The Sociology and Culture of Sustainable Development: an interview with Professor John Clammer.

AuthorClammer, John

Introduction

JV: Professor Clammer, tell us about the occasion of visiting international fellow of the IAS, your current academic post in India, and importantly, your academic motivations.

JC: I am here partly because of your kind invitation and having established links with Warwick over the last several years--this being a wonderful full-spectrum University. The chance to come and spend time with scholars who are working in fields that are adjacent to, or overlap with, what I am doing, is a wonderful chance for dialogue and deepening my own understanding or just finding out actually what is going on in a country that pursues these kinds of interest, particularly in relation to the discourse of culture and development. Although there has been talk about this for several decades now, I think UNESCO issued statements on the subject at least 50 years ago. In fact, very little has been done to actualise or innovate academic research in this field, so to find somewhere where a research agenda has been actively pursued is really quite something.

It relates to where I am now--my own career has been, in one sense, [metaphorically] 'schizophrenic'--it started perhaps that way, whereas professionally I've always worked in an established area related to development studies--my field is sociology. At the same time, personally I have been interested in the arts, and have practised some of them in my own way. It took me a little while to discover how to create a productive relationship between academics and the arts. I am currently working in India, which is a rather unusual career move, perhaps. However, my career prior to that was always international, having started out in the UK, indeed, in the UK after graduate school, then having lived in Singapore for over a decade, from there to Japan for some considerable period of time, part of the time spent in one of the major private universities in Japan and then the last seven years at the United Nations University (UNU, Tokyo). This was actually a think-tank for the UN--which included some teaching functions; it is essentially a research organisation that feeds ideas back into the UN system.

I had spent time in India in the past. It's a country that fascinates me; I really love it in so many ways. I've spent shorter periods there, including a semester teaching several years ago at Pondicherry Central University, which is one of the major state universities in the southern part of India; I am now in Delhi, which is in the north.

I was offered this opportunity, to actually live in India--which is always different from just visiting a country to experience it--and over, hopefully, a period of years, develop my work in a relatively new university; Jindal is, in fact, only just over a decade old. It is very innovative, and still at that formative stage where you are allowed to put ideas into practice--convince the Vice-Chancellor if something is good, and he will support you to initiate things It's been exciting, something I don't regret at all; every day is a different experience, and I must say that culturally and sociologically, India is a paradise, for every day is a learning experience; one is never bored. At least, I'm certainly never bored in India, so I'm happy to be there, as unusual as that may sound. There's also another aspect to this, in terms of the globalisation of higher education. It was only a few years ago that Indian universities did not routinely hire foreigners at all, except probably in fields connnected to languages. Now they are beginning to, because they are themselves beginning to diversify. I rather like, in a way, being not head of a wave but at least on a wave which I think is going to transform many aspects of India and higher education. I would hope it does, in positive ways, in the coming years.

JV: Tell us about your academic trajectory--where you started in terms of academic 'disciplines', in terms of research frameworks and theories, and who were your primary influences and how you developed a sense of academic independence in a complex international environment?

JC: When I started out as a student, I had to face first of all one major decision. I entered university at a time when the group of 'new' universities [as they were known in the 1960s and 70s]--Essex, Sussex, East Anglia, Lancaster, and so on--were all being established. The choice was, those universities (which were fairly innovative in the kind of course combinations they were offering), or Oxbridge (or the equivalent, like the LSE, which was another potential choice). I finally decided to go for one of the new universities, where I took a batchelors course, which I don't regret in the least. It sounds crazy, but it was a triple major in Philosophy, Politics, and Modern History. Looking back on it, it was a fantastic education; because, I think, at the beginning of one's education, of your intellectual trajectory, being exposed to major many subjects, on how to think in an historical perspective, on how to understand the structure of the contemporary world, and all of those contextual matters, is crucial. I was very attracted to philosophy, except that I was in the 'wrong' generation, that is, the subject still heavily dominated by so-called linguistic philosophy, which I enjoyed as a way of training my mind but I couldn't see myself offering me any kind of future. But, as a result of that experience I concluded that while philosophers had good questions they didn't really have the best answers. So I started looking for where I could find those 'better' answers, and it was actually this that led me to Social Anthropology. I still remember the occasion, I was browsing for something on the Library bookshelves and I came across Levi Strauss, The Savage Mind (La Pensee sauvage of 1962), and thought 'this is interesting', took it out and started to read it; I then thought, 'this looks like the answer to my problem'. The way in which my interests were evolving, I then went on to a graduate education in Social Anthropology and found there a positive but also a negative side. The negative side was that a lot of academic anthropology was still very fixated on issues of kinship, of a really rather narrow conception of what anthropologists did, such as the study of so-called 'primitive' society. Positively, however, I found anthropology an amazing subject because it is, in a sense, 'boundary-less'--you could ask questions about art, you could ask questions about mythology, about all sorts of remarkable things and they still somehow fell within the field of the discipline.

Looking back, I think that was a good choice because it allowed me to explore these two dimensions at once--arts and material culture on the one hand; and what today we would call 'development'--not from an economist perspective but inevitably, in a way, from a 'cultural sociological' perspective. It was that, actually, which led me into this field, or the nexus between anthropology and sociology, (if you want to call it a 'field'). I don't think the particular way I work now existed at that time; I think this was something that had to be created. As a professional scholar I have had to create a dialogue, and to convince enough other people that this dialogue was a valid one--that this field wasn't simply a peripheral 'subject' of some other field. I had to convince people that this was something that raised issues that were not only interesting but hopefully quite fundamental to the study of both anthropology and development. Today there's more talk about 'transdisciplinarity' and my current university has even set up a centre to investigate and promote this; and I've never found it perplexing, because I think my work always was transdisciplinary; but at the beginnning it was very hard.

When I started my PhD, I remember going to see a distinguished professor at SOAS, London, who had worked in a similar geographical area to where I was going to do my fieldwork. When he looked at my proposal I still remember him saying to me 'What is this? Is this anthropology? is this linguistics? is this philosophy?' I said 'What, does it matter?' and he replied, 'Well, only in the sense you will have to get it through an examination board one day.' I was willing to continue to pursue that kind of--what was then an--eccentric direction, and with the hope that if I did it well enough it would justify itself. I think it did, and in a way the curve seems to have now met me coming back, insofar as this transdisciplinary approach is now exactly what people are talking about and it's evidently the way to go in many subject areas; but it wasn't in my generation The beginning period was therefore 'sticky', in the sense that I had to convince others that this was the way to go; but I think we've now reached the point where researchers and scholars accept that widely, and whether I contributed to that in any way I don't know. I suspect, it is partly that the intellectual scene has moved and it's moved in a way which I now find conducive, attractive, because I think it was the goal that I was pursuing from really quite an early stage. Possibly without any consciousness of being trans-or multidisciplinary, what I was doing has turned out to be a rather 'funky' thing to have done.

JV: If we may continue to think on trans-, multi-or interdisciplinarity and how they work--where 'multidisciplinarity' can attain to a genuine dialogue between experts from different disciplines, trans-and interdisciplinarity assume a certain level of competency in different areas that, in reality, are very difficult to achieve (unless one is a gifted 'polymath' in the old sense of the term). I would say, however, that it does work in your books--sociology, anthropology, and some of the socio-ethical and legal issues around development, do come together. But is this a result of you heavily investing in a lot of time and reading in those separate disciplines and...

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