many layers of mixed metaphor can I work into this discussion?) in showing how many different animals can be equally interesting when observed closely.

What neither set-up does is promote or allow the sort of genuine free-ranging across boundaries and mingling of different species that I imagine was Jo’s intended point; even in the safari park, some species are kept well apart from others. Or maybe for the big beasts it is just about the territory, the individual freedom to fish around in different periods of history in the morning, do some philosophy in the afternoon and then head over to the sociology of music in the evening, without being confined to a single small enclosure, whereas I’m thinking too much about the collective impact – the promotion of interaction between the people who do these different things to see what happens.

The advantage of being a small nocturnal rodent is that you can just get on with stuff without people paying much attention, whether you’re in a zoo or a safari park. Concretely, while my research and teaching has regularly been influenced by the particular colleagues and structures with which I’ve found myself interacting, I’ve never felt either restricted or compelled to do things I don’t want to do. If I was in a History department rather than a Classics & Ancient History department I might be doing some different things differently, but not to the extent that this seems either like a nightmare or like the promised land; ditto, some bigger and less defined school of humanities or humanities and social sciences. Perhaps I am especially adaptable, able to find a niche in any ecosystem, but actually I think this is true of most academics. The potential impact of institutional restructuring, beloved of ambitious vice chancellors and university presidents across the globe, is vastly exaggerated, other than the time and resources that the process of restructuring consumes.

What we have to avoid is the circus – and both zoos and safari parks can effectively become circuses if they shift from passive to active manipulation of the behaviour of their inhabitants. There’s a significant difference between leaving animals to adapt to an artificial environment and compelling them to behave in artificial ways; between putting academics with some group of other academics with some high-level goals in teaching and research, and seeking to direct and limit exactly what research and teaching they can do. University restructuring, where it’s not just about cost-cutting and profit margins, is often driven by top-down ideas that this is what everyone needs to be doing to entertain the punters. All humanities must be environmental humanities! Social justice is the trick that will get you nice fish! (Until this becomes politically inconvenient). Everyone should digital futures!

Worrying about whether we should keep separating primates from ungulates, or instead move to a geographically based organisation, really does seem beside the point when university management is determined to get every animal to balance a ball on its nose and when the world outside is burning. Angus Wilson’s The Old Men At The Zoo was all too prescient…